Does Obama Really Need a VP?

This piece, admittedly by a right-winger, claims Barack Obama is toying with the media and clearly intends to choose Hillary Rodham Clinton as his VP.

I don’t think so. She’s obviously his best choice from one standpoint — her electoral prowess — and the worst from many others.  After all, she declared John McCain was a more plausible president than Obama. That and many other quotes denigrating Obama’s experience will already be used against him, but coming from the mouth of his VP candidate? Deadly.  What many of us suspect about Obama, that he’s not quite ready for the job of president, she has said explicitly.  So has her husband.

But I cite the post mainly because it illustrates how much of a pickle Obama is in with respect to choosing his VP nominee.  Nobody helps him. Everybody hurts him.  He’d be better off running alone.  To quote from the blogger, Patrick Ruffini:

Just look at the other names on the short list:

• Joe Biden’s mouth is a constant source of embarassment. And how would the PUMAs take to a failed second-tier candidate leapfrogging someone with 18 million votes?
• Evan Bayh has been vetoed by the netroots
• Kathleen Sebelius would be a clear and direct affront to the PUMAs, much more so even than Biden. The first woman VP/President — and one you’ve never heard of — would increase the sense of Clintonian alienation.
• Tim Kaine. Hahahahahahahahahaha
• Wesley Clark would provide the military experience Obama needs, but his comments about McCain’s service are a problem.
• Chris Dodd is a crook.

What if he didn’t pick anyone?  If he’s elected and then dies in office, the Speaker of the House, presumably Nancy Pelosi, would be perfectly acceptable to Democrats.  Even the PUMAs (which used to mean Party Unity My Ass, and now means People United Means Action) would probably grant Pelosi is acceptable.

Is there a constitutional problem with leaving the VP slot vacant?  Undoubtedly.  So what if Obama picked a literal nonentity. Say, the winner of a lottery, or perhaps a special political edition of Jeopardy! The winner would have to swear that in the event of Obama’s demise, he or she would immediately resign, stepping aside for the Speaker.

Of course, Obama could short-circuit all this and just nominate Pelosi for the vice-presidency.  Her political style is more suited to a VP campaign.  She’s a shin-kicking ear-biter, and she’s obviously totally unimpressed by the McCain mystique.

But since what I’m proposing is probably too absurd, my guess is Obama will pick Joe Biden.  He’s much more than a “failed second-tier candidate.” He’s a sherpa for an inexperienced president. He’s instantly credible in all the ways Obama is not yet.  Evan Bayh has the next-best chance, but Obama would have to stand up to a lot of criticism from the left netroots, where he’s described with language such as “fucking worthless to the progressive cause.” Not a lot of wiggle room there.  After watching Gov. Kaine on Charlie Rose a few weeks ago, I was nonplussed as to how he ever got on the short list.  If he’s a rising star, it’s going to be a slow rise. It would almost be unfair to subject him to national attention at this point in his career.

The blood is thinning in the political ranks of both parties.  The VP sweepstakes illustrate that perfectly.

Gore Back At Number One Observatory Circle?

Fate

Somehow, this story reminds me of “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

I mean, if Obama/Gore battles it out with McCain/? to a near draw and it comes down to…oh…Tennessee?  And he loses again?  I wonder if that’s crossing his mind.

Or maybe it goes the other way.  Maybe he was fated to be President.  Could the possibility tempt him?

For most observers, the idea of Gore as Obama’s VP would mean he’s in charge of the climate.

Yes, at first blush another Vice Presidency would be beneath Gore. But Obama has no huge emotional investment in either energy/environment/climate change or science & technology, and Gore cares about them passionately. Obama could give him primary authority in those areas without having a full “co-Presidency.” It’s hard to see how Gore does more for what he cares about from the outside.

But Gore might see it as a route back to winning what he thought he already won.

I wonder if Gore’s 10-year challenge to sever electricity from fossil fuels will help or hurt him?  Suddenly, the Republicans have an incentive to run the numbers on his idea.  It won’t be hard to make it look very expensive.  And what if Obama/Gore wins, serves eight years, and the US is falling short (as it surely will, since Gore’s goal is impossible)?

Really, It’s All About Obama III: Why Are They Tied?

The press and political world are wondering why John McCain has apparently evened up with Barack Obama, despite a week of embarrassing flubs.  How could Obama have lost ground?

But if you start from the assumption that this election is all about Obama, it’s really not surprising at all.  He said it himself:

“If you are satisfied with the way things are going now, then you should vote for John McCain,” Obama says before rattling off a list of current concerns, including rising gas prices, home foreclosures and job losses as the country fights two wars. Then, Obama promises “fundamental change.”

With the exception of Ted Kennedy, John McCain is the best-known politician in America who hasn’t been president or vice-president.  Whether he is “McSame” is a matter for debate, but one thing’s for sure.  He is who he is and you know who he is.  If he has a bad week, if he misspeaks, if he changes his mind on offshore oil drilling or tax cuts, it doesn’t alter our view of him.

The picture of Obama isn’t so clear yet.  The things he says resonate more because they add proportionally more to the sum of knowledge about him.  When Obama alters his positions, there is more of an impact on his overall reputation, because his initial set of positions represented most of what we knew about him.  He is in a real bind on Iraq, because he owes his nomination to his ability to chide Hillary Clinton for her pro-war vote in 2002.

The conventional wisdom is that he can “run to the center” without penalty, but I challenge that opinion.  You could not imagine an article like this one appearing with regard to any of the Democratic candidates since 1976, all of whom tried to position themselves as centrists after securing the nomination.  Some repositionings didn’t seem legitimate, perhaps.  But none have been portrayed as betrayal:

In the breathless weeks before the Oregon presidential primary in May, Martha Shade did what thousands of other people here did: she registered as a Democrat so she could vote for Senator Barack Obama.

Now, however, after critics have accused Mr. Obama of shifting positions on issues like the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, gun control and the death penalty — all in what some view as a shameless play to a general election audience — Ms. Shade said she planned to switch back to the Green Party.

“I’m disgusted with him,” said Ms. Shade, an artist. “I can’t even listen to him anymore. He had such an opportunity, but all this ‘audacity of hope’ stuff, it’s blah, blah, blah. For all the independents he’s going to gain, he’s going to lose a lot of progressives.”

Later in the article, Shade allows as how she is far out of the mainstream, and the theme of the article is that Obama doesn’t really need to worry about the far left.  But it’s another clue to Obama’s situation that some in the far left thought Obama was one of them.  It’s the amplitude of surprise that impresses me.  Compare that with McCain’s situation.  The far right knows he’s not one of them.  When McCain strikes a centrist pose, they might resent it, but they expect it and have accounted for it already.  They’re surprised when he agrees with them.

It’s all about Obama.  If his statements and positions gel into a coherent whole, a graspable persona, and a philosophy, he probably wins.  But if voters are still trying to square Statement A with Statement B, voters will probably settle for McCain.

Really, It’s All About Obama II

This WSJ column by Fouad Ajami reminded me of something else I want to put on my “do’s and don’ts” list for Barack Obama:

• Don’t pretend your election is going to put a halt to anti-Americanism, or that it only started with George W. Bush.

An excerpt:

American liberalism is heavily invested in this narrative of U.S. isolation. The Shiites have their annual ritual of 10 days of self-flagellation and penance, but this liberal narrative is ceaseless: The world once loved us, and all Parisians were Americans after 9/11, but thanks to President Bush we have squandered that sympathy.

It is an old trick, the use of foreign narrators and witnesses to speak of one’s home. Montesquieu gave the genre its timeless rendition in his Persian Letters, published in 1721. No one was fooled, these were Parisian letters, and the Persian travelers, Rica and Usbek, mere stand-ins for an author taking stock of his homeland after the death of Louis XIV and the coming of an age of enlightenment and skepticism.

“This King is a great magician. He exerts authority even over the minds of his subjects; he makes them think what he wants,” Rica writes from Paris. “You must not be amazed at what I tell you about this prince: there is another magician, stronger than he. This magician is called the Pope. He will make the King believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind.” Handy witnesses, these Persians.

The Pew survey tells us that some foreign precincts show a landslide victory for Barack Obama. France leads the pack; fully 84% of those following the American campaign are confident Mr. Obama will do the right thing in foreign policy, compared with 33% who say that about John McCain. There are similar results in Germany, and a closer margin in Britain. The populations of Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan have scant if any confidence in either candidate.

The deference of American liberal opinion to the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Amman and Karachi is nothing less than astounding. You would not know from these surveys, of course, that anti-Americanism runs deep in the French intellectual scene, and that French thought about the great power across the Atlantic has long been a jumble of envy and condescension. In the fabled years of the Clinton presidency, long before Guantanamo, the torture narrative and the war in Iraq, American pension funds were, in the French telling, raiding their assets, bringing to their homeland dreaded Anglo-Saxon economics, and the merciless winds of mondialisation (globalization).

(snip)

Meanwhile, a maligned American president now returns from a Europe at peace with American leadership. In France, Germany and Italy, center-right governments are eager to proclaim their identification with American power. Jacques Chirac is gone. Now there is Nicolas Sarkozy, who offered a poetic tribute last November to the American soldiers who fell on French soil, before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. “The children of my generation,” he said, “understood that those young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.”

The great battle over the Iraq war has subsided, and Europeans who ponder the burning grounds of the Islamic world know the distinction between fashionable anti-Americanism and the international order underpinned by American power. George W. Bush may have been indifferent to political protocol, but he held the line when it truly mattered, and the Europeans have come to understand that appeasement of dictators and brigands begets its own troubles.

