More Losses

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people didn't stop dying.

In an attempt to get away from the unseemly circus surrounding the death of Titans and Ravens quarterback Steve McNair, if nothing else, I'd like to write a word or two about Robert McNamara, who died today at the age of 93.

McNamara was born in 1916 and came of age during the Great Depression in Oakland, California. He was a "whiz kid" with numbers, and got his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he was hired as an assistant professor one year later. He also joined the military as an analyst (he had been ROTC undergrad at Berkeley), studying effectiveness of various military efforts, such as Curtis LeMay's B-29 bombers in China during WWII. He later became the first non-Ford to be president of Ford Corporation, where he excelled during the postwar boom years, and then became Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, where is largely viewed as responsible for the Vietnam War's early years. He then led the World Bank, and remained active in politics as a champion for various positions. He is, as one might imagine, a figure who engenders mixed feelings.

I wasn't alive during the Vietnam War, and I've never as an adult had to deal with an existential threat like Communism was (I don't think terrorism represents such a threat), so I don't have much to say on McNamara's war management. Others who are more informed will say it better, and I trust the dialogue on that to be robust. I think it is important to note that his departure from Lyndon Johnson's cabinet in 1967 was after many disagreements with LBJ over Vietnam. Most accounts have McNamara as believing that the correct course of action was to reduce bombings, fortify the boundary between North and South Vietnam, and switch strategies. Johnson and the Joint Chiefs disagreed. Various obits, like the Post's, declaring him "Architect of the Vietnam War," might be right in some sense, but the Vietnam War is defined culturally by its end, which McNamara likely would have handled differently.

But what I want to focus on is McNamara's more lasting - and less discussed - legacy, that of systems analysis. McNamara believed that the effectiveness of programs, military and otherwise, had to be examined in context, and evaluated based on objective cost-benefit analysis. This belief and the system of measurements he put in place at Defense and, later, the World Bank, are in many ways the basis of the way we look at policy today.

Some criticize this calculated examination of being heartless and missing intangible benefits and costs, and those criticisms are not without merit. But the idea that policy should be determined and implemented based on results is, for someone like me, a good one, and an important one. My biggest criticism of the Bush Administration was the stubborn refusal to consider reality as a concern. Whether it was hiring people based on politics rather than ability, implementing programs based on belief rather than results, or just the idea that "we said so" is a worthy reason, I think the failures of the last 8 years show us what happens when one ignores measurables altogether in favor of gut plays and intangible arguments.

The World Bank, for McNamara, was an attempt to revive a reputation that had fallen far, and he believed strongly in it. His efforts dramatically reduced River Blindness worldwide, and set a standard for spending the World Bank's money in ways that would help in actual, concrete ways. When Paul Wolfowitz went to head the World Bank a few years ago, many made the analogy to McNamara, and, while I see the similarites in the situations, the men were really very different. While McNamara believed in study and results, Wolfowitz is an ardent ideologue who very much believed that the Iraq, Afghanistan, and preemptive war were worth any cost. McNamara was in some ways the opposite, a man who believed in results above all, perhaps to a fault. Because of that, he was extremely skeptical of nuclear weapons. He opposed an anti-ballistic missile installation because it was too expensive and, he thought, would result in Russia further escalating its arsenal. And then he joined other national security figures signed a letter urging the US to restrain from nuclear action if hostilities in Europe escalated.

Again, I did not live through the Vietnam War, and perhaps anyone who ran Ford during the postwar years would have done well. In fact, I feel strange obitting him, since I'm sure I'm focusing on some smaller things, so if you've got a moment, please leave a comment telling me all I'm missing. But McNamara, for all his negatives, also had the quality I prize most in people, which is the ability to admit when they are wrong. He saw what no one else in LBJ's war council saw, which is that the strategy in Vietnam was not working. The fact that it was largely his strategy that was failing makes that position all the more impressive.

Losses

It has been a hell of a week.

Ed McMahon made sidekicks an integral part of late-night television. Karl Malden had memorable supporting roles in some of the most important movies of his era. Farrah Fawcett was an absolute icon to an entire generation. Alexis Arguello was one of the best small boxers arguably ever, a national icon to Nicaragua, and the mayor of its capital city.

