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Will McCain Ruin Palin?
A reader writes: If I were as big a Palin fan as you have admitted to being, I'd be
pretty upset with John McCain right now. Fallows put it best this
morning; there's just no way anyone, even someone of
considerable intellect and political skill, can come out looking good
after being slingshot into the international spotlight so quickly. The
intricacies of national and international politics are just way too
overwhelming, it takes months to years of careful study to be able to
operate on that big a stage without making huge, potentially game
changing gaffes.
John McCain just took one of the Republican party's top prospects (if not the top
prospect) and shot her into a situation in which she (or anyone) is all
but bound to fail, all for his own selfish hope that it might help him
win this election.
I'm about as big an Obama
fan as you are for Palin, and if John Kerry had tapped him as his
running mate following Obama's 04 convention speech, I'd have been
furious.
I wouldn't say I have quite the same Palin-love that progressives had for Obama in '04 ... but yeah, I'm sure this is part of the reason I'm pulling so hard for her to succeed: She's a politician I've liked for a while who's been thrust onto the national stage perhaps before her time, and there's a chance she'll crash and burn in service to a losing Presidential campaign. But I can't say I didn't ask for it! As far back as the winter - in a post responding to Josh Patashnik's argument that in veep-picking, "far and away the most important question is: Is this somebody you
want closely identified with your party brand for the next two decades?" - I had this to say:
As far as the GOP's (rather thin) roster of rising stars goes, I think
this argument would militate against picking Bobby Jindal and in favor
of picking Sarah Palin.
Jindal already has a national profile (and a movement-conservative
cheering section), and having him as the whiz-kid Republican Governor
of post-Katrina Louisiana is arguably better - both for the party and for him - than having him as the (very) junior partner in a weak Republican administration that's facing off against an ascendant Democratic Party.
Palin, on the other hand, has no such national profile, and absent
unforeseen developments is unlikely to obtain one so long as she's
occupying a governor's mansion that's just south of Yellowknife. Like
Jindal, she's a great political story,
but it's hard to see how that story gets told unless the Palin brand
gets taken national somehow - and it might be worth risking
subjecting her to the "losing veep's curse" to give her a place on the national stage.
Be careful what you wish for, huh? And yes, if it turns out that the next two months transform Palin into a national laughingstock with no future outside Alaska, I won't be terribly happy with John McCain's decision-making process. I intend to wait slightly longer than 48 hours, though, before I pass judgment on that question.
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An Admission
At the moment, I'm probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you're reading my commentary.
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Adama-Roslin '08
Jonathan Last comes through with the perfect pop-culture analogy.
Update: Except, as a reader notes, that Tigh-Roslin is even more perfect - though rather less reassuring.
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Palin and McCain's Judgment
Andrew's more substantive attacks on the Palin pick have circled around the idea that this is a devastating indictment of McCain's judgment, since even if Palin helps put him over the top in November McCain will have triumphed by putting his own short-term political interests over the country's need for a steady hand on the tiller should he keel over during his first year in office. Well, maybe. Another way to look at it, though, is that Palin will only help McCain politically if she shows herself to be a quick study and a plausible vice president over the next sixty-six days; if she's as ludicrous a pick as Andrew thinks she is, then McCain will look like a fool and his already none-too-high chances of winning this election will drop lower still. If she's a Quayle-type choice or worse, the odds are good that she'll never occupy the Naval Observatory: She only helps him (and he needs help!) if she turns out to be a case study in his ability to size up political talent on the fly, and if that's how things shake out, nobody will be talking about how McCain put "country last" with his VP pick. I would add, too, that there's a lot more to running a successful administration than having a President with decades of foreign policy experience. You wouldn't know it from listening to John McCain of late, admittedly, but that's because foreign policy experience is his trump card against Barack Obama, so he's playing it as often as he can. But an effective administration needs to be able to communicate and charm and finesse its way through difficulties, to appease its base and reach out to the middle, to talk fluently about kitchen-table issues and appear in touch with the hopes and fears of the average voter. This is not, to put it mildly, the sort of politics and governance that John McCain excels at. And consider, for a moment, the political landscape that he wakes up to every morning. He's running for the Presidency at a time when the Republican brand is in the toilet, with a party that seems unable to excite its hard-core supporters or woo swing voters, and a leadership - McCain included - that gets the heebie-jeebies when called upon to discuss any topic save terrorism, 9/11 and the Surge. Even if by some Jeremiah Wright-aided miracle he edges out Barack Obama, he'll limp into the White House as a John Major-in-the-making - an aging politician who won an election that belonged by rights to the other party, facing Democratic majorities in both houses, a media that will be primed to treat Senators Obama and Clinton as the default co-Presidents for the next four years, and a conservative base that's just waiting for an opportunity to turn on him. Does this sound like a recipe for a successful Presidency? And if it isn't, wouldn't it be better for McCain, who at present seems like the last candidate of a fading party and a dying generation, to sweep into Washington with a popular, dynamic, female politician as his junior partner, rather than a dull white male like Ridge or a Romney or a Pawlenty? And wouldn't it be better, frankly, for America as well? Now maybe Palin isn't a dynamic leader in the making. Maybe she's Quayle meets Eagleton meets Geraldine Ferraro - the last gamble of a reckless politician who cares more about winning the news cycle than keeping his country safe. But I think it's worth reserving judgment, both about her and about what she says about McCain's judgment, until we've seen how she performs on the national stage.
