With so much attention being lavished these days on the perceived flaws and foibles of the ’08 presidential candidates, it’s easy to overlook the reigning master of disaster – until such moments when he reminds us why he still wears the crown.
That’s precisely what George W. Bush did yesterday, when he spoke at a conservative think tank (naturally), and uncorked one of his rhetorical whoppers, the kind that has a landslide majority of Americans counting down the days to his departure.
In remarks to a rapt crowd at the Heritage Foundation, he essentially argued that if the Democratic Senate doesn’t confirm Michael Mukasey for attorney general, it will mean that the Democrats are weak in the war on terror. (Those last eight words worked for Bush in the elections of 2002 and 2004, and apparently he still thinks they pack a punch, despite the fact that he was soundly repudiated in the election of 2006. But I digress.)
In the midst of suggesting yesterday that Democrats are terrorist-coddlers, he came out with this: “Some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden…”
He was basically arguing that the Democrats don’t take Osama bin Laden seriously, whereas he, as our vigilant protector-in-chief, does take Osama bin Laden seriously.
But wait a minute – I seem to recall that Bush, in past disquisitions about the war on terror, told us that things were going so swimmingly that we didn’t need to take Osama bin Laden seriously. Yep, that’s what the man said, in all kinds of ways:
“I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority...I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became - we shoved him out more and more on the margins...Deep in my heart I know the man's on the run...I just don't spend much time on it, really, to be honest with you…He’s a person who’s now been marginalized.”
Let's puzzle out this national security flip flop.
If Osama bin Laden in the past was "marginalized" and unimportant and thus not worthy of the president’s attention, yet now he is apparently so important that he warrants the president’s attention, it can mean only one of two things: either bin Laden is still on the margins and Bush is intentionally lying in order to serve his current political needs – or bin Laden is indeed resurgent, in which case Bush has fundamentally botched the war on terror.
I lean strongly toward the latter, based on the president's well-documented ineptitude. The Bush war team allowed bin Laden to escape from the Tora Bora mountains in December 2001 - a debacle initially documented in an April ’02 news report and confirmed three years later by CIA commander Gary Bernsten. In his ’05 memoir, Jawbreaker, Bernsten wrote that he and his team begged the Pentagon for 800 U.S. Army Rangers to help go after the bin Laden entourage, and to “block a possible al Qaeda escape into Pakistan.” He was turned down; instead, the bin Laden hunt was entrusted to Afghan warlords.
The hunt took further hits in 2002 when Bush shifted his focus to Iraq. American military units that had been geared to pursuing bin Laden and his key associates were pulled off the job and sent off to fight Saddam Hussein. As Bob Andrews, former head of a Pentagon special operations office, remarked in 2004, Saddam was a needless “distraction,” in his words, “a real diversion from the longer struggle against jihadists.”
And how has that Iraq diversion been working out for us? In April of last year, the National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iraq “has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” And bin Laden is still out there, taking full advantage.
With a track record like that, it’s no surprise that Bush, and the GOP generally, have forfeited their traditional image as strong national security stewards.
The Republicans had held that advantage over the Democrats in the polls for more than three decades, sometimes by margins of 30 percentage points. Today, the polls show the two parties roughly at parity; they also show majority disapproval for Bush’s handling of the war on terror. For these reasons, it is almost presumptuous for Bush to think that he can stand in front of a conservative think tank, and lecture the majority Democrats (and, by extension, the American majority) about Osama bin Laden and the stakes in the war on terror. His own actions – and inactions – trump his tired rhetoric.
All of which means that if the Democrats can’t wage a strongly competitive ’08 presidential race, with such a strong wind at their backs, they should sell off their DC headquarters and take up residence in a historical museum somewhere, sharing a display case with the Whigs.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Joe Biden, the underdog grown-up
I was thinking this morning about Joe Biden, and about how - in two important respects - he was arguably the real winner of the latest Democratic presidential debate.
That's actually no surprise, because, in many debates over many months, while his better-financed celebrity rivals have dominated the news coverage, he has often come across as the real grown-up on stage. He shouts too much sometimes, and sometimes his natural loquacity compels him to spew too many sentence fragments, but, just as often, the venerable senator has refused to pander, instead offering straight talk on politically sensitive topics.
Iraq is Exhibit A. Most antiwar liberals in the Democratic base want the U.S. troops brought home as quickly as possible, with scant concern about the consequences on the ground. Biden, with decades of foreign policy expertise, has been willing to suggest that such a view is naive. The Democratic base wants simple answers; Biden has been willing to describe our national security decisions as "complicated." In a recent debate, he said: "If we leave Iraq and we leave it in chaos, there will be a regional war. The regional war will engulf us for a generation."
More than anyone on stage, he has thought hard about the Iraq that we would leave behind. His longstanding plan - to establish a federal, decentralized Iraq, with separate enclaves for the warring sectarian factions - is probably imperfect (what plan is?), but he, at least, has been willing to think conceptually and pitch the idea to Democratic debate audiences. Meanwhile, 75 senators voted on Sept. 26 to approve the Biden plan in principle; the bipartisan resolution was non-binding, but it marked the first time that the chamber had decisively bucked the Bush administration's war strategy.
Biden has talked straight on other issues. In a September debate, he was asked whether, in order to guarantee the long-term solvency of Social Security, he'd be willing to essentially raise taxes. Currently, the tax we pay for Social Security is capped on the first $97,500 worth of income; some other Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, have been reluctant to raise the cap, for fear that the Republicans will assail them as tax-hikers. At that September debate, Hillary said she'd study the issue by setting up a bipartisan commission, a classic Washington dodge. But would Biden be willing to raise the cap - and basically tax not only the rich, but the middle class?
"The answer is yes...You're either going to cut the benefits, or you're going to go ahead and raise taxes above the first $97,000...The bottom line here is, you can't (achieve Social Security solvency) by growing the economy alone. So I would raise the cap."
Which brings us to the Tuesday night debate. While John Edwards and Barack Obama were busy hammering Hillary, Biden did two noteworthy things: He talked like a grown-up about Iran, and he, more than any of his rivals, made the argument that Rudy Giuliani's 9/11 tough guy image is a fraud.
Host Tim Russert asked, "Senator Biden, would you pledge to the American people that Iran would not build a nuclear bomb on your watch?"
Biden, refusing to accept Russert's narrow question, put the matter in proper context. He began by cautioning, "This is complicated stuff" - uh, oh, there's that C-word again.
He said it would be wrong to "talk about this in isolation. The fact of the matter is, the Iranians may get 2.6 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium. But the Pakistanis (already) have hundreds - thousands - of kilograms of highly-enriched uranium. If by attacking Iran to stop them from getting 2.6 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium, the government in Pakistan falls, who has missiles already deployed with nuclear weapons on them that can already reach Israel, already reach India, then that's a bad bargain. Presidents make wise decisions informed not by a vacuum in which they operate, by the situation they find themselves in the world. I will do all in my power to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but I will never take my eye off the ball. What is the greatest threat to the United States of America: 2.6 kilograms of highly enriched uranium in Tehran, or an out-of-control Pakistan? It's not close."
In other words, he was arguing that a narrow focus on Iran, followed by a military strike on Iran, might have serious adverse repurcussions for the big picture, and for American security generally. He was also implicitly demonstrating the inherent limitations of these debates, which often devolve into yes-or-no game shows.
Meanwhile, at another point, he refused an invitation to join the Hillary-bashing, and signaled a crucial change in subject:
"I'm not running against Hillary Clinton...Rudy Giuliani (is) probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency. Rudy Giuliani - I mean, think about it. Rudy Giuliani - there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11. I mean, there's nothing else. There's nothing else, and I mean this sincerely. He is genuinely not qualified to be president. Here's a man who brags about how he made the city safe. It was the Biden crime bill that became the Clinton crime bill that allowed him to do that. They wipe it out. He remains silent. The 9/11 Commission comes along and says the way to keep your city safe is to do the following things. He's been silent. He's done nothing. And now he's talking about he's going to go in and he will demonstrate to Iran, he's going to in fact lay down the law. This man is truly not qualified to be president. I'm looking forward to running against Rudy Giuliani."
Granted, one must wade through a number of Bidenesque non-sequiturs to reach bottom, but that passage was an important moment in the debate. Biden put his finger on the question that will matter most in 2008 - who will keep us safe? - and he targeted the Republican who presumes to be most qualified. If Giuliani wins the nomination, the Democrats will need to knock the 9/11 halo off his head; failure to do that could cost them the election. On Tuesday, Biden was virtually alone in taking him on.
He could have made his argument more concise (no surprise there). The Biden/Clinton crime bill put 100,000 new police officers on Americans streets, and New York City benefited from that; later, when the Republican Congress slashed the funding for that program (hence Biden's reference to "they wipe it out"), Giuliani barely uttered a peep. Meanwhile, regarding the 9/11 Commission, Biden could have mentioned that Giuliani testified in secret - and no wonder, because we now know that he admitted to the commissioners that, prior to 9/11, this alleged terrorist expert knew virtually nothing about al Qaeda and had to be briefed after the fact. There's a lot more in the Rudy file - such as his decision to place the crisis command unit inside the World Trade Center, despite the experience of the '93 bombing - but at least Biden was willing to defy the Hillary-centric theme of the debate and frame the '08 political stakes.
So perhaps the big question is, why does Biden remain mired in the second tier? It's the usual stuff, nothing new: He's tagged forever as a guy who runs his mouth too much without editing in his brain (on C-Span last spring: "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent"); he's a career senator, with a penchant for talking about legislative nuance, and a fondness for recounting his work with other senators, yet most Americans ignore senators unless they're crossover celebrities (like Hillary and Obama); the embarrassment of his first failed bid in '87, when he lifted a British politician's rhetorical passages for his own use, has not completely faded (Giuliani retaliated yesterday by bringing it up).
But he's clearly providing a valuable service in these debates, and it would not be a surprise to find him serving in a new Democratic administration, free perhaps to attend to the nuances of foreign policy, far from the simplicities of the electoral arena, and the imperatives of celebrity.
That's actually no surprise, because, in many debates over many months, while his better-financed celebrity rivals have dominated the news coverage, he has often come across as the real grown-up on stage. He shouts too much sometimes, and sometimes his natural loquacity compels him to spew too many sentence fragments, but, just as often, the venerable senator has refused to pander, instead offering straight talk on politically sensitive topics.
Iraq is Exhibit A. Most antiwar liberals in the Democratic base want the U.S. troops brought home as quickly as possible, with scant concern about the consequences on the ground. Biden, with decades of foreign policy expertise, has been willing to suggest that such a view is naive. The Democratic base wants simple answers; Biden has been willing to describe our national security decisions as "complicated." In a recent debate, he said: "If we leave Iraq and we leave it in chaos, there will be a regional war. The regional war will engulf us for a generation."
More than anyone on stage, he has thought hard about the Iraq that we would leave behind. His longstanding plan - to establish a federal, decentralized Iraq, with separate enclaves for the warring sectarian factions - is probably imperfect (what plan is?), but he, at least, has been willing to think conceptually and pitch the idea to Democratic debate audiences. Meanwhile, 75 senators voted on Sept. 26 to approve the Biden plan in principle; the bipartisan resolution was non-binding, but it marked the first time that the chamber had decisively bucked the Bush administration's war strategy.
Biden has talked straight on other issues. In a September debate, he was asked whether, in order to guarantee the long-term solvency of Social Security, he'd be willing to essentially raise taxes. Currently, the tax we pay for Social Security is capped on the first $97,500 worth of income; some other Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, have been reluctant to raise the cap, for fear that the Republicans will assail them as tax-hikers. At that September debate, Hillary said she'd study the issue by setting up a bipartisan commission, a classic Washington dodge. But would Biden be willing to raise the cap - and basically tax not only the rich, but the middle class?
"The answer is yes...You're either going to cut the benefits, or you're going to go ahead and raise taxes above the first $97,000...The bottom line here is, you can't (achieve Social Security solvency) by growing the economy alone. So I would raise the cap."
Which brings us to the Tuesday night debate. While John Edwards and Barack Obama were busy hammering Hillary, Biden did two noteworthy things: He talked like a grown-up about Iran, and he, more than any of his rivals, made the argument that Rudy Giuliani's 9/11 tough guy image is a fraud.
Host Tim Russert asked, "Senator Biden, would you pledge to the American people that Iran would not build a nuclear bomb on your watch?"
Biden, refusing to accept Russert's narrow question, put the matter in proper context. He began by cautioning, "This is complicated stuff" - uh, oh, there's that C-word again.
He said it would be wrong to "talk about this in isolation. The fact of the matter is, the Iranians may get 2.6 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium. But the Pakistanis (already) have hundreds - thousands - of kilograms of highly-enriched uranium. If by attacking Iran to stop them from getting 2.6 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium, the government in Pakistan falls, who has missiles already deployed with nuclear weapons on them that can already reach Israel, already reach India, then that's a bad bargain. Presidents make wise decisions informed not by a vacuum in which they operate, by the situation they find themselves in the world. I will do all in my power to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but I will never take my eye off the ball. What is the greatest threat to the United States of America: 2.6 kilograms of highly enriched uranium in Tehran, or an out-of-control Pakistan? It's not close."
In other words, he was arguing that a narrow focus on Iran, followed by a military strike on Iran, might have serious adverse repurcussions for the big picture, and for American security generally. He was also implicitly demonstrating the inherent limitations of these debates, which often devolve into yes-or-no game shows.
Meanwhile, at another point, he refused an invitation to join the Hillary-bashing, and signaled a crucial change in subject:
"I'm not running against Hillary Clinton...Rudy Giuliani (is) probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency. Rudy Giuliani - I mean, think about it. Rudy Giuliani - there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11. I mean, there's nothing else. There's nothing else, and I mean this sincerely. He is genuinely not qualified to be president. Here's a man who brags about how he made the city safe. It was the Biden crime bill that became the Clinton crime bill that allowed him to do that. They wipe it out. He remains silent. The 9/11 Commission comes along and says the way to keep your city safe is to do the following things. He's been silent. He's done nothing. And now he's talking about he's going to go in and he will demonstrate to Iran, he's going to in fact lay down the law. This man is truly not qualified to be president. I'm looking forward to running against Rudy Giuliani."
Granted, one must wade through a number of Bidenesque non-sequiturs to reach bottom, but that passage was an important moment in the debate. Biden put his finger on the question that will matter most in 2008 - who will keep us safe? - and he targeted the Republican who presumes to be most qualified. If Giuliani wins the nomination, the Democrats will need to knock the 9/11 halo off his head; failure to do that could cost them the election. On Tuesday, Biden was virtually alone in taking him on.
He could have made his argument more concise (no surprise there). The Biden/Clinton crime bill put 100,000 new police officers on Americans streets, and New York City benefited from that; later, when the Republican Congress slashed the funding for that program (hence Biden's reference to "they wipe it out"), Giuliani barely uttered a peep. Meanwhile, regarding the 9/11 Commission, Biden could have mentioned that Giuliani testified in secret - and no wonder, because we now know that he admitted to the commissioners that, prior to 9/11, this alleged terrorist expert knew virtually nothing about al Qaeda and had to be briefed after the fact. There's a lot more in the Rudy file - such as his decision to place the crisis command unit inside the World Trade Center, despite the experience of the '93 bombing - but at least Biden was willing to defy the Hillary-centric theme of the debate and frame the '08 political stakes.
So perhaps the big question is, why does Biden remain mired in the second tier? It's the usual stuff, nothing new: He's tagged forever as a guy who runs his mouth too much without editing in his brain (on C-Span last spring: "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent"); he's a career senator, with a penchant for talking about legislative nuance, and a fondness for recounting his work with other senators, yet most Americans ignore senators unless they're crossover celebrities (like Hillary and Obama); the embarrassment of his first failed bid in '87, when he lifted a British politician's rhetorical passages for his own use, has not completely faded (Giuliani retaliated yesterday by bringing it up).
But he's clearly providing a valuable service in these debates, and it would not be a surprise to find him serving in a new Democratic administration, free perhaps to attend to the nuances of foreign policy, far from the simplicities of the electoral arena, and the imperatives of celebrity.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Character attacks as a form of flattery
For two hours she stood there with a semi-civil smile nailed to her face, her shoulders squared, her head held high, swiveling left and right to look her accusers in the eye - taking it like a man, as it were - and listening to critiques of her character that essentially boiled down to this:
Hillary Clinton is dishonest, reckless, polarizing, integrity-challenged, and unelectable.
Such was the verdict rendered at the Democratic debate last night by her two chief rivals (or, in Hillary's word, "colleagues"), both of whom have decided that they cannot rise in this marathon race unless she is somehow made to fall. And such is the lot of the frontrunner - especially this one, whose steady march toward the party nomination had begun to take on the trappings of a coronation. How ironic that she took so much character flak in the City of Brotherly Love.
