BREAKING NEWS (from last night): Pennsylvania has a budget. And, in my ongoing series of things you should ask yourself next time you are tempted to decry the media: Would you stay up all night waiting for Pennsylvania politicians to reach a deal that everyone knew was going to wait until at least the last minute? If the answer is no, then just remember that journalists get paid badly to do that type of exciting work, so they can write it up for a shmoe like me to read and report to you.
Also, Joe Posnanski has a brief, brilliant, and amusing critique of idiot electoral stats.
Okay, back to the nation.
It's that time of year. It's after the primary, before the conventions, and no one but freaks like me are paying attention to politics. Now is the time for the sordid, technical political work that no one hears about, but makes a massive difference in November. The campaigns set up their ground games, raise money, talk about media markets and which states they won't even try to win, shore up their base and transform the National Committees into giant versions of their campaigns. It's the time when even inspiring politicians stop inspiring and give up on doing anything other than the smart, safe thing to do.
So, if you're a fan of either of the two men running for president, I'd try to avoid watching or paying attention for the next month and a half. They're unlikely to do anything but disappoint you. Obama's going to shelve talk of change while he shifts from plucky insurgence to bona-fide frontrunner with a war chest larger than anyone's ever seen. McCain got a jump start on disappointment by flip-flopping on every issue he ever cared about in the primary, but he'll do more. And while they may run a clean campaign against each other, now is also the time when others start doing the really dirty work. Again, the right got the head start on smearing Obama long ago with email lies, but not all of the negative points are wrong. For example, the left (and extreme right) is trotting out Wesley Clark to make the unfortunate and valid point that simply being tortured for five years does not a military genius make. Of course, McCain, not to be outdone in the poor taste department, has equated this to anti-Obama smears and launched his own Truth Squad.
Not for nothing, but there is, to me, a difference between saying something unwise from a communications point of view (i.e. "a terrorist attack will help McCain," or "being tortured doesn't make you a great commander," or "this is a war to stop slavery") and flat out lying about someone because you don't like him or her ("Obama is a secret nazi racist Muslim," or "John Kerry lied about his service record" or "Abraham Lincoln has an illegitimate black child who is a time-traveling secret nazi Muslim"). Something can be true even if it is uttered for ill purpose, and something can be untrue even if the person has good intentions. Likewise, a new book about McCain is definitely aimed to hurt him, but there are legitimate questions about whether McCain's temper is something we need to worry about, and if women voters will really be comfortable with a man who refers to wife as a four-letter-word starting with c. That link sources that particular story, but many of these allegations (like the famous ones against Obama) have no author or voice, just nameless Internet cowards. Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post (and others) actually tried to trace the source of the rampant emails lying about Obama's religion (as Jon Steward called it, "the only email your grandmother has ever been able to successfully forward"), and met with some interesting results.
All of which is saying that I'll probably deliver less campaign "news" than usual until we have something to talk about, and try and turn to some of the more interesting Congressional and Senate races. With the exception, of course, of the veepstakes, where my obsession is evident to all of you, I'm sure.
Current buzz in the GOP camp is all about Willard "Mitt" Romney as Mac's VP. I was on the Tim Pawlenty bandwagon two years ago, before the wagon had a band, or a wagon to speak of, but even I have to admit that Romney is a strong choice. He's a young, vibrant executive (in both state and business offices), with huge monetary networks, contacts and (puzzlingly) conservative cred. He's everything McCain isn't. They probably hate each other, but so did Kennedy and Johnson. I see two real problems with him. One is that a VP is supposed to help in a state you might not win otherwise, and Massachusetts will not be in play for McCain no matter what (though it might help him marginally in New Hampshire or Connecticut or Rhode Island or something, and the name might help in Michigan where his father was governor). The second problem is that Mitt Romney has flip-flopped on every issue McCain has, but more dramatically. Also, they hate each other and McCain does make decisions based on emotion sometimes. The same story points out that Sen. John Thune (R-SD) makes a strong top-tier selection "if McCain can't stomach picking Romney." It also mentions Joe Liberman as a longshot if McCain needs press by late summer.
Speaking of longshots, The Politico also delves into some dark horse candidates for Veep. For McCain, there's a few business types: Bill Gates, but he seems to favor Dems at the moment, and Ebay CEO Meg Whitman, who's at least more successful than Carly Fiorina. Also in there are some Congressman, like Eric Cantor (R-VA), a Republican Virginian Jew who's helpful on the map but not necessarily anywhere else. For Obama, the Congressman is Timothy Roemer (D-IN), a party player who's anti-abortion. There are other names, but none worth considering for very long outside of Colin Powell. Still, putting two black men on a ticket might be change not even Barack Obama could believe in. I still like former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) as an idea for Obama (Hagel said he'd consider it), even though he and Obama agree on basically no domestic issues. Could be a bold move to show that he's a reformer and still a change agent.