If you're ever in a macabre mood, or just want to be reminded of how little you know, browse the Wikipedia page for people who have died recently. These are the ones who are important enough to deserve a Wiki entry, which is a reasonably high standard in itself, but even beyond that, the accomplishments are often impressive. The past two days have seen about two dozen, including everything from labor leaders to German choreographer to the first black woman on the Arkansas Supreme Court. It's easy to think of these minor heroes as beneath our radar, until you start thinking of how hard it might have been, for example, to be the first black woman on the Arkansas Supreme Court. And that's to say nothing of the odd person who died broke and alone, but will be realized in the coming decades as one form of genius or another.

We lose people every day, some of them famous, many of them very accomplished, almost all of them missed by someone, but when a rash of celebrities dies, there are worse things to do than realize how many potentially important deaths we miss.

But, since this is a blog, there's two I want to focus on.

The first is the obvious one. With all the circus that currently surrounds his life, death, will, children, and debt, it's easy to remember the circus that often surrounded Michael Jackson's life. Bob Schieffer, and many others, threw a cursory "separate the art from the artist" out before focusing on the "weirdness" of the King of Pop.

I tend to go the other way.

In all the plastic surgery, the strange fixations, the allegations of improper relationships with children, it became easy over the last 15 years to forget how transformative an artist Michael Jackson was. But he did more than maybe any other single person to change the way pop music was created, consumed and appreciated. He was beyond just an unparalleled singer and dancer, he had an instinctive understanding of performance.

If you've never seen it, and even if you have, there's a video I'd like to share. It's from an event in 1983 commemorating the 25th anniversary of Motown. It's long, an entire 12 minutes when a 25-year-old Michael Jackson was on stage, first with his siblings in the Jackson 5, and then on his own. The first performance, a medley of Motown music, is a good reminder of how good the Jackson 5 were as a vocal group. Many have made the comment that Jackson never stopped being a child, and that the childlike approach to things was one of his defining characteristics. The few moments between the performances on this video show someone who looks like a kid. He's soft-spoken, almost timid, he's even stammering. He says that he likes the old songs, that those were great songs, and then there's a pause, and you can tell the stammering kid is gone, because he's on the verge of performing, and then he says he likes the new songs, too, and flips a hat on. The performance that follows, which was the first performance of "Billie Jean" and the debut of his famous Moonwalk, is an absolute seminal moment in pop music. The intensity of his performance - the emotional charge that was in every performance Jackson ever gave - resonates even 26 years later. Music changed that night.


Watch Michael Jackson - Live Motown 25 - Full Performance(Rare) in Music | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Jackson, for all of the strangeness that came, was one of the few people who, for a time, was the most famous person in the world. There aren't many of those, and when they pass, it's a good thing to remember how rare that type of stardom is. Muhammad Ali certainly was one, Bill Clinton for a time, Pele was once, and almost certainly Barack Obama is right now. There has been no musical act since Jackson to achieve that. In his book, "The Long Tail," Wired editor Chris Anderson lays out the argument that, thanks to shifts in media and availability of information, we are almost never going to have superstars again. When it comes to music, I agree with him. There are too many different available options; no one act will ever dominate pop culture via music that way again, which makes Michael the last musical megastar we will ever see.

The closest analogue I have to Michael Jackson is another meteoric figure, Mike Tyson. Like Jackson, Tyson was stunningly good at what he did, and like Jackson, sadly became known as a freak show. Like I do with Tyson, I choose to remember Jackson as the gifted performer, and not as the creepy person who had so much difficulty maintaining a functional life. He was the first superact of which I was aware, and I have found his music has actually grown on me as I've gotten older, which is true of very little from when I was 8-12 years old. In my younger and more vulnerable years, I occasionally bartended at large gatherings at my college house where people would imbibe alcohol. At such gatherings, whenever a Michael Jackson song played, shots went on special, three for $2. You would be stunned at how many people were excited by that. So I'm fairly certain that Michael Jackson's music will, for the rest of my life, spur not thoughts of news cycles and Neverland Ranch, but memories of watching and rewatching a kid change music with a flip of a hat, being 8 years old and listening to a cassette tape of Bad, and seeing legions rush the bar during "Rock With You."

The other person I'd like to commemorate was a little less glamorous.

If you know where McKees Rocks is, it's probably because you lived in Pittsburgh. And even then, you probably didn't go there much. McKees Rocks is the definition of a sad, poor, post-industrial Pennsylvania town that got lost when the mills left. The Rocks, as it is semi-affectionately called, was mostly visited by city folks, in my experience, because it is outside of Pittsburgh municipal ordinances, and so therefore features a fully nude gentlemen's club.