Barack Obama had signaled in the press several days earlier that it would be No More Mr. Nice Guy, and he did ratchet up his criticisms of Hillary, but he is instinctively too decorous to engage in bareknuckled brawling (indeed, he cautioned everyone, right at the start, that "I think this has been the most hyped fight since Rocky fought Apollo Creed"). Obama left the dirty work to John Edwards, who is even more stymied in the polls than he is, and whose whole candidacy could collapse unless he, Edwards, somehow can manage to beat Hillary in Iowa 65 days from now.
Edwards, who, as a former senator, had the luxury of not needing to decide whether to vote for the recent Senate resolution that declared Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, repeatedly banged away at Hillary for voting Yes. This way, he could assail her as a reckless Bush-enabler who is again (coupled with her 2002 Iraq war authorization vote) giving the Republican regime an excuse to go to war.
He said that Hillary voted for "a resolution that looks like it was written literally by the neocons...A lot of us on this stage have learned our lessons the hard way, that you give this president an inch and he will take a mile...what I worry about is if Bush invades Iran six months from now, I mean, are we going to hear, 'If I only I had known then what I know now?'"
The latter sentence was a frontal slap at Hillary, because that's how she currently laments her '02 war vote. Edwards had to carry the ball for Obama on the Iran issue, because Obama has actually indicated in the recent past that he thinks the Guards should be deemed a terrorist organization - and when it came time to vote on the resolution, he didn't take a position. He was out campaigning instead.
But even though Edwards got off some of the roughest lines - Hillary, he said, doesn't spend sufficient time "in tell-the-truth mode" - Obama did contend that her reputation as a polarizer is grist for the Republicans, and hence a prescription for more politics as usual: "Part of the reason that Republicans, I think, are obsessed with you, Hillary, is because that's a fight they're very comfortable having. It is the fight that we've been through since the '90s...And what we don't need is another eight years of bickering." (Edwards topped him, though, by arguing that anyone who thinks Hillary will truly reform the system must also believe in Santa and the tooth fairy.)
Hillary mostly sought to deflect the attacks by focusing most of her fire on the Bush administration, but there came a point - toward the very end of the debate - when she suddenly dug herself a hole and descended into it. Her rivals were only too happy to pile on the dirt.
She was asked to comment on a proposal, by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, to give drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants. She recently told a New Hampshire newspaper that the proposal made sense, and last night she explained why she thought that, yes, it did make sense:
"What Governor Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of (the Bush) administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform. We know in New York we have several million at any one time who are in New York illegally. They are undocumented workers. They are driving on our roads. The possibility of them having an accident that harms themselves or others is just a matter of the odds. It's probability. So what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is to fill the vacuum."
Yet, minutes later, after Chris Dodd had voiced his opposition to the idea, Hillary jumped in and appeared to say that she was actually against the idea after just having said she was for it:
"I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it. And we have failed -- "
Dodd jumped all over that: "Wait a minute. No, no, no. You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it."
Clinton replied: "No, I didn't, Chris. But the point is, what are we going to do with all these illegal immigrants who are (driving)?"
Tim Russert, the co-host, pounced like a cat that had just smelled fish: "Senator Clinton, I just want to make sure what I heard. Do you, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, support the New York governor's plan to give illegal immigrants a driver's license?...Do you support his plan?"
Clinton replied: "You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha." (When the press nails a politician for double talk, the politician often tries to play the victim by invoking the Gotcha Defense. President Bush does it all the time.)
She continued: "It makes a lot of sense. What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problem...Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No."
After that, it was a race between Edwards and Obama to say I-told-you-so. Edwards won: "Unless I missed something, Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes just a few minutes ago, and I think this is a real issue for the country. I mean, America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them." Obama followed, essentially saying: Yeah, me too. (Here's Hillary strategist Mark Penn, spinning the incident after the debate.)
But will all this intramural Hillary-bashing slow her march in the end? Edwards has been hammering Hillary in this manner for many months, yet the strategy hasn't moved the needle on his candidacy. If anything, her lead in the Democratic polls has widened. She remains highly popular with the Democratic base, and it's quite likely that the base will not warm to any rivals who critique her character in ways that might benefit the message-crafters on the Republican side. In particular, this could prove to be true in Iowa, where local Democrats prefer that their candidates make nice.
Loyalty to Hillary may be her strongest trump card, even though she persists in giving evasive or multiple answers on a range of topics (for instance, on how she'd save Social Security), while stonewalling on others (would she favor opening up her First Lady papers to public scrutiny? "That's not my decision to make," she replied).
Last night, it fell to Bill Richardson to sue for peace: "I'm hearing this holier-than-thou attitude toward Senator Clinton. That it's bothering me because it's pretty close to personal attacks that we don't need...We need to be positive in this campaign. Yes, we need to point out our differences, and I have big differences with her...I think it's important that we save the ammunition for the Republicans....the important thing is that we need to stay positive. We need to have disagreements on the issues, not on whether you can trust. I trust Senator Clinton..."
Somewhere in that particular rumination, Richardson also tried to tout his own credentials as a governor. He reminded everyone that seven of our last eight presidents had been governors. The only problem with that statement was this: It was wrong. In point of fact, only four of our last eight presidents (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush) had been governors.
But luckily for Richardson, he's so far down in the polls that his rivals don't bother to fault him for not being in "tell-the-truth mode." That's Hillary's burden alone, and she appears not be ruffled by it, because she knows that, for a frontrunner in this high-stakes game, character attacks are merely a form of flattery.
And if Obama and Edwards wind up merely dividing the not-Hillary vote, her path to the nomination will be that much easier.
-------
Meanwhile, on the Republican hypocrisy front, we now have yet another family-values conservative caught in the act. Richard Curtis, a legislator in the state of Washington, who has consistently voted against gay people...has been named in police documents as having sought sex with a man whom he met at an adult video store. There was a dispute over money, but the police documents specify that Curtis and the other guy had sex anyway.
I suppose my favorite detail is that Curtis, who is married, and who has voted against civil rights protections for gays as well as domestic partnerships for gays, was spotted in the store wearing women's stockings and a black sequined lingerie top.
(Update: Curtis resigned his state Senate seat late Wednesday.)
Wait, let me amend that. My favorite detail is actually what he told a local newspaper this week, after acknowledging that he and the other guy did have sex: "I am not gay."
No word yet on whether this family-values conservative can manage a wide stance in women's stockings.
Hillary Clinton is dishonest, reckless, polarizing, integrity-challenged, and unelectable.
Such was the verdict rendered at the Democratic debate last night by her two chief rivals (or, in Hillary's word, "colleagues"), both of whom have decided that they cannot rise in this marathon race unless she is somehow made to fall. And such is the lot of the frontrunner - especially this one, whose steady march toward the party nomination had begun to take on the trappings of a coronation. How ironic that she took so much character flak in the City of Brotherly Love.
Barack Obama had signaled in the press several days earlier that it would be No More Mr. Nice Guy, and he did ratchet up his criticisms of Hillary, but he is instinctively too decorous to engage in bareknuckled brawling (indeed, he cautioned everyone, right at the start, that "I think this has been the most hyped fight since Rocky fought Apollo Creed"). Obama left the dirty work to John Edwards, who is even more stymied in the polls than he is, and whose whole candidacy could collapse unless he, Edwards, somehow can manage to beat Hillary in Iowa 65 days from now.
Edwards, who, as a former senator, had the luxury of not needing to decide whether to vote for the recent Senate resolution that declared Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, repeatedly banged away at Hillary for voting Yes. This way, he could assail her as a reckless Bush-enabler who is again (coupled with her 2002 Iraq war authorization vote) giving the Republican regime an excuse to go to war.
He said that Hillary voted for "a resolution that looks like it was written literally by the neocons...A lot of us on this stage have learned our lessons the hard way, that you give this president an inch and he will take a mile...what I worry about is if Bush invades Iran six months from now, I mean, are we going to hear, 'If I only I had known then what I know now?'"
The latter sentence was a frontal slap at Hillary, because that's how she currently laments her '02 war vote. Edwards had to carry the ball for Obama on the Iran issue, because Obama has actually indicated in the recent past that he thinks the Guards should be deemed a terrorist organization - and when it came time to vote on the resolution, he didn't take a position. He was out campaigning instead.
But even though Edwards got off some of the roughest lines - Hillary, he said, doesn't spend sufficient time "in tell-the-truth mode" - Obama did contend that her reputation as a polarizer is grist for the Republicans, and hence a prescription for more politics as usual: "Part of the reason that Republicans, I think, are obsessed with you, Hillary, is because that's a fight they're very comfortable having. It is the fight that we've been through since the '90s...And what we don't need is another eight years of bickering." (Edwards topped him, though, by arguing that anyone who thinks Hillary will truly reform the system must also believe in Santa and the tooth fairy.)
Hillary mostly sought to deflect the attacks by focusing most of her fire on the Bush administration, but there came a point - toward the very end of the debate - when she suddenly dug herself a hole and descended into it. Her rivals were only too happy to pile on the dirt.
She was asked to comment on a proposal, by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, to give drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants. She recently told a New Hampshire newspaper that the proposal made sense, and last night she explained why she thought that, yes, it did make sense:
"What Governor Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of (the Bush) administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform. We know in New York we have several million at any one time who are in New York illegally. They are undocumented workers. They are driving on our roads. The possibility of them having an accident that harms themselves or others is just a matter of the odds. It's probability. So what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is to fill the vacuum."
Yet, minutes later, after Chris Dodd had voiced his opposition to the idea, Hillary jumped in and appeared to say that she was actually against the idea after just having said she was for it:
"I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it. And we have failed -- "
Dodd jumped all over that: "Wait a minute. No, no, no. You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it."
Clinton replied: "No, I didn't, Chris. But the point is, what are we going to do with all these illegal immigrants who are (driving)?"
Tim Russert, the co-host, pounced like a cat that had just smelled fish: "Senator Clinton, I just want to make sure what I heard. Do you, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, support the New York governor's plan to give illegal immigrants a driver's license?...Do you support his plan?"
Clinton replied: "You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha." (When the press nails a politician for double talk, the politician often tries to play the victim by invoking the Gotcha Defense. President Bush does it all the time.)
She continued: "It makes a lot of sense. What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problem...Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No."
After that, it was a race between Edwards and Obama to say I-told-you-so. Edwards won: "Unless I missed something, Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes just a few minutes ago, and I think this is a real issue for the country. I mean, America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them." Obama followed, essentially saying: Yeah, me too. (Here's Hillary strategist Mark Penn, spinning the incident after the debate.)
But will all this intramural Hillary-bashing slow her march in the end? Edwards has been hammering Hillary in this manner for many months, yet the strategy hasn't moved the needle on his candidacy. If anything, her lead in the Democratic polls has widened. She remains highly popular with the Democratic base, and it's quite likely that the base will not warm to any rivals who critique her character in ways that might benefit the message-crafters on the Republican side. In particular, this could prove to be true in Iowa, where local Democrats prefer that their candidates make nice.
Loyalty to Hillary may be her strongest trump card, even though she persists in giving evasive or multiple answers on a range of topics (for instance, on how she'd save Social Security), while stonewalling on others (would she favor opening up her First Lady papers to public scrutiny? "That's not my decision to make," she replied).
Last night, it fell to Bill Richardson to sue for peace: "I'm hearing this holier-than-thou attitude toward Senator Clinton. That it's bothering me because it's pretty close to personal attacks that we don't need...We need to be positive in this campaign. Yes, we need to point out our differences, and I have big differences with her...I think it's important that we save the ammunition for the Republicans....the important thing is that we need to stay positive. We need to have disagreements on the issues, not on whether you can trust. I trust Senator Clinton..."
Somewhere in that particular rumination, Richardson also tried to tout his own credentials as a governor. He reminded everyone that seven of our last eight presidents had been governors. The only problem with that statement was this: It was wrong. In point of fact, only four of our last eight presidents (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush) had been governors.
But luckily for Richardson, he's so far down in the polls that his rivals don't bother to fault him for not being in "tell-the-truth mode." That's Hillary's burden alone, and she appears not be ruffled by it, because she knows that, for a frontrunner in this high-stakes game, character attacks are merely a form of flattery.
And if Obama and Edwards wind up merely dividing the not-Hillary vote, her path to the nomination will be that much easier.
-------
Meanwhile, on the Republican hypocrisy front, we now have yet another family-values conservative caught in the act. Richard Curtis, a legislator in the state of Washington, who has consistently voted against gay people...has been named in police documents as having sought sex with a man whom he met at an adult video store. There was a dispute over money, but the police documents specify that Curtis and the other guy had sex anyway.
I suppose my favorite detail is that Curtis, who is married, and who has voted against civil rights protections for gays as well as domestic partnerships for gays, was spotted in the store wearing women's stockings and a black sequined lingerie top.
(Update: Curtis resigned his state Senate seat late Wednesday.)
Wait, let me amend that. My favorite detail is actually what he told a local newspaper this week, after acknowledging that he and the other guy did have sex: "I am not gay."
No word yet on whether this family-values conservative can manage a wide stance in women's stockings.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
The rich grist of presidential debates
As the Democratic presidential candidates prepare for tonight's debate in Philadelphia - their 12th or 13th, depending on your criteria - the usual complaints are being raised that these forums are too numerous, too wasteful of the candidates' precious time, and way too boring for the average American voter.
I'll stipulate that these candidates are starting to resemble the large gaggle of prison escapees in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, seemingly doomed to wander the land in collective misery because they are joined at the ankles by the same length of chain. Fearing that they will lose face if they offend debate sponsors, these candidates (the Republicans as well) have been rocketing hither and yon for six months already, tethered to each other, to their well-rehearsed talking points, and to their well-honed rebuttals.
I'll also stipulate that the viewing audiences are relatively miniscule: perhaps a couple million, which is roughly 10 percent of the viewership for a crucial postseason baseball game. I'll also stipulate that chaos reigns, because every TV operation from CNN to Univision, from PBS to Logo (the gay network), wants to host a debate and hence boost their profile; and every special-interest group from the AFL-CIO to the AARP, from the NAACP to the CBC wants the candidates to run the gauntlet.
As one veteran Democratic strategist, Tom Pazzi, groused to me four years ago - when the same pattern was evident, during the runup to the '04 primaries - "You just show up, and all you can do is stay on message or be evasive, no matter what the question is...To some extent, we're just doomed to do this."
And yet, in the spirit of contrarian thought, I'll suggest here that a crowded debate calendar is a good thing. Debates help the top candidates hone their rhetorical skills under pressure, and they provide the underdogs with free exposure. The viewing audiences may be small, but that's the wrong way to measure the impact of these events. The key exchanges in these debates, and the behavior of certain candidates while under questioning, have driven much of the subsequent media discussion of the '08 campaign, and have resonated in the political community for days or weeks afterward.
The debates have already supplied us this kind of grist (and this is only a tiny random sampling): Hillary Clinton's refusal to be pinned down on how she'd reform Social Security ans whethey she'd raise payroll taxes to do so; her stonewalling on the issue of whether the names of Bill Clinton's library donors should be made public; Joe Biden's insistence that Hillary is too polarizing to govern effectively; John McCain’s dismissal of Mitt Romney as a flip-flopping opportunist; Rudy Giuliani’s fumbling attempts to tiptoe away from his past record as an abortion rights defender; the GOP candidate competition to see who’s most macho on Iran; Barack Obama’s penchant for platitudes, and his persistent reluctance to duke it out with his chief rival.
Speaking of which...The latter already is deemed to be the big story in advance of tonight’s debate. Obama truly has a dilemma: he wants to travel the high road as the epitome of a new politics of civil discourse, but there is no way he can win the Democratic nomination unless he descends into the arena with Hillary. He signaled the other day that he thinks maybe he will do so, telling The New York Times that he plans to confront Hillary more forcefully. Yet I viewed that story as a fresh sign of his reluctance. If you’re really going to slug it out with the frontrunner, you simply do it; you don’t launch a trial balloon in the Times, vowing to do it.
The truth is, Obama doesn't seem to feel comfortable confronting Hillary on camera. The guy by instinct is not a street fighter - Chris Matthews last night called him "a National Public Radio liberal," and he didn't intend that as a compliment - yet the simple fact is that, if he ultimately wants the power, he'll have to fight for it. And that will require him to take on a battle-tested woman who has been in the arena since 1992. Worse yet, he'll have to fight with enough deftness to attract new followers, rather than alienate those he already has.
In a way this is a character test for Obama - and we can thank these debates for providing him the opportunity. There will always be complaints about these forums, as evidenced by this news story: "Political specialists continue discussing how many debates are too many debates...Some organizers fear that voters' interest is strained (and that) the candidates may be a little jaded..."
That's from The New York Times - on January 8, 1988.
I'll stipulate that these candidates are starting to resemble the large gaggle of prison escapees in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run, seemingly doomed to wander the land in collective misery because they are joined at the ankles by the same length of chain. Fearing that they will lose face if they offend debate sponsors, these candidates (the Republicans as well) have been rocketing hither and yon for six months already, tethered to each other, to their well-rehearsed talking points, and to their well-honed rebuttals.