Okay, to the branch of government that's supposed to write the laws. The Michigan 7th remains a big takeover candidate for the DCCC, who will try to unseat Tim Walberg (no relation to the Wahlberg brothers of boy band fame) with one of two strong and well-funded Dems. Sharon Renier ran two years ago and came close, but the current primary favorite is State Sen. Mark Schauer, who leads the Dem minority in the state Senate. Either one will make a tough beat for Walberg in tough times for a Republican. While the Senate campaigns for Dems in Colorado continue to go well, comedian Al Franken's campaign against Senator Norm Coleman in Minnesota is having tough poll times, as he remains down double digits and mired in controversies about things he's said and written. Coleman's over 50% in the latest Q poll, but it isn't even July, and the state did elect Jesse Ventura governor. Expect this race to get close again. Meanwhile, in Oregon, Gordon Smith is playing the "I'm really, really bipartisan!" card effectively for the moment. Democrat Jeff Merkley is going to have tough times unseating Smith, low approval or no.
And, from the campaign finance reform efforts department, the US Supreme Court knocked out the "Millionaire's Amendment" part of McCain-Feingold. That was the rule that said, basically, a very rich person running for Congress had different standards than the person he or she was running against. If you donate more than $350,000 to yourself, it said, then donation limits for the other candidate were relaxed. The decision was 5-4, down ideological lines. Justice Alito, who's money=speech beliefs I alluded to as once benefitting my newspaper, wrote for the majority. Stevens wrote the dissent, with which I tend to agree. I am not the biggest fan of McCain-Feingold, but I think it's fine to say that a very wealthy person can not simply buy a seat; by relaxing the restrictions on other candidates' donations, it effectively increased free speech. If it's Constitutional to cap donations to campaigns, as we say it is, then how can it not be Constitutional to lighten those restrictions in certain circumstances?
Monday, June 30, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Supreme Court and Beer
Two magical runs in the world of sports ended yesterday. One was Turkey's campaign in the Euro 2008 soccer championships. The Turks played insane soccer for four games, managing to win despite holding a lead for a combined 4 minutes (all at the end of games). Sadly, the injury- and suspension-ravaged team (some might see some politics in all of their suspensions and denied appeals) couldn't muster more heroics to beat the heavily favored Germans. The other was Fresno State's unranked baseball team, which ended its run by winning the College World Series over eighth-ranked University of Georgia. The barely-over-.5000 FSU Bulldogs wouldn't have made the tournament at all had they not won their conference championship. They then beat 6 of the top 20 teams in the country to become the first unranked team to ever win the CWS. For you college basketball fans, it was roughly the equivalent of a 14th seed winning the title.
Okay, news.
Before I get to beer industry news, there have been three Supreme Court rulings in the last 24 hours that are of interest. For reference, a great deal of my information on Supreme Court cases usually comes from the rundown by the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where experts like Marcia Croyle almost always give fantastic and detailed examinations of the decisions.
The one that is drawing the most attention is a ruling on DC's handgun ban. 5-4 along the usual ideological lines, the court ruled that the handgun ban, as well as laws requiring all guns in a home to be locked or disassembled, was in violation of the Second Amendment. The ruling actually went beyond what even the cowboy-esque Bush administration had recommended. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, admitting that the vague limits will result in more litigation. Stevens wrote in dissent, pointing to the court's precedent that the Second Amendment was primarily for military purposes.
Personally, it is hard for me to find an issue I wrestle with more than gun control. The Second Amendment is fairly clear where the framers stood, but it is hard to argue they foresaw guns the likes of which one can buy today. The Amendment includes the word "regulated," but one also understands that the right to bear arms, but allowing one to bear them as long as they are in pieces is a little out of the spirit. There are many views to this, and smart people can disagree on what the words mean.
As odd as it is for me to think this, I think I agree with the court on this. Regulating guns is obviously okay, but blanket bans seem out of the spirit of the Amendment. One needs to remember that, at the time, there was no real distinction between a soldier and a citizen, and the founders were terrified of a powerful government. Reserving to people the right to own arms ensured that, should things go south, the people could once again rise up and take their rights back from the government that had taken them. We needn't like this point of view, but it is almost certainly what the framers were thinking. The first thing an infringing government would do, of course, is take away the people's methods of resistance (i.e., arms). For better or worse, rulings like this are in the spirit of the formation of our country, which was at all points one of individual rights and fear of tyranny.