It is one thing to rail against the Pax Americana. But after the pollsters are gone, the truth of our contemporary order of states endures. We live in a world held by American power – and benevolence. Nothing prettier, or more just, looms over the horizon.

It would cost Obama nothing politically to acknowledge this.  In doing so, he need not endorse Bush’s leadership — just America’s.  A change we could really use beginning in 2009 is bipartisanship and greater continuity in US foreign policy.

Really, It’s All About Obama

I hope my last post makes clear what I think the 2008 election is really all about. It’s about Barack Obama.  Obama is the only interesting choice, but I am uneasy about him, as are many Americans.

John McCain is a safe choice, but a most unsatisfactory one.  He’s safe enough to function in this election as the default.  If Obama lays an egg, we’ll get McCain, and he’ll be no worse and probably a good deal better than what we have now.  But most of us would be disappointed, wouldn’t we?  We are rooting for Obama to succeed, but not betting everything on it.

I have my own list of things Obama has to do and other things he has to avoid.  I’m sure you have yours.  I’m sure mine isn’t like yours, but I’d enjoy reading yours, and I’ll keep adding to mine:

• Don’t be too liberal.
• Don’t do class warfare.
• Don’t be naive on foreign policy.
• Don’t pretend it’s the 1930s or the 1960s.
• Don’t let your past campaign rhetoric stand in the way of doing what’s right in Iraq. Go there and come back with a new message.
• Don’t let yourself get rolled by the unions. Make them shape up first.
• That goes double for the public employee unions.
• You’ll probably get away with breaking your word on public financing of campaigns.  Don’t get cocky.
• Don’t be too clever by half.  Telling McCain you’ll meet him at a town-hall forum on the night of July 4th and only then is infuriatingly disingenuous.
• Do more town halls.  If your advisors tell you this isn’t your best format, tell them “Practice makes perfect.”
• Don’t play the race card.
• Don’t get pissed off when the media starts getting tougher on you. If they ever do.

To be continued….

Obama Can Reboot the Federal Government

Barack Obama apparently resents it when he’s accused of being vague about the policies he’ll pursue as president, seeing such questions as a political trap.  He’s not unjustified in this fear, but since he doesn’t have a record of doing anything in particular in the public sphere — if he had a signature issue, it was ethics and campaign reform, and he just jettisoned that with his decision to raise unlimited private funds in his general election bid — he does have to be more specific than another candidate with a record and a reputation might have needed to be.

I think the promise of Obama is that he will bring to the US government of the new opportunities for collaboration and network formation that creative people have developed in the past five years, using the Internet’s capabilities as their primary tool.  Social media is why my son’s life is going to be very different from mine.

Social media could also be why Obama’s presidency could be very different from any of his predecessors.  Who knows, maybe the state of the art is such that McCain would also embrace these techniques, but if you had to pick between them as to who would usher in that future first, it wouldn’t be a contest. It’s Obama.

There’s a tension, however, between the futuristic orientation of Obama’s young supporters and the essential stodginess of the Democratic Party — a condition Obama’s acolytes haven’t really experienced yet.  The Democratic Party gives life to, and is the death of, idealism in youth.  The situation was nicely captured in today’s Sunday New York Times Magazine, in a short piece by NYU sociology professor Dalton Conley.  Here are some of the key grafs:

The chatter these days is that the Republicans are a party that has run out of ideas. The Soviet Union is long gone; welfare has been reformed; market logics have permeated almost every aspect of our lives (eBay, anyone?). The truth is that the triumph of conservative ideas may present a political problem for the ailing Republicans, but the party that’s truly lacking in new ideas is my own, the resurgent Democrats.

There is lots of talk in progressive policy circles that we need a “New New Deal” or some other sort of postindustrial revision to the social contract. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, after all, were forged in a society in which, for the most part, social organization was concentric. By way of analogy, think of Russian nesting dolls: children were nested in families; each family had one breadwinner; that breadwinner worked for a single employer; those employers were firmly rooted in the United States; and, to top it all off, the vast majority of people living in the country were citizens. This form of social organization made the social contract possible. There were clear parties to cut the deal, so to speak.

(snip)

Today, by contrast, the most common model of social organization is crosscutting social groups.

(snip)

These more complex social arrangements create many problems for the old social contract.

(snip)

So perhaps we need to reimagine these nesting dolls and instead think of the social contract along the lines of a computer network or the hub-and-spoke airline network in the U.S. In such “scale free” networks, distance has been collapsed by long links that allow you to skip between any two points in a couple steps. The government’s role is less as a backup provider — in case one link of the nested chain breaks down — and more as honest broker and resource hub across groups.

In health care, for example, the government could act as a pooler, forming health-insurance-purchasing cooperatives, randomly assigning unaffiliated individuals to groups that would then contract with private insurers. Likewise, the state could set up universal investment accounts for retirement savings, college savings and health expenditures. In education, the feds could mandate that any institutions of higher education that receive government dollars must make their research and course materials available online in an open-source format free of charge.

Private companies and nonprofits are already stepping in to fill this role. The Freelancers Union allows self-employed individuals to purchase health insurance at less expensive group rates. And M.I.T. and iTunes U have already inaugurated the open-courseware movement. But government has an important role to play. After all, the state can absorb a lot more risk than smaller entities can. Think how well government-backed V.A. and F.H.A. mortgages worked after World War II as compared with how the private market has fared lately.

(snip)It’s not surprising that the private-sector, new-economy companies are ahead of government in adapting to the networked society, but if progressives want a victory in the world of ideas and policy — and not just a couple of good election cycles — they are going to have to stop talking F.D.R, J.F.K. and L.B.J. and start thinking eBay, Google and Wiki.

On my other blog, From 50,000 Feet, I wrote about Obama as viewed similarly in a Wired story.

These aren’t the ideas that will get Obama elected, surely.  He already gets mocked as the “egghead” in the race.  He’s compared in an uncomplimentary fashion to such famous Democratic intellectuals as Adlai Stevenson and Michael Dukakis.

But someday, somehow, one of our presidents is going to rescue the federal government from its sclerotic ways and figure out how to treat us like valued customers.  I think it will have to be a Democrat, because only a Democrat will be trusted to reconfigure social safety-net programs, and only a Democrat can butt heads with the public-employee unions that exist to kill efficiency reforms and expert to emerge with anything to show for it.

Obama can grow in the areas where he is now weak.  McCain is what he is. He’s the Pope Benedict XVI of this election, the safe, stall-for-time choice for president who will hold the office honorably while both parties figure out what their new directions will be.  Obama might not be ready (see my last post), but modernizing the colossus that is the US government is a task no one will ever be ready for.  You have to start somewhere, and Obama brings more of the kinds of tools we’ll need than anyone else with a credible chance to become president in 2012.

Is Obama Ready? (*updated)

Okay, Barack Obama, you’ve survived the Hillary gauntlet.  She “threw the kitchen sink” at you, and you hung onto your delegate lead until finally you inched over the top.  You also survived the revelation that Rev. Jeremiah Wright, your pastor, mentor, spiritual advisor and the guy you bring your children to listen to every Sunday is a racist extremist.  Kudos on both.  It couldn’t have been easy.

But you were also lucky. Hillary Clinton is the emblem of a despicable political machine, to which there was a post-traumatic response among some Democrats, particularly the intellectual types who sleep-walked through their skanky reign, recited the talking points on TV when asked, and cheered Bill as if he was Stagger Lee giving a commencement address at Harvard.  You gave them a wake-up call, and you offer an opportunity for cleansing.

Obama, you might get lucky again.  John McCain isn’t as despised as Hillary, but he’s not a beloved figure among his own party, and he’s undeniable tied to George W. Bush on enough policies that the public’s rejection of what’s now being called “the GOP brand” might get him to the White House.

At that point Obama, I hope you can take a few weeks to figure out what it means to be the Leader of the Free World and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the known history of the planet.

You need to take a class or something.  You’re making some appalling errors right now.

———–

On NAFTA:  During a Democratic debate, Obama quite clearly threatened to unilaterally withdraw the US from the treaty if Canada and Mexico weren’t willing to renegotiate.  It came out that his economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee met with Canadian officials as an Obama representative to tell them to take Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric as “political posturing.”  When a memo regarding this meeting was publicized, Obama’s campaign tried to issue a carefully parsed denial, but eventually had to acknowledge the meeting did happen and comments about the politics of NAFTA were made.  Obama and his campaign reaffirmed, however, their anti-NAFTA bonafides. The story hurt Obama, and he lost the Ohio primary.

Now that he’s the nominee, he’s doing the usual things, including giving reassurances to Wall Street of his intentions.  His method was a sit-down with Fortune magazine, during which he was asked about NAFTA.  Not too surprisingly, Obama took a more moderate position on the treaty.  The position shift isn’t what made him look bad.  It was the clumsy way he did it:

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.

(snip)

Now, however, Obama says he doesn’t believe in unilaterally reopening NAFTA. On the afternoon that I sat down with him to discuss the economy, Obama said he had just spoken with Harper, who had called to congratulate him on winning the nomination.

“I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally,” Obama said. “I’m a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people.”

This isn’t a shift in tone or emphasis.  This is Obama talking about himself as if he doesn’t recognize that “politician” who was running around Ohio, getting all overheated and talking about unilateral moves that Obama doesn’t believe in.  As if he was just seized by a passionate hatred of NAFTA, and not making calculated statements to draw votes from NAFTA-hating Ohio unionists, statements that these Ohioans would be justified in now calling lies.

In the big leagues, Obama, politicians shift around all the time, depending on the audience and the temper of the times. The moderate uniter-not-a-divider George W. Bush of 2000 would hardly recognize the Onward Christian Soldiers Bush of 2004.  But you don’t make the shift by casting yourself as an unreliable source of your own beliefs. “Yeah, I said that, but I must have been crazy,” is a fair paraphrase of what Obama told Fortune.