I'll also stipulate that the viewing audiences are relatively miniscule: perhaps a couple million, which is roughly 10 percent of the viewership for a crucial postseason baseball game. I'll also stipulate that chaos reigns, because every TV operation from CNN to Univision, from PBS to Logo (the gay network), wants to host a debate and hence boost their profile; and every special-interest group from the AFL-CIO to the AARP, from the NAACP to the CBC wants the candidates to run the gauntlet.
As one veteran Democratic strategist, Tom Pazzi, groused to me four years ago - when the same pattern was evident, during the runup to the '04 primaries - "You just show up, and all you can do is stay on message or be evasive, no matter what the question is...To some extent, we're just doomed to do this."
And yet, in the spirit of contrarian thought, I'll suggest here that a crowded debate calendar is a good thing. Debates help the top candidates hone their rhetorical skills under pressure, and they provide the underdogs with free exposure. The viewing audiences may be small, but that's the wrong way to measure the impact of these events. The key exchanges in these debates, and the behavior of certain candidates while under questioning, have driven much of the subsequent media discussion of the '08 campaign, and have resonated in the political community for days or weeks afterward.
The debates have already supplied us this kind of grist (and this is only a tiny random sampling): Hillary Clinton's refusal to be pinned down on how she'd reform Social Security ans whethey she'd raise payroll taxes to do so; her stonewalling on the issue of whether the names of Bill Clinton's library donors should be made public; Joe Biden's insistence that Hillary is too polarizing to govern effectively; John McCain’s dismissal of Mitt Romney as a flip-flopping opportunist; Rudy Giuliani’s fumbling attempts to tiptoe away from his past record as an abortion rights defender; the GOP candidate competition to see who’s most macho on Iran; Barack Obama’s penchant for platitudes, and his persistent reluctance to duke it out with his chief rival.
Speaking of which...The latter already is deemed to be the big story in advance of tonight’s debate. Obama truly has a dilemma: he wants to travel the high road as the epitome of a new politics of civil discourse, but there is no way he can win the Democratic nomination unless he descends into the arena with Hillary. He signaled the other day that he thinks maybe he will do so, telling The New York Times that he plans to confront Hillary more forcefully. Yet I viewed that story as a fresh sign of his reluctance. If you’re really going to slug it out with the frontrunner, you simply do it; you don’t launch a trial balloon in the Times, vowing to do it.
The truth is, Obama doesn't seem to feel comfortable confronting Hillary on camera. The guy by instinct is not a street fighter - Chris Matthews last night called him "a National Public Radio liberal," and he didn't intend that as a compliment - yet the simple fact is that, if he ultimately wants the power, he'll have to fight for it. And that will require him to take on a battle-tested woman who has been in the arena since 1992. Worse yet, he'll have to fight with enough deftness to attract new followers, rather than alienate those he already has.
In a way this is a character test for Obama - and we can thank these debates for providing him the opportunity. There will always be complaints about these forums, as evidenced by this news story: "Political specialists continue discussing how many debates are too many debates...Some organizers fear that voters' interest is strained (and that) the candidates may be a little jaded..."
That's from The New York Times - on January 8, 1988.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Is Hillary narrowing the gal gap?
Since I seem to be on the subject of Hillary Clinton – as evidenced again yesterday, when I wrote in my newspaper column that she's unpopular with white males (the white guy gap) – it’s also worth noting that she has long had problems attracting a certain category of females.
Ironically, it is the category to which she herself belongs: upscale, college-educated professionals. Call it the gal gap.
This past summer, a plurality of these women told pollsters that they favored Barack Obama over Hillary in the Democratic nomination contest (35 percent to 32 percent). In late May, only 19 percent of college-educated women saw Hillary as the most honest candidate in the field; by contrast, 50 percent chose Barack Obama. And last April, in the crucial early primary state of New Hampshire, only 25 percent of professional women told pollsters that they favored Hillary.
None of this was particularly surprising, because Hillary’s brethren have actually been cool to her for years, largely for cultural reasons.
Many of these women simply didn’t like the fact that Hillary had opted to stick with Bill in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal. They felt that she had allowed Bill to walk all over her – in their view, unacceptable behavior for a feminist – and, worse yet, that she had done so only to further political ambitions that could not be fulfilled without the philanderer’s assistance. (By contrast, Hillary’s strongest female supporters – downscale, blue-collar, non-college-educated women – reportedly believe that she deserves to be lauded for making the tough decision to keep her family together.)
I can attest to the attitude among upscale professional women, having watched videos of Democratic focus groups that were convened when Hillary was first running for the Senate. Those Long Island gals didn’t mince words. And I was reminded of their skepticism yesterday, when I ran across an article in the new issue of The Atlantic. The writer Caitlin Flanagan, a well-educated professional female in good standing, lays out the anti-Hillary case. Since her ruminations are for magazine subscribers only, here’s a lengthy excerpt:
If Hillary really wants to connect with professional, well-educated women, “she would have to be willing to let us women in on the big, underlying struggle of her life that is front and center in our understanding of who she is as a woman. Her husband’s sexual behavior, quite apart from the private pain it has caused her, has also sullied her deepest – and most womanly – ideals and convictions, for the Clintons’ political partnership has demanded that she defend actions she knows to be indefensible. To call her husband a philanderer is almost to whitewash him, for he’s used women far less sophisticated, educated, and powerful than he – women particularly susceptible to the rake’s characteristic blend of cajolery and deceit – for his sexual gratification. In glossing over her husband’s actions and abetting his efforts to squirm away from the scrutiny and judment they provoke, Hillary has too often lapsed into her customary hauteur and self-righteousness, and added to the pain delivered upon these women…
“(B)ecause Hillary long ago attached her ideals and political destiny to Bill Clinton’s, she has of necessity made herself complicit – in ways that go far beyond the traditional role of first lady and candidate’s wife – in all sorts of unsavory actions, including the way he treated vulnerable women…In short, to get excited about Hillary is not to get excited about how a woman can change the world, but rather to endorse the way a certain kind of man – over time, and holding her hostage not only by her ambition, but by the love she has for a child whose home she desperately didn’t want to destroy – can diminish the very best of a woman.”
But here’s the interesting new development: well-educated professional women are starting to warm to Hillary anyway.
According to the numbers-crunchers at Gallup, who just conducted a poll analysis for the nonpartisan National Journal, Hillary’s growing autumn lead over Obama on the Democratic side is largely attributable to an influx of support from these women. That summer survey I mentioned earlier, which showed professional females backing Obama by 35 to 32 percent? Now the numbers have reversed; now it’s Hillary over Obama by 47 to 24 percent.
Apparently this is happening because the well-educated professionals are increasingly impressed with Hillary’s specificity on certain top-tier issues, notably her new health care plan, her crisp communication style, and her sense of command in the Democratic debates (another is slated for tomorrow night, in Philadelphia). That’s how some Democratic pollsters see it, anyway. But clearly Obama has hurt himself as well, by failing to close the sale. He has promised to raise the political discourse, but many professional women have apparently concluded (at least for now) that his high-road idealism is not sufficient, that they can’t get a sense of how he would actually govern.
All of which prompts one other thought: Won’t it be great when we can finally test these shifting sentiments with the help of actual votes? Is it January 3 yet?
-------
Good grief, those conservatives are sure hard to please.
Here's a Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, who has made it abundantly clear that, as an ordained southern Baptist preacher, he (a) supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, (b) considers abortion to be a "holocaust," and (c) doesn't believe in evolution....and yet a lot of conservatives think the guy is just too liberal.
The Washington Times reports today that some vocal conservatives are assailing Huckabee as a "treacherous liberal on taxes, social welfare spending, and illegal immigration." Fiscal conservative leader Pat Toomey complains about Huckabee's "big government liberalism." What we have here, apparently, is vivid evidence of a split on the right - between the fiscal conservatives (who care most about money) and the social/religious conservatives (who care most about the soul).
When the GOP is healthy, these factions tend to be in sync. Not so today.
-------
And congratulations to the ballclub that has owned my heart since 1962, the Boston Red Sox.
Ironically, it is the category to which she herself belongs: upscale, college-educated professionals. Call it the gal gap.
This past summer, a plurality of these women told pollsters that they favored Barack Obama over Hillary in the Democratic nomination contest (35 percent to 32 percent). In late May, only 19 percent of college-educated women saw Hillary as the most honest candidate in the field; by contrast, 50 percent chose Barack Obama. And last April, in the crucial early primary state of New Hampshire, only 25 percent of professional women told pollsters that they favored Hillary.
None of this was particularly surprising, because Hillary’s brethren have actually been cool to her for years, largely for cultural reasons.
Many of these women simply didn’t like the fact that Hillary had opted to stick with Bill in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal. They felt that she had allowed Bill to walk all over her – in their view, unacceptable behavior for a feminist – and, worse yet, that she had done so only to further political ambitions that could not be fulfilled without the philanderer’s assistance. (By contrast, Hillary’s strongest female supporters – downscale, blue-collar, non-college-educated women – reportedly believe that she deserves to be lauded for making the tough decision to keep her family together.)
I can attest to the attitude among upscale professional women, having watched videos of Democratic focus groups that were convened when Hillary was first running for the Senate. Those Long Island gals didn’t mince words. And I was reminded of their skepticism yesterday, when I ran across an article in the new issue of The Atlantic. The writer Caitlin Flanagan, a well-educated professional female in good standing, lays out the anti-Hillary case. Since her ruminations are for magazine subscribers only, here’s a lengthy excerpt:
If Hillary really wants to connect with professional, well-educated women, “she would have to be willing to let us women in on the big, underlying struggle of her life that is front and center in our understanding of who she is as a woman. Her husband’s sexual behavior, quite apart from the private pain it has caused her, has also sullied her deepest – and most womanly – ideals and convictions, for the Clintons’ political partnership has demanded that she defend actions she knows to be indefensible. To call her husband a philanderer is almost to whitewash him, for he’s used women far less sophisticated, educated, and powerful than he – women particularly susceptible to the rake’s characteristic blend of cajolery and deceit – for his sexual gratification. In glossing over her husband’s actions and abetting his efforts to squirm away from the scrutiny and judment they provoke, Hillary has too often lapsed into her customary hauteur and self-righteousness, and added to the pain delivered upon these women…
“(B)ecause Hillary long ago attached her ideals and political destiny to Bill Clinton’s, she has of necessity made herself complicit – in ways that go far beyond the traditional role of first lady and candidate’s wife – in all sorts of unsavory actions, including the way he treated vulnerable women…In short, to get excited about Hillary is not to get excited about how a woman can change the world, but rather to endorse the way a certain kind of man – over time, and holding her hostage not only by her ambition, but by the love she has for a child whose home she desperately didn’t want to destroy – can diminish the very best of a woman.”
But here’s the interesting new development: well-educated professional women are starting to warm to Hillary anyway.
According to the numbers-crunchers at Gallup, who just conducted a poll analysis for the nonpartisan National Journal, Hillary’s growing autumn lead over Obama on the Democratic side is largely attributable to an influx of support from these women. That summer survey I mentioned earlier, which showed professional females backing Obama by 35 to 32 percent? Now the numbers have reversed; now it’s Hillary over Obama by 47 to 24 percent.
Apparently this is happening because the well-educated professionals are increasingly impressed with Hillary’s specificity on certain top-tier issues, notably her new health care plan, her crisp communication style, and her sense of command in the Democratic debates (another is slated for tomorrow night, in Philadelphia). That’s how some Democratic pollsters see it, anyway. But clearly Obama has hurt himself as well, by failing to close the sale. He has promised to raise the political discourse, but many professional women have apparently concluded (at least for now) that his high-road idealism is not sufficient, that they can’t get a sense of how he would actually govern.
All of which prompts one other thought: Won’t it be great when we can finally test these shifting sentiments with the help of actual votes? Is it January 3 yet?
-------
Good grief, those conservatives are sure hard to please.
Here's a Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, who has made it abundantly clear that, as an ordained southern Baptist preacher, he (a) supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, (b) considers abortion to be a "holocaust," and (c) doesn't believe in evolution....and yet a lot of conservatives think the guy is just too liberal.
The Washington Times reports today that some vocal conservatives are assailing Huckabee as a "treacherous liberal on taxes, social welfare spending, and illegal immigration." Fiscal conservative leader Pat Toomey complains about Huckabee's "big government liberalism." What we have here, apparently, is vivid evidence of a split on the right - between the fiscal conservatives (who care most about money) and the social/religious conservatives (who care most about the soul).
When the GOP is healthy, these factions tend to be in sync. Not so today.
-------
And congratulations to the ballclub that has owned my heart since 1962, the Boston Red Sox.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Pillow talk as public policy, and vice versa
You may have noticed that Hillary Clinton likes to repeat herself:
"I have a unique perspective being on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue" (Sept. 18); "My experience at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue...gives me special insight into what we must do" (Sept. 26); "My eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue..." (Oct. 10, 2002, when she voted to authorize the Iraq war option).
And with respect to that experience at the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue, we also have this long-recurring theme:
"I talk to my husband about everything. We talk constantly (about policy), and, you know, he tells me sometimes why what I think won't work, or thinks it's a good idea and he'll look into it, but sometimes I talk to other people in the administration as well (May 28, 1996); "I worked alongside my husband..." (Jan. 24, 2005); "We have influenced each other so much over these, goodness, 36 years now...there's a bit of a challenge to say 'here's where he stops and I start'" (Essence magazine, Nov '07).
But if a scholar or journalist or voter tries to find out the exact nature of the Bill-Hillary collaboration, to indeed determine where he stops and she starts, the inquiring citizen will be stonewalled. Because all her '90s White House papers are locked away at the federally-financed William J. Clinton Presidential Library, and virtually none of them are expected to see the light of day prior to the '08 election.
Here's the deal, apparently: She gets to tout her First Lady stint as proof of her governmental experience, but we on the receiving end don't get to find out exactly what she did. She gets to travel America extolling the successes of the Bill Clinton administration, and she gets to tell us how much she influenced his thinking, but we don't get the chance to learn exactly what she influenced (much less how and why).
To verify her experience claims, to understand the nature of her advice, and to determine whether her advice helped or hurt her husband's performance, we would need to have access to a number of things: her policy memos, her notes from strategy meetings, her appointment calendars, and a lot more. But there is no such access - as the respected biographer Sally Bedell Smith discovered recently when she visited the library. When she requested material on Hillary's advice to Bill about welfare reform, she was told that "policy" matters were off limits; when she requested material on Bill's advice to Hillary during her 2000 Senate campaign, she was told that "political" matters were off limits.
Much of this is Bill's doing; as Newsweek determined, after reviewing documents obtained from the National Archives under a Freedom of Information request, Bill decreed in a 2002 letter that there should be no speedy release of "sensitive policy, personal, or political" material. He was also very interested in slowing the release of "communications directly between the President and First Lady, and their families, unless routine in nature." Apparently he was casting a wide net, because neither of his immediate predecessors, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, has reportedly placed any controls on the papers of their respective spouses.
Democratic strategists and pro-Clinton archivists have been arguing for months that Bill and Hillary are rightly concerned about the pitfalls of disclosure, that Clinton critics would merely cherry-pick the most negative material. Yes, they would do that. It's just too bad that the voters won't have the chance to decide for themselves whether to believe the critics, or, more importantly, to decide whether the archives confirm Hillary's claims about the breadth of her experience.
The bottom line is that this issue demonstrates why the Clinton collaboration is so unique - and potentially troublesome.
As Hillary keeps telling us, she and Bill have been talking policy since the day they were married; it's part of what bonds them as a couple. But now that she's running for president herself, and people want to understandably find out more about the nature of their policy talk (since, after all, their policy talk affected the nation in the '90s and may well do so again), they're invoking an expansive zone of privacy. Witness Bill's abiding interest in safeguarding "communications between the President and First Lady." Witness Hillary's remark, during a Sept. 26 debate, that "I don't talk about my private conversations with my husband."
So the deal, for the '08 campaign, is that when Hillary touts her close collaboration with Bill, as part of what she calls her "35 years of experience," she expects the voter to simply take it on faith and not sweat the details. Because those details are under lock and key.
"I have a unique perspective being on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue" (Sept. 18); "My experience at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue...gives me special insight into what we must do" (Sept. 26); "My eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue..." (Oct. 10, 2002, when she voted to authorize the Iraq war option).
And with respect to that experience at the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue, we also have this long-recurring theme:
"I talk to my husband about everything. We talk constantly (about policy), and, you know, he tells me sometimes why what I think won't work, or thinks it's a good idea and he'll look into it, but sometimes I talk to other people in the administration as well (May 28, 1996); "I worked alongside my husband..." (Jan. 24, 2005); "We have influenced each other so much over these, goodness, 36 years now...there's a bit of a challenge to say 'here's where he stops and I start'" (Essence magazine, Nov '07).