Fifty years ago, though, there were still remnants of Western PA's steel industry. And it was in that blue-collar environment that William Darrell Mays, Jr. was born. His father owned a hazardous waste company, where he worked after graduating from Sto-Rox High School and dropping out of West Virginia University. But that life wasn't for him, so he moved to Atlantic City in 1983 to be a salesman on the boardwalk, selling any type of product he could. During those years, he learned from older salesmen who had made a career of pitching products.

Ten years later, he was back home in Pittsburgh for a trade show, and struck up a friendship with a rival salesman named Max Appel. Appel's company, Orange Glo International, was a manufacturer of cleaning products, and it needed a pitchman for the Home Shopping Network spots. With a blue button-down shirt, full beard, and almost manic enthusiasm, Mays pitched cleaners like Kaboom!, Orange Glo, and Oxi Clean. Reviewers thought he was terrible, but viewer response was incredible, and sales rocketed. Soon, the line "Billy Mays here for..." became a trademark of the most successful television pitchman ever.

This season, I've been an avid watcher of the Discovery Channel's show Pitchmen, which features Mays and his friend Anthony Sullivan as they go through the process of choosing and pitching products. In addition to being a lot of fun, the show is a fascinating look at the different considerations that are involved to direct-to-consumer marketing. It's also a great look at Mays, a compelling figure who was clearly a diva, but ultimately still the blue-collar guy from the Rocks who worked - hard - for everything he got. The last few episodes, which I watched recently on DVR, were particularly hard because they feature Billy Mays III, Mays' son, who is an aspiring producer of commercials, and clearly has some talent for it. I do not know how the show will deal with the loss of its driving force, but I confess it's disconcerting that I feel like I developed a great deal of respect for the person and the work of Billy Mays, just in time for him to die of heart failure at the age of 50.

Mays was - by a big margin - the most famous graduate of Sto-Rox High School, an avid Steeler fan, and someone who climbed to wealth and fame simply by doing very well a hard job that few people like to do. He was a perfect son of the Pittsburgh area, hard-working, proud and endlessly thankful for everything he had. He defined what a television pitchman could be, and then started and maintained a profitable company, and then used Discovery Channel to show people how hard it was. In a way, he is the opposite of Michael Jackson; he did a mundane job, lived a functional life with fairly standard tastes, and the haunting thought about his death is all of the future he won't have (rather than the past he never repeated). He loved Pittsburgh, he loved his products, and he loved being a pitchman.

I ran, He ran, Tehran

Wow, a month between posts? What the hell type of blogger am I? I actually have a reason, if not an excuse, which I will divulge at the end of this in a shameless plug for an event this Saturday that I've spent the year organizing. But first, you all deserve a post.

I was going to write about national debt (Is it good? Is it bad? Who cares, at least it's something America still makes!), but then Iran had to go and have an election. Sort of.

For those of you who have not seen a television for a long time, Iranian voters went to the polls a week or so ago in what was expected to be a close, hard-fought election between multiple candidates that might end in a runoff when no one got more than 50% of the vote. If someone was expected to win, it was Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a change agent who was campaigning against incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the grounds that the current Iranian president is internationally reviled and plays identity politics to divide Iranians and score political points.

As you can tell from my description, Iran is not always so different from the US as we might imagine. While it still has a position of "Supreme Leader" that is as powerful as the title implies, the country is a long way from a dictatorship or one of the third world's quasi-democracy with no history of effective governance. The Islamic Republic actually is in part what it claims to be, with elected government and no particular history of outlandish corruption and illegitimate rulers, except when other countries (like the U.S.) start messing with their politics, which happens every 20 years or so. And, contrary to the fiery language that comes from Supreme Leader Khameni and Ahmadinejad, much of the country is moderate and progressive, with a desire for increasing relations with the rest of the world. Indeed, it looked for a few weeks there like Iran might actually determine its own course toward a more modern vision, less intolerance, and greater involvement with the rest of the world.

So, it was a bit of a downer when, with about 20% of the vote in, Iranian officials declared an overwhelming majority of votes for the incumbent. And then people protested, which the Supreme Leader blamed on Britain and the Great Satan (i.e., us). Because, clearly, it's our fault that they couldn't even fake an election convincingly. Beyond the rhetoric, this is a sad occurrence. Iran is one of those countries that always seems tantalizingly close to joining the modern world, but this is a major setback.