I am aware of all of the arguments and statistics about guns in the home. I am similarly aware of the insipid idiocy of the "guns don't kill people; people kill people" argument. That's like saying "drugs don't do drugs, people do drugs," so let's make all drugs legal, which very few gun advocates would agree with. I am terrified of guns, and I don't like how easy they are to get and keep. I am very susceptible to pragmatic arguments, but I haven't seen any great evidence that the DC handgun ban has made the city a ton safer. If someone has such evidence, please post it on the site.
But I am fond of our other freedoms; I believe in the right to privacy, which is not in the Constitution (unless you count the 9th Amendment), because I believe that's in the spirit of the framers. I at one point in my life argued against what I believed to be a First Amendment infringement by the State of Pennsylvania against student newspapers. PA's argument was that removing someone's right to make money on speech was not the same as infringing on the freedom of speech; our argument was that this is not a road down which it is okay to start treading, simply because someone dislikes the idea that college students drink. The analogy to this case is imperfect, of course, but consider, if you hate this decision, how you would feel if a similar decision were handed down in re: a limitation of the First Amendment. Would you say any infringement is not okay? Incidentally, the PA Supreme Court eventually agreed with our argument over the state's. The majority decision noted that denying the right to profit from speech leaves little left in the freedom of speech itself. The man who wrote that majority decision signed on to this one, as well: Samuel Alito.
If guns are protected in this country, as they appear to be, and if they are protected for our use in self-defense, then requiring people to have them disassembled or locked up is nonsensical. There are ways to regulate guns, under this ruling, including where they can be brought, or to whom they can be sold, and I see no reason that comprehensive registration and licensing, as with cars, couldn't be instituted if the Congress had the guts to do it. Our "militia" can be "well-regulated," it just can't be abolished in some cities. Okay, gun control nuts can now sound off in the comments section.
If you were wondering, this has Pennsylvania repercussions. Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter has long been an outspoken gun control advocate, and I believe he favored a handgun ban similar to the one just ruled against. How this will shape Philadelphia remains to be seen.
The second court ruling was actually foreseen by a recent episode of Boston Legal, where James Spader's character gets a chance to argue in front of the US Supreme Court against the death penalty in the case of child rape, which four states have. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled such a penalty in violation of the 6th Amendment, which protects us from cruel and unusual punishment. Regardless of one's feelings on the death penalty, we can all agree that child rape is horrifying. We can also agree that, for all its horror, it is not a final offense; it is perhaps more sickening than murder, but it is less severe in its consequences by any legal understanding. Many victims of child rape, such as Maya Angelou, have survived the crime and gone on to live inspirational and full lives, psychologically damaged, perhaps, but not dead. There are also pragmatic arguments: The endless appeals of the death penalty force survivors to go through hearing after hearing, making it more painful for them, advocacy groups argue. Those same groups argue that the finality of the death penalty, if it ever happens (which it hasn't in 44 years), makes reporting of child rape even less likely than it sadly already is. Still, the Court wasn't interested in those arguments, as much as it was the fact that so many states - and the federal government, and other governments - see child rape as a non-capital offense that the "cruel and unusual" threshold was easily reached.
The third case, with which it is harder to agree or disagree, is the end of the 19-year battle over damages from the Exxon Valdes oil spill. The Court lowered the punitive damages on Exxon from $2.5 billion to $500 million. Before you decry this as another pro-business decision by a pro-business court, you should know that the Court voted not along ideological lines, but rather according to a technical understanding of maritime law and what, exactly, is fair when it comes to punitive damages. Punitive damages, remember, have nothing to do with the actual damage done, or very little. Those are compensatory damages, and the $500 million of those that Exxon already paid out to the people of Alaska whose livelihood and environment it destroyed aren't affected. This has to do strictly with punitive damages, monetary awards given out by courts to the plaintiffs just to smack the offending party around for being so bad. It's never made sense to me why these damages go to the plaintiffs, if they're not for anything in specific but instead are just to serve as a deterrent for companies (in this, I believe, they are necessary, since the threat of massive punitive judgments is one of the only things to prevent corporations from perpetrating massive and damaging fraud). But in any case, Justice David Souter, one of the more liberal judges, wrote for the majority, explaining that, when it comes to maritime law, the median punitive damages award was 1:1, as far as punitive dollars:compensatory dollars, not the 10:1 or so that this originally was. On those grounds, the Court adjusted the ruling, angering lots and lots of Alaskans.