But if a scholar or journalist or voter tries to find out the exact nature of the Bill-Hillary collaboration, to indeed determine where he stops and she starts, the inquiring citizen will be stonewalled. Because all her '90s White House papers are locked away at the federally-financed William J. Clinton Presidential Library, and virtually none of them are expected to see the light of day prior to the '08 election.
Here's the deal, apparently: She gets to tout her First Lady stint as proof of her governmental experience, but we on the receiving end don't get to find out exactly what she did. She gets to travel America extolling the successes of the Bill Clinton administration, and she gets to tell us how much she influenced his thinking, but we don't get the chance to learn exactly what she influenced (much less how and why).
To verify her experience claims, to understand the nature of her advice, and to determine whether her advice helped or hurt her husband's performance, we would need to have access to a number of things: her policy memos, her notes from strategy meetings, her appointment calendars, and a lot more. But there is no such access - as the respected biographer Sally Bedell Smith discovered recently when she visited the library. When she requested material on Hillary's advice to Bill about welfare reform, she was told that "policy" matters were off limits; when she requested material on Bill's advice to Hillary during her 2000 Senate campaign, she was told that "political" matters were off limits.
Much of this is Bill's doing; as Newsweek determined, after reviewing documents obtained from the National Archives under a Freedom of Information request, Bill decreed in a 2002 letter that there should be no speedy release of "sensitive policy, personal, or political" material. He was also very interested in slowing the release of "communications directly between the President and First Lady, and their families, unless routine in nature." Apparently he was casting a wide net, because neither of his immediate predecessors, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, has reportedly placed any controls on the papers of their respective spouses.
Democratic strategists and pro-Clinton archivists have been arguing for months that Bill and Hillary are rightly concerned about the pitfalls of disclosure, that Clinton critics would merely cherry-pick the most negative material. Yes, they would do that. It's just too bad that the voters won't have the chance to decide for themselves whether to believe the critics, or, more importantly, to decide whether the archives confirm Hillary's claims about the breadth of her experience.
The bottom line is that this issue demonstrates why the Clinton collaboration is so unique - and potentially troublesome.
As Hillary keeps telling us, she and Bill have been talking policy since the day they were married; it's part of what bonds them as a couple. But now that she's running for president herself, and people want to understandably find out more about the nature of their policy talk (since, after all, their policy talk affected the nation in the '90s and may well do so again), they're invoking an expansive zone of privacy. Witness Bill's abiding interest in safeguarding "communications between the President and First Lady." Witness Hillary's remark, during a Sept. 26 debate, that "I don't talk about my private conversations with my husband."
So the deal, for the '08 campaign, is that when Hillary touts her close collaboration with Bill, as part of what she calls her "35 years of experience," she expects the voter to simply take it on faith and not sweat the details. Because those details are under lock and key.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The deceptive allure of darn good buzz
On a busy day, I'll confine myself to offering this public service:
In recent weeks, a great number of emailers have excitedly sought to inform me about a particulary juicy entry in The Reagan Diaries, a recently published volume of the late president's private jottings. They have quoted the entry, and urged me to post it forthwith; after I declined to do so, I was duly informed, by some of the emailers, that I was clearly a right-wing stooge/Republican apologist/censor/killjoy.
Here's the passage. Supposedly, the juice factor is high because the writer is Reagan, the "George" is Vice President Bush, and the "son"...well, you know who that is:
"May 17, 1986. A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."
For those of you who might find this passage in your email box, and might be tempted to forward it to new recipients, be forewarned: It's fake.
This verdict is apparently a revelation to many of my emailers, who seem to assume, in our new communications era, that anything rocketing through cyberspace automatically has the ring of truth - or, more specifically, that anything that squares with their partisan views should be treated as true. Certainly, back in the mid-'80s, George W. Bush was a notoriously underemployed adult, so perhaps that was sufficient for those who greeted the purported entry with guffaws of delight.
My first reaction, when I read it, was puzzlement. How had this not been highlighted last May, in the initial news stories about the diaries? How was it possible that Bill Maher had not mined it for an entire opening monologue on HBO? How was it possible that a president would have penned such brazenly disdainful prose, when, in fact, every president assumes that his diaries will be publicized, and therefore that they need to be written with malice toward none and charity toward all?
So I went to a bookstore, pulled The Reagan Diaries off the shelf, leafed to the date...and there was nothing about a shiftless ne'er-do-well son. Then I went online, and within seconds, the truth emerged:
Columnist Michael Kinsley learned last spring that he would surface on page 400, where Reagan briefly mentions enjoying an off-the-record lunch with Kinsley and several other journalists. Amused by this news, Kinsley then proceeded, in the July '07 pages of The New Republic, to write a satire, in which he made up several Reagan entries, with himself playing a cameo role in each. The Bush passage was one of three Kinsley inventions.
Somewhere along the line, somebody with no sense of irony highlighted the Bush passage and, minus the Kinsley authorship, passed it along as truth...and out it spun, morphing into darn good buzz.
And what's doubly ironic is that, according to Kinsley, the actual Reagan entry - where he attends an off-the-record lunch with the president - was wrong too. Kinsley says the actual New Republic attendee was Charles Krauthammer; somebody (Reagan, the editor, the publisher) stuck in Kinsley's name by mistake.
Which brings me to the point I wanted to make, about slippery factoids on the Internet. There's an old saying in journalism, and it needs to be honored anew: "If your own mother says she loves you, check it out."
In recent weeks, a great number of emailers have excitedly sought to inform me about a particulary juicy entry in The Reagan Diaries, a recently published volume of the late president's private jottings. They have quoted the entry, and urged me to post it forthwith; after I declined to do so, I was duly informed, by some of the emailers, that I was clearly a right-wing stooge/Republican apologist/censor/killjoy.
Here's the passage. Supposedly, the juice factor is high because the writer is Reagan, the "George" is Vice President Bush, and the "son"...well, you know who that is:
"May 17, 1986. A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."
For those of you who might find this passage in your email box, and might be tempted to forward it to new recipients, be forewarned: It's fake.
This verdict is apparently a revelation to many of my emailers, who seem to assume, in our new communications era, that anything rocketing through cyberspace automatically has the ring of truth - or, more specifically, that anything that squares with their partisan views should be treated as true. Certainly, back in the mid-'80s, George W. Bush was a notoriously underemployed adult, so perhaps that was sufficient for those who greeted the purported entry with guffaws of delight.
My first reaction, when I read it, was puzzlement. How had this not been highlighted last May, in the initial news stories about the diaries? How was it possible that Bill Maher had not mined it for an entire opening monologue on HBO? How was it possible that a president would have penned such brazenly disdainful prose, when, in fact, every president assumes that his diaries will be publicized, and therefore that they need to be written with malice toward none and charity toward all?
So I went to a bookstore, pulled The Reagan Diaries off the shelf, leafed to the date...and there was nothing about a shiftless ne'er-do-well son. Then I went online, and within seconds, the truth emerged:
Columnist Michael Kinsley learned last spring that he would surface on page 400, where Reagan briefly mentions enjoying an off-the-record lunch with Kinsley and several other journalists. Amused by this news, Kinsley then proceeded, in the July '07 pages of The New Republic, to write a satire, in which he made up several Reagan entries, with himself playing a cameo role in each. The Bush passage was one of three Kinsley inventions.
Somewhere along the line, somebody with no sense of irony highlighted the Bush passage and, minus the Kinsley authorship, passed it along as truth...and out it spun, morphing into darn good buzz.
And what's doubly ironic is that, according to Kinsley, the actual Reagan entry - where he attends an off-the-record lunch with the president - was wrong too. Kinsley says the actual New Republic attendee was Charles Krauthammer; somebody (Reagan, the editor, the publisher) stuck in Kinsley's name by mistake.
Which brings me to the point I wanted to make, about slippery factoids on the Internet. There's an old saying in journalism, and it needs to be honored anew: "If your own mother says she loves you, check it out."
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Grownups say the dumbest things
In the spirit of broadcast pioneer Art Linkletter, who once authored a book entitled Kids Say the Darndest Things, I offer today's post, Grownups Say the Dumbest Things.
Actually, dumb might be too mild an adjective. In several of the instances listed below, you might feel that moronic is more accurate - depending, of course, on your partisan inclinations:
1. Mike Huckabee, GOP presidential candidate. I mentioned on Monday that he might be poised to ride a boomlet into the Iowa caucuses, in part because he is an effective communicator and an ordained Baptist preacher who is sincerely in sync with the party's religious conservatives. Nevertheless, in a Republican debate on Sunday night, his fervor got in the way of his facts.
At one point, he said, "When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them..." (emphasis mine)
Really? "Most" of the Declaration signers were clergymen? I have toured Independence Hall a number of times, and I have read my share of early histories (thank you, Joseph Ellis), yet I had never heard that stat before. In the reality-based community, "most" is defined as a majority. This would mean, if Huckabee is using the reality-based definition, that, at minimum, 29 signers were clergymen.
Here's the problem, however: All available evidence indicates that, at maximum, the actual number was...four.
Among the signers, there was only one active clergyman (John Witherspoon of New Jersey). One religious website, Adherents.com, says that perhaps four signers were preachers in the past. One conservative group, the Heritage Foundation, puts that number at two.
Perhaps Huckabee was using a faith-based definition, one that is tailored to the belief that the signers were explicitly creating a Christian nation. One of his rivals on stage could have rebutted him by quoting Thomas Paine, whose fiery writings helped inspire the Declaration of Independence ("I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.") But no presidential candidate would dare do that.
2. Glenn Beck, host of The Glenn Beck Program. One of the perks of being a talk radio loudmouth is that the brain's flotsam can be flushed through the lips, without the checks and balances of rational thought. Beck, who is also employed by CNN, belched on his radio show Monday about the current tragedy in southern California:
"I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."
I would suggest that it is inappropriate to run a loyalty test on people who have just lost their homes. I would even bet that a large number of the newly homeless are America-loving Republicans; there are many such people in southern California, as indicated by the voting rolls and the presence of so many Republican congressmen. But such nuances are the province of journalists, and those who spew on the air don't qualify.
3. Pete Stark, Democratic California congressman. This guy has been a loose cannon for years - six years ago, during a House debate, he falsely charged that black Republican J.C. Watt's children had been "born out of wedlock" - but last week he overreached with an anti-Bush tirade that embarrassed his own party colleagues.
During the struggle last week over children's health insurance, Stark told Republicans: "You don't have money to fund...children, but you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement."
Notwithstanding President Bush's historic miscalculations in Iraq, and the fact that 3,800 Americans are dead because of his errors, it's a tad unfair to assume that he is amused by the death toll. Some liberal bloggers have declared Stark to be a hero, but the reality is, he made life more difficult for the half-dozen House Democratic freshmen who represent conservative districts.
Unlike Stark, who is seemingly a congressman for life because he hails from a liberal northern California enclave, those freshmen have to compete in 2008, and the last thing they need is to be linked with a guy who thinks that a commander-in-chief is amused by the death of soldiers. Which is why Stark was squeezed by the House leadership until he finally apologized. But we'll undoubtedly hear from him again, in some future fracas.
4. Mitt Romney, GOP presidential candidate. Here he was Tuesday morning, discussing the latest developments in the war on terror:
"Actually, just look at what Osam, uh, Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. 'That is a battlefield. That is the central place,' he said. 'Come, join us under one banner.'"
Naturally, Romney's spokesman later explained that the candidate had "simply misspoke." (Twice, in fact.)
I suppose that's understandable. All those funny-sounding names sound alike, right? Granted, one of them is a presidential candidate and the other is a terrorist, but what's a guy to do? Perhaps, if it happens again, Romney can defend himself in song, with apologies to George and Ira Gershwin:
You say Osama, and I say Obama/ Osama, Obama/ Obama, Osama/ Let's call the whole thing off...
Actually, dumb might be too mild an adjective. In several of the instances listed below, you might feel that moronic is more accurate - depending, of course, on your partisan inclinations:
1. Mike Huckabee, GOP presidential candidate. I mentioned on Monday that he might be poised to ride a boomlet into the Iowa caucuses, in part because he is an effective communicator and an ordained Baptist preacher who is sincerely in sync with the party's religious conservatives. Nevertheless, in a Republican debate on Sunday night, his fervor got in the way of his facts.
At one point, he said, "When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them..." (emphasis mine)
Really? "Most" of the Declaration signers were clergymen? I have toured Independence Hall a number of times, and I have read my share of early histories (thank you, Joseph Ellis), yet I had never heard that stat before. In the reality-based community, "most" is defined as a majority. This would mean, if Huckabee is using the reality-based definition, that, at minimum, 29 signers were clergymen.
Here's the problem, however: All available evidence indicates that, at maximum, the actual number was...four.
Among the signers, there was only one active clergyman (John Witherspoon of New Jersey). One religious website, Adherents.com, says that perhaps four signers were preachers in the past. One conservative group, the Heritage Foundation, puts that number at two.
Perhaps Huckabee was using a faith-based definition, one that is tailored to the belief that the signers were explicitly creating a Christian nation. One of his rivals on stage could have rebutted him by quoting Thomas Paine, whose fiery writings helped inspire the Declaration of Independence ("I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.") But no presidential candidate would dare do that.
2. Glenn Beck, host of The Glenn Beck Program. One of the perks of being a talk radio loudmouth is that the brain's flotsam can be flushed through the lips, without the checks and balances of rational thought. Beck, who is also employed by CNN, belched on his radio show Monday about the current tragedy in southern California:
"I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."
I would suggest that it is inappropriate to run a loyalty test on people who have just lost their homes. I would even bet that a large number of the newly homeless are America-loving Republicans; there are many such people in southern California, as indicated by the voting rolls and the presence of so many Republican congressmen. But such nuances are the province of journalists, and those who spew on the air don't qualify.
3. Pete Stark, Democratic California congressman. This guy has been a loose cannon for years - six years ago, during a House debate, he falsely charged that black Republican J.C. Watt's children had been "born out of wedlock" - but last week he overreached with an anti-Bush tirade that embarrassed his own party colleagues.
During the struggle last week over children's health insurance, Stark told Republicans: "You don't have money to fund...children, but you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement."
Notwithstanding President Bush's historic miscalculations in Iraq, and the fact that 3,800 Americans are dead because of his errors, it's a tad unfair to assume that he is amused by the death toll. Some liberal bloggers have declared Stark to be a hero, but the reality is, he made life more difficult for the half-dozen House Democratic freshmen who represent conservative districts.
Unlike Stark, who is seemingly a congressman for life because he hails from a liberal northern California enclave, those freshmen have to compete in 2008, and the last thing they need is to be linked with a guy who thinks that a commander-in-chief is amused by the death of soldiers. Which is why Stark was squeezed by the House leadership until he finally apologized. But we'll undoubtedly hear from him again, in some future fracas.
4. Mitt Romney, GOP presidential candidate. Here he was Tuesday morning, discussing the latest developments in the war on terror:
"Actually, just look at what Osam, uh, Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. 'That is a battlefield. That is the central place,' he said. 'Come, join us under one banner.'"
Naturally, Romney's spokesman later explained that the candidate had "simply misspoke." (Twice, in fact.)
I suppose that's understandable. All those funny-sounding names sound alike, right? Granted, one of them is a presidential candidate and the other is a terrorist, but what's a guy to do? Perhaps, if it happens again, Romney can defend himself in song, with apologies to George and Ira Gershwin:
You say Osama, and I say Obama/ Osama, Obama/ Obama, Osama/ Let's call the whole thing off...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Message to the moralists: Mind your own business
It looks like Fred Thompson can kiss off the Christian conservative vote. He has insulted them, big time.
During a news conference yesterday, the Republican presidential candidate basically stated that when a family member is struggling to decide whether to pull the plug on a mortally ill loved one, everybody else should just butt out because it's none of their business. Indeed, it's an issue near and dear to him: “I had to face a situation like that in my own personal life, with my own daughter.”
Thompson's stance is definitely not in tune with the Christian conservative agenda. Their attitude - as evidenced by the Terri Schiavo case, the 24/7 cable TV melodrama of 2005 - is that the federal government should intervene in the private lives of families, and ensure, in accordance with their views of morality, that the doomed patient remains attached to the feeding tube.
When Thompson was asked about the Schiavo case last month, he claimed that he couldn't recall the details. It turns out that he pleaded amnesia merely to avoid discussing his own family trauma. But for those of you who truly don't remember the Schiavo case, here's the gist:
Terri Schiavo, who had hovered near death for the better part of 15 years, was being kept alive by a feeding tube. Her husband wanted to remove the tube. State courts in Florida, backed by the testimony of medical specialists, ruled that he had the right to remove the tube; the key state judge was a southern Baptist and Republican. But religious conservatives, cracking the whip, compelled the Republican Congress to pass a special law, overruling the state courts and Michael Schiavo. In the immortal words of then-House GOP leader Tom DeLay, "I don't care what her husband says."