For one thing, the results seem pretty badly faked. If it had been 51 percent of the vote, then maybe we could all agree that Persian polling is an inexact science and we just underestimated his support. But with 84 percent turnout (!), the reported results of Ahmadinejad's more than 60 percent of the vote seem beyond unlikely. And there is that whole "oh, this is over" moment with less than one-fifth of the vote counted.

I'm watching last night's Daily Show on DVR now, which features an interview with the son of a progressive Iranian cleric that was among the hundreds jailed in the past weeks. Clearly, the Iranian government wants this election issue to be over. The nicest way to see it is that allowing a volatile situation to continue is dangerous, but it's hard not to see it as a government fixing an election, and then throwing everyone that disagreed with it in jail. And that is pretty much what those lousy third-world governments (with which I said Iran has little in common) do as SOP.

Obama gave a speech today trying to walk the delicate line between the typical American meddling in another country's government and the world leader that sees a chance for any much-needed progress in a really troubling region slipping away. He said we won't interfere, but talked about how saddening the events in Iran are to those watching.

And that's about all any of us can do. The bottom line is that Iran has decided that, at least for the near future, it wants to be more like Zimbabwe than Germany. No one can change that, apparently not even Iranians. A few people at the top have the power to run that country, and it's a shame that this is the way they're deciding to run it.

As the country who helped overthrow the government of Iran in the 1950s, and then again in the 1970s, it probably doesn't mean much that we find the events there troubling, or sad, or anti-Democratic, since we did the same stuff to whatever nation we wanted, whenever it suited us. But if something is wrong when someone else does it, it's also wrong when you do it. And this goes way beyond a "no one beats up my little brother but me" situation; this is a nuclear-aspiring nation with centuries of history, culture, and pride deciding that it's people are barely worth lying to. There's no good answer, there's not even really a question. But it's worth noting that a very important country went a bad way this week, and it had a choice to do otherwise.

Okay, shameless plug ahead:

I've been out of blogtouch because I've been in the final weeks of organizing and planning "Design, Drink and Be Merry," the only exhibition in the country of art produced by craft breweries. The exhibition, currently up in the Schmidt Gallery of my employer, the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts, lasts the month of June and culminates in a beer tasting and fundraiser for the GoggleWorks' After-School Arts Program. Breweries come in and donate some beer, area restaurants have donated food, and we all get together and raise money to keep kids doing art instead of hanging around on the streets. That particularly fun event is this Saturday, the 27th, at 5 p.m. If you've never done it before (and it's statistically likely that's the case), curating a show and planning a fundraiser is a major deal, and it's still a little strange to me that I've been given the opportunity to do this, and even stranger that it's worked for two years in a row. So, if you live in striking distance of Reading, PA, we'd love to see you Saturday night. For one night of your life, drinking beer will be a tax deduction. It all goes to a really good cause, and if you read this, you count as a friend, so it'll make me happy that you're there for the biggest night of my year. If that's not in the cards, then accept my profound apologies, and know that I'll be back blogging more regularly after this week.

Thanks for bearing with me,
SJS

The Future of the GOP

So I'm watching some DVR of Colin Powell articulate the virtues of an inclusive, tolerant Republican Party. Am I crazy, or is he way more eloquent and compelling than I remember?

Of course, Powell spoke rarely and through his career he has often been the voice of various GOP administration war efforts, so he was extremely confined as to what he could say. Since he's retired, he's been more public, and more able to speak candidly. And I'm pretty thrilled to have the guy as a defender of moderates. How, when presented with this intelligent, competent, reasoned man, could any member of the Republican Party say they'd rather have a gasbag like Rush Limbaugh, as Dick Cheney did?

Cheney said he considered Powell a Democrat, because the general endorsed Obama. Think about that for a minute. One vote that Cheney disagrees with removes for him 50 years of service to the party. I know I harp on this a bit, but it's worth thinking about a again: That's the opposite of Democracy. In a Democracy or a Republic, an individuals votes are supposed to be based on an understanding of the candidates and the needs of the government. You are in fact obligated to vote based on your own conscience and intellect, not to do what someone else tells you to because you share a same monetary and organizational structure. George Washington hated political parties, and thought they would destroy the country. While that's a bit strong, I think we can all agree that the right to vote and to choose one's own party are fairly basic in our system. I suppose Cheney would like a system where you must vote with your party, and for whom they tell you to vote? Maybe he would.