He did it again on an even more sensitive subject: The status of Jerusalem in a hypothetical Israeli-Palestinian accord.  From a Reuters story Tuesday that was headlined: Adviser denies Obama showed naivete on Jerusalem:

Democrat Barack Obama misused a “code word” in Middle East politics when he said Jerusalem should be Israel’s “undivided” capital but that does not mean he is naive on foreign policy, a top adviser said on Tuesday.

Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. “He has closed all doors to peace,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.

Obama later said Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the status of the city, in line with long-held U.S. presidential policy.

Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama’s comment stemmed from “a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones.”

“So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East,” Kurtzer said.

The U.S. Congress passed a law in 1995 describing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and saying it should not be divided, but successive presidents have used their foreign policy powers to maintain the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and to back talks between Israel and Palestinians on the status of Jerusalem.

I am not running for president, and I don’t consider myself an expert on the Palestinian issue, but even I know that Palestinians take offense when US politicians promise U.S. Jewish leaders that Jerusalem will be Israel’s.  This time it was Kurtzer uttering the “yeah, he said that but he must have been crazy” formulation, describing the misleading and confusing images in Obama’s mind that led him astray.

It’s also bound to be noted by conservatives and McCain’s campaign that Obama seems intimately aware of what Jerusalem looked like when he was all of six years old, but had no clue what his Weather Underground friend Bill Ayers was up to, blowing up buildings two years later.  But more to the point, the claim that Obama is “not naive” doesn’t alter the inherent naivete in a presidential finalist talking off the top of his head on the most touchy international topic imaginable.   Jennifer Rubin, an Obama critic who blogs for Commentary Magazine, spreads the responsibility to Obama’s campaign:

Even more so, if the advisor says Obama didn’t understand what he was saying. But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama have advisors on Israel assisting him with the speech? Where were they? Once again, this suggests that there is too little adult supervision of a candidate unaccustomed to speaking on the world stage about issues in which there are lots of code words, indeed in which every word (e.g. “preconditons,” “immediate withdrawal”) has meaning to Americans’ foes and friends.

The link on the words “adult supervision” will take you to another embarrassment, but this one implicating his “likely National Security adviser” Richard Danzig, who compared foreign affairs to Winnie-the-Pooh.  He was probably kidding, Rubin suggests hopefully.  But I’ve seen so many Democratic candidates destroyed by seeming unequipped to defend the country.  You know, the Dems are supposed to be “the Mommy party.”  To make the same point, I would have picked any book in the world but Winnie-the-Pooh.

Obama has had a meteoric rise to power, to the threshold of the presidency, which I believe he should be favored to win almost no matter what he does.  But please, Obama, don’t scare the grownups, or else a lot of us might take our secret ballots and secretly pick someone else.

*Update, 6/20/08:  The NY Times columnist David Brooks disagrees with any hint that Obama is naive.  It’s all strategery, Brooks says:

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

The Murderous Mrs. C.

Peggy Noonan is ecstatic that the Democrats nominated Barack Obama, and at least half the reason why is that they didn’t nominate Hillary Clinton:

Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.

We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party.

They had a great and roaring fight, a state-by-state struggle unprecedented in the history of presidential primaries. They created the truly national primary. They brought 36 million people to the polls, including the young, minorities and first-time voters. They brought a kind of dogged brio to the year.

All of this is impressive, but more than that, they threw off Clintonism. They threw off the idea that corruption is part of the game, an acceptable fact. They threw off the idea that dynasticism was an unstoppable dynamic in modern politics, that Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton could, would, go on forever. They said: “No, that is not the way we do it.”

They threw off the idea of inevitability. Mrs. Clinton didn’t lose because she had no money or organization, she didn’t lose because she had no fame or name, she didn’t lose because her policies were unusual or dramatically unpopular within her party. She lost because enough Democrats looked at her and thought: I don’t like that, I don’t like the way she does it, I’m not going there. Most candidates lose over things, not over their essential nature. But that is what happened here. For all her accomplishments and success, it was her sketchy character that in the end did her in.

So then the question comes up:  Given the closeness of the contest, should Hillary be Obama’s VP pick?  (No, say I.)  No, says Peggy Noonan.  Here is one of her reasons:

She would never be content to be vice president. She’d be plotting against him from day one. She’d put poison in his tea.

Trust me, in the succeeding paragraphs, there is no rim-shot-bada-bing to indicate Noonan is kidding.  She would expect Hillary to poison Obama, if it meant she would be in the Oval Office. 

Noonan’s column is not the first place I’ve seen this “Hillary would poison Obama” meme.  I wish I’d been saving all the links.  They mostly appear in comment threads, or if it’s the main blogger, they usually try to let you know they’re joking. 

Keep an eye out for it.

When her husband was president, the Clintons were accused in some right wing rubber rooms of having people murdered.  I don’t remember the details, but there was supposed to be a list of premature deaths, and somehow it was tied in with cocaine shipments into the Mena Airport in Arkansas.  They were also accused of using very rough tactics to silence “bimbo eruptions.”  Kathleen Willey’s dead cat, for example.

The mainstream media thought these accusations were hideous, hysterical, evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy led by crazy people who would say anything.

Now, the suggestion that Hillary would use the Office of the Vice President to carry out a murder plot against the president has become a normal part of political discourse, across the ideological spectrum.

You know, she almost won the nomination, folks.  If the Democratic Party had used Republican primary rules, she would have won. Would these same commentators be suggesting the Democratic Party had nominated a murderer if she was the presidential candidate?  Would they be worrying about John McCain’s water glass at the presidential debates the way they’re worrying about Barack Obama’s tea?  

What’s Wrong With Appeasement? You Really Want To Know?

Maybe some people have to have the tragic error of appeasement explained to them. Like Bruce Ramsey, a writer for the Seattle Times. Here is something he actually wrote Friday. I’ve left nothing out, contrary to usual blog practice. I don’t want anyone to think he mitigated his idiocy with lines I left out.

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.

The narrative we’re given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany’s claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland.

So the British and French let him have it. Their thought was: “Now you have your Greater Germany.” They didn’t want a war. They were not superpowers like the United States is now. They remembered the 1914-1918 war and how they almost lost it.

In a few months, in early 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of what is now the Czech Republic—that is, territory that was not German. Then it was obvious that a deal with him was worthless–and the British and French did not appease Hitler any more. Thus the lesson of Munich: don’t appease Hitlers.

But who else is a Hitler? If you paste that label on somebody it means they are cast out. You can’t talk to them any more. And it has gotten pasted on quite a few national leaders over the years: Milosevic, Hussein, Ahmadinejad, et. al. In particular, to apply that label to the elected leaders of the Palestinians is to say that you aren’t going to listen to their claims to a homeland. I think they do have a claim. So do the Israelis. In order to get anywhere, each side has to listen to the other. To continually bring up Hitler, the Nazis, the Munich Conference and “appeasement,” is to try to prolong the stalemate.

I trust that Barack Obama does not possess the same historical ignorance.

Hitler telegraphed exactly what he intended to do in his book, Mein Kampf, written years before 1938. Also by then he had violated the Versailles treaty and begun rearming.

There was no evidence that Sudetenland wanted to be part of Hitler’s empire. Hitler had destroyed German democracy. Britain and France presumably understood the difference between democracy and dictatorship, since both countries operated under a democracy.

There was already a flood of Jewish refugees. News of Hitler’s atrocities, albeit downplayed in the British and French press in order to massage public opinion, was still known to the U.K. and French leadership. Winston Churchill and his friends in British intelligence made sure of that. His parliamentary speeches exposed Hitler repeatedly. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s naivete about Hitler and his aims was willful. He had plenty of facts at hand to demonstrate to him that Hitler did not deserve the trust he was vesting in him.

Ramsey writes as if he thinks Hitler is unique in history, and that attempts to compare contemporary enemies to Hitler is…unfriendly? I can’t tell what he means by this: “If you paste that label on somebody it means they are cast out. You can’t talk to them any more.” I don’t think the comparison of “Milosevic, Hussein, Ahmadinejad” to Hitler is inapt, given what they did and what, in Ahmadinejad’s case, he’s openly threatened to do.

I realize the cries of “Munich!” have begun to bore some people. Bore, or agitate. It struck me as strange that Obama and other leading Democrats would rush to identify themselves as the targets of Bush’s remarks to the Knesset. Maybe Bush was trying to be crafty — which is always cute to watch, like watching a toddler try to kick a ball — but the smarter Democratic play probably would have been to say, “What he said.” Because appeasement is still something to be avoided, if you define appeasement correctly as:

• Letting your enemy know you will do anything to avoid war.
• Letting your enemy take this knowledge and use it to their advantage.
• Making excuses for enemy actions and policies that violate law and conscience.
• Giving your enemy concessions based on a flimsy rationale that ignores indisputable facts.
• Convincing yourself that your concessions are trivial — a cheap way to avoid war.
• Using PR spin to isolate domestic opponents to your appeasement policy as “warmongers.”
• Continuing to make excuses for the enemy until you have no choice but to fight back.

That last point is the ultimate folly of appeasement. It is a policy pursued by peacemakers that leads inevitably to war. True, it postpones war, which is sometimes politically desirable to the appeaser, who might only be thinking of the short run, i.e. the next election. But it also gives your enemy time to get stronger, a process accelerated by the act of appeasement, which convinces some fence-sitters that the future belongs to the enemy and not to you.