Eventually, the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled for Michael Schiavo. Which brings us back to Thompson; clearly, his idea of conservatism is that the federal government should not be in the business of promoting morality and butting into people's private lives. That's the old conservative credo, as articulated several generations ago by Barry Goldwater (who said in 1964, "I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow"). The problem is, Thompson's credo is not the Christian right's credo.
It's probably bad enough, from their perspective, that Thompson is known to be an infrequent churchgoer, that he once lobbied for an abortion rights group, and that he bestirred few hearts at the weekend Values Voter Summit. And now, from Thompson at his news conference, comes this blasphemy:
"Making this (Schiavo case, and others like it) into a political football is something that I don't welcome, and this will probably be the last time I ever address it. It should be decided by the families - the federal government and the state government, too, except for the court system, ought to stay out of those matters as far as I am concerned."
And the reason he doesn't want to revist this issue publicly is because he knows first-hand about what it's like to struggle with it in private: His 38-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Panici, died from an accidental drug overdose in 2002, six days after being hospitalized. He said yesterday, "These things need to be decided by the family. And I was at that bedside."
That should put the kibosh on Fred. Anyone who sounds this much like a Goldwater conservative, anyone who refuses to accept a little evangelical assistance while at a stricken daughter's bedside, won't stand much of a chance with religious conservatives. After all, it was Goldwater himself who in 1981 said of those folks, "I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism."
-------
On the mercenary front, Erik Prince uttered a revealing remark the other day. The founder/owner of Blackwater, who says his longstanding family Republican ties have played absolutely no role in his reaping of more than $1.02 billion in private security contracts from the Bush administration, was being quizzed on CNN on the issue of accountability...or, more specifically, about why the Bush team and the Iraqi government have long failed to hold Blackwater accountable for anything (as two new audits have also concluded).
Prince was asked, "Whose laws are you subject to?" And in response, almost in passing, he told CNN: "Well, in the ideal sense, we would be subject to the Iraqi law, but that would mean -- that would indicate that there was a functioning Iraqi court system where Westerners could actually get a fair trial. That's not the case right now."
Well, that's not very helpful to the Bush team, is it? The administration has been struggling for many months to put the best spin on the failure of the Iraqi government to meet the benchmarks laid out in Washington...and here is Prince, casually mentioning a failure that is not even addressed in the benchmarks.
When the White House issued its July report card on Iraqi "progress," there was no mention of any criteria for the Iraqi judiciary. Indeed, the judiciary is barely mentioned at all. But now Prince, seeking only to defend his mercenaries, has informed us that the Iraqi judiciary is not even "functioning" in any western sense of the word. Perhaps the White House needs to craft an extra benchmark. We thank Prince for that inadvertent public service.
During a news conference yesterday, the Republican presidential candidate basically stated that when a family member is struggling to decide whether to pull the plug on a mortally ill loved one, everybody else should just butt out because it's none of their business. Indeed, it's an issue near and dear to him: “I had to face a situation like that in my own personal life, with my own daughter.”
Thompson's stance is definitely not in tune with the Christian conservative agenda. Their attitude - as evidenced by the Terri Schiavo case, the 24/7 cable TV melodrama of 2005 - is that the federal government should intervene in the private lives of families, and ensure, in accordance with their views of morality, that the doomed patient remains attached to the feeding tube.
When Thompson was asked about the Schiavo case last month, he claimed that he couldn't recall the details. It turns out that he pleaded amnesia merely to avoid discussing his own family trauma. But for those of you who truly don't remember the Schiavo case, here's the gist:
Terri Schiavo, who had hovered near death for the better part of 15 years, was being kept alive by a feeding tube. Her husband wanted to remove the tube. State courts in Florida, backed by the testimony of medical specialists, ruled that he had the right to remove the tube; the key state judge was a southern Baptist and Republican. But religious conservatives, cracking the whip, compelled the Republican Congress to pass a special law, overruling the state courts and Michael Schiavo. In the immortal words of then-House GOP leader Tom DeLay, "I don't care what her husband says."
Eventually, the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled for Michael Schiavo. Which brings us back to Thompson; clearly, his idea of conservatism is that the federal government should not be in the business of promoting morality and butting into people's private lives. That's the old conservative credo, as articulated several generations ago by Barry Goldwater (who said in 1964, "I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow"). The problem is, Thompson's credo is not the Christian right's credo.
It's probably bad enough, from their perspective, that Thompson is known to be an infrequent churchgoer, that he once lobbied for an abortion rights group, and that he bestirred few hearts at the weekend Values Voter Summit. And now, from Thompson at his news conference, comes this blasphemy:
"Making this (Schiavo case, and others like it) into a political football is something that I don't welcome, and this will probably be the last time I ever address it. It should be decided by the families - the federal government and the state government, too, except for the court system, ought to stay out of those matters as far as I am concerned."
And the reason he doesn't want to revist this issue publicly is because he knows first-hand about what it's like to struggle with it in private: His 38-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Panici, died from an accidental drug overdose in 2002, six days after being hospitalized. He said yesterday, "These things need to be decided by the family. And I was at that bedside."
That should put the kibosh on Fred. Anyone who sounds this much like a Goldwater conservative, anyone who refuses to accept a little evangelical assistance while at a stricken daughter's bedside, won't stand much of a chance with religious conservatives. After all, it was Goldwater himself who in 1981 said of those folks, "I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism."
-------
On the mercenary front, Erik Prince uttered a revealing remark the other day. The founder/owner of Blackwater, who says his longstanding family Republican ties have played absolutely no role in his reaping of more than $1.02 billion in private security contracts from the Bush administration, was being quizzed on CNN on the issue of accountability...or, more specifically, about why the Bush team and the Iraqi government have long failed to hold Blackwater accountable for anything (as two new audits have also concluded).
Prince was asked, "Whose laws are you subject to?" And in response, almost in passing, he told CNN: "Well, in the ideal sense, we would be subject to the Iraqi law, but that would mean -- that would indicate that there was a functioning Iraqi court system where Westerners could actually get a fair trial. That's not the case right now."
Well, that's not very helpful to the Bush team, is it? The administration has been struggling for many months to put the best spin on the failure of the Iraqi government to meet the benchmarks laid out in Washington...and here is Prince, casually mentioning a failure that is not even addressed in the benchmarks.
When the White House issued its July report card on Iraqi "progress," there was no mention of any criteria for the Iraqi judiciary. Indeed, the judiciary is barely mentioned at all. But now Prince, seeking only to defend his mercenaries, has informed us that the Iraqi judiciary is not even "functioning" in any western sense of the word. Perhaps the White House needs to craft an extra benchmark. We thank Prince for that inadvertent public service.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Christian conservatives and the Huck: perfect together?
Are we perhaps witnessing the political ascendance of Mike Huckabee? Is it possible that restive religious conservatives, widely dissatisfied with their choices in the GOP presidential field, are poised to flock en masse to an ordained Baptist preacher who plays the electric guitar? To an ex-governor from Bill Clinton’s state whose chief claim to fame – until recently – was that he lost 100 pounds? To a guy who, with that kind of name, sounds like he should be cracking cornpone jokes on The Andy Griffith Show?
The answer is yes. Huckabee, notwithstanding his ostensible second-tier status as an ’08 candidate, finished in a virtual tie for first place this weekend in a straw poll of religious conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington (if we include the online voters who chose not to attend), and Huckabee slaughtered the entire GOP field (polling 50 percent, with Mitt Romney a distant second at 10 percent) if we count only the votes that were cast in person, by those who were in the room.
It actually makes perfect sense that grassroots Christian conservatives might be warming to a candidate who has long been right under their noses. Huckabee – in part because he is actually one of them, having been a past leader of Arkansas’ Southern Baptist Convention; in part because he is a gifted communicator; in part because he questions all this stuff about evolution – might be well poised to fill the vacuum that persists on the Republican side.
The vacuum was obvious at the weekend Washington confab. For instance:
Romney (who took 27.62 percent of the total straw poll vote, compared to Huckabee’s 27.15 percent), is still widely perceived by these folks as the quintessential panderer - somebody who’s merely talking a good anti-abortion game, after having previously told Massachusetts voters that he supported abortion “and you will not see me wavering on that.”
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is still (rightly) perceived by the religious right as being a New York liberal on abortion. In his Saturday speech, he tried to sell his unpalatable beliefs as a character asset, as proof that he is a man of conviction: “Isn't it better to tell you what I really believe than to change my positions to fit the prevailing winds? I believe trust is more important than 100 percent agreement." The problem with Rudy’s argument is that these people really aren’t interested in disagreement, particularly on an issue (abortion) that they deem to be a deal-breaker. Rudy wound up with 1.85 percent of the total straw poll vote.
John McCain? He got nowhere this weekend. And how about Fred Thompson, who was supposed to swoop into the race and scoop up the Christian conservative vote? Forget about it. He did tell the Summit crowd that if he makes it to the Oval Office, he will immediately start to pray (perhaps as compensation for the fact that he is not a regular churchgoer, a lifestyle choice that displeases some religious right leaders). But Thompson still isn’t wild about the idea of codifying a gay marriage ban in the U.S. Constitution, he still refuses to apologize for the fact that he did lobbying work for an abortion-rights group, and, in his Summit speech, he probably lulled hundreds of eyelids to half mast with some of his less than scintillating bromides (“We must have good laws. We must do our best to stop bad laws”).
By contrast, Huckabee appeared to electrify the crowd with an eloquent appeal to purity: “I come today not as one who comes to you, but as one who comes from you.” He said that Christian conservatives should focus on candidates who “sing from their hearts,” as opposed to those (Romney, apparently) who “just lip-sync the lyrics from our songs….I don't want expediency or electability to replace our vales. We live or die by those values…Our party may be important, but our principles are even more important…Let us never sacrifice our principles for anybody's politics. Not now. Not ever.” One conservative blogger at the National Review wrote this weekend that Huckabee “blew the doors off the place.”
The crowd also loved his take-no-prisoners stance on abortion. According to Huckabee, not only is abortion a violation of "God's values," it has also forced us to give cheap domestic jobs to immigrants - jobs that could have been filled by the aborted. Yep, that's what the man said on Saturday: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be (because) for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce, had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973." (If Huckabee was ever to win the nomination, I wonder how independent swing voters - who generally support that abortion ruling, as well as immigration - would react to Huckabee's argument?)
Anyway, the Summit vote marks the second time that the ill-financed Huckabee has come from nowhere to duel the well-heeled Romney to a virtual draw. It happened back in August, at the Iowa Republican straw poll. And it also appears that Huckabee is inching upward in the surveys of likely Iowa caucus-goers. The religious right leaders are still wary of him (because he hasn’t raised much money), but the grassroots seems to be increasingly receptive. If this kind of thing keeps happening, Huckabee will surely win the honor that is bestowed upon all ascendant candidates:
He will become a target.
If he starts to get real traction with the religious right, some of his rivals will start to utter insinuations about Huckabee’s dearth of foreign policy experience (an accurate charge), and about how we need national security acumen in this post-9/11 era. Also, expect them to tar Huckabee as a tax-hiker (as a governor faced with budget woes and lousy roads in need of repair money, he did sign hefty sales-tax increases on cigarettes and gasoline).
Indeed, fiscal conservatives are already on his case about his economic record. The Club for Growth, an activist group, ran ads last summer assailing Huckabee as a flagrant tax-and-spender, and, late last week, the veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie (a legend in the movement) slammed Huckabee for similar reasons, calling him “just another wishy-washy Republican -- inconsistent in policy because he’s inconsistent in principle.”
(Note the potential here for a conservative split over Huckabee, between religious right-wingers who like his social positions and Christian values; and economic right-wingers who dislike his tax-and-spend decisions.)
But if Huckabee does well in Iowa and suddenly takes off for real, how long will it take for somebody to bring up the case of Wayne Dumond?
Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis, in 1988, when the Massachusetts governor was pilloried by the GOP for presiding over a prison furlough program that put rapist Willie Horton into the community, with tragic results? Potentially, Wayne Dumond is Mike Huckabee’s Willie Horton.
The short version: In 1985, in eastern Arkansas, Dumond was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years after he was convicted for kidnapping and raping a teenage cheerleader. Some critics thought the sentence was excessive, particularly considering the fact that, while he was awaiting trial in ‘85, Dumond had been castrated by a pair of masked vigilantes. In 1992, state authorities decreed that Dumond should be allowed to petition the state parole board; he then asked to be freed, but the board said no.
Enter Huckabee, who became governor in 1996. Two months after taking office, he announced that he intended to set Dumond free. Shortly thereafter, the parole board did so. Huckabee congratulated Dumond, and told him in a letter, “I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society take place.”
Due to various logistics, Dumond wasn’t released until 1999. A year later, he moved to Missouri – where he sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman.
When asked about this case recently, Huckabee said, “I did not have this apprehension that something horrible like that would happen…There’s nothing you can say, but my gosh, it’s the thing you pray never happens. And it did.”
Was this a case of Christian forgiveness gone awry? If Mike Huckabee takes off as a candidate – and he still needs a lot more money, if he expects to play in the big primary states on Feb.5 - then he’ll surely be asked to say a lot more.
The answer is yes. Huckabee, notwithstanding his ostensible second-tier status as an ’08 candidate, finished in a virtual tie for first place this weekend in a straw poll of religious conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington (if we include the online voters who chose not to attend), and Huckabee slaughtered the entire GOP field (polling 50 percent, with Mitt Romney a distant second at 10 percent) if we count only the votes that were cast in person, by those who were in the room.
It actually makes perfect sense that grassroots Christian conservatives might be warming to a candidate who has long been right under their noses. Huckabee – in part because he is actually one of them, having been a past leader of Arkansas’ Southern Baptist Convention; in part because he is a gifted communicator; in part because he questions all this stuff about evolution – might be well poised to fill the vacuum that persists on the Republican side.
The vacuum was obvious at the weekend Washington confab. For instance:
Romney (who took 27.62 percent of the total straw poll vote, compared to Huckabee’s 27.15 percent), is still widely perceived by these folks as the quintessential panderer - somebody who’s merely talking a good anti-abortion game, after having previously told Massachusetts voters that he supported abortion “and you will not see me wavering on that.”
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is still (rightly) perceived by the religious right as being a New York liberal on abortion. In his Saturday speech, he tried to sell his unpalatable beliefs as a character asset, as proof that he is a man of conviction: “Isn't it better to tell you what I really believe than to change my positions to fit the prevailing winds? I believe trust is more important than 100 percent agreement." The problem with Rudy’s argument is that these people really aren’t interested in disagreement, particularly on an issue (abortion) that they deem to be a deal-breaker. Rudy wound up with 1.85 percent of the total straw poll vote.
John McCain? He got nowhere this weekend. And how about Fred Thompson, who was supposed to swoop into the race and scoop up the Christian conservative vote? Forget about it. He did tell the Summit crowd that if he makes it to the Oval Office, he will immediately start to pray (perhaps as compensation for the fact that he is not a regular churchgoer, a lifestyle choice that displeases some religious right leaders). But Thompson still isn’t wild about the idea of codifying a gay marriage ban in the U.S. Constitution, he still refuses to apologize for the fact that he did lobbying work for an abortion-rights group, and, in his Summit speech, he probably lulled hundreds of eyelids to half mast with some of his less than scintillating bromides (“We must have good laws. We must do our best to stop bad laws”).
By contrast, Huckabee appeared to electrify the crowd with an eloquent appeal to purity: “I come today not as one who comes to you, but as one who comes from you.” He said that Christian conservatives should focus on candidates who “sing from their hearts,” as opposed to those (Romney, apparently) who “just lip-sync the lyrics from our songs….I don't want expediency or electability to replace our vales. We live or die by those values…Our party may be important, but our principles are even more important…Let us never sacrifice our principles for anybody's politics. Not now. Not ever.” One conservative blogger at the National Review wrote this weekend that Huckabee “blew the doors off the place.”
The crowd also loved his take-no-prisoners stance on abortion. According to Huckabee, not only is abortion a violation of "God's values," it has also forced us to give cheap domestic jobs to immigrants - jobs that could have been filled by the aborted. Yep, that's what the man said on Saturday: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be (because) for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce, had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973." (If Huckabee was ever to win the nomination, I wonder how independent swing voters - who generally support that abortion ruling, as well as immigration - would react to Huckabee's argument?)
Anyway, the Summit vote marks the second time that the ill-financed Huckabee has come from nowhere to duel the well-heeled Romney to a virtual draw. It happened back in August, at the Iowa Republican straw poll. And it also appears that Huckabee is inching upward in the surveys of likely Iowa caucus-goers. The religious right leaders are still wary of him (because he hasn’t raised much money), but the grassroots seems to be increasingly receptive. If this kind of thing keeps happening, Huckabee will surely win the honor that is bestowed upon all ascendant candidates:
He will become a target.
If he starts to get real traction with the religious right, some of his rivals will start to utter insinuations about Huckabee’s dearth of foreign policy experience (an accurate charge), and about how we need national security acumen in this post-9/11 era. Also, expect them to tar Huckabee as a tax-hiker (as a governor faced with budget woes and lousy roads in need of repair money, he did sign hefty sales-tax increases on cigarettes and gasoline).