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All Class
For months and months, all through Hillary Clinton's losing campaign for the Presidency, my colleague Andrew Sullivan insisted over and over again that his furious anti-Hillary partisanship was in fact a defense of authentic feminism, since Hillary's ascension to the White House would represent the worst sort of pre-feminist, second-hand success - a woman marrying her way into power, that is, rather than attaining it on her own. Well, now John McCain has picked as his running mate a woman who embodies all the post-feminist virtues Andrew insisted were absent in Hillary Clinton's ascent - she's risen from working-class obscurity to govern a state dominated by an old boys' network (where the other prominent female politician is a classic legacy pick), while successfully juggling motherhood and her career and never, ever, piggybacking on any of her husband's achievements. (Though admittedly, Todd Palin would probably kick Denis Thatcher's ass in a snowmobile race.) Obviously, there are serious questions about the wisdom of the Palin pick, and as an Obama partisan Andrew has ever reason to go on one of his characteristic blogging tears against her candidacy. But given his primary-season insistence on his own credentials as a feminist, you'd think that Andrew would confine his attacks on Palin to critiquing her record and mocking her lack of experience, rather than, say, posting emails accusing her of being a bad mother for accepting the nomination, snickering over her children's names, and razzing her as a bimbo and a "trophy candidate."Or, you know, not.
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Sarah the Commoner
A very good point, from Nate Silver: ... we are in completely
uncharted territory here. Palin is the most manifestly ordinary person
ever to be nominated for a major party ticket. In this year of
bittergate and Britney-gate and McCain-has-seven-houses-gate, that
could conceivably be a virtue; it's certainly less tone-deaf than a
selection like Mitt Romney would have been.
But Palin isn't merely playing
at being ordinary, the way that Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar) or George
W. Bush (son of a president) or Hillary Clinton (wife of a president)
might. She really, really comes across that way -- like someone who had
won a sweepstakes or an essay contest. Her authenticity factor is
off-the-charts good; her biography sings. But do Americans really want their next-door-neighbor running for Vice President, or rather someone who seems like one?
It's going to be an interesting fall ...
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Palin vs. Obama
I'm getting a lot of email grief for writing: "There's a not-implausible case to be made that Sarah Palin has more experience than ... Barack Obama!" And maybe rightly so - blog in haste, repent at leisure. At the very least, there's no question that Barack Obama has spent more time preparing for high office than Sarah Palin: He's been prepping himself for a race like this since he first entered politics, in some sense, and he's just endured the rigors of a long Presidential campaign - which forces you, as Ezra rightly notes, to get up to speed on a host of issues that most state-level politicians don't spend very much time thinking about. So what was I thinking when I wrote the line above? Just this: That in terms of actual governance, as opposed to the mix of issue-studying and campaigning that Obama's been immersed in, Palin's resume and Obama's aren't wildly dissimilar. She ran her first race in 1992; he ran his first race in 1997. She was a city councilor for four years, then a mayor, lost a race for statewide office in 2002 then won the governorship in 2006. He was a state senator from Chicago for seven years, lost a House race in 2000, and then won the Illinois Senate race in 2004. The argument for her having more experience, then, would be relatively simple: She's been in government five years longer than Obama, and has twelve years of executive experience to his zero. But yes, there's more than a touch of sophistry to this line of reasoning. I think you can take the argument that running a successful Presidential campaign qualifies you to be President too far, but where the Obama-Palin comparison is concerned, David Frum's point is obviously well-taken: Yes, if I had been a Democratic donor back in
2006, I'd sure worry about whether Barack Obama had what it took to be
president. That was before he took on the toughest political operation in America, before he beat Bill and Hillary Clinton, before he won 18 million primary votes.
Obama's
nomination was not handed to him. He fought hard for it and won against
the odds. "Qualifications" predict achievement. Once you have achieved,
it doesn't matter what your qualifications are. Who cares whether the
guy who built a big company from nothing didn't have much of a resume
when he started? But if you are applying to run a big company built by
somebody else, the resume matters ... So let's concede the resume war to Obama. Then the question, going forward, is twofold: First, to what extent can Palin demonstrate that she's capable of closing the preparedness gap and the experience gap, by getting up to speed on a host of issues in a very short time and proving herself a capable actor on the national stage? (If she can't, her candidacy will rapidly turn into a joke, and McCain will have sacrificed one of his party's rising stars on the altar of his own ambitions.) Second, does the fact that McCain has "violate[d] the contemporary
understanding of the role of the Vice Presidency," as Yglesias notes, by picking a leader-in-training rather than an experienced hand, undercut his argument that experience matters at the top of the ticket? My first instinct, as yesterday's post suggested, was that it doesn't - that if you're an old Washington hand yourself, you can afford to pick an understudy and groom them in office; that voters care vastly more about the President's experience than his running mate's qualifications; and that the more Democrats call attention to inexperience at the bottom of the GOP ticket, the more voters will find themselves thinking about the inexperience at the top of the Dem ticket. But it's quite possible that I'm overly influenced by the blaseness that comes with never having seen a President die in office or resign from it during my lifetime, and that my comfort with the idea of filling the veep slot with a talented young politician who needs to learn on the job isn't (and shouldn't be) shared by the voting public.
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The Experience Question, Cont.
Peter Scoblic for the prosecution, Noah Millman for the defense.