Regardless, this battle for the GOP is real. The reason Cheney is so vocal right now reflects more of a vacuum of leadership than anything else. The supposed leader of the GOP, Michael Steele, is a total laughing stock and couldn't even keep his own organization from passing a resolution to relabel Democrats as the "Democratic Socialist Party." Sarah Palin's approval rating is down to the 50s and can't seem to do anything that doesn't make her look more lost in the national scene. Bobby Jindal has been MIA since the Kenneth the Page disaster. No one else seems to want to grab the reins, and that might be because no one trusts the horse. Why would you step up to lead this party right now, when the past ways of doing things don't work, and any new position you might take will lead to being ostracized by the ones with the money?

Which leads me to wonder where the party is going. I see another bad year next year in Congress. It'll be a bad year in the sense that no much will change. A few seats here or there might switch, the GOP might even pick up some House seats, but everything we're seeing now indicates that the supermajority in the Senate is likely to be reinforced for the Democrats. Yes, yes, lots can change, but it's hard to see what that change would be. Anyway, if we assume that there are no seismic shifts, and we're at the same place in 18 months, what happens then?

Certainly, in 2012, people will use the presidential election to see if they can take over the leadership. But can a moderate win the primary? Not right now, certainly. I've written that I thought the GOP self-assesment would take some time, but the entrenched leadership there has really surprised me, and it's tough to see a way out of this spiral, short of a deus-ex-machina type of change in ideology nationwide. And that could happen; things move in cycles, and we could swing back reactionary at some point.

So, either the Republican Party can modernize, as Powell et al. would like, or we as a nation can be seized with a conservative furor.

Or, something else could happen.

If the GOP continues to drive itself off a cliff, we'll wind up with a very large tent on the Democratic side, and soon they'll be the one having the debates. Obama seems too savvy and pragmatic to let it happen, but another Dem leader could well lean to the left and allow hubris to control treatment of the crucial moderates. If that happened, things could get interesting.

We don't have the Whigs anymore. Or the Progressive Party, or the Tories, or the Know-Nothings. Political parties die in our system, once or twice a century, and we're due. The reality is that, if there were a party of Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Colin Powell, Claire McCaskill, Arlen Specter, Jim Webb, my boy Heath Shuler, etc., it would be more popular than the Republican Party. Since most of those names are Dems, it's hard to know if it would be more popular than the current Democratic Party, but it would be close. The names I just listed alone would be enough for a pretty serious faction, and think of how many would come out of the closet if the group actually broke off.

The key, of course, is building the money and organization that American political parties wield as their main weapons. But money will follow success, and that party would have plenty of success. Again, those people are some of Obama's biggest supporters, so I doubt very much that he would be foolish enough to neglect them to a point where they would leave. But Republicans didn't win a presidential election for decades after Hoover, and that could happen again. Which would mean that there would Dem leaders other than Obama. And what have we learned about what happens when one party has control over this country's governmental system? They can go completely, ideologically insane. It's not at all hard to see how, within 20 years, we could have a radically different set of political parties.

Of course, if this fun little scenario actually happens, one of the parties will have to fail. Our country has never sustained three parties, and sooner or later we'd be back down to two. Would it be the marginalized right wing, the Dems gutted by the defections, or the upstart centrist party? See how much fun speculation can be?

Incidentally, the last time we had a semi-major shift in political parties was the defection of Strom Thurmond's band of Dixiecrats, who were their own party for a short time but caucused with - and then became the power base of - the Republican Party.

Okay, didn't want to sign off without linking a summary of the credit card legislation. It's been mostly underreported, and it's easy to make too much of these minor victories, but any end to some of these hideous practices by banks is worth applauding. CNN Money has a fairly easy - if a little enthusiastic - summary of the changes.

Tomorrow, as you all know, is a holiday. And while observing for 24 hours what Memorial Day is actually about is probably more than anyone can expect, the U.S. government has made the very reasonable request that we observe a moment of silence at 3 p.m. on Monday.

People die all the time, and I'm not sure I'm one of those people who believes dying in battle is more glorious than dying anywhere else. Fighting to defend one's country certainly takes bravery, but so does living with a disease you know will kill you, and the latter doesn't come with glory or a salary. But we've all seemed to agree that death is bad and we should try to live as long as possible, and the thing about wars is that the people who fight them are young.