Indeed, fiscal conservatives are already on his case about his economic record. The Club for Growth, an activist group, ran ads last summer assailing Huckabee as a flagrant tax-and-spender, and, late last week, the veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie (a legend in the movement) slammed Huckabee for similar reasons, calling him “just another wishy-washy Republican -- inconsistent in policy because he’s inconsistent in principle.”
(Note the potential here for a conservative split over Huckabee, between religious right-wingers who like his social positions and Christian values; and economic right-wingers who dislike his tax-and-spend decisions.)
But if Huckabee does well in Iowa and suddenly takes off for real, how long will it take for somebody to bring up the case of Wayne Dumond?
Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis, in 1988, when the Massachusetts governor was pilloried by the GOP for presiding over a prison furlough program that put rapist Willie Horton into the community, with tragic results? Potentially, Wayne Dumond is Mike Huckabee’s Willie Horton.
The short version: In 1985, in eastern Arkansas, Dumond was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years after he was convicted for kidnapping and raping a teenage cheerleader. Some critics thought the sentence was excessive, particularly considering the fact that, while he was awaiting trial in ‘85, Dumond had been castrated by a pair of masked vigilantes. In 1992, state authorities decreed that Dumond should be allowed to petition the state parole board; he then asked to be freed, but the board said no.
Enter Huckabee, who became governor in 1996. Two months after taking office, he announced that he intended to set Dumond free. Shortly thereafter, the parole board did so. Huckabee congratulated Dumond, and told him in a letter, “I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society take place.”
Due to various logistics, Dumond wasn’t released until 1999. A year later, he moved to Missouri – where he sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman.
When asked about this case recently, Huckabee said, “I did not have this apprehension that something horrible like that would happen…There’s nothing you can say, but my gosh, it’s the thing you pray never happens. And it did.”
Was this a case of Christian forgiveness gone awry? If Mike Huckabee takes off as a candidate – and he still needs a lot more money, if he expects to play in the big primary states on Feb.5 - then he’ll surely be asked to say a lot more.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Auditioning for the blessing
It's a travel day around here, so I'll keep it pithy:
Over the next several days, at the "Values Voter Summit" in Washington, the '08 Republican presidential candidates will be vying for the blessing of religious conservatives. Those traditional gatekeepers of the GOP nomination remain frustrated that they can't seem to find anyone who satisfies their purist sensibilities.
The auditions should be fairly predictable.
Rudy Giuliani will play down his liberal past on social issues, by invoking 9/11 with some frequency and vowing to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court; Mitt Romney will spin his flip-flops (from liberal on abortion to conservative on abortion) as some sort of spiritual awakening, and brag a lot about his family (in a veiled contrast to all the divorced guys in the race); Fred Thompson will say he has always been a consistent conservative, and overlook his own past lobbying efforts on behalf of an abortion rights group; Mike Huckabee will play up his previous life as a pastor, and skip over the fact that donors still don't seem to want to give him any money; John McCain, who's hoping in vain that his listeners have forgotten his 2000 dismissal of Christian conservatives as "agents of intolerance," will paint himself as a man of conviction by contrasting himself with Romney's flip-flops.
(Indeed, here's an excerpt from McCain's speech today: "I have been pro-life my entire public career....That is a personal testament, which you need not take on faith. You need only examine my public record to know that I won't ever change my position to fit the politics of the day.")
Meanwhile, there's one other development that should displease the religious right. The departure today of Sam Brownback - the Kansas senator, plagued with microscopic poll ratings, is dropping out of the race - translates into a rise in the percentage of Republican candidates who actually believe in evolution.
With Brownback in the race, the EA (evolution average) was .556...meaning, only five of the nine candidates said they endorsed evolution. But with Brownback gone, the EA will climb all the way to .625. No wonder the religious conservatives feel that their decades of political toil has yielded insufficient satisfaction.
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But even though Rudy Giuliani continues to have problems with the religious right, there is ample polling evidence that he is a popular with another sizeable segment of the population:
The factually-challenged.
I know that sounds harsh. But, as I mentioned several weeks ago, there is still a huge pool of people who inexplicably persist in believing - despite all the massive empirical evidence to the contrary - that Saddam Hussein plotted 9/11. Last month, a New York Times/CBS News poll determined that 33 percent of Americans believe Hussein was “personally” involved. And last June, a polling firm sponsored by Newsweek put that percentage at 41.
And, according to Times/CBS, take a guess which '08 candidate most strikes their fancy. The pollsters asked these clueless Americans to rate all the candidates in terms of favorability, and the winner was Rudy Giuliani - who has already proved to be a master at rhetorical sleight of hand, by repeatedly implying, a la the Bush administration formula, that all bad guys are indistinguishable...a tactic that also conveniently excuses the Bush team for its ill-fated decision to invade Iraq.
Over the next several days, at the "Values Voter Summit" in Washington, the '08 Republican presidential candidates will be vying for the blessing of religious conservatives. Those traditional gatekeepers of the GOP nomination remain frustrated that they can't seem to find anyone who satisfies their purist sensibilities.
The auditions should be fairly predictable.
Rudy Giuliani will play down his liberal past on social issues, by invoking 9/11 with some frequency and vowing to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court; Mitt Romney will spin his flip-flops (from liberal on abortion to conservative on abortion) as some sort of spiritual awakening, and brag a lot about his family (in a veiled contrast to all the divorced guys in the race); Fred Thompson will say he has always been a consistent conservative, and overlook his own past lobbying efforts on behalf of an abortion rights group; Mike Huckabee will play up his previous life as a pastor, and skip over the fact that donors still don't seem to want to give him any money; John McCain, who's hoping in vain that his listeners have forgotten his 2000 dismissal of Christian conservatives as "agents of intolerance," will paint himself as a man of conviction by contrasting himself with Romney's flip-flops.
(Indeed, here's an excerpt from McCain's speech today: "I have been pro-life my entire public career....That is a personal testament, which you need not take on faith. You need only examine my public record to know that I won't ever change my position to fit the politics of the day.")
Meanwhile, there's one other development that should displease the religious right. The departure today of Sam Brownback - the Kansas senator, plagued with microscopic poll ratings, is dropping out of the race - translates into a rise in the percentage of Republican candidates who actually believe in evolution.
With Brownback in the race, the EA (evolution average) was .556...meaning, only five of the nine candidates said they endorsed evolution. But with Brownback gone, the EA will climb all the way to .625. No wonder the religious conservatives feel that their decades of political toil has yielded insufficient satisfaction.
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But even though Rudy Giuliani continues to have problems with the religious right, there is ample polling evidence that he is a popular with another sizeable segment of the population:
The factually-challenged.
I know that sounds harsh. But, as I mentioned several weeks ago, there is still a huge pool of people who inexplicably persist in believing - despite all the massive empirical evidence to the contrary - that Saddam Hussein plotted 9/11. Last month, a New York Times/CBS News poll determined that 33 percent of Americans believe Hussein was “personally” involved. And last June, a polling firm sponsored by Newsweek put that percentage at 41.
And, according to Times/CBS, take a guess which '08 candidate most strikes their fancy. The pollsters asked these clueless Americans to rate all the candidates in terms of favorability, and the winner was Rudy Giuliani - who has already proved to be a master at rhetorical sleight of hand, by repeatedly implying, a la the Bush administration formula, that all bad guys are indistinguishable...a tactic that also conveniently excuses the Bush team for its ill-fated decision to invade Iraq.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Dreamy Democrats, traveling through time
No wonder the Democratic Congress is saddled with a microscopic approval rating (11 percent, in the latest poll). Consider this week's misadventure:
At a time when the public is hungry for real solutions to a slew of contemporary crises - for starters, the war in Iraq - the House Democrats have been dithering for days about whether they should stand tall and make a courageous statement...about some atrocities that were perpetrated by a country that no longer exists, in an era long dead and gone.
The Ottoman Empire. In 1915.
Needless to say, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the desire to take a moral stand against genocide; indeed, the Armenian-American community has long been urging Congress to officially acknowledge the mass killings of their ancestors, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, during World War I. And many Democrats, including the current party leaders in Congress, generally believe that American foreign policy should be guided by fixed moral principles - as expressed in their pending House resolution condemning as genocide the Ottoman Turks' behavior 92 years ago.
But, for Democrats, the problem with standing tall against an injustice that transpired 92 years ago is that it makes them look clueless with respect to sensitive national security developments that are unfolding in the here and now. And, with a national election looming, the Democrats can hardly afford to look clueless in the national security realm.
Democrats incensed about the Ottoman Turks of 92 years ago might be better advised to simply rent the DVD of Lawrence of Arabia, because this doesn't appear to be a propitious time to take a moral stand. The pragmatics argue against it. Turkey is a stalwart Muslim ally, a NATO ally that allows us to resupply American troops in Iraq from military bases on its soil. Turkey is also viewed by Israel as a stabilizing force in the region. Turkey is also a crucial player in the movement of oil to the West.
Turkey is also ticked off at America these days, because it doesn't think we have done enough to stop Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq from crossing the border and attacking Turkish civilians; yesterday, in fact, the Turkish Parliament authorized sending Turkish troops into northern Iraq to pursue the rebels - a direct slap at America, which officially lists these rebels' group, PKK, as a terrorist operation.
It's fair to argue that - regardless of the Turks' complicity in the Armenian killings, and regardless of their obstinate refusal to acknowledge same - this is not the best time to be ruffling their feathers.
Such are the complications of realpolitik. When all those security pragmatics are taken into consideration, the Democratic leaders, with their gazes fixed on 1915, come off looking like pie-eyed dreamers.
It should also be pointed out that their moral outrage is fueled in part by domestic political pragmatics. The Armenian-American community has been good to the Democrats, and now they want to cash in some IOUs. (Perhaps if Native-Americans had the same kind of electoral clout, we'd now be seeing resolutions condemning Andrew Jackson for what he did to the Florida Seminoles.)
Armenians vote heavily in Nancy Pelosi's California district, and it's no accident that one of the key resolution sponsors in Adam Schiff - another California Democrat who was elected in 2000 with heavy support from the burgeoning Armenian electorate in Glendale and Burbank.
I can attest to that, because I covered Schiff's race; that race drew national attention, because the incumbent was James Rogan, a key GOP player in the House Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton. At one point, I had lunch with one of the key political operatives in the district - an Armenian named Eric Hacopian. He spelled out the importance of the Armenians as a local swing vote (10 percent of that district's electorate); he talked at length about the 1915 killings, and their desire to back a candidate who would push for a congressional resolution. In his words at the time, "This is a blood issue for all Armenians, it is extremely personal."
Well, Schiff is still pushing the blood issue - it was passed by the Foreign Affairs Committee last week - and it appeared that the resolution could reach the House floor any day now. But suddenly the Democratic leaders are wavering. With some Democrats bailing out, and with others stressing the here and now (Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat: "These are real-life situations, and sometimes your heart has to give in to your head"), Pelosi is now saying that action on the resolution "remains to be seen."
Behold the congressional Democrats: First they come up with a symbolic toothless gesture of idealism that threatens to play havoc with geostrategic realities...then they wobble over whether to pursue their own gesture. That 11 percent approval rating should be safe for awhile.
But to really gauge their performance on this matter, consider the response of President Bush. Speaking yesterday at a press conference, he said this: "With all these pressing responsibilities, one thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire. The resolution on the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 is counterproductive. Both Republicans and Democrats, including every living former Secretary of State, have spoken out against this resolution. Congress has more important work to do than antagonizing a democratic ally in the Muslim world, especially one that is providing vital support for our military every day."
Talk about ineptitude...The Democrats have managed to make even Bush sound wise and sensible.
At a time when the public is hungry for real solutions to a slew of contemporary crises - for starters, the war in Iraq - the House Democrats have been dithering for days about whether they should stand tall and make a courageous statement...about some atrocities that were perpetrated by a country that no longer exists, in an era long dead and gone.
The Ottoman Empire. In 1915.
Needless to say, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the desire to take a moral stand against genocide; indeed, the Armenian-American community has long been urging Congress to officially acknowledge the mass killings of their ancestors, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, during World War I. And many Democrats, including the current party leaders in Congress, generally believe that American foreign policy should be guided by fixed moral principles - as expressed in their pending House resolution condemning as genocide the Ottoman Turks' behavior 92 years ago.
But, for Democrats, the problem with standing tall against an injustice that transpired 92 years ago is that it makes them look clueless with respect to sensitive national security developments that are unfolding in the here and now. And, with a national election looming, the Democrats can hardly afford to look clueless in the national security realm.
Democrats incensed about the Ottoman Turks of 92 years ago might be better advised to simply rent the DVD of Lawrence of Arabia, because this doesn't appear to be a propitious time to take a moral stand. The pragmatics argue against it. Turkey is a stalwart Muslim ally, a NATO ally that allows us to resupply American troops in Iraq from military bases on its soil. Turkey is also viewed by Israel as a stabilizing force in the region. Turkey is also a crucial player in the movement of oil to the West.
Turkey is also ticked off at America these days, because it doesn't think we have done enough to stop Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq from crossing the border and attacking Turkish civilians; yesterday, in fact, the Turkish Parliament authorized sending Turkish troops into northern Iraq to pursue the rebels - a direct slap at America, which officially lists these rebels' group, PKK, as a terrorist operation.
It's fair to argue that - regardless of the Turks' complicity in the Armenian killings, and regardless of their obstinate refusal to acknowledge same - this is not the best time to be ruffling their feathers.
Such are the complications of realpolitik. When all those security pragmatics are taken into consideration, the Democratic leaders, with their gazes fixed on 1915, come off looking like pie-eyed dreamers.
It should also be pointed out that their moral outrage is fueled in part by domestic political pragmatics. The Armenian-American community has been good to the Democrats, and now they want to cash in some IOUs. (Perhaps if Native-Americans had the same kind of electoral clout, we'd now be seeing resolutions condemning Andrew Jackson for what he did to the Florida Seminoles.)
Armenians vote heavily in Nancy Pelosi's California district, and it's no accident that one of the key resolution sponsors in Adam Schiff - another California Democrat who was elected in 2000 with heavy support from the burgeoning Armenian electorate in Glendale and Burbank.
I can attest to that, because I covered Schiff's race; that race drew national attention, because the incumbent was James Rogan, a key GOP player in the House Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton. At one point, I had lunch with one of the key political operatives in the district - an Armenian named Eric Hacopian. He spelled out the importance of the Armenians as a local swing vote (10 percent of that district's electorate); he talked at length about the 1915 killings, and their desire to back a candidate who would push for a congressional resolution. In his words at the time, "This is a blood issue for all Armenians, it is extremely personal."
Well, Schiff is still pushing the blood issue - it was passed by the Foreign Affairs Committee last week - and it appeared that the resolution could reach the House floor any day now. But suddenly the Democratic leaders are wavering. With some Democrats bailing out, and with others stressing the here and now (Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat: "These are real-life situations, and sometimes your heart has to give in to your head"), Pelosi is now saying that action on the resolution "remains to be seen."
Behold the congressional Democrats: First they come up with a symbolic toothless gesture of idealism that threatens to play havoc with geostrategic realities...then they wobble over whether to pursue their own gesture. That 11 percent approval rating should be safe for awhile.
But to really gauge their performance on this matter, consider the response of President Bush. Speaking yesterday at a press conference, he said this: "With all these pressing responsibilities, one thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire. The resolution on the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 is counterproductive. Both Republicans and Democrats, including every living former Secretary of State, have spoken out against this resolution. Congress has more important work to do than antagonizing a democratic ally in the Muslim world, especially one that is providing vital support for our military every day."
Talk about ineptitude...The Democrats have managed to make even Bush sound wise and sensible.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Rudy and Hillary and Larry
So many developments, so little time:
Rudy Giuliani, whose social liberalism continues to be a drag on his Republican nomination prospects, dearly wants GOP conservatives to ignore that inconvenient truth and focus instead on his national security machismo.
That was the drill yesterday, when he soared like a hawk at the Republican Jewish Coalition confab in Washington. He said, with respect to Iran and its nuclear ambitions, that it's very important for America to keep all its military options on the table. Then he said, for emphasis, that it's very important for America to keep all its military options on the table. He also stressed, in case nobody heard him, that America should keep all its military options on the table. He also wanted everybody to know that "if I am president of the United States, I guarantee you, we will never find out what they will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they're not going to get nuclear weapons," and that's because he'll keep all military options on the table.
He never did address the thorny issue of consequences - such as the likelihood that the cost of a barrel of oil would soar in the aftermath of a U.S. military attack, and that such costs would be passed along to American motorists - but Rudy wants to stay focused right now on looking tough and stoking emotions and playing the 9/11 card in all its permutations...anything to potentially distract conservatives from his tolerant track record on social issues.