Lastly, Anheuser-Busch gave its expected rejection of Belgian beer-maker InBev's hostile takeover bid, and plans to unveil a vast plan to $500 million in costs. That will likely include many, many jobs in the St. Louis area, which will likely anger the local government. If InBev's proposal will result in more U.S. jobs than A-B's, the tides could turn in this beverage battle quickly. Already, A-B ally Modelo is backing off and talking with In-Bev. In this day and age, many are concerned that selling one of America's largest family-owned companies to Belgians will send the wrong message for a nation already shipping jobs oversees. People will no doubt react emotionally and not bother to look at InBev's incredibly progressive, sustainable and admirable locally-oriented business practices, instead saying that A-B is an American icon with American jobs that stands for American integrity.
Some of you are familiar with the town of Latrobe, home to Arnold Palmer and once home to Rolling Rock beer. I say "once" because Anheuser-Busch bought the iconic beer about two years ago, and then promptly moved it to Newark, NJ. It may go without saying that there is not much else in Latrobe, as far as job opportunities for the hundreds of workers that A-B screwed when they picked up and moved. I'm sure the move was profitable for the nation's largest brewer, but I wonder if the profits were significant enough to justify killing an entire town and removing the one thing of which that town's denizens were the most proud. Since that happened, I have not spent one dime on any product made by Anheuser-Busch, and I go out of my to buy Sam Adams, which bailed the brewery workers out and is now proud to be made in Latrobe, PA. I will hope for this takeover, not because I prefer Stella Artois to Bud Light, but because one of the companies involved has already shown that it could care less about honest, hard-working Americans; unfortunately, it was the American company.
Okay, news.
Before I get to beer industry news, there have been three Supreme Court rulings in the last 24 hours that are of interest. For reference, a great deal of my information on Supreme Court cases usually comes from the rundown by the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where experts like Marcia Croyle almost always give fantastic and detailed examinations of the decisions.
The one that is drawing the most attention is a ruling on DC's handgun ban. 5-4 along the usual ideological lines, the court ruled that the handgun ban, as well as laws requiring all guns in a home to be locked or disassembled, was in violation of the Second Amendment. The ruling actually went beyond what even the cowboy-esque Bush administration had recommended. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, admitting that the vague limits will result in more litigation. Stevens wrote in dissent, pointing to the court's precedent that the Second Amendment was primarily for military purposes.
Personally, it is hard for me to find an issue I wrestle with more than gun control. The Second Amendment is fairly clear where the framers stood, but it is hard to argue they foresaw guns the likes of which one can buy today. The Amendment includes the word "regulated," but one also understands that the right to bear arms, but allowing one to bear them as long as they are in pieces is a little out of the spirit. There are many views to this, and smart people can disagree on what the words mean.
As odd as it is for me to think this, I think I agree with the court on this. Regulating guns is obviously okay, but blanket bans seem out of the spirit of the Amendment. One needs to remember that, at the time, there was no real distinction between a soldier and a citizen, and the founders were terrified of a powerful government. Reserving to people the right to own arms ensured that, should things go south, the people could once again rise up and take their rights back from the government that had taken them. We needn't like this point of view, but it is almost certainly what the framers were thinking. The first thing an infringing government would do, of course, is take away the people's methods of resistance (i.e., arms). For better or worse, rulings like this are in the spirit of the formation of our country, which was at all points one of individual rights and fear of tyranny.
I am aware of all of the arguments and statistics about guns in the home. I am similarly aware of the insipid idiocy of the "guns don't kill people; people kill people" argument. That's like saying "drugs don't do drugs, people do drugs," so let's make all drugs legal, which very few gun advocates would agree with. I am terrified of guns, and I don't like how easy they are to get and keep. I am very susceptible to pragmatic arguments, but I haven't seen any great evidence that the DC handgun ban has made the city a ton safer. If someone has such evidence, please post it on the site.
But I am fond of our other freedoms; I believe in the right to privacy, which is not in the Constitution (unless you count the 9th Amendment), because I believe that's in the spirit of the framers. I at one point in my life argued against what I believed to be a First Amendment infringement by the State of Pennsylvania against student newspapers. PA's argument was that removing someone's right to make money on speech was not the same as infringing on the freedom of speech; our argument was that this is not a road down which it is okay to start treading, simply because someone dislikes the idea that college students drink. The analogy to this case is imperfect, of course, but consider, if you hate this decision, how you would feel if a similar decision were handed down in re: a limitation of the First Amendment. Would you say any infringement is not okay? Incidentally, the PA Supreme Court eventually agreed with our argument over the state's. The majority decision noted that denying the right to profit from speech leaves little left in the freedom of speech itself. The man who wrote that majority decision signed on to this one, as well: Samuel Alito.