My DVR of This Week just showed me that the Pentagon released the names of four service members killed in our operations abroad this week. Of those four, only Specialist David A. Schaefer Jr., of Belleville, Illinois, was older than me. He was 27. Even the most ardent pacifist can appreciate that our soldiers are young, and when they die, they leave behind not just a life, family and friends like everyone else, but the potential for an entire life that goes unlived. So, if nothing else, take a moment at 3 p.m. tomorrow and think about all of the moments that our servicemen and women missed out on because they were taken in the course of protecting the country.

Primary Day

Good morning from the Internet.

For those of you living in Pennsylvania, it's Primary Day. For those of you living in certain areas of Pennsylvania, like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, that means it's usually election day. Today it's fairly quiet, with the usual slate of local judges and councilpeople, except in Pittsburgh, where young Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has a couple of challengers, including councilman Patrick Dowd. There's no polling on the race, but the feel is definitely that Dowd has a chance.

In Pittsburgh, many elections take on a dynamic of the old boys network versus the young upstart reformer, and this one is no different. It's mildly ironic that the 20-something is the voice of the establishment, while the history teacher from Highland Park is the voice of change, but only mildly. Normally, as I mentioned, today would be the equivalent of the election, since Pittsburgh always goes Democratic. But the fact that Steeler scion - Franco Dok Harris - is running in the general as an independent means this won't be over until November. For that matter, Ravenstahl is mounting a write-in bid for the Republican nomination as well, so even he might be back in fall.

Full disclosure: I worked on Patrick Dowd's city council campaign for a couple days in 2007, when he ran a grassroots effort against one of the more entrenched old boys of Pittsburgh. No one gave the Ph.D. teacher much of a chance against the usual political/union machine and goonery, but it was one of the best-run local campaigns I'd seen in that city, and he pulled it out by about 100 votes. I know some of the people on his current campaign, and they're young, smart, and a little crazy; in other words, exactly the ones you want on an upstart campaign.

But as good as Patrick Dowd is, this election will largely be a referendum on Luke Ravenstahl's Kremlin-style running of Grant Street. In an adminstration where very few people are the decision-makers, there has been a stunning lack of transparency, even for Pittsburgh, where such things are reasonably common. He has embodied the city's backroom style, using a combination of personal charisma (of which he has a moderate amount), heavily promoted public efforts to clean up the city, and emotion about past leaders (he took over when Mayor Bob O'Connor passed away, and has begun calling for a "Rennaissance III," calling to mind the popular mayors of David L. Lawrence and Richard Caligiuri) to soften the fact that he is as old-school as they get. To be fair, Lawrence and Caligiuri both had success due largely to participation by the aforementioned old boys, but they both also managed to convince the citizens of Pittsburgh that they were important as well.

All of which is to say: It'll be an interesting day for Pittsburgh. Since I don't live there anymore, and I'm not in touch with any of the politicos, it's hard for me to know if Dowd has more than a puncher's chance. My experience with it leads me to believe that he might, and I hope he does. Dowd is the rare public servant whose ambition is far outstripped by his intelligence, and Pittsburgh needs such men if it ever wants to move past the model of governance in smoke-filled rooms.

There's a lot more to write about, and I know I've been MIA. Politics season will be back soon. In the mean time, enjoy the warm weather, and remember to vote today if you live in Pennsylvania.

Other candidates that SJS has had a beer with and therefore endorses:
Jimmy Lynn - Commonwealth Court
Walt Garvin - Northampton County Council

Specter Follow-Up

I spent a great deal of yesterday talking with friends about - what else - the defection of Arlen Specter to the Dems. And I've been reading about the hoopla over the 100th day of President Obama: A completely silly and arbitrary deadline during which no president can do much but talk and transition from the predecessor, but it gives reporters something to talk about. And I've been avoiding studying for a final tonight, so I wanted to take a moment and put the Specter thing into at least one larger context.

First, there is this terrific Politico story about what happened, and how this whole switch has been a work in progress for a few months. The story calls it a "bidding war" with Specter's longtime friend and colleague Joe Biden talking to him from the White House, and Harry Reid carrying on private conversations from the Senate leadership. And that's interesting mostly because, on the Republican side, the story is mostly sniping and ineptitude. That is the context in which I see this whole saga.