But I doubt that his rhetorical willingness to bomb Iran will get him off the hook this Saturday, when he is slated to address the religious conservatives' Values Voter Summit in Washington. Those folks are well aware of his longstanding support for abortion rights and gay rights, and many are already threatening to bolt the GOP if the party nominates a pro-choice candidate. They're clearly less than thrilled about Rudy; a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that only 39 percent of evangelical Christians view him in a "somewhat positive" light, and that only 20 percent intended to back him during the primaries.
If Rudy renounces his pro-choice past, he'll look like just another flip-flopper, and undercut his straight-talking image; if he doesn't renounce it, he risks further alienating a lot of the GOP base (indeed, one Christian right leader endorsed rival Mitt Romney yesterday, pointedly saying that Romney, despite his Mormon faith, fills the bill "both personally and ideologically").
Rudy's intraparty quandary helps to explain why he's focusing so much these days on bashing Hillary. For instance, on Fox News last night, he said: "Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city. She's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people."
That's actually not a bad line of attack, especially coupled with his national security machismo. But it won't necessarily sell with those in the GOP base who see his social liberalism as a deal-breaker. The success of his candidacy will ultimately hinge on whether he can somehow becalm the base without alienating the socially tolerant GOP moderates who predominate in the big early primary states - notably California, New York, and New Jersey.
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Speaking of Hillary-bashing, Barack Obama is pocketing his halo and ratcheting up the rhetoric. Yesterday he basically dismissed her as a poll-driven, conviction-free Machiavelli: "If every move you’re making is based on a static politics where you are looking backwards and 'this is what the polls tell me, this how much room we have to maneuver'...you’ll be a vast improvement over George Bush. But you are not going to deliver on the major challenges, and you are not going to set a broad vision for the country."
He's only doing this, however, because of his ongoing slide in the surveys of likely Democratic primary voters. Hillary's lead continues to widen; in one new poll, she is the favorite of 50 percent of likely Democratic voters - a fairly impressive figure, considering the large field of candidates.
I'd argue that Hillary has Obama right where she wants him: in a box. If he stays above the fray (his preference) and continues to advertise himself as a new kind of non-partisan pol, he'll continue to lose ground. But if he descends into the fray and tries to assail her directly, he'll look like just another partisan candidate - while exposing himself to Hillary's counterpunches.
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Is Larry Craig secretly working for the Democrats, or what? The GOP's albatross surfaced yet again last night (on Matt Lauer's NBC show), and again this morning (on the Today show), defending his john habits, pleading convenient memory lapses, and wallowing in lame denials. At least Mark Foley was wise enough, last year, to quit his House seat and disappear. This guy, by sticking around and keeping himself in the news cycle, threatens anew to damage the battered Republican brand during the runup to '08.
"Matt, I use bathrooms for bathroom's sake...False rumor and innuendo...I go to the bathroom to use the bathroom for bathroom's sake...The facts have just got covered up...It didn't happen...I don't recall that...I don't agree with the (gay) lifestyle. And I've said so by my votes over the years..."
One hour of this. But my favorite part was when Lauer asked whether his fellow senators were shunning him. Lauer asked, "They're not parking in your parking spot?"
Craig: "They better not."
What better metaphor can there be, for an entrenched Washington politician who has pled guilty, has refused to accept the ruling of a state judge, and has compromised his party's purported "family values?" What could be worse for GOP morale than to have a tainted entrenched incumbent fighting in defense of his parking spot?
Rudy Giuliani, whose social liberalism continues to be a drag on his Republican nomination prospects, dearly wants GOP conservatives to ignore that inconvenient truth and focus instead on his national security machismo.
That was the drill yesterday, when he soared like a hawk at the Republican Jewish Coalition confab in Washington. He said, with respect to Iran and its nuclear ambitions, that it's very important for America to keep all its military options on the table. Then he said, for emphasis, that it's very important for America to keep all its military options on the table. He also stressed, in case nobody heard him, that America should keep all its military options on the table. He also wanted everybody to know that "if I am president of the United States, I guarantee you, we will never find out what they will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they're not going to get nuclear weapons," and that's because he'll keep all military options on the table.
He never did address the thorny issue of consequences - such as the likelihood that the cost of a barrel of oil would soar in the aftermath of a U.S. military attack, and that such costs would be passed along to American motorists - but Rudy wants to stay focused right now on looking tough and stoking emotions and playing the 9/11 card in all its permutations...anything to potentially distract conservatives from his tolerant track record on social issues.
But I doubt that his rhetorical willingness to bomb Iran will get him off the hook this Saturday, when he is slated to address the religious conservatives' Values Voter Summit in Washington. Those folks are well aware of his longstanding support for abortion rights and gay rights, and many are already threatening to bolt the GOP if the party nominates a pro-choice candidate. They're clearly less than thrilled about Rudy; a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that only 39 percent of evangelical Christians view him in a "somewhat positive" light, and that only 20 percent intended to back him during the primaries.
If Rudy renounces his pro-choice past, he'll look like just another flip-flopper, and undercut his straight-talking image; if he doesn't renounce it, he risks further alienating a lot of the GOP base (indeed, one Christian right leader endorsed rival Mitt Romney yesterday, pointedly saying that Romney, despite his Mormon faith, fills the bill "both personally and ideologically").
Rudy's intraparty quandary helps to explain why he's focusing so much these days on bashing Hillary. For instance, on Fox News last night, he said: "Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city. She's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people."
That's actually not a bad line of attack, especially coupled with his national security machismo. But it won't necessarily sell with those in the GOP base who see his social liberalism as a deal-breaker. The success of his candidacy will ultimately hinge on whether he can somehow becalm the base without alienating the socially tolerant GOP moderates who predominate in the big early primary states - notably California, New York, and New Jersey.
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Speaking of Hillary-bashing, Barack Obama is pocketing his halo and ratcheting up the rhetoric. Yesterday he basically dismissed her as a poll-driven, conviction-free Machiavelli: "If every move you’re making is based on a static politics where you are looking backwards and 'this is what the polls tell me, this how much room we have to maneuver'...you’ll be a vast improvement over George Bush. But you are not going to deliver on the major challenges, and you are not going to set a broad vision for the country."
He's only doing this, however, because of his ongoing slide in the surveys of likely Democratic primary voters. Hillary's lead continues to widen; in one new poll, she is the favorite of 50 percent of likely Democratic voters - a fairly impressive figure, considering the large field of candidates.
I'd argue that Hillary has Obama right where she wants him: in a box. If he stays above the fray (his preference) and continues to advertise himself as a new kind of non-partisan pol, he'll continue to lose ground. But if he descends into the fray and tries to assail her directly, he'll look like just another partisan candidate - while exposing himself to Hillary's counterpunches.
-------
Is Larry Craig secretly working for the Democrats, or what? The GOP's albatross surfaced yet again last night (on Matt Lauer's NBC show), and again this morning (on the Today show), defending his john habits, pleading convenient memory lapses, and wallowing in lame denials. At least Mark Foley was wise enough, last year, to quit his House seat and disappear. This guy, by sticking around and keeping himself in the news cycle, threatens anew to damage the battered Republican brand during the runup to '08.
"Matt, I use bathrooms for bathroom's sake...False rumor and innuendo...I go to the bathroom to use the bathroom for bathroom's sake...The facts have just got covered up...It didn't happen...I don't recall that...I don't agree with the (gay) lifestyle. And I've said so by my votes over the years..."
One hour of this. But my favorite part was when Lauer asked whether his fellow senators were shunning him. Lauer asked, "They're not parking in your parking spot?"
Craig: "They better not."
What better metaphor can there be, for an entrenched Washington politician who has pled guilty, has refused to accept the ruling of a state judge, and has compromised his party's purported "family values?" What could be worse for GOP morale than to have a tainted entrenched incumbent fighting in defense of his parking spot?
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
You're next, Bethany!
Supporters of SCHIP expansion – translation: the grassroots activists who want Congress to override President Bush's veto of the popular, bipartisan State Children's Health Insurance Program bill – are trying once again to put a human face on the issue. They are spotlighting a modest-income Florida couple whose 2-year-old daughter, Bethany Wilkerson, was able to get life-saving heart surgery in 2005, thanks to the SCHIP program.
But, considering how the conservative media/blogosphere assailed the first publicized youngster – 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who received SCHIP-financed hospital care after a serious car accident, and whose parents were promptly slimed by false innuendo about their personal finances – we can only assume that Bo and Dara Wilkerson are psychologically prepared for what might happen next. Perhaps it will be something like this…
TUCKER CARLSON: “Good evening, and welcome to this Fox News emergency special, 'The Wilkersons: Threat or Menace?' I am joined here in the studio by my guests, Bill Kristol – hi, Bill, you look happy, glad the war is going so well – and best-selling author Ann Coulter. Ann, I must say, that dress is good TV. You look absolutely fetching tonight. Where’s the party?”
COULTER: “You mean the Socialist party? I’d be interested in knowing why these Wilkersons are behaving like Socialists. And as for that name - 'Wilkerson’ - doesn't that sound Jewish to you?”
KRISTOL (beaming): “Not necessarily. And, Ann, please remember that I’m Jewish.”
COULTER: “Well, Bill, I’ve always said that you need to be perfected. Would you like to start the Christianization process? Come to church with me?”
(Laughter, crosstalk)
KRISTOL: “Frankly, Ann, I think it’s the Wilkersons who need to get religion about our priorities in this country. First, let me say that this is a great time in America to be a conservative, to stand up for smaller government, to advocate for a muscular America abroad, and surely, as Americans, the Wilkersons should agree with that. The president decided to veto this bill, which, if enacted, would waste billions that could be better spent to aid our fighting men and women in Iraq, as well as our freedom workers at Blackwater. So what the Wilkersons are doing is irresponsible. The key question to consider is, why is their toddler against the troops?”
COULTER: “And when you consider who these Wilkersons really are – it’s a disgrace. I’ve been scanning the blogs, and there are many commenters who say they know this couple, and did you know that the Wilkersons pre-enrolled sweet little Bethany in a posh preschool program, and that they have a chauffer-driven limousine and a vacation home in the Cayman Islands?”
CARLSON: “Really, let’s be honest, it is truly a disgrace that these people have decided to exploit their own child for partisan political propaganda, and that certainly doesn’t speak well of their personal family values, or their skills as parents. I also suspect that a lot of people in St. Petersburg vote Democratic. But with respect to the personal information you just mentioned, that’s amazing! Where did you hear that…”
COULTER: “It’s just out there, for anyone to hear about.”
CARLSON: “…Because I read a quote yesterday from Mr. Wilkerson - Bo Wilkerson is his name - saying that the family income is only around $34,000, and that he has only $67 in his bank account.”
COULTER: “Well, the rest of the money could be in his Cayman Islands account, couldn’t it?”
KRISTOL (beaming): “Conceivably, Ann. But I’d like to get back to this issue of patriotism, and whether the Wilkersons think it is a disgrace that Al Gore won the Nobel Prize. I understand, from news reports, that Bo Wilkerson claims to have only one car, and he refers to that car as a ‘junker.’ First, we don’t know if that’s true, he could have stashed his Audi somewhere so that his daughter could qualify for her socialist heart operation. But if it is true, let’s remember that junkers are not fuel-efficient. Which means they contribute to global warming. It is Bo Wilkerson’s right to pollute if he chooses to. And if he continues to remain silent about Al Gore, if he refuses to speak out and condemn Gore for meddling with the rights of junker drivers, I think that tells us a lot about Bo Wilkerson.”
COULTER: “And I’d like to get back to this name thing. What kind of name is ‘Bo,’ anyway?”
(Laughter)
CARLSON: “You know, there’s a website – and this is true – which says that ‘Bo’ is a popular Scandinavian nickname for both boys and girls.”
COULTER: “Well, that figures, doesn’t it? The Scandinavian countries have long been a hotbed for socialist, welfare-state thinking. Sweden, for instance. That tells us all we need to know.”
KRISTOL: “Not just Sweden, either. Norway is a Scandinavian country. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in Norway. Do the Wilkersons believe that George W. Bush rightfully deserved to win the peace prize this year, for his liberation of Iraq? More importantly, does Bethany believe that?”
COULTER: “Is Bethany walking yet? Or still crawling? And what does that say about her parents? I also notice, in the YouTube ad, that Bethany is shown on a beach. So why is the family beach house conveniently out of camera range?”
CARLSON: “And did you notice that Bethany had her heart operation in a Florida hospital in 2005 – the same year that Terri Schiavo was allowed to die in another Florida hospital? I’d like to know, do the Wilkersons believe that Terri had the same right as Bethany to live a full and healthy life? But we’re out of time. Bill, take us to commercial break.”
KRISTOL (Beaming): “Join us tomorrow night, for a special investigation of the Wilkersons’ political beliefs. Have they put their daughter’s interests ahead of winning the war on terror? Thank you for joining us.”
But, considering how the conservative media/blogosphere assailed the first publicized youngster – 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who received SCHIP-financed hospital care after a serious car accident, and whose parents were promptly slimed by false innuendo about their personal finances – we can only assume that Bo and Dara Wilkerson are psychologically prepared for what might happen next. Perhaps it will be something like this…
TUCKER CARLSON: “Good evening, and welcome to this Fox News emergency special, 'The Wilkersons: Threat or Menace?' I am joined here in the studio by my guests, Bill Kristol – hi, Bill, you look happy, glad the war is going so well – and best-selling author Ann Coulter. Ann, I must say, that dress is good TV. You look absolutely fetching tonight. Where’s the party?”
COULTER: “You mean the Socialist party? I’d be interested in knowing why these Wilkersons are behaving like Socialists. And as for that name - 'Wilkerson’ - doesn't that sound Jewish to you?”
KRISTOL (beaming): “Not necessarily. And, Ann, please remember that I’m Jewish.”
COULTER: “Well, Bill, I’ve always said that you need to be perfected. Would you like to start the Christianization process? Come to church with me?”
(Laughter, crosstalk)
KRISTOL: “Frankly, Ann, I think it’s the Wilkersons who need to get religion about our priorities in this country. First, let me say that this is a great time in America to be a conservative, to stand up for smaller government, to advocate for a muscular America abroad, and surely, as Americans, the Wilkersons should agree with that. The president decided to veto this bill, which, if enacted, would waste billions that could be better spent to aid our fighting men and women in Iraq, as well as our freedom workers at Blackwater. So what the Wilkersons are doing is irresponsible. The key question to consider is, why is their toddler against the troops?”
COULTER: “And when you consider who these Wilkersons really are – it’s a disgrace. I’ve been scanning the blogs, and there are many commenters who say they know this couple, and did you know that the Wilkersons pre-enrolled sweet little Bethany in a posh preschool program, and that they have a chauffer-driven limousine and a vacation home in the Cayman Islands?”
CARLSON: “Really, let’s be honest, it is truly a disgrace that these people have decided to exploit their own child for partisan political propaganda, and that certainly doesn’t speak well of their personal family values, or their skills as parents. I also suspect that a lot of people in St. Petersburg vote Democratic. But with respect to the personal information you just mentioned, that’s amazing! Where did you hear that…”
COULTER: “It’s just out there, for anyone to hear about.”
CARLSON: “…Because I read a quote yesterday from Mr. Wilkerson - Bo Wilkerson is his name - saying that the family income is only around $34,000, and that he has only $67 in his bank account.”
COULTER: “Well, the rest of the money could be in his Cayman Islands account, couldn’t it?”
KRISTOL (beaming): “Conceivably, Ann. But I’d like to get back to this issue of patriotism, and whether the Wilkersons think it is a disgrace that Al Gore won the Nobel Prize. I understand, from news reports, that Bo Wilkerson claims to have only one car, and he refers to that car as a ‘junker.’ First, we don’t know if that’s true, he could have stashed his Audi somewhere so that his daughter could qualify for her socialist heart operation. But if it is true, let’s remember that junkers are not fuel-efficient. Which means they contribute to global warming. It is Bo Wilkerson’s right to pollute if he chooses to. And if he continues to remain silent about Al Gore, if he refuses to speak out and condemn Gore for meddling with the rights of junker drivers, I think that tells us a lot about Bo Wilkerson.”
COULTER: “And I’d like to get back to this name thing. What kind of name is ‘Bo,’ anyway?”
(Laughter)
CARLSON: “You know, there’s a website – and this is true – which says that ‘Bo’ is a popular Scandinavian nickname for both boys and girls.”
COULTER: “Well, that figures, doesn’t it? The Scandinavian countries have long been a hotbed for socialist, welfare-state thinking. Sweden, for instance. That tells us all we need to know.”
KRISTOL: “Not just Sweden, either. Norway is a Scandinavian country. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in Norway. Do the Wilkersons believe that George W. Bush rightfully deserved to win the peace prize this year, for his liberation of Iraq? More importantly, does Bethany believe that?”
COULTER: “Is Bethany walking yet? Or still crawling? And what does that say about her parents? I also notice, in the YouTube ad, that Bethany is shown on a beach. So why is the family beach house conveniently out of camera range?”