Update: See also Tyler Cowen: Around the blogosphere you will see many left-wing writers criticizing
Palin for lack of experience. Maybe this criticism is correct, but
these commentators are falling into The Trap. Most American voters do
not themselves know much detail about foreign affairs and their vision
of an experienced leader does not require such knowledge. Was it
demanded from Reagan? Doesn't everyone agree that Cheney and Rumsfeld
knew plenty? Rightly or wrongly, many American voters will view
Palin's stint as mayor of small town, her background in sports, her
role in a beauty contest (yes), her trials raising teenage children,
and her decision to stick with her priinciples and have a Downs
Syndrome baby as all very valuable and relevant forms of experience. The more the word "experience" is repeated, no matter what the context,
the more it will hurt Obama. Palin needs to appear confident and
capable on TV and in the debates, but her ticket is not going to lose
votes if she cannot properly spell Kyrgyzstan or for that matter place
it on a map.
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Palin and Pitchfork Pat
Hmmm - could McCain-Palin be the neocon-paleocon fusion ticket we've all been waiting for?
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My Obama Problem (But Maybe Not Yours)
 Now that Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she can speak fluently on the biggest stage of her life - one hurdle down, a lot more to go! - I thought I'd turn back to Obama's speech for a moment. Here's Isaac Chotiner, echoing Jon Cohn's comment that " the agenda Obama laid out tonight is bolder than anything Democrats have seriously proposed since the 1960s": Indeed. I was (not
unpleasantly) surprised by the boldness of Obama's proposals and the
degree to which his campaign--and Democrats more generally--feel that
they are free to move sharply to the left on economic issues and the
role of government. As the speech wore on, Obama talked more about
personal responsibility, but his fundamental message on the necessary
role of the state in providing for its citizens struck me as remarkably
bold, and rhetorically distinct from the Clinton years... ...Which
leads me to a related point: I imagine this speech was frusturating for
conservatives. All of Obama's moves to the center were symbolic, while
the policies he actually outlined were decidedly liberal.
Yep, that's about right. In a related vein, Rod Dreher does yeoman's work comparing lines and phrases and paragraphs in Obama's speech to Gore's 2000 address and Kerry's '04 acceptance speech - and finds, as I more or less expected, that the nuts and bolts of last night's address were roughly the same kind of Democratic talking points that we've heard many times before. Now that's not a huge surprise - he was addressing the Democratic Convention, obviously - and it may not be a bad thing politically. This is, after all, the most favorable political climate that Democrats and liberals have enjoyed in years if not decades - and yet Barack Obama is currently running behind the generic Democrat on the ballot. Given that reality, why shouldn't he present himself as an acceptable Dem, as a Gore or a Kerry with bigger plan and more charisma, rather than trying to play the post-partisan, national-unity candidate and run the risk of being unable to even consolidate his own base? If the public wants to vote for a generic Democrat, there's definitely a case to be made for just being a generic Democrat - especially when your biggest liability is your perceived exoticism and celebrity status. But from where I sit, to the right of the political center, Obama the generic Democrat is a big disappointment. He started this campaign with two promises: That he'd tell us what we needed to hear, rather than what we wanted to heart, and that he wouldn't be captive to the old left-right divide in American politics. But there were no tough choices presented in last night's speech, no hard truths told. There was just the promise that we can have it all: Energy independence (within ten years, no less!), universal health care, an army of new teachers, tax cuts for the middle class, the working class, and the upper-middle class, zero capital gains taxes on small business owners, a perpetually solvent safety net, plus a dose of protectionism - and all of it paid for by (unspecified) spending cuts, and tax hikes on just five percent of America. Meanwhile, the speech's concessions to conservatism were largely pro forma - an acknowledgment that fathers matter, that programs can't solve every problem, and that government "can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework" - and its proposals for common ground (reduce unwanted pregnancies, keep AK-47s out of the hands of gang members, etc.) were equally thin. Again, if you're a liberal, none of this is going to sour you on Obama's speech, or on the candidate: Why should he concede anything to the Right, you might say, given the disasters of Bushism, and given that the political wind is finally blowing liberalism's way? Which is fair enough. But for those who aren't liberals, but who have been drawn, in varying ways, to Obama's transformational promise anyway, his claim to stand for "new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time" looks a lot more hollow today than it did a year ago. Photo by Flickr user NewsHour used under a Creative Commons license.
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The Experience Question
Obviously, it's a potentially potent problem for Palin, especially where foreign policy is concerned. But I'm not sure Andrew wants to be skating out onto this ice: The first criterion for a veep - and I'm simply repeating a truism
here - is that they are ready to take over at a moment's notice. That's
especially true when you have a candidate as old as McCain. That's more
than especially true when we are at war, in an era of astonishingly
difficult challenges, when the next president could be grappling with
war in the Middle East or a catastrophic terror attack at home. Under
those circumstances, we could have a former Miss Alaska with two terms
under her belt as governor. Now compare McCain's pick with Obama's: a
man with solid foreign policy experience, six terms in Washington and
real relationships with leaders across the globe. One pick is by a man of judgment; the other is by a man of vanity. She may be a fine person, but she's my age, she has zero Washington experience, and no foreign policy expertise whatsoever. McCain has just told us how seriously he takes the war we are in. Not seriously at all.
Read this once, and it sounds persuasive. Read it twice, though, and it starts to boomerang. Yes, Joe Biden has more experience than Sarah Palin. But there's a not-implausible case to be made that Sarah Palin has more experience than ... Barack Obama! (As Jeff Goldberg notes, she has more executive experience than Obama, McCain and Biden combined.) It's possible that adding Palin to the ticket will take away McCain's ability to attack Obama's inexperience. But it's also quite possible that any conversation that ends up happening about whether Sarah Palin is ready to be Vice President after ten years in local government and two years in statewide office can only end up hurting the Obama campaign - by raising, indirectly, the Democratic ticket's biggest liability. Update: Clearly, the Obama camp disagrees, because they're going there right out of the box.