No one calls him or herself an appeaser. It’s not a philosophy. It’s a verdict, based on objective facts. Saying “I’m not an appeaser” does not prevent you from acting like one. In the moment, it is often easier for a politician to be an appeaser than not to be one. It takes a lot of leadership strength to overcome appeasement’s gravitational pull. The truly chilling thing about Chamberlain’s appeasement was the wild public enthusiasm it generated among French and British citizens. Within two years, members of these cheering crowds would be slaughtered by Hitler’s forces.

The big question Obama will have to deal with when he takes office is whether to fulfill his promise of rapid withdrawal from Iraq, at risk of making it appear to the radical Islamic world that by doing so, he’s appeasing them. Perhaps there is a way to do it and preserve our strength in the region. But if there isn’t, he’ll have to show a lot of strength, the strength to look his most fervent supporters in the eyes and tell them he’s changed his mind. This decision will define his presidency, and it will come at him early.

Brakes on the Pendulum?

We seem to be coming out of the conservative era in American politics that was first glimpsed with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and zenithed with the elections of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.  Since George McGovern’s overwhelming defeat in 1972, Democratic candidates for president have all acknowledged the tide was against them.  Mondale and Dukakis claimed they refused to apologize for being liberals, while apologizing.  Carter and Clinton insisted they weren’t liberals at all, and Clinton really didn’t govern like one, achieving all his successes through triangulating the activist wings of both parties. The continued strength of the conservative current was demonstrated in 2000 and 2004 when a deeply flawed candidate, George W. Bush, managed to put his two sharper, smarter opponents on the defensive, forcing them into mistake after mistake. 

This election season feels different.  I guess we’ll find out soon enough, but I think the country is readier for a sharp left turn than at any time since the last liberal era began in 1932.  In 2008, I think you could get a lot of people to agree there are “malefactors of great wealth” to use FDR’s great phrase.  The economic issues that cut the deepest are aimed directly at industries and individuals who seem to have taken advantage of this country to accumulate their wealth, to the detriment of middle class people. The insurance companies.  Big pharma.  The oil companies.  Mortgage brokerages. Hedge fund managers. The presidents of financial institutions who make disasterous investments then drift away, carrying with both arms duffel bags full of severance money. 

The picture of unfettered capitalism painted by the most prominent capitalists on the business scene is not a pretty one.  It was said the magic of the market would benefit all of us.  Lately, it hasn’t, so the conservative warnings against the damage high taxes do to the economy ring hollow.  Politically, it would seem to be a perfect time for a political movement attacking capitalism — in the American formulation, the “excesses” of capitalism.  We don’t really have an intellectually coherent Left in this country in the 19th-century European sense.  But we do have a political location where capitalism’s disappointed, disaffected and disgusted can unite — the Democratic Party.  

And, they are about to nominate the most unapolegetically liberal candidate since McGovern in Barack Obama.  In doing so, they are specifically rejecting a continuation of the successful Clinton legacy.  Today’s Democrats largely no longer find Clinton’s reign to be such a success. Oh, it’s tied in with his and her ethical problems, but even his pure policy plays were either more wins for conservatism (welfare reform, NAFTA), symbolic changes in a liberal direction (the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows workers to take time off to care for a sick child — at their own expense), or big flops (do I need to remind anyone about health care?).

If you believe Obama, his administration will bring back liberalism in a big way.

Do you believe him?  Check that: I’m not doubting his sincerity.  I think he wants an activist government to create greater security for middle-class voters.  My question is: If he wins, will he be able to pull it off?  Will he take advantage of Democratic majorities in both houses (something Clinton had, but squandered after just two years) and get health care reform passed?  Will he really go after the oil companies and mortgage companies?

Or is that going to be impossible?

This is what I’m dying to find out. Have the pitiless realities of the global economy rendered liberalism obsolete?  Can Milton Friedman be repealed?

I sense the American voters are anxious to find out.  They’d like to believe — “yes we can” — that we can use the tools of government to construct a fairer, more secure, more democratic and more sustainable economy than the one we have now.  Will that belief survive the first two years of an Obama Administration?

If so, Obama could be the next FDR.  But does that seem realistic to you?

P.S. I realize McCain is still close in the polls and might win.  He’s got the national security issue about as locked up as a candidate can, and his domestic-policy views are closer to liberalism than any Republican has tried for decades.  He’s not to be written off by any means.  If this election is about homeland security and national defense, he wins.  

Or: He wins if the American public decides it isn’t ready to revive liberalism.

Or: He wins if the American public concludes Obama doesn’t have enough experience to back up his promises.  

Admitting Obama is Ordinary

I go back over this blog’s past few months and have to cringe a little over my political prognostications of Hillary’s demise and excess enthusiasm for Barack Obama who, it turns out, is mortal, flawed, and perhaps worst of all, a rather ordinary politician.  He still might become president and still might be an adequate president.  But he is not what I thought he was, nor what most of us thought he was.  He is one more in a long line of Democrats who have been packaged by political geniuses to suit the temper of the times; who, in the end, can’t live up to the hype carefully designed on their behalf.

Kurt Andersen’s piece in New York provides a kind of elegy for the grand illusion that some of us (not just those “in the media”) shared:

Back in February, when the new prince was gliding thrillingly up and up toward nomination, a part of the thrill for the media was their happy astonishment that they were no longer cosmopolitan outliers but finally (unlike in 1984 with Gary Hart) in sync with America: Regular folks, white people in Iowa and Virginia and Wisconsin, were actually voting for Obama!

That was then. With the ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, the latest Reverend Wright eruption, and the shrinkage of Obama’s leads in the polls, the media are feeling lousy, and not just because their guy is taking a beating. If Obama is deemed to be an effete, out-of-touch yuppie, then the effete-yuppie media Establishment that’s embraced him must be equally oblivious and/or indifferent to the sentiments of the common folk.

Uh-oh. As the cratering of newspaper circulations accelerates (thousands a week are now abandoning the Times) and network-news audiences continue to shrink, for big-time mainstream journalists to seem even more out of touch makes some of them panic. And … so … it’s all … his fault, that highfalutin Obama!

Andersen’s still rooting for Obama but more, it appears, because he can’t abide the alternative: A Clinton win.  The Clintons were merely tolerated all along, at least after 1994, because they were up against unattractive enemies.  But the Obama vs. Clinton matchup has unleashed the anti-Clinton id, the beast many of us kept in the cellar throughout the 90s, the silent acknowledge that these people are liars! and what Bill did with Monica was disgusting! and how dare they cart off official gifts from dignitaries as if they owned them! and Jesus, he pardoned Mark Rich!? and how can she live with herself after screwing up health care reform? It’s hard to stop once you get started, and the Obama/Clinton contrast certainly got a lot of us started.

But the depressing fact is: Obama’s not up for this.  He’s already looking defeated.  He’s clearly embarrassed by the man who’s been revealed over the past couple of months.  Not Rev. Wright, but himself.  He hears questions about his judgment and is too smart not to agree at some level.  The real explanation for his dalliances with the likes of Rev. Wright, Tony Rezco, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn — that if you want to succeed in southside Chicago politics, you need to show up with such people — isn’t acceptable to the broad American public and he knows it.

It isn’t fair, really.  Bush, Gore, Kerry, Clinton, McCain, whoever you want to cite, they all cut deals with frauds, kooks and boodlers on their ways up the greazy pole, as did most of their legendary political predecessors.  This is the dark side of “all politics is local.”  Few politicians emerge from their home base without enemies and alliances that, later, they’ll wish they hadn’t made.   Harry Truman was a product of the corrupt Pendergast machine in Kansas City.  JFK’s ties with organized crime went back to his father’s years as a bootlegger, the source of much of the family fortune, and the connection obviously helped him secure Illinois’ electoral votes and thus the White House. Ronald Reagan’s relationship with MCA president Lew Wasserman was corrupt on both sides, to their mutual benefit and ultimately sparked Reagan’s political rise.  Al Gore and his father had a crucial relationship with oilman and Soviet tool Armand Hammer.  None of these men would have become president or vice-president without the help of their unsavory sponsors.

But, no matter.  Obama’s political life has caught up with him and he’s become the proverbial deer in headlights ever since.  He can’t go back to the gossamer appeals to hope.  But he lacks much else to recommend him. Other than not being Hillary and not being McCain, for those who dislike those two warhorses.

Only Churchgoers Need Apply

Thinking about Barack Obama’s problem with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I was reminded of why, despite an interest in politics that goes back to when I was eight years old, I never considered running for office.

It seemed like all politicians went to church – like you just had to be a practicing something-or-other in order to get elected.   I didn’t go to church.  I’ve never gone regularly, and if you add up all the Sundays in my life, I’m sure I haven’t spent more than one percent of them in a pew.  I just wasn’t raised that way. 

My mother, feeling pangs of guilt, sent me to an Episcopal church in Connecticut for about six months when I was about 10, but she tells me I was impatient with Sunday school and asked to be relieved of it.  What I mostly remember  was a little store across the street from the church where I could buy flavored wax lips while waiting (and waiting) for my parents to pick me up.  In my adult life, I’ve attended church sporadically, usually at someone’s invitation.  My late wife got me to go to a Methodist church for awhile, but only because they had this great jazz-gospel organist. Repeating my own pattern, however, my son’s reasonable objections to Sunday School ended that.  

My beliefs about God veer from hopeful agnosticism to “gimme a break” atheism.  To anticipate what my wife now would say, yes I feel life on earth is a miracle, a holy thing, full of mysteries.  But there’s another side to me that says: Every spiritual experience, every act of prophecy or other-awareness is, one day, going to be explained by physics.  And maybe physics leads to God.  But I won’t live long enough to find out.