Michael Steele, the outspoken and strange chairman of the Republican National Committee, is not a stupid man. Some of you will recall that yesterday, Steele made a statement calling Specter's record "left-wing" and saying that the decision was practical, not principled. I mentioned that one could be practical without compromising principles; such is the main benefit of being a moderate. But something else occurred to me, and it's actually far more alarming if you're a Republican.

Rememeber, Steele's job is to WIN races and BEAT Democrats. That's a tactical - and maybe strategic - job. He doesn't run a think tank. He isn't a talk show host. His job is not to be the sould of the party, it's to be the brain. He is supposed to win things.

By that standard, it is hard to imagine how his first 100 days could have gone much worse than they have. So far, he's presided over the lost Senate seat in Minnesota and the lost House seat in the New York 20th. He has spent his first few months 1) Taking on, and then backing off from, Rush Limbaugh 2) Looking stunningly clueless by pushing his "off-the-hook" marketing campaign to "urban-suburban" settings and 3) Being laughed at.

But he inherited the Minnesota situation, the NY-20 election came up fast and was close, and he's at least out there as a relatively young black face in the party, and he's trying stuff. Like I said, 100 days is just too short a time to get a lot done, so all of that can be forgiven. He's a smart guy, if weird, and he's got something to run against. Plus, he's surrounded himself generally with good people (like Saul Anuzis for his transition team). So, I figured, it was too early to judge.

But the Specter thing means that the situation is actually worse than it seems. And it's because, as Steele pointed out, Specter's decision is one of pragmatism, not ideology.

Ideology is not something we can do a lot to control. As I pointed out with regard to Rick Santorum (who, it turns out, went not to nonexistent Butler Catholic, but to Butler Area High before moving to Illinois as a child), ideologues do things that don't make rational sense. As RNC chair, you can't do anything about a guy like Santorum; if people turn against his ideas, he loses. No amount of money, support or anything will help.

But pragmatism is something we can do something with. From them third page of the Politico story:

A source close to the Republican National Committee said that Chairman Michael Steele and Specter had a cordial meeting after Steele seemed to suggest in a TV interview that he was open to withholding funds from Specter and the two other GOP senators who supported the stimulus bill. But Steele never urged Specter to stay in the party or even discussed a party switch with him. That was being done, the RNC believed, by [Senators Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn].

Through emissaries, the RNC learned that Specter wanted it to try to push conservative challenger Pat Toomey out of the Pennsylvania GOP primary.

“They would’ve liked it if the RNC did what the NRSC did,” said the source, alluding to the Senate campaign committee’s statement of support for Specter.

Specter's defection isn't a disaster for the GOP because it means the Dems have 60 seats. It's a disaster because they could have stopped it, and just chose not to.

Specter told them what to do: Push Toomey out, and you keep your seat and elder statesman. You also send the message that the party can tolerate moderates, which is the way back to building the big tent and being the party of the center.

Instead, they hemmed, hawed, and then made statements supporting Toomey. They gave him Specter no choice. AND MICHAEL STEELE KNEW IT. He said as much in his statement.

Which means Steele had the opportunity to shore up a strong Senate seat for his party. All he had to do was play a little hardball, clear the field, and make some calls. In short, to do his job, which is once again to win Republican seats and beat Democrats.

And instead, he drove a six-term senator to the other party, where he will almost certainly defeat the GOP's nominee.

If you're a member of a party, it's one thing when that party tilts one way or the other. It's what parties do, and you have to be prepared to accept that you won't always agree with elements on side or the other. But, if you're a member of an organization where the people who are specifically paid to think tacitically and pragmatically seem comfortable with losing for irrational reasons, that is a bad, bad, bad sign. When the people who get paid to win no longer care as much about winning as they do about something else, it means there's no one left thinking in tactical terms.

And it means there's more losing to come.

Specter the Democrat.

On this, I will admit to being taken by surprise.

Following weeks of reassurance that he is a Republican, and a very brief run to his right, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) will run for his sixth term as a Democrat.

I was in the legions who believed he had decided against this route, and I was also not alone in my belief that that decision had all but sealed his loss to former Rep. Pat Toomey in the primary. Apparently, Specter has come to the same conclusion.

It's a good decision in three ways:

1. As I mentioned, Specter had little hope of winning as a Republican. The registration disadvantage was huge for him, because the moderates - his base - had left the party. That meant Toomey, who only lost by 2 points 6 years ago, was all but assured a primary victory. Now, the Dems will surely clear the field for him (no one had even confirmed they were running for Senate on the Democratic side yet), and - barring unforeseen circumstances - he will crush Toomey in the general election by double digits.