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Grand New Palin
Noah Millman likes the pick: Count me as one of the people who was deeply underwhelmed by Obama's
speech last night, and underwhelmed as well by the entire convention.
McCain's choice of Sarah Palin (assuming it's confirmed) is a brilliant
first counter-stroke. She helps the ticket on so many different fronts:
she gives women who are angry about Hillary being passed over another
reason to vote McCain; she gives fence-sitting whites who feel they
"ought" to vote for Obama because of the historic nature of his
candidacy an excuse to find history on the other side; she burnishes
McCain's credentials as an independent, reform candidate; she restores
McCain's credibility on energy and environmental issues, where Obama
personally feels most comfortable going on the attack; she will
generate enthusiasm among evangelicals among whom Obama was hoping to
make inroads; she absolutely locks down the gun-rights vote (where
McCain needed to play a bit of defense against Barr); she helps McCain
in the Mountain West (Colorado and Montana) where he cannot afford to
lose any states (except New Mexico); she neutralizes Biden in the
debates (if he comes out zinging, he'll seem ungentlemanly); and, most
important, she makes McCain seem bold, future-oriented, and in control
of his Administration, where Obama has seemed timid, defensive and
unable to control his own party.
I'm pretty excited, I have to say. This could, of course, turn out to be an enormous debacle if she isn't ready for prime time. But for now, Sarah Palin looks like a perfect face for the sort of Republican Party I want to support: She's a pro-life working mom; she's tough on corruption and government waste without being a doctrinaire Norquistian on taxes; she's more supportive of gay rights than the current GOP orthodoxy (while stopping short of backing same-sex marriage); she has a more conservationist record than your typical GOP pol, but supports drilling in ANWR; she's an evangelical but she isn't a southern evangelical ... and if McCain loses, she can run at the top of a Palin-Jindal ticket in 2012! With apologies to Andrew: Know hope.
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Obama's Night (II)
So far, the reaction to the speech seems to be breaking down along partisan lines - which makes me mistrust my own "it was a letdown" response, but ought to make Obamaphiles mistrust their enthusiasm. I think Peggy Noonan's tempered but ultimately negative take is the best thing I've read so far; I also think she's right to say that we won't be able to judge the speech's effectiveness for days or weeks, as the impact of this convention, and next week's GOP rebuttal, slowly sinks in.
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Palin??
Well, if so, I guess I can't complain anymore about the McCain campaign playing it safe ...
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Obama's Night
Only a moral cretin could fail to be inspired when the speech rolled around, in its closing moments, to Martin Luther King Jr. But that inspirational moment was just a moment, and I think that the pundits and advisers who urged Barack Obama to temper his soaring rhetoric and produce a more workmanlike, down-to-earth speech did him a disservice: The speech had good lines and good sections, but for the most part it felt surprisingly banal and jury-rigged, and it suffered throughout from a failure to cohere around any single theme or rhetorical style. There was a lot of liberal boilerplate (recruit an army of teachers, tax the rich, etc.) that could have fit easily into any Democratic acceptance speech of the last twenty years; there was a series of swings at John McCain that, while often effective, seemed more appropriate to a veep's speech than to an address by a Presidential nominee; and then there was a half-hearted attempt to return, in the speech's final third, to the themes of post-partisanship and national unity that defined his '04 convention speech. The whole thing felt schizophrenic - part Clintonian laundry-list, part McCain-bashing polemic, part "beyond red and blue" peroration - and watching it I was left with the impression that Obama would have been better off just sticking with the high-flown inspirational style that got him here, and waiting for the debates to recast himself as the meat-and-potatoes guy who can throw a punch and get down into the policy weeds. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and you can see what Obama and his speechwriters were trying to do - namely, have the best of both worlds, by being soaring and substance-oriented, combative and post-partisan. But the substance was predictable, thin, and rife with pandering, the combativeness felt faintly inappropriate, and the speech didn't soar nearly as much as it should have. It was a historic evening, for Obama and for America, and there were moments that gave me shivers just watching on TV - but if you didn't go in sold on the Democratic nominee, I think it was ultimately something of a letdown.
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My Pick For Veep
A friend writes: "If you think a Romney pick would be a mistake and that McCain can do
better, I think you have some obligation to give your faithful readers
a name." Which is fair enough. Since I still think, even now that the polls have tightened, that the race is Obama's to lose, I'm in the camp that views "playing it safe" - whether Romney counts as "safe" or not - as the wrong tack for McCain to take. For a few months now, I've inclined toward Sarah Palin as a gamble worth taking: She's a charming unknown with a great story, both politically and personally, and the potential upside of having the media fawn all over her for a week or two might outweigh the risk that she undercuts McCain's experience narrative and/or gets carved up by Biden in a veep debate. (Especially since I suspect Biden is more likely to come off as an obnoxious bully if he's up against a likable woman.) However, I assume that the possible scandal involving Palin's brother-in-law has taken her out of the running - if she was ever being considered at all - and I'm not sure that any of the other dark horse possibilities have nearly so much potential upside, not least because most of them (from Ridge and Lieberman to Meg Whitman, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Condi Rice) are pro-choice or something like it. When I think of the veep pick purely in terms of the party I'd like to see the Republicans become, I suppose I'd be happiest with Tim Pawlenty or Eric Cantor, both of whom seem much more in sync with the broad thesis of Grand New Party than your average Republican pol, even if neither of them are running around screaming about wage subsidies or the weighted-student formula. So out of the options on the table, I guess I'm pulling for one of them. But from a purely political point of view, I think McCain could use a pick that sparks more media excitement than either Pawlenty or Cantor probably would; I'm just at a loss to come up with someone who fits that bill and passes my own ideological litmus tests.