But I digress.  The point is, I figured early on that if I didn’t go to church, I could never successfully run for office. For some reason, it never occurred to me to do what Barack Obama and probably thousands of other politicians did, just expediently join a church and sit there every Sunday and pretend to agree.  In Obama’s case, he chose a church in the heart of the community he hoped would elect him to public office.  Poignantly, he also apparently chose this church because he wanted to understand African-American culture — a culture everyone assumed he was part of even though he really wasn’t. 

But Obama’s strategem really was no different from what a white would-be politico of no particular religious upbringing would probably do.  It’s just never occured to the news media to find out what the politician’s minister was really saying.  I’m guessing Obama is being held accountable for statements he not only didn’t believe,  but were probably said when he was out a side door, smoking a butt and politicking.  Or maybe even sleeping. Church is a great place for a sitting-up nap, almost as good as the movies. 

I just couldn’t do it, I guess.  The indignity of having to do as John McCain did, describing some obvious whacko as a “spiritual advisor,” just seemed like more than I could ever bear.  Some of the things Obama has said, about how Wright “brought me to Christ” make me queasy, now that we know what the Rev. Wright’s all about.  Hillary has said plainly unbelievable things about her faith, too.  I mean, we all know she’s hardly a pious person.  Her reputation for foul mouthed vindictiveness, dishonesty and gargantuan ego does not track with what we’ve been led to believe religious people are all about.  But she gets credit for being a churchgoer.  For some voters, not going to church is a dealbreaker.  To me, attending church insincerely is profane. 

None of this is said to forgive Obama’s condoning of Wright’s poisonous lie that the government created and launched HIV as a genocidal plot against blacks.  The idea that someone would take their children someplace they could hear such statements is inexcusable, especially if the point was mere political networking.  Much as I want to, I can’t make it go away.  If I vote for him in November, I’ll have to do so in spite of this.

Unimpressive

Regarding the demands for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the presidential contest:

Can someone explain to me exactly what Barack Obama’s campaign has done to give Hillary any incentive to drop out? Unless you think a stream of insults, threats, impatient whining (e.g. Obama’s ‘movie…too long’ comment) and finger-pointing is what you think would motivate someone with the ego to fancy themselves a president.

Is this how he plans to handle diplomacy when he’s in the White House?  He’s managing to look arrogant and weak at the same time, quite a trick.

Maybe they could bring in Al Gore to sigh at her.

Look, I’m aware that Obama hasn’t, directly, in his own words, called on Clinton to quit.  But his surrogates have done so, presumably with the blessing of his campaign gurus.  Let’s just say, he could stop the talk and he hasn’t. 

Like Bill Press says:

It’s not over yet. Until it is, we can’t be sure of the outcome. And it would be a big mistake to end it prematurely. There’s been many a boxing match where one fighter won 14 rounds, only to get knocked out in the 15th.

All these Obama supporters calling on Clinton to drop out aren’t helping their candidate, either. They make Obama look like he’s afraid of a fight. And they themselves look like a stereotypical bunch of men telling a woman she can’t hack it in politics, so she might as well get back in the kitchen…. If Obama ends up the nominee, I’ll do handstands on the White House lawn. But only if he wins it, fair and square.

I probably find it a bit more troubling in what it says about Obama than Press does.  The Obama campaign, which looked so savvy and professional for all of 2007 and the first two months of ‘08 has suddenly fallen into a self-destructive spiral. For a candidate who has arguably cinched the nomination, he’s acting like he’s desperately unsure of himself and wants Hillary out of the way so he can go into free-fall without consequence.

Or else why would he have signed off on denying revotes to two big and critical states, Michigan and Florida?  A confident candidate would have encouraged a revote, which is the obviously fair thing to do.  But Barack Obama is no longer a confident candidate.  He’s a shell of what he was just 30 days ago.

For example, I thought Obama was awful on “The View.” If he can be pushed around by Elizabeth Hasselback, the meekest lil’ Republican on the planet, it’s scary to think what John McCain will be able to do to him.  He may be sticking to his story on Rev. Wright, but it’s not a story that hangs together, or commends him to independent voters. 

I admit, I fell hard for Obama a few months ago — maybe longer.  I’m wondering about that now.  Did I get caught up in his campaign irrationally?  No question about it, he’s a brilliant person, but there are lots of brilliant people who won’t wake up next January as president. Obama still could get my vote, but he is much-diminished. There is absolutely no reason for Hillary to drop out, and I’m guessing there is a contingent of Obama-supporting Dems who are saying it but hoping she won’t actually do it.  He needs the remaining weeks of this campaign to reestablish in our minds the qualities that made him seem like a potentially great president. 

The Obama and McCain Buddy-Cop Show

A month ago, I tossed off a comment on Althouse that included the following lines:

So that leaves Obama and McCain. I wish they could run together. They’d be like one of those old 1970s cop shows. The crusty old seen-it-all guy who goes by his gut, partnered with the brilliant rookie whose got courage to match his brains.

They both seem like leaders to me. Contrary to extremely popular belief, the presidency is not an ideological office. The needed skills are inertia-busting on the domestic front, and strategic courage on the international front. Plus the right kind of ego, an ego strong enough to surround themselves with very smart advisors and encourage candor from them.

Both seem to have these skills. If they end up running against each other, I don’t yet know which way I’d go. But if only one of them is in the race, that’s the one I’m voting for.

I was sort of kidding.  In the same comment, I discussed briefly my distaste for Hillary Clinton and at greater length my dislike of Mitt Romney. 

Recently, Salon’s Edward McClelland wrote a column suggesting that guys are supporting Obama and/or McCain — just to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.  His take-off point was my post:

John Stodder, a 52-year-old blogger from Palos Verdes Peninsula, Calif., looks at the presidential field and sees another buddy-cop pairing: John McCain and Barack Obama, supposed mavericks who break their parties’ rules, bound together by a common mission — keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

“I wish they could run together,” Stodder swoons. “They’d be like one of those old 1970s cop shows. The crusty old seen-it-all guy who goes by his gut, partnered with the brilliant rookie who’s got courage to match his brains.

I give McClelland huge props for crediting me with the line.  I think it’s funny.  I don’t actually think the White House is like a grungy detective precinct in a gritty urban core.  The fact that I like both candidates (Obama more than McCain) is incidental. 

The fact that they’re both men has nothing to do with why I like them.  I was prepared to vote for Sen. Clinton until this year despite some misgivings, until her campaign’s empty-headed and scurrilous nature became apparent. 

You hear a lot about the failure of the Clinton “inevitability” strategy.  In America, what else could such a strategy do but fail?  “Vote for me because you have no choice” might work in Cuba or Iran, but not here. 

Anyway, my little brainstorm got another push into potential meme-dom today on NPR’s “Wait…Wait…Don’t Tell Me.”  Listen to the first couple of minutes.  (And thank you to my wife’s aunt for happening across the show.)

It makes me want to blog some more!

New Hampshire Theories

Whaaaa….?

Here are a few theories.

Like the Washington Post’s Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiest, I don’t buy the so-called “Bradley Effect” in 2008.

A more likely culprit than the role of race in the New Hampshire election was the “likely voter” modeling, with pollsters perhaps over-counting the boost of enthusiasm among Obama supporters following his victory in Iowa. Another possibility is that independents opted at the last minute to participate in the Republican primary, depriving Obama of crucial voters.

A further potential source of error stems from New Hampshire ballot rules. In previous contests, the state rotated candidate names from precinct to precinct, but this year the names were in alphabetical order, with Clinton near the top and Obama lower down. Stanford Professor Jon Krosnick, a survey specialist and expert witness in a lawsuit about ballot order in New Hampshire, has estimated a three percentage point or greater bounce for a big name candidate appearing high on the ballot. Therefore, if pre-election polls randomized candidate names, as most do, they would have underestimated Clinton’s support by at least three points.

Tim Russert reportedly said internal campaign tracking polls were as wrong as the public ones. Obama’s people were telling him he had a 14 point edge; Clinton’s were telling her he was ahead by 11.

Another underestimated factor — a frequently underestimated factor:  Early absentee ballots.  How many Democrats cast their ballots before the Iowa results?  Hillary’s campaign emphasized rounding those up. 

Anyway.  As I said earlier, Obama needs to be tested while the public’s watching.  Recovering from unexpected disappointment is a good next test.

Oh, Mama, Could This Really Be the End?

I’m running into a lot of blog posts and articles like this:

(T)o watch Obama v. Clinton is to be reminded of watching Ali v. Foreman. The de facto knockout blow is about to be delivered tomorrow in the snowy streets of New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton certainly won’t drop out after her loss; she will stagger on but prove unable to stop Obama. And to watch the Clintons’ rage and desperation grow in the last days of this campaign will not be pretty. They will lash out at everyone, including Obama, the media, her own campaign, and maybe, eventually, each other.

This is a couple not known for their grace or for holding lightly to their grip on power.

There are many things to say about the deeper meaning of this moment and what its passing will signify. Suffice it to say that it will be good, very good, for us to say farewell to the couple that brought you Carville, Begala, Blumenthal, and Ickes; the “war room,” the use of private investigators, and attacks on women like Dolly Kyle Browning, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Kathleen Willey; impeachment for perjurious, false and misleading testimony to a grand jury; contempt of court findings; the promiscuous smearing of those whom they viewed as threat to their power; the charges of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and assurances that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”; and so much more.

Or, more pithily:

R.I.P., THE CLINTON ERA, 9:34 P.M. EST.

Wow.

Get your kids out and put them in front of the TV: The Clinton Era officially ended at 9:34 p.m. EST when Edwards paired with Obama to bury Hillary as a non-agent of change.

Wow, again.