2. In addition to political sense, it makes actual sense, too. He started his career as Democrat, and became a Republican in 1966 when the Dems were too insular and ideological to allow a moderate like Specter. Now, the Republican party is too insular and ideological, and the Dems are the big tent party. The GOP has systematically driven moderates away from their ranks in the past 10 years with everything from primary challenges (Toomey's efforts at the Club for Growth, incidentally, being among the highest-profile of these efforts) to the usual tricks of gerrymandering and chairmanshipping. Meanwhile, the Dems are now the party of Claire McCaskill, Heath Shuler, Joe Sestak and Jim Webb (who was, you'll recall, Reagan's Navy Secretary). Specter is to the left of several of those names, placing him comfortably within the party's ideological spectrum, while basically every vote he's cast with the Dems has been the source of excoriation by the GOP power brokers and Fox pundits. With this, Pennsylvania's senators will be two moderate Democrats, which is basically what the state wants.

3. Specter will be 80 next year, and his cancer has relapsed. While - with treatment - he is likely to be alive and healthy enough to run and win, a long and strenuous primary battle is not what the doctors ordered. In any case, with all apologies to guys like Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond, Specter is old, and this will almost certainly be his last term. An easy primary with Rendell's machine raising money and then a fairly easy election is a good thing. And then, the Dems, I am sure, have promised him his old Judiciary Committee chairmanship, as well as some other plum appointments. It's not a bad way to end a long and productive career of statesmanship.

The always-classy Michael Steele, head of the RNC, said this in response:

"Some in the Republican Party are happy about this. I am not. Let’s be honest - Senator Specter didn’t leave the GOP based on principles of any kind. He left to further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record. Republicans look forward to beating Sen. Specter in 2010, assuming the Democrats don’t do it first.”

Anyone remember when Jim Jeffords left the GOP and the party just attacked him? And everyone who watched responded that such vicious and classless dogmatic rhetoric was the reason he left to begin with? Yeah.

Specter, unlike Jeffords, did do this in part for personal gain. In the end, he has never been a down-the-line party guy, and he'd rather stay in the Senate than lose because of a letter in front of his name that no longer accurately represents his position. But Specter voted against the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act; to call his voting record "left-wing" shows just how out of touch the RNC is with the country. Also, one might point out to Chairman Steele that it was the RNC that forced his hand by allowing Toomey to challenge him, and even voicing hints of mild support. They could have kept the seat by clearing the field for him; instead, they pushed him into a corner until he had no choice but to push back.

Barack Obama called Specter this morning, and said he was "thrilled to have" Specter in the party. He also said Specter has the president's full support, meaning that Steele's wish for a Dem primary battle is a pleasant delusion. And I'm sure that Steele knows Toomey has basically no chance to beat a healthy Specter in the general election. Actually, it's Michael Steele, so maybe he does actually think Toomey can win.

Look, I know this state elected Rick Santorum, who was as right-wing as they come, but he was a hard-working blue-collar guy who looked like the dumb quarterback from Butler Catholic High School. Toomey spent the last six years paying himself to run a think tank about how to make rich people richer. Pennsylvania will elect hard workers, even if we don't agree with them; Rendell is left of most of the state, Santorum was right of most of the state, and it's why I believed Chris Matthews had a real chance. Toomey isn't like that, though. He looks like a money-grubbing weaselly Master of the Universe, which is basically what he is.

Here's a picture of Toomey, and a picture of our wildly unpopular Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner:



















See what I'm saying?

Toomey is my former representative. He's a very smart man who will no doubt run a very well-funded campaign. But to beat Specter in PA means you need hard-working moderates to empathize with you, and it's just not going to happen for Toomey. I know he came form working-class roots, but he's also a derivatives trader from Rhode Island.

It's a little funny that I was working on a post about what Dem voters in PA should do with regard to Specter when the news came down. As much as I had believed Specter was past this decision, I suppose I should have known better. Of course, the thing to do is deny, deny, deny until you do something this drastic, and Specter is as good a politician as there is in the country. When Santorum lost, he did so spouting the same hateful nonsense that had gotten him elected twice, even though he knew it was keeping him down double digits, because he believed in it. While there's a certain admirable quality to keeping one's principles in that event, 1) Specter isn't a radical ideologue like Santorum and 2) Specter doesn't like to lose.

In the end, it really wasn't a choice at all.