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Biden's Speech
He bellowed, he rambled, he stumbled over his words - but he got the job done. It wasn't as smooth as Clinton, but it was more of the anti-GOP red meat this convention desperately needed. All in all, tonight was a reminder - the first in what seems like a while - that this is an election that the Democrats really, really ought to be able to win.
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The Natural
So Bill Clinton, tonight as always, makes it all look sooooo easy. But here's the thing: America is a country of 300 million people and just two political parties. You would think that out of all those millions, the parties would be able to find at least a few dozen politicians with a Clintonesque gift of gab - at least enough to fill up four nights' worth of prime-time speaking gigs once every four years. And yet, and yet ...
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How Safe Is Romney?
Regarding my post on McCain and veepstakes, Andrew writes: McCain-Romney = "do no harm"? Not in the part of the universe I'm aware of.
Just to clarify, I think that picking Romney would be a mistake, and that the GOP ticket would be weaker for his presence on it - for some (though not all) of the reasons David Frum's friend lays out here, and for others as well. But Romney doesn't come with anything like the risks and/or unknowns associated with some of the other names that have been floated as potential veeps - names like Joe Lieberman, like Tom Ridge, like Bobby Jindal, like Meg Whitman. True, picking a Mormon might depress evangelical turnout, but a McCain-Romney ticket wouldn't risk a serious intra-party civil war the way McCain-Lieberman or McCain-Ridge might. True, Romney is an epic flip-flopper, but he isn't an ideological black box with no governmental experience like Whitman. True, he's got a phoniness problem, but he isn't twelve years old like Bobby Jindal. True, he has some rich-guy liabilities ... but he has a real record of achievement both in and out of government, he isn't a D.C. insider, he won't get embarrassed by Biden in a debate the way, say, a Sarah Palin might, and his strengths dovetail reasonably well with McCain's message, as Yuval Levin argues. Again, I'm no Romney fan and I think McCain can do better (though I'm damned if I know who he should pick - or who he has picked, I guess I should say at this point). But Mitt, for all his slew of weaknesses, is much more of a known and tested quantity than most of his apparent competition for the slot, and I think that's enough to make him one of lower-risk options available, even if he's considerably lower-reward as well.
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The Weaker Party
Generally, I don't think much of the persistent liberal handwringing about how much tougher and meaner the Republicans are, how much better the GOP tends to be at political hardball, etc. etc. But watching this convention so far, I'm inclined to agree with Ezra Klein: Say what you will about the 2004 Convention, it had a theme.
Conversely, the first night of the 2008 Democratic Convention had
Michelle Obama bring the warm and fuzzies, Ted Kennedy calling forth
tears and hankies, and Jim Leach speaking quietly and pedantically
without any serious promotion from the Obama campaign. The second night
of the 2004 Convention saw Barack Obama tearing apart the arena. In
2008, we had Mark Warner with a well-crafted speech that fell flat
because it was an attack structure that refused to name the politician
it was attacking. You had Hillary Cinton giving a powerful address, but
it was an address that was broadly aimed at problems in the Democratic
Party, not the problems with the Republican Party.
The first two days of the convention were wasted, or seemed so from
my vantage point. Tonight, Joe Biden will rip into McCain. And
tomorrow, Obama will do whatever he does. Then on Friday, at noon, John
McCain will announce his vice presidential nominee, strangling any
convention bounce in the crib. Then the Republican Convention will
begin, and you can be assured that they will remember Barack Obama's
name. They will remember how to make fun of him, how to mock his
celebrity and inexperience. And the media will not cover Ron Paul's
protesters with the vigor or attention they gave to Hillary Clinton's
diehards. Instead, they will cover four days of straight attacks on
Barack Obama, culminating with a grave address about sacrifice and
service from John McCain. And unless Obama's convention makes a sharp
turn tonight and tomorrow, they will have done nothing to soften the
impact of these attacks and themes or create a counternarrative for the
media to cover.
The Democrats are holding their convention at a time when the GOP nominee is reasonably popular, his party is reasonably unpopular, and the current President, a Republican, is extremely unpopular. It's easy to say when you don't have to actually organize the damn thing, but I think that they could be doing a far better job than they are so far of using Denver as a four-day clinic on how John McCain will be just as bad as Bush, if not much, much worse. There's still time to make hay on this front, obviously, but so far I think the convention has been a big fat missed opportunity.
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The Obamessiah Revisited
Jon Chait claims I'm misreading him: Ross Douthat sarcastically points out
that many people do, in fact, regard Barack Obama in overheated or even
quasi-messianic terms. I agree with this. What I don't understand is
why Douthat thinks this is a rebuttal to the argument in my latest TRB column about Obama and the charge of messianism. Since my argument apparently was not clear enough, I'll sum it up:
1. The Cult of Obama is no stranger or kitschier than the Cult of
Reagan or the (short-lived) Cult of George W. Bush. Indeed, Bush,
unlike Obama, literally believed he was called by God to lead the
world. Ross is more theologically inclined than I am, so I'll leave it
to him to decide whether that's less messianic than Obama's primise to
ameloriate the effects of climate change upon global sea levels.