Posted by Tom Schaller on January 5, 2008 9:31 PM

I’d expand it.  We’ve reached the end of what will be called the Bush-Clinton Era.  You can’t explain the Clintons without the Bushes.  You can’t explain Bush without the Clintons.  It’s been going on since the conventions of 1988, when George H.W. Bush said “Read my lips,” and Bill Clinton said much, much more in a horrible nominating speech for Michael Dukakis, then went on “The Tonight Show” to make fun of himself.  

The Bush “machine” and the Clinton “machine” each run much the same way; a thin veneer of idealism over a “back off, chump” culture of intimidation.  Kennedys, but without the charm and poetry.   

Bush’s presidency ushered in Clinton’s in many ways.  His success in the Gulf War scared off stronger and more qualified Democratic challengers like Mario Cuomo, who thought a second Bush term was a foregone conclusion.  Bush’s victory over Dukakis had already convinced some Democratic leaders that the party’s 70s-era liberalism needed to be moderated if the party was ever going to win again.  Only with those two developments could a Clinton nomination have been possible.

Then add Ross Perot.  It’s pretty clear that his presidential campaign of 1992 had as much to do with harming Bush as advancing an agenda. There was some bad blood there — some dark and probably well-earned grudge against the Bush clan.  If Perot hadn’t have been on the ballot as an independent in 1992, Bush probably would’ve won.  (Perot’s presence on the ballot also denied Clinton a majority in 1996.) 

Clinton’s cycles of failure and success incubated George W. Bush’s political career.  The second Bush copied key elements of Clinton’s success while exploiting his failures.  He governed Texas as a moderate, and ran in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” a kind of tribute to Clinton’s “Third Way.”  Like Clinton, Bush was a candidate of confessions, but he did Clinton one better by pronouncing Christianity as his salvation from the bottle.  

Still, Bush would’ve had no chance against Al Gore if it wasn’t for the political damage inflicted on him by Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair and the various fundraising scandals.  All the other conditions were perfect for Gore’s success.  But he couldn’t capitalize because he was tainted by Clinton sleaze.

Who wasn’t tainted by Clinton sleaze?  Surprisingly, Hillary Clinton.  In what must have struck Gore in the middle of many nights as a horrible irony, he lost but Bill’s wife won a seat in the Senate.

Then 9/11/01 happened.  Much of the politics of the past seven years has been reacting to that event.  Both the incumbent but relatively new Bush Administration and the predecessor Clinton Administration were implicated for policy failures that led directly to the terrorist attack’s success.  How much each Administration was to blame became a defining political dynamic ever since. 9/11 empowered Bush to invade Iraq, which he couldn’t have done without getting nervous Democrats like Hillary to support him.

Hillary Clinton’s vote (as well as John Kerry’s) to grant Bush war authority was like a poison pill for her presidential ambitions.  Her only strategy for getting elected in 2008 was “inevitability,” but the war vote was a chink in that armor that a candidate not implicated in the war could exploit.   And Barack Obama has done that — and so much more.

But the real reason the Bush-Clinton era has ended?  We’re just tired of these people.  We’re tired of criticizing them and we’re tired of defending them.  We’re tired of how every day of the past three Administrations, stretching back 20 years, has been about a permanent campaign.  We’re tired of the “derangement-syndromes” each family has stimulated in the body politic — the conspiracy theories, the name-calling, the gossip, the investigations. Yes, we’re glad to wave goodbye to Carville, Begala and the rest, but we’re also glad to send Karl Rove and Dick Cheney off with them.  All these despised family retainers.

So what about this video?

Is she crying because she knows her time has come and gone?  Hillary’s favorite phrase to describe herself was “tireless advocate,” but she looks awfully tired.  You know she won’t let go of the hope that her campaign can succeed, but Clinton is no longer capable of being the underdog.

It’s dismal to be where she is right now — in free-fall, according to the polls, running against a candidate, Obama, who is almost immune to criticism right now no matter what happens.  How does she keep going…knowing that defeat is almost inevitable?

When The Hero Takes a Fall

Hillary Clinton’s sudden fall from the “inevitable frontrunner” position is going to create big and fast-moving waves through both parties’ nomination processes.  Things might not be entirely as they seem.

That’s what went through my mind after reading this post on TownHall.com.  According to Duane R. Patterson, a couple of unlikely lads have attached themselves to Mike Huckabee’s campaign:  Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich. 

Very quietly, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is meddling in the GOP primary field.  A couple of weeks ago, there was a press release that indicated Rick Tyler, long time communications director for Gingrich, was taking a leave of absence from his day job, and helping out the communications effort for Mike Huckabee.

Mark Levin over on The Corner writes today that Newt and Dick Morris are both helping the Arkansas populist former governor, Newt behind the scenes, Morris publicly.  The question is why is Newt doing this?

When the Tyler move became public, the theory developed that Newt still envisions himself running for the presidency, but didn’t think this cycle was the right time to run because of the aura of invincibility of Hillary Clinton.  Newt would then benefit by helping out the perceived weakest of the GOP candidates, ensuring that come January ‘09, the Republicans would begin their four year wandering through the desert.  This would set up Newt as the White Knight in 2012, riding to the rescue after President Hillary screwed things up in her first term. 

But after Iowa last night, another theory is beginning to develop.  Hillary’s aura of invincibility is no longer there.  Barack Obama is now the frontrunner, and although very charismatic, he’s an empty suit, especially when it comes to foreign policy.  Newt may now be thinking that there’s a window of opportunity this cycle.  All that needs to take place is for Huckabee to take a couple of the early states, Rudy take a couple of the big states, McCain maybe taking a state here or there, and Romney to take a couple, and you have yourself a brokered convention.  If the Republicans can’t decide on a clear frontrunner by the convention, could we potentially see the White Knight riding in a little earlier than expected into Minneapolis/St. Paul this September? 

This reminds me of what President Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks squad did in the 1972 election — weakening the candidates who threatened Nixon, like Senators Ed Muskie and Ted Kennedy, while strengthening the one they could most easily beat, Sen. George McGovern.  Except this is coming from within the party, and is seemingly a more elegant process of controlled quantum reactions to render a weak field even weaker. 

Somehow, though, I don’t see Newt Gingrich as the ultimate beneficiary of all this.  I’m not a Republican, so I know nothing, but my instinct tells me that if the GOP establishment pulls itself together, it will settle on Fred Thompson; and if it doesn’t, the nominee will be Rudy Giuliani. 

The thing that’s harder to see is what happens if Hillary manages to beat Obama in New Hampshire.  What if the campaign between the two of them becomes a mutual-assured-destruction dance?  Does Edwards benefit by default?  Or does Al Gore — reportedly out of the race because he feared the Clinton machine — suddenly get inspired to jump into the race?  Does John Kerry (who despises John Edwards) unleash his ego on the public again?

The point is, last night’s results didn’t merely change the respective positions of the existing candidates.  The effect is potentially much deeper.  The script might change far more than we imagine.  

Bring It On, Hillary

What an exciting night for politics in the USA…the most exciting for me since somewhere back in the 70s.  

A few months ago, I was telling people, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ll probably end up voting for Hillary Clinton.”  Not because I didn’t like Barack Obama, but because he seemed to be falling short.  Not because I couldn’t vote for any Republican against Clinton. But I knew I couldn’t vote for Mitt Romney, the presumed favorite with all the money.  The Reeps I could tolerate seemed unlikely to survive the gantlet.

All of that has changed.

After Iowa, I agree with RealClearPolitics’ John Ellis.  Romney is finished.  The Republican establishment that was backing him will drop him if he can’t be competitive with Mike Huckabee–a thoroughly unacceptable candidate–and will choose from among John McCain, Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani to lead the Anyone-But-Huckabee brigade. All of whom I like at least a little better than the egotistical, robotic Romney.

Huckabee is here because Romney conjured him, like the sorcerer’s apprentice. Romney, a moderate, formerly pro-choice Republican primarily known for his business acumen, cynically tried to turn himself into a “values” candidate to appease the GOP’s social conservatives. It wasn’t real.  The evangelical voter is not going to be led in a values campaign by someone who practices a religion for which, let’s face it, evangelicals have contempt.  They might have tolerated him, but he asked for more.  Romney put the question out there to the Christian right: Who will lead you? Who will bash gays for you? Who will deny women’s rights for you?  The answer came back: Some guy named Huckabee. Not you. He’s a Christian. You’re not.

Ellis correctly identifies the opportunity Romney missed:

Romney’s only real choice was to run as a Republican Gary Hart, the candidate of “new ideas” for a party in desperate need of same. That would have at least given him the flexibility to play to his strengths; his intellectual prowess, his business acumen, his demonstrable executive skills and his admirable personal qualities. And it would have enabled him to attract a wide array of advisors and intellectuals to help him think through innovative policy positions on what appear to be intractable issues.

Hillary’s not quite as far down the Loserville vortex as Romney, but tonight’s Iowa vote was as much a repudiation of her — and of the Clinton gang including her husband — as an endorsement of an Obama future.  But she has already signalled what she’ll say tomorrow and for the rest of the campaign.  Politico’s Ben Smith got a copy of the talking points.

— The race begins here in Iowa but it ends when Democrats throughout America have their say. Hillary remains more than 20 points ahead nationally, 7 points ahead in New Hampshire and ahead in Nevada, South Carolina and the large Feb. 5th states

— We’re going to continue to make the case that in these serious times when America faces big challenges, it will take a leader with Hillary’s strength and experience to deliver real change.

— Hillary has the resources to run a national campaign where she will compete across the country in the weeks ahead. This campaign was built for a marathon.