CARLSON: “And did you notice that Bethany had her heart operation in a Florida hospital in 2005 – the same year that Terri Schiavo was allowed to die in another Florida hospital? I’d like to know, do the Wilkersons believe that Terri had the same right as Bethany to live a full and healthy life? But we’re out of time. Bill, take us to commercial break.”
KRISTOL (Beaming): “Join us tomorrow night, for a special investigation of the Wilkersons’ political beliefs. Have they put their daughter’s interests ahead of winning the war on terror? Thank you for joining us.”
Monday, October 15, 2007
Al Gore and his aversion to toxicity
Al Gore’s fans are dreaming if they actually believe that he will choose, at this late date in the campaign calendar, to parlay his Nobel Prize into another White House bid. Notwithstanding the requisite buzz, he doesn’t need that kind of grief.
He has long indicated that he has little appetite for the toxicity of modern politics. He undoubtedly remembers the 2000 presidential debates, when the media dwelled on his audible sighs, and he remembers the campaign itself, when he was successfully painted as a serial liar. (George W. Bush had a line in his standard stump speech about how Gore once claimed to have invented the Internet - but that was the actual lie, because Gore had only claimed that as a senator during the ‘80s he had taken the “initiative” to develop the technology. Which was the actual truth.) And he'd rather not be reminded how he outpolled Bush on election day by 543,000 votes, only to lose the presidency when a 5-4 GOP-dominated Supreme Court stepped into a state dispute and stopped the crucial recount.
Speaking of toxicity, Gore can’t even win the Nobel Prize without taking retaliatory heat from conservatives who can’t abide the notion that he has been vindicated. Witness Bill Kristol’s predictable quip yesterday on Fox News, where he sought to discredit Gore and the Nobel Prize in the same sentence (“It’s a prize given by bloviators to a bloviator for nothing”), although he was quickly topped by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who – big surprise – used the occasion to question Gore’s patriotism (the Nobel committee awards its prizes “to people whose politics are either anti-American or anti-Bush”).
But, as a candidate, his foes on the right would’ve been the least of his problems. His primary headache would have been Hillary Clinton.
Taking her on would be tough enough just in terms of the horserace; she is lapping the track at the moment, Barack Obama and John Edwards both having failed to slow her momentum. Even if Gore felt a strong urge to take a late plunge, his prospects for toppling such a well-financed, well-organized frontrunner would not be promising. Indeed, a Gore ally said as much to CNN last Friday.
And, horserace aside, taking on Hillary would immediately alter the Al Gore media narrative. Right now, he is “Al Gore, seer and international icon.” If we was to challenge Hillary for the nomination, the story would quickly become “Al Gore, politician, seeking to settle old scores and avenge his grievances with the Clintons.” That’s a giant step off the pedestal.
It has long been known – and I did a few such reports of my own, back in ’99 – that Al and Hillary were never the best of buddies. The vice president and the First Lady dueled for influence in the Bill Clinton White House for most of the ‘90s, and guess who generally won. Gore was also overshadowed when he ran for president in 2000, because Hillary at the time was making her initial Senate bid, and she soaked up most of Bill’s time, attention, and fund-raising energies. A new Vanity Fair article points out that between June and December of 1999, Bill staged 20 White House events in order to boost Hillary’s political profile, while staging only one event to boost his vice president.
In June of that year, I spoke with ex-White House aide David Gergen about Al and Hillary, and he spoke of “a natural friction” between the two. He said, “As long as the Clintons remain on the stage, it’s difficult for Al Gore to be on the stage, too.”
Little has changed since. Gore has come too far, in terms of rehabilitating his image and reputation, to want to risk it now by crowding the Clintons on the political stage and resurrecting the “Al versus Hillary” media narrative.
The same problem will complicate his impending decision about whether to endorse one of the current Democratic candidates. As an “outsider” who yearns for a new political paradigm, he would probably lean toward either Obama or Edwards, both of whom are painting Hillary as an establishment insider who would ultimately do little to change the Washington fundamentals. But, if he does tender a non-Hillary endorsement, his decision still risks being dismissed as sour grapes from a guy with grievances against the Clintons. And I have long felt that political endorsements are overrated, anyway. I seem to recall that Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean, on the eve of the ’04 primaries, didn’t exactly sway the Democratic grassroots on the issue of Dean’s electability.
Nor am I convinced that Gore can use his Nobel status to put his environmental issues front and center in the 2008 campaign. The public generally applauds his efforts, but the overriding concerns are still Iraq, the economy, and health care. And no Democratic candidate is so anxious for a Gore endorsement that he or she will agree to endorse the Gore plan for combating global warming (a political suicide agenda that would hit Americans in their wallets).
It would appear, therefore, that Gore’s best option is to continue to lead his current life, with the expectation that he would play a strong educational role in any ’09 Democratic administration. Given the traumas that he was forced to endure seven years ago, that’s not such a bad deal.
-------
Speaking of political toxicity, emailers have been asking me lately why I have neglected to comment on Rush Limbaugh’s denigration of antiwar Iraq veterans (whom he has derided as “phony soldiers”), particularly in the wake of the conservative attacks on Moveon.org, for its “General Betrayus” denigration. Today, I address the whole issue in my latest newspaper column – although I doubt that my perspective will please those who are caught up in this game of rhetorical tit-for-tat.
-------
And for those of you who prefer the national game - that would be baseball, of course - today I offer something completely different, a freelance obituary on the New York Yankees.
He has long indicated that he has little appetite for the toxicity of modern politics. He undoubtedly remembers the 2000 presidential debates, when the media dwelled on his audible sighs, and he remembers the campaign itself, when he was successfully painted as a serial liar. (George W. Bush had a line in his standard stump speech about how Gore once claimed to have invented the Internet - but that was the actual lie, because Gore had only claimed that as a senator during the ‘80s he had taken the “initiative” to develop the technology. Which was the actual truth.) And he'd rather not be reminded how he outpolled Bush on election day by 543,000 votes, only to lose the presidency when a 5-4 GOP-dominated Supreme Court stepped into a state dispute and stopped the crucial recount.
Speaking of toxicity, Gore can’t even win the Nobel Prize without taking retaliatory heat from conservatives who can’t abide the notion that he has been vindicated. Witness Bill Kristol’s predictable quip yesterday on Fox News, where he sought to discredit Gore and the Nobel Prize in the same sentence (“It’s a prize given by bloviators to a bloviator for nothing”), although he was quickly topped by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who – big surprise – used the occasion to question Gore’s patriotism (the Nobel committee awards its prizes “to people whose politics are either anti-American or anti-Bush”).
But, as a candidate, his foes on the right would’ve been the least of his problems. His primary headache would have been Hillary Clinton.
Taking her on would be tough enough just in terms of the horserace; she is lapping the track at the moment, Barack Obama and John Edwards both having failed to slow her momentum. Even if Gore felt a strong urge to take a late plunge, his prospects for toppling such a well-financed, well-organized frontrunner would not be promising. Indeed, a Gore ally said as much to CNN last Friday.
And, horserace aside, taking on Hillary would immediately alter the Al Gore media narrative. Right now, he is “Al Gore, seer and international icon.” If we was to challenge Hillary for the nomination, the story would quickly become “Al Gore, politician, seeking to settle old scores and avenge his grievances with the Clintons.” That’s a giant step off the pedestal.
It has long been known – and I did a few such reports of my own, back in ’99 – that Al and Hillary were never the best of buddies. The vice president and the First Lady dueled for influence in the Bill Clinton White House for most of the ‘90s, and guess who generally won. Gore was also overshadowed when he ran for president in 2000, because Hillary at the time was making her initial Senate bid, and she soaked up most of Bill’s time, attention, and fund-raising energies. A new Vanity Fair article points out that between June and December of 1999, Bill staged 20 White House events in order to boost Hillary’s political profile, while staging only one event to boost his vice president.
In June of that year, I spoke with ex-White House aide David Gergen about Al and Hillary, and he spoke of “a natural friction” between the two. He said, “As long as the Clintons remain on the stage, it’s difficult for Al Gore to be on the stage, too.”
Little has changed since. Gore has come too far, in terms of rehabilitating his image and reputation, to want to risk it now by crowding the Clintons on the political stage and resurrecting the “Al versus Hillary” media narrative.
The same problem will complicate his impending decision about whether to endorse one of the current Democratic candidates. As an “outsider” who yearns for a new political paradigm, he would probably lean toward either Obama or Edwards, both of whom are painting Hillary as an establishment insider who would ultimately do little to change the Washington fundamentals. But, if he does tender a non-Hillary endorsement, his decision still risks being dismissed as sour grapes from a guy with grievances against the Clintons. And I have long felt that political endorsements are overrated, anyway. I seem to recall that Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean, on the eve of the ’04 primaries, didn’t exactly sway the Democratic grassroots on the issue of Dean’s electability.
Nor am I convinced that Gore can use his Nobel status to put his environmental issues front and center in the 2008 campaign. The public generally applauds his efforts, but the overriding concerns are still Iraq, the economy, and health care. And no Democratic candidate is so anxious for a Gore endorsement that he or she will agree to endorse the Gore plan for combating global warming (a political suicide agenda that would hit Americans in their wallets).
It would appear, therefore, that Gore’s best option is to continue to lead his current life, with the expectation that he would play a strong educational role in any ’09 Democratic administration. Given the traumas that he was forced to endure seven years ago, that’s not such a bad deal.
-------
Speaking of political toxicity, emailers have been asking me lately why I have neglected to comment on Rush Limbaugh’s denigration of antiwar Iraq veterans (whom he has derided as “phony soldiers”), particularly in the wake of the conservative attacks on Moveon.org, for its “General Betrayus” denigration. Today, I address the whole issue in my latest newspaper column – although I doubt that my perspective will please those who are caught up in this game of rhetorical tit-for-tat.
-------
And for those of you who prefer the national game - that would be baseball, of course - today I offer something completely different, a freelance obituary on the New York Yankees.
Friday, October 12, 2007
"A stain on democracy"
Meanwhile, away from the news cycle:
Political analyst Larry Sabato, the academician/author/quotemeister, contends in a provocative new book that the U.S. Constitution is a brilliant yet somewhat "archaic" document in dire need of an update. He says that certain provisions should be revised or even overhauled, in order to address “the new demands of a very different country than the one that existed in the founders' world.”
He pitched his 23 proposals last week at the National Constitution Center – I moderated the panel, which also featured Hofstra University law professor Eric Lane and International Herald Tribune executive editor Michael Oreskes, co-authors of a new book that says the Constitution is sufficiently flexible as it is – and I recall sounding skeptical about the prospects for radical change. (The forum is slated for broadcast on C-Span2 this weekend, at 7 a.m. Sunday and again at 7 p.m.)
Sabato, based at the University of Virginia, is calling for a new constitutional convention, and tossing out all kinds of ideas: changing the composition of the Senate to give greater representation to the most populous states; slapping term limits on all members of the House and Senate; eliminating lifetime tenure for federal judges; giving the president a single six-year term, with an option to seek two additional years in a national referendum; a new provision requiring that all able-bodied young Americans devote two years to national service; and many more.
I suspect that he knows a constitutional convention would be a long shot, and that he is really most interested in getting people to think anew about a document that is widely taken for granted.
At least one proposal, however, seems particularly attractive (and perhaps achievable, if only by legislation): Dropping the requirement that only “natural born citizens” can serve in the presidency. Sabato thinks the job should also be open to naturalized Americans who have been citizens for 20 years. A number of legal scholars and members of Congress concur; John Yinger of Syracuse University, testifying on Capitol Hill three years ago, in support of a reform bill that went nowhere, contended that the constitutional provision that bars the presidency to all foreign-born citizens is “an extreme form of profiling.”
Sabato argues in his book (and argued on the panel as well) that this constitutional provision “is a stain upon our democracy” that currently disqualifies 14.4 million American citizens, including Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. He points out that the provision was enacted at a time when the signers feared the prospect of a foreign monarch coming to these shores, perhaps at the invitation of conniving politicians in Philadelphia; rumors persisted that the Prussian brother of Frederick the Great, and the second son of British King George III, had received various overtures.
Sabato writes: “Fundamental to our national self-image is a belief that here in the United States, however humble one’s origins, anyone can rise to the highest office in the land. Striking the prohibition on non-native-born citizens will be a powerful symbol if America’s rising inclusiveness and equality in the 21st century.” He and other reformers think that 20-year naturalized citizens should be free to run for president, thereby leaving it up to the voters to decide whether they feel comfortable about electing somebody not born on American soil.
But the prospects for reform are dim, because the issue is too politically sensitive. In the aftermath of 9/11, many Americans are instinctively more fearful of foreign influence; in a national poll that Sabato commissioned for his book, 68 percent of respondents opposed the idea of a “foreign-born president.”
(Interestingly, one presidential candidate in the recent past was foreign-born. George Romney, father of current candidate Mitt Romney, ran for the GOP nomination in 1968, even though he had been born in Mexico, where his parents were Mormon missionaries. If he had triumphed during the primaries, the constitutional prohibition would have been front and center.)
It’s also noteworthy that Schwarzenegger, arguably one of the most popular and successful Republicans on the national scene, is nevertheless barred from seeking higher office due to his birth in Austria. Indeed, he was in the front row of the audience, at a GOP presidential debate last May, when the current candidates were asked whether they’d be willing to knock out that constitutional provision. Eight of nine said no – including Mitt Romney (“I’ll give it some thought, but probably not”). That kind of response must have made Arnold proud to be an American.
Political analyst Larry Sabato, the academician/author/quotemeister, contends in a provocative new book that the U.S. Constitution is a brilliant yet somewhat "archaic" document in dire need of an update. He says that certain provisions should be revised or even overhauled, in order to address “the new demands of a very different country than the one that existed in the founders' world.”
He pitched his 23 proposals last week at the National Constitution Center – I moderated the panel, which also featured Hofstra University law professor Eric Lane and International Herald Tribune executive editor Michael Oreskes, co-authors of a new book that says the Constitution is sufficiently flexible as it is – and I recall sounding skeptical about the prospects for radical change. (The forum is slated for broadcast on C-Span2 this weekend, at 7 a.m. Sunday and again at 7 p.m.)
Sabato, based at the University of Virginia, is calling for a new constitutional convention, and tossing out all kinds of ideas: changing the composition of the Senate to give greater representation to the most populous states; slapping term limits on all members of the House and Senate; eliminating lifetime tenure for federal judges; giving the president a single six-year term, with an option to seek two additional years in a national referendum; a new provision requiring that all able-bodied young Americans devote two years to national service; and many more.
I suspect that he knows a constitutional convention would be a long shot, and that he is really most interested in getting people to think anew about a document that is widely taken for granted.
At least one proposal, however, seems particularly attractive (and perhaps achievable, if only by legislation): Dropping the requirement that only “natural born citizens” can serve in the presidency. Sabato thinks the job should also be open to naturalized Americans who have been citizens for 20 years. A number of legal scholars and members of Congress concur; John Yinger of Syracuse University, testifying on Capitol Hill three years ago, in support of a reform bill that went nowhere, contended that the constitutional provision that bars the presidency to all foreign-born citizens is “an extreme form of profiling.”
Sabato argues in his book (and argued on the panel as well) that this constitutional provision “is a stain upon our democracy” that currently disqualifies 14.4 million American citizens, including Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. He points out that the provision was enacted at a time when the signers feared the prospect of a foreign monarch coming to these shores, perhaps at the invitation of conniving politicians in Philadelphia; rumors persisted that the Prussian brother of Frederick the Great, and the second son of British King George III, had received various overtures.
Sabato writes: “Fundamental to our national self-image is a belief that here in the United States, however humble one’s origins, anyone can rise to the highest office in the land. Striking the prohibition on non-native-born citizens will be a powerful symbol if America’s rising inclusiveness and equality in the 21st century.” He and other reformers think that 20-year naturalized citizens should be free to run for president, thereby leaving it up to the voters to decide whether they feel comfortable about electing somebody not born on American soil.
But the prospects for reform are dim, because the issue is too politically sensitive. In the aftermath of 9/11, many Americans are instinctively more fearful of foreign influence; in a national poll that Sabato commissioned for his book, 68 percent of respondents opposed the idea of a “foreign-born president.”
(Interestingly, one presidential candidate in the recent past was foreign-born. George Romney, father of current candidate Mitt Romney, ran for the GOP nomination in 1968, even though he had been born in Mexico, where his parents were Mormon missionaries. If he had triumphed during the primaries, the constitutional prohibition would have been front and center.)
It’s also noteworthy that Schwarzenegger, arguably one of the most popular and successful Republicans on the national scene, is nevertheless barred from seeking higher office due to his birth in Austria. Indeed, he was in the front row of the audience, at a GOP presidential debate last May, when the current candidates were asked whether they’d be willing to knock out that constitutional provision. Eight of nine said no – including Mitt Romney (“I’ll give it some thought, but probably not”). That kind of response must have made Arnold proud to be an American.
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