2. The notion that Obama is holding himself up as a God-like figure rests upon a series of distortions.
3. It's true that a lot of Obama supporters have unrealistic
expectations of what he could accomplish as president, but that is not
a good reason to vote against him.
I appreciate the clarification. I think that Chait might have made his original argument just slightly more difficult to misinterpret if he hadn't kicked it off by writing that "the image of Obama as a messianic figure rests upon an endlessly repeated litany of bogus particulars," and then cited, as two of his four examples of the "particulars" in question, the claim that people faint at Obama rallies, and the notion that Oprah Winfrey once referred to Obama as "The One." These aren't examples of the Democratic nominee " holding himself up as a God-like figure" - they're examples of other people treating him as some sort of God-like figure, and by trying to debunk them at the outset of his piece Chait gave the strong impression that he intended to take on a lot more than just the question of whether Obama himself has a messiah complex. I would also add that while Chait is of course correct that other politicians have inspired icky messiah-like adulation, his examples - Reagan and the post-9/11 Dubya - don't necessarily make the current wave of over-the-top Obamaphilia appear quite as benign as he thinks. I'm certainly no defender of Reagan kitsch or Bush busts, but it's worth noting that the reason Reagan inspires such ardor among conservatives is that they think he was an amazing, world-historical President - the whole "bringing down Communism" thing and all that. The shorter-lived cult of George W. Bush, likewise, blossomed at a time when conservatives (and some liberals) were persuaded that Bush was acquitting himself impressively in the face of the world-historical challenge posed by Islamist terror. As Ramesh points out, the lionization of Obama is weirder than these cases because of how little the Democratic nominee has actually accomplished to date - unless, I suppose, you think of beating Hillary Clinton as a world-historical achievement, in which case it makes a certain sense. That possibility aside, the Obama cult is the equivalent of messiah-hungry right-wingers making busts of Bush in 1999 - which would have been odd, to say the least. As for Chait's third point, that the over-the-top adulation he inspires isn't a reason to vote against Obama, I would associate myself with Ramesh again: "The point of the McCain campaign's attacks on Obama as a celebrity is
not to make people vote against him in disgust at his supporters. It is
to suggest that once the halo is taken off him, he isn't a very
compelling figure." (Though I would also add that a politician whose supporters overstate his virtues so drastically before he even takes office is being set up for failure in ways that your typical Presidential candidate isn't.) And as for Chait's claim, near the end of his original piece, that liberals "don't like personality cults, which is why you never see any bronze busts of Clinton in anybody's den" - I mean, seriously? A couple of guys named JFK and RFK say hello ...
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The Pathos of Bill Clinton
These comments will get the most attention, but I wanted to highlight this quote, from a Byron York conversation with a Friend of the Clintons: I asked whether Team Clinton appreciated Michelle Obama's mention in
last night's speech. "Yes, the line was appreciated," I was told. "It
was only one sentence, it could have been a bit more than one sentence,
but it was appreciated."
"However," the source continued, "we
had a two-term president who left with a 65 percent approval rating,
who Barack Obama forgot to mention when he described Ronald Reagan as a
transformational figure, and who was not mentioned at all by Michelle
Obama."
It isn't the bitterness about not being mentioned by the Obamas that's striking; it's the insistence on reminding us all exactly where Clinton's approval rating stood when he left office. At 65 percent! Higher than Truman! Higher than Eisenhower! As high as Reagan and Roosevelt! We'll never be allowed to forget it: Clinton will be on his deathbed, with the obituarists circling, and he'll reach out and grab a flunky's wrist and hiss: Remind the Times that I was up over 65 percent, dammit! And the Times will duly remind its readers of the figure. And nobody, then as now, will care.
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Dept. of Head-Scratchers
Like Jon Chait, I don't have the foggiest idea where someone would get the strange, strange notion that Barack Obama is being depicted with language and images usually reserved for a millenial cult leader. Obviously, those fiendish Republicans have made the whole thing up!
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McCain-Excitement '08?
It's worth noting that by playing it safe and vanilla with his VP choice, Barack Obama has given John McCain a real opportunity to make a splash with his pick: A surprising selection, whether of the Jindal-Palin sort, the Lieberman variety, or something more left-field still, would look even more striking in contrast with Obama's "generic Democrat" choice of a running mate. I don't expect the McCain camp to go this route: I think they're probably feeling pretty good about their position at the moment, and the same "first, do no harm" impulse that produced Obama-Biden will probably produce McCain-Pawlenty or McCain-Romney. (I imagine that the chances of a high-risk, high-reward one-term pledge have likewise dropped toward zero.) But by picking Biden, Obama left a lot of free media coverage on the table, and there's a case to be made that McCain's veep choice should be made with an eye toward scooping it up.