And so on.  She’s not giving up. She’s going to try to take Obama apart.  Suddenly, it will be Hillary playing a Giuliani-like role, scaring everyone about 9/11, 9/11, do you really trust Obama to handle another 9/11?  Among the dumbest political prognostications of the last week was the claim of Hugh Hewitt — a helplessly smitten Romney fanboy – that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was going wake up voters to the need for a “serious” candidate:

Senator Obama has to be reeling as voters realize that impressing Oprah has very little to do with being Commander-in-Chief in wartime, and Governor Huckabee’s “aw shucks” shtick is suddenly and transparently exposed as inadequate to the task ahead. 

This is the tack Hillary will surely take against Obama — and y’know, I hope she does.  He was not the front-runner until a poll showing him with a big lead came out in the Des Moines Register a few days ago.  He has not gotten the scrutiny a front-runner must get.  He hasn’t had to keep his composure against a wave of attacks, only some of which will be visible to us. 

As I write in the middle of the night, I’m sure Team Clinton is working the phones, trying to staunch a flood of campaign money flowing in the winner’s direction.  The Clinton machine will not quit.  It is the most ruthless, single-minded campaign organization since Richard Nixon’s.  

At least that’s the reputation.

I want to see how Obama handles Clinton’s coming assault.  I suspect and hope he’ll show grace under pressure.  He’ll make mistakes but the genius is in the way you recover from those mistakes.  I believe Obama will demonstrate his complete “adequacy to the task ahead.” So, yeah, Hillary, do your worst. Bring it on.  You’ll be doing your country a service — showing us what this potentially great new American leader is capable of. 

And if Obama should succumb?  It’ll be a sad day, but it’s better to find out now. 

How She Hates Him

If David Corn of The Nation is to be believed — and his reputation as a reporter is solid despite his affiliation with a far-left news source — the Hillary Clinton campaign’s recent harshness against Barack Obama comes straight from the heart:

When talking to Clintonites in recent days, I’ve noticed that they’ve come to despise Obama. I suppose that may be natural in the final weeks of a competitive campaign when much is at stake. But these people don’t need any prompting in private conversations to decry Obama as a dishonest poser. They’re not spinning for strategic purposes. They truly believe it. And other Democrats in Washington report encountering the same when speaking with Clinton campaign people. “They really, really hate Obama,” one Democratic operative unaffiliated with any campaign, tells me. “They can’t stand him. They talk about him as if he’s worse than Bush.” What do they hate about him? After all, there aren’t a lot of deep policy differences between the two, and he hasn’t gone for the jugular during the campaign. “It’s his presumptuousness,” this operative says. “That he thinks he can deny her the nomination. Who is he to try to do that?” You mean, he’s, uh, uppity? “Yes.” A senior House Democratic aide notes, “The Clinton people are going nuts in how much they hate him. But the problem is their narrative has gone beyond the plausible.”

That is, the Clintonites–and the campaign–may be overreacting. Will Democratic voters really buy the Clinton argument that Obama is an inauthentic and a dissembling scoundrel? Until the caucus-goers of Iowa speak, there is no way to know if Clinton’s DEFCON-1 assault on Obama will succeed or backfire. But the Clinton attacks do say something about Hillary Clinton. She’s adopting a whatever-it-takes strategy, mixing legitimate criticisms with truth-stretching blasts. And her campaign aides have adopted a we-must-destroy-him mindset that they justify by viewing Obama as a political lowlife.

Whatever-it-takes often works in political campaigns. But we all know that hatred can be blinding. Clinton is, as has been noted, running the risk of alienating those kindhearted souls of Iowa by slamming the lovable, likable and inspiring Barack Obama. She could end up looking a bit desperate. Candidates are always responsible for their campaigns, and they can be judged accordingly. If the Clinton campaign throws anything it can against Obama–with little regard for accuracy or decency–that will reflect her own character and values. It could, to turn her words against her, be a disqualification for the job.

Clinton is playing with fire. In explaining to reporters that she will be tougher on Obama, she said, “Now the fun part starts.” That was tasteless. It’s a remark that certainly can–and will be–used against her.

Whatever happened to “Don’t get mad, get even?”  (Attributed to Robert Kennedy.)  Or “revenge is a dish best served cold?” 

My image of the Clinton campaign operations over the years was that all the emotion was on the upbeat side, the “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” orgy of idealism in 1992-93, combined with a steely, unemotional ruthlessness in dealing with its foes.  If Hillary’s got a bunch of people around her feeding her paranoia about Obama, thinking they’ve got to save the country from Obama, then some kind of contagion has gotten loose.

Hopefully, for his sake, Obama won’t give way to the dark side himself.  A cooler, more confident Obama emerging victorious out of Iowa could suddenly find himself formidable.

ADDED:  I finally took a look at the “kindergarten” press release Clinton’s campaign manager is now trying to spin as a “silly” joke that “the spin machine” sold to a gullible press.  TPM has the release in this post. 

Help Wanted: Democratic Candidate to Run for President that People Don’t Hate

It is said that while the right looks for converts, the left looks for heretics.  The consequences of that tendency are demonstrated in this perceptive story from the LA Times:

It is a paradox of the 2008 presidential race. By a wide margin, several polls show, voters want a Democrat to win — yet when offered head-to-head contests of leading announced candidates, many switch allegiance to the Republican.

In a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll conducted this month, this dynamic was most clearly evident with Clinton.

When registered voters were asked which party they would like to win the White House, they preferred a Democrat over a Republican by 8 percentage points. But in a race pitting Clinton against former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican was favored by 10 percentage points.

Clinton’s showing against Giuliani was the starkest example of how the general Democratic edge sometimes narrows or vanishes when voters are given specific candidates to choose between.

The poll also showed Clinton trailing when matched against two other Republicans, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The deficits, however, were within the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

These results, as well as follow-up interviews of poll respondents, reflect the array of difficulties that Clinton could face as the Democratic nominee.

Plenty of time remains for Clinton to temper resistance to her candidacy. But for now, her failure to match her party’s generic advantage underscores the primacy of personal appeal in a presidential race, regardless of political context.

“Personal appeal” is part of the problem, but I don’t think it really captures it.  Hillary, Edwards and Obama are anything but repellent personalities.  In their own ways, they can be charismatic.  The problem is the toll that being a Democratic leader takes against a candidate’s image for strength and having a core of beliefs.

The one-issue caucuses within the party, especially labor, put so much pressure on candidates to carry their water regardless of how the general public feels, regardless of what common sense and experience shows that one of two things happens.  The Democratic leader becomes unviable because the special interests exert their veto power; or they become a flip-flopping ball of confusion, totally reliant on careful parsing of words and PR spin to make their positions seem coherent and principled.

To some degree, the netroots phenomenon was supposed to overcome this.  Kos is a “just win baby” Democrat who wants the party to unite around broad principles.  But despite the good intentions, the netroots have somehow evolved into yet another single-issue constituency — the “get out of Iraq now” caucus.   Both Clinton and Obama joined a small minority of Democrats in opposing the troop funding bill, because they believed they would otherwise be crucified.  But that position is likely to come back to haunt them later.

What If We Held an Election and None of the Candidates Qualified?

According to the New Republic’s John B. Judis, none of the six major presidential candidates for 2008 is qualified to be president.  Five of them have no foreign policy experience (sorry Hillary, but being First Lady doesn’t really count, and as a senator you haven’t been involved).  The one whose resume shows him to be qualified, John McCain, is discounted by Judis because “in his dogged pursuit of a neoconservative agenda, McCain shows little evidence of having acquired any wisdom from that experience.”

Given what’s at stake in 2008, Judis is right to be alarmed. 

Like everything else that’s wrong with politics nowadays, the roots of the problem in selecting a president qualified to serve as commander-in-chief and our nation’s representative to the world go back to the 1960s, Judis says.  By the 1970s…

(p)opular primaries became the main vehicle for nominating candidates. That meant that the party itself, and the party convention, became increasingly irrelevant. What mattered was a candidate’s ability to win votes in the primaries, especially the early ones. Foreign policy played a peripheral role, and only as a component of the themes the candidate developed. What mattered most was the ability of the candidate–best evidenced by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush–to make voters feel that he cared personally about them. That demanded special skills from a candidate and from a large campaign staff devoted to polling and media, including advertising.

Jimmy Carter was the first of these post-sixties candidates, and he set the standard that subsequent candidates have followed. Even though the United States was still in the throes of a foreign policy crisis caused by its defeat in Vietnam, he ran primarily on a Watergate promise of personal honesty and integrity. His experience consisted of one term as Georgia’s governor. He had no experience in foreign policy and was being tutored during the campaign by Zbigniew Brzezinski, but the voters didn’t hold it against him. George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000 was a carbon copy of Carter’s campaign. He stressed personal qualities and knew, if anything, even less about foreign policy than Carter did. But he ran a skillful campaign and won.

Few of these candidates could boast any expertise in foreign policy. Many of them, as in the past, were governors. The senators and House members who ran for president were unlikely to have served on the foreign relations committees–committees that are generally shunned by presidential aspirants because they are irrelevant to local constituents and because they don’t provide a basis for fundraising. When challenged on whether they had the experience to be president, many of the candidates cited their experience running for president. The ability to campaign became the test of the ability to govern.

Whenever I read things like this, I always say to myself:  “God must love the United States of America.  Left to our own devices, we’d be screwed.”   I hope we haven’t done anything to piss Him off.  

Who would be qualified to serve as president, who has a chance?  Gore is the obvious choice.  Who else?  

Campaign Reform’s Perverse Effects

I was aware that my first political crush, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, was funded in his 1968 presidential campaign by a handful of liberal millionaires who wanted to dethrone Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam folly.  I was not aware, until reading this George Will column, that it was McCarthy’s challenge that led us down the foolish road of campaign finance reform — a reform process with a great PR image but perverse effects. 