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Obama-Dullsville '08
I was feeling a little bad that I'd abandoned Washington (and this blog) during the week when Barack Obama was due to announce his running mate, but I shouldn't have worried, since he went and made the dullest of all possible Vice-Presidential picks. Not that Joe Biden is personally boring - he has a major tragedy and a deeply bizarre scandal in his past, and a garrulous barfly persona that makes him by turns entertaining and insufferable, but rarely dull. But as a political figure, he's one of the least interesting veep picks in recent memory. He's white, male, and late in middle age, and he looks like Central Casting's idea of a U.S. Senator. He doesn't embody the future of his party, or hearken back to its glory days: He isn't a rising star or a grizzled veteran of Presidencies past. He's an insider who's never been that far inside (Senator is basically the only job he's ever held), and his Senate record is defined largely by its middlingness - he's neither wildly impressively nor strikingly undistinguished as a legislator, and he blends extremely easily into the Levin-Dodd-Leahy ranks of Dem elder statesmen. He doesn't offer Obama a chance to expand the map - his native state is small, blue and boring, and he hasn't generated any political excitement outside Delaware in twenty years - or co-opt an up-for-grabs constituency (the notion that he's going to be the candidate of Joe Lunchbucket seems mildly implausible, working-class roots or no), or mollify those Democrats who are still wary of their nominee. As far as the politics of the pick goes - and again, his personality is another matter - Biden is unlikely to alienate anyone, and unlikely to attract anyone either. This doesn't mean he's a bad choice for Obama; indeed, his boringness is no doubt precisely what recommended him. And Poulos is right that there are worse qualities in a veep than being a political party's "best second-rate career politician." (Certainly, having a second-rate career pol as your veep nominee makes way more sense than nominating one for the Presidency itself, as the Dems managed to do the last time around.) But from the point of view of the pundit class, there's very little of interest to be said about a pick that takes the "first, do no harm" principle of running-mate selection nearly all the way to its logical extreme.
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Gone Fishin'
I'm headed off for a (truncated) vacation, so posting will be light-to-nonexistent until early next week - you'll have to go elsewhere, alas, for instant reaction when Obama, desperate to reverse his slide in the polls, picks Joe Lieberman (!!) as his running mate. When I get back, I hope to respond to a thoughtful critique of Grand New Party from my former Atlantic Media colleague Conn Carroll, but for now I'll direct you to Reihan's response, and to this post on related themes as well. Also, if you see one movie this week, make it Tell No One. That is all.
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Tippecanoe and Lieberman Too
Ron Brownstein, fresh off pondering Obama and McCain's potential for bipartisan governance in the latest Atlantic, explains why bipartisan tickets are a bad idea: ... only two presidents have actually taken the leap of choosing a vice
president who was not firmly attached to their party. And their
experiences suggest that in practice, a fusion ticket is the wrong
means to a worthwhile end.
For starters, Obama or McCain would probably see their life
insurance premiums soar if they made such a selection. The two previous
presidents who choose running mates not clearly identified with their
party both died within weeks of taking the oath of office. The aged William Henry Harrison, a Whig elected in 1840, died of pneumonia one month into his term; Abraham Lincoln was assassinated six weeks after his second inauguration in 1865. Each man's death elevated to the presidency a vice president not
solidly committed to the program of the deceased president's party.
Over time it turned out that the new president was, in fact, closer to
the opposition party in which his roots were planted. Perhaps this
should not have been a shock, but in each case it provoked a political
civil war.
Brownstein goes on to recount the cautionary tales of John Tyler and Andrew Johnson, whose presidencies foundered amid vicious conflict with the party they technically represented, but didn't really belong to. God willing, a Vice President Lieberman wouldn't end up thrust into the Presidency, but the fates of the Tyler and Johnson Administrations do make for cautionary tales as McCain ponders his choice. I would add, though, that Brownstein's analysis offers a reasonable case for a pro-lifer to actually feel at least slightly better about a McCain-Lieberman ticket than about, say, a McCain-Ridge (or McCain-Rudy!) pairing. Lieberman's record on domestic issues and partisan affiliation more or less guarantee that he would only succeed McCain if McCain died in office, and the examples of Tyler and Johnson, as well as common sense, suggest that in that eventuality he wouldn't be embraced as the GOP's standard bearer for 2012. As veep, his most likely role would be as a Cheney-style partner in power, with a strong foreign policy portfolio and no plausible post-Administration ambitions of his own. By picking Ridge and Rudy, by contrast, McCain would be selecting a semi-plausible successor figure, and one with the capacity, however small, to move the GOP in a pro-choice direction in a way that a Vice President Lieberman almost certainly couldn't. Not that McLieberman isn't still a bad idea, mind you - but from a pro-life perspective, McRidge and McRudy seem a whole lot worse.
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The Case of Jerome Corsi
I'm not big on ritual denunciations: I'd rather argue with people than read them out of the conversation, as a general rule, and I hope my distaste for certain styles of political discourse is clear enough without my having to publicly denounce Ann Coulter every time she pulls an offensive, sales-goosing stunt on live TV. But along with Jon Henke and Pete Wehner, I think it's worth making an exception in the case of Jerome Corsi's anti-Obama book, whose Amazon page won't be linked here. It isn't just that Corsi himself is a conspiracy theorist and a crank, or that his best-selling farrago of innuendo and outright smears exemplifies everything that's wrong with a certain sort of right-wing publishing, or that David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama demonstrates that it's perfectly possible to write an anti-Obama book without descending into the fever swamps. It's that this is an election where conservatives need to be very, very conscious about the importance of line-drawing: If the Right is going to resist the ongoing attempts by Obamaphiles to define various sorts of normal political elbow-throwing (cutting ads making fun of Barack Obama's political style, calling attention to the controversial public utterances of Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright, etc.) as inherently racist and hatemongering, conservatives need to be very clear about where the line actually is, and what sort of attacks are actually beyond the pale and worth condemning. In a related vein, I can't help noticing that Andrew has decided to elevate this campaign's tone with eleven posts ( and counting, as I write) about the possibility that John McCain fabricated and/or plagiarized his story about a North Vietnamese guard sketching a Christmas-time cross in the prison camp dirt. It is, of course, possible that Andrew's suspicions are justified and McCain invented (or at the very least seriously embellished) the story to pander to the dread Christianists; all sorts of things are possible when you're dealing with a story that almost by definition can't be corroborated. But if this is the standard we're establishing, it's also possible that Jerome Corsi is right when he insinuates that Barack Obama is deliberately concealing the extent of his childhood exposure to Islam in order to maintain his political viability. After all, who can really say? Look, if Andrew thinks the possible "cross in the dirt" fabrication represents a fruitful line of anti-McCain inquiry, he has every right to pursue it. But given my colleague's steady appeals for a more high-minded approach to political argument, I think he should ponder whether this sort of thing might, just possibly, be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
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Redeeming Dubya, Revisited
And so it begins: Fareed Zakaria only wants to redeem the second-term, realist-friendly Bush; Edward Luttwak, though, goes the whole Truman. Next month, David Frum and Robert Kagan take their turns at bat. It'll take a bit longer for Thomas Friedman to bite, of course, but give it time ...
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Above His Pay Grade?
Andrew tries to defend Obama's response to Rick Warren's abortion question at the Saddleback Forum by suggesting that that the Democratic nominee was being asked about ensoulment, or the nature of conception. But Warren, to his credit, didn't pose a metaphysical question, or a biological one. He asked a legal question: "At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?" Obama tried to dodge by saying that from a "theological perspective" or a "scientific perspective" the issue is "above his pay grade." But Warren asked a more narrow question, and one that any politician who votes on abortion laws should be able to answer. And of course, as a supporter of Roe and Casey, Obama does have an answer: He thinks that a baby acquires rights when it's born - well, perhaps depending on how and why it happens to be born - and lacks them at every juncture before birth. He just didn't want to come out and say it.
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Not-So-Isolationist America
Abe Greenwald, on America's conduct toward Georgia: Victim status doesn't get you what it used to. There was a time when
an American friend or a strategically critical state under attack got
more than color commentary from the White House and a boat full of Ace
bandages. When Russia rolled into Afghanistan in 1979 we didn't give
Afghans our sympathy; we gave them guns-big ones. When Saddam tried to
annex Kuwait, we went in and sent him back home. Today a real invasion
will get a symbolic vote, a high profile condemnation, and a Facebook
group. But it's the old America that friends and states with democratic
aspirations remember, and they continue in vain to appeal to us. I am
currently in Azerbaijan and if I've been asked once I've been asked a
hundred times: "What does America think about the Armenian occupation
of our country?" Whether it's a reporter or a graduate student doing
the asking, their desperation is a little heartbreaking and I answer
honestly: "You're conflict isn't even a blip on our radar." Inevitably
they respond: "Will you write about it when you get back home?" "Yes, I
will," I tell them. This provides some visible hope. Luckily they don't
go on to ask me if such attention will make any difference. Armenians are not the only concern of Azeris these days. They, like
Georgians, live in a post-Soviet territory. Their capital city, Baku,
is the starting point for the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline-the only oil route out of the Caspian that bypasses Russia. It goes without saying that this is a conflict on Moscow's
radar. The Deputy Foreign Minister told me that since last week's
Russian aggression, he feels like it's 1920 again. 1920 is when
Azerbaijan's two-year break from oppression gave way to seventy years
of Soviet rule. 1920 also heralded a period of American isolationism. I
agree with the Deputy Foreign Minister. It does feel like 1920 again.
Greenwald's right, of course, that there's something tragic about the hopes that small countries repose in the idea of an all-powerful United States swooping in to solve all their problems. But the tragedy is that a unipolar world breeds these kind of unrealistic expectations for what American power can plausibly do for the Azeris; it's not that the United States has grown too soft and weak to actually swoop in and solve the problems bedeviling every small state and put-upon people. And it takes a strange view of global politics, to put it mildly, to accuse America - a power that's presently conducting massive counter-insurgency operations in not one but two strife-torn Muslim-majority countries, while patrolling the world's sea lanes, maintaining garrisons from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim, engaging in delicate counterproliferation efforts in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, and running secret anti-terror missions in God knows how many countries - of lapsing into 1920s-style "isolationism" because it's unwilling to simultaneously police every border dispute in the Caucuses.
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Locke, Machiavelli and Rick Warren
Rick Warren, who's about to interview Obama and McCain, gets interviewed by our own Jeff Goldberg: I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe
in the separation of politics from religion. Faith is simply a
worldview. A person who says he puts his faith on the shelf when he's
making decisions is either an idiot or a liar. It's entirely
appropriate for me to ask what is [the Presidential candidates'] frame of reference.
To which Andrew splutters: The entire basis for Western secular government, which rests on the
capacity of people to distance absolute truth from political affairs,
is based on idiocy or lies? I wonder if Warren has ever read Locke, or
Hobbes, or Machiavelli or would even understand the term secularism if t knocked him square off his pedestal.
You know, I can pretty much guarantee that Andrew has read a lot more of Locke, Hobbes and Machiavelli than Rick Warren - and of any relevant political philosopher you care to name, for that matter. Yet oddly, the bumptious Warren seems to have a stronger grasp of what separation of church and state has actually meant in the American political tradition, both historically and philosophically, than my vastly more erudite colleague.
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No Party For Pro-Choicers?
Nicholas Beaudrot (along with several emailers) wants to know why I'm calling out the Democrats for being rigid and unyielding on abortion when the Republicans have just as rigid a posture on the issue, if not more so. Certainly he's right about the two parties' respective platform language; on the other hand, I think that some of what Beaudrot describes as the Democrats' bigger tent on abortion (the presence of notional pro-lifers in the House and Senate leadership, for inst |