For 35 years, campaign finance limits have been sold as a way of “leveling the playing field.”  In fact, they provide the Establishment candidates of both parties an almost insurmountable advantage.  If Hillary Clinton ends up winning the 2008 Democratic nomination, it will be because of, not in spite of, campaign limits that artificially suppressed the potential for an insurgent, like Barack Obama or a centrist alternative, to challenge her. 

Will says:

Democrats have many interesting candidates, but governors often are the most plausible candidates to be the nation’s chief executive and only one remains in the Democratic race — New Mexico’s Bill Richardson. Three former governors — Virginia’s Mark Warner, Indiana’s Evan Bayh and Iowa’s Tom Vilsack — have left the field.

Vilsack said the demise of his candidacy was determined by ” money and only money.” Well, yes, but there were reasons, political and ideological, why he could not find buyers for what he was selling. Nevertheless, his statement triggered the usual laments about the determinative role of money in politics. This year we are told to be horrified by the fact that by November 2008 the presidential contest will have cost $1 billion. Which means that the two-year process will cost half as much as Americans spend every year on Easter candy.

Candidates do have to spend too much time raising money. But that is because the government, by banning large campaign contributions, has transformed a huge American surplus — money — into an artificial scarcity. The government began to do this for anti-competitive purposes.

The modern drive for campaign finance “reforms” is usually said to have been initiated by Democrats in response to Watergate. Democrats did start it, but before Watergate, in response to their traumas of 1968.

That year, Sen. Gene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurgency disturbed the Democratic Party’s equilibrium by mounting a serious challenge to the renomination of President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was able to do that only because a few wealthy people gave him large contributions. Democrats also were alarmed by former Alabama governor George Wallace’s success in 1968, and they mistakenly assumed that Wallace, too, was mostly funded by a few very large contributions.

According to John Samples of the Cato Institute (in his book ” The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform”), congressional Democrats began the process that culminated in criminalizing large contributions — the kind that can give long-shot candidates, such as Vilsack, a chance to become competitive. Yes, the initial aim of campaign “reforms” was less the proclaimed purpose of combating corruption or “the appearance” thereof than it was to impede the entry of inconvenient candidates into presidential campaigns. In that sense, campaign reform is a government program that has actually worked, unfortunately.

Was Al Gore Abused as a Candidate?

Although the post is more than six months old, a lively little discussion erupted underneath my item chiding former VP Al Gore for using a private jet on his promotional tour for “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Someone who signed his comments “algoredotorg” and has a website called Drafting Gore claimed here that during the 2000 campaign, the news media “was incredibly biased against Gore (moreso than any candidate in modern history)…” 

The sub-amateur historian in me didn’t recognize this as a political statement but as a historical claim with little basis; so I went on to list all the victims of media bias who ran for president since 1960.  (Interestingly, in many cases, the media showed unfairness to both candidates, which some news media spokesperson like to claim is proof of their objectivity.  It could also be proof that they are consistent horse’s asses.  You decide.) 

Anyway, being somewhat of an Internet Pangloss, I didn’t really see what “algoredotorg” was really trying to do.  This was not about comparing views of history.  This was about creating an alternate history of the 2000 election.  It’s a campaign.  Salon.com pundit Joe Conason gives it full expression on Salon.com:

The same press corps that once snarled for his blood is now smooching his boots — an implicit apology that might be gratifying to the former future president, if only he were still naive enough to value their esteem.

The sudden fashion for favorable comment won’t influence any thoughtful American’s opinion of Gore, but it should remind us of the dismal media performance that did such a terrible disservice to him and to the nation. Although Gore himself certainly deserves a measure of blame for the catastrophic conclusion of the 2000 presidential election and the events that led up to it, his hateful treatment by the press slanted the campaign against him from the beginning.    

Conason puts Gore on notice:  If Gore decides to run for president, the smooching will stop.  Like my commenter, Conason links to a Daily Howler piece that cites the many mean things pundits said about Gore in the past — the same pundits who like him now and are seemingly encouraging him to join the campaign.  He quotes ominously a statement from ABC’s The Note:

“Basically, the political press wants to tempt Al Gore into the race, and then they will destroy him as a flip-flopping, exaggerating, stiff loser. And Gore knows this.”

I dunno, Joe…that sounded kind of like a joke to me.

If Gore is too sensitive to take the media pounding that all presidential candidates get, then Conason’s right — he should stay out.  It’s like a star ballplayer deciding whether to play in New York or Kansas City.  If he doesn’t like being called out on the back of a tabloid in type face other cities’ newspapers save for presidential assassinations, don’t play in New York. 

But I’ve never heard Gore himself whine about his press coverage in 2000.  Gore is an odd fellow, like most politicians, and the press likes to join in the fun of making fun of public figures’ peculiar qualities.  I think Conason, the Daily Howler and “algoredotcom” do their friend Gore a disservice by making it seem as if harsh press coverage caused Gore’s defeat (or un-selection).   There are plenty of candidates who got terrible press and went on to win the presidency, including the current occupant of the White House.  Of presidents in my memory, I don’t think any of them won because the press was biased in their favor.

Gore lost in 2000 because he ran a bad campaign.  He is getting adulation now mostly because he is being so blunt about the cause that means the most to him, climate change.  It’s pretty clear now that he’s felt the way he feels about global warming since the early 1990s.  But he didn’t talk about it in 1999-2000 because his advisors didn’t think environment as an issue would be decisive.  And maybe it wasn’t – but Gore’s lack of passion was.  He campaigned on focus-grouped issues he didn’t give a shit about, and it showed.  The meme that Gore had to hire a feminist writer to teach him how to be an “alpha male” stuck because, by the time that happened, Gore had already made an impression on the electorate as a guy who didn’t know who he was.

Nobody could possibly say that now.  He is unleashed as an anti-war, pro-environment progressive.  His credentials and experience in economic and foreign policy would make him acceptable to moderates in ways that Barack Obama can’t be.  Gore is far from perfect, and those meanies in the media will continue to pick on his flaws (like the blatant hypocrisy about his personal energy use).  But now, it doesn’t seem to bother him.  He’s grown a layer of Teflon. 

He’s no longer the “old person’s idea of what a young person should be like” – the rap on him back when he first tried to run for president in 1988.  This month, he’ll turn 59.  He’s already won the gravitas primary, which I believe will prove to be the most important aspect of the 2008 contest — and is the big advantage Rudy Guiliani or John McCain would bring to the GOP ticket. 

I think a Gore/Obama ticket is the only sure winner available to the Democratic party in 2008.  A ticket headed by any of the three major announced candidates — Clinton, Obama or Edwards — would have to get a lot of breaks to win.  Gore is, by far, the best messenger for what the Democratic Party is about now, and because of his long experience, he can crowd out feckless characters like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, whose dithering has slid the party backward since last November’s win.  It would be good for the country, and great for the Democratic Party, if Gore decided to run.

So I say to his fans and defenders:  Stop being such wimps about the media!  You’re wrong about 2000, but even if you were right, it’s the wrong thing to be talking about.  Don’t talk about Florida either.  If Gore was robbed or if he wasn’t, it doesn’t matter now.  Gore-as-victim is a loser.  Gore is a leader now; stop babying him.  

Go For It, Obama

Why shouldn't the 2008 Democratic Party nominee be Barack Obama (the senator from Illinois whose flirtation with a presidential run is detailed in this Washington Post story)?

The Republicans are tired and unpopular, and yet it appears that the Democratic Party is in no shape to take advantage of the opportunity. They're twisted up by the war, twisted up by the left-wing bloggers, twisted up by the cocooning effect of major media (of which the Obama story I've linked to is a perfect example, ironically.) The state of our two-party system is atrocious. Both parties need some time in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, there will be a Democratic Party nominee in 2008. As the Post story says,

The speculation is as much a commentary on the state of the party as it is on Obama. The Democrats' most prominent likely contenders — such as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and John F. Kerry (Mass.) — are figures who have been in the public eye for many years and wear scars from earlier controversies.

No, Obama hasn't been much of a senator in his year-plus in office. He's not in the majority, and he's a rookie, so you can't set your expectations too high. No, Obama hasn't got any distinctive positions on any issues, and is afflicted with the Democratic Party's self-cancelling orthodoxy. But he's dynamic, and very smart; charming and charismatic; young and energetic. And depending on who the Republicans nominate, a candidate who'll run on the Democratic orthodoxy might not seem so bad.

There is no question that Barack Obama is fully qualified to be our president. And, as the Post story details, there is little doubt he could raise the money he would need. He's a star, the first star the party's had since Bill Clinton.

It was said just a few months ago that Hillary Clinton could take the party's left-wing base for granted, and could run as a moderate on national security and social issues, where the left-wing ideology scares away voters. That conventional wisdom is already washed-up. If Hillary runs, she will run as the moderate. Kerry and others will take the left wing vote. Hillary will be treated like Joe Lieberman.

Obama can do what Hillary cannot: Keep the left enthralled, while tacking to the center-right on national security. Obama could be Peter Beinart's dream, a new Truman.

I predict the 2006 election won't go nearly as well for the Democrats as they've been hoping. If I'm right, there will be a lot of gloom and rancor in the run-up to 2008. But Obama entering the race would change everything. Politics might seem fun again for a lot of us. He can put an easy grin on Democratic partisanship. He's not a hater or a divider.

If he runs, we'll find out more about him. Maybe Obama will melt under the kleiglights. But in politics, timing is everything, and I think the timing is exquisite for Barack Obama in 2008. Don't wait, don't let anyone trick you into paying dues you don't need to pay. Go for it, Senator Obama.