If guns are protected in this country, as they appear to be, and if they are protected for our use in self-defense, then requiring people to have them disassembled or locked up is nonsensical. There are ways to regulate guns, under this ruling, including where they can be brought, or to whom they can be sold, and I see no reason that comprehensive registration and licensing, as with cars, couldn't be instituted if the Congress had the guts to do it. Our "militia" can be "well-regulated," it just can't be abolished in some cities. Okay, gun control nuts can now sound off in the comments section.
If you were wondering, this has Pennsylvania repercussions. Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter has long been an outspoken gun control advocate, and I believe he favored a handgun ban similar to the one just ruled against. How this will shape Philadelphia remains to be seen.
The second court ruling was actually foreseen by a recent episode of Boston Legal, where James Spader's character gets a chance to argue in front of the US Supreme Court against the death penalty in the case of child rape, which four states have. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled such a penalty in violation of the 6th Amendment, which protects us from cruel and unusual punishment. Regardless of one's feelings on the death penalty, we can all agree that child rape is horrifying. We can also agree that, for all its horror, it is not a final offense; it is perhaps more sickening than murder, but it is less severe in its consequences by any legal understanding. Many victims of child rape, such as Maya Angelou, have survived the crime and gone on to live inspirational and full lives, psychologically damaged, perhaps, but not dead. There are also pragmatic arguments: The endless appeals of the death penalty force survivors to go through hearing after hearing, making it more painful for them, advocacy groups argue. Those same groups argue that the finality of the death penalty, if it ever happens (which it hasn't in 44 years), makes reporting of child rape even less likely than it sadly already is. Still, the Court wasn't interested in those arguments, as much as it was the fact that so many states - and the federal government, and other governments - see child rape as a non-capital offense that the "cruel and unusual" threshold was easily reached.
The third case, with which it is harder to agree or disagree, is the end of the 19-year battle over damages from the Exxon Valdes oil spill. The Court lowered the punitive damages on Exxon from $2.5 billion to $500 million. Before you decry this as another pro-business decision by a pro-business court, you should know that the Court voted not along ideological lines, but rather according to a technical understanding of maritime law and what, exactly, is fair when it comes to punitive damages. Punitive damages, remember, have nothing to do with the actual damage done, or very little. Those are compensatory damages, and the $500 million of those that Exxon already paid out to the people of Alaska whose livelihood and environment it destroyed aren't affected. This has to do strictly with punitive damages, monetary awards given out by courts to the plaintiffs just to smack the offending party around for being so bad. It's never made sense to me why these damages go to the plaintiffs, if they're not for anything in specific but instead are just to serve as a deterrent for companies (in this, I believe, they are necessary, since the threat of massive punitive judgments is one of the only things to prevent corporations from perpetrating massive and damaging fraud). But in any case, Justice David Souter, one of the more liberal judges, wrote for the majority, explaining that, when it comes to maritime law, the median punitive damages award was 1:1, as far as punitive dollars:compensatory dollars, not the 10:1 or so that this originally was. On those grounds, the Court adjusted the ruling, angering lots and lots of Alaskans.
Lastly, Anheuser-Busch gave its expected rejection of Belgian beer-maker InBev's hostile takeover bid, and plans to unveil a vast plan to $500 million in costs. That will likely include many, many jobs in the St. Louis area, which will likely anger the local government. If InBev's proposal will result in more U.S. jobs than A-B's, the tides could turn in this beverage battle quickly. Already, A-B ally Modelo is backing off and talking with In-Bev. In this day and age, many are concerned that selling one of America's largest family-owned companies to Belgians will send the wrong message for a nation already shipping jobs oversees. People will no doubt react emotionally and not bother to look at InBev's incredibly progressive, sustainable and admirable locally-oriented business practices, instead saying that A-B is an American icon with American jobs that stands for American integrity.
Some of you are familiar with the town of Latrobe, home to Arnold Palmer and once home to Rolling Rock beer. I say "once" because Anheuser-Busch bought the iconic beer about two years ago, and then promptly moved it to Newark, NJ. It may go without saying that there is not much else in Latrobe, as far as job opportunities for the hundreds of workers that A-B screwed when they picked up and moved. I'm sure the move was profitable for the nation's largest brewer, but I wonder if the profits were significant enough to justify killing an entire town and removing the one thing of which that town's denizens were the most proud. Since that happened, I have not spent one dime on any product made by Anheuser-Busch, and I go out of my to buy Sam Adams, which bailed the brewery workers out and is now proud to be made in Latrobe, PA. I will hope for this takeover, not because I prefer Stella Artois to Bud Light, but because one of the companies involved has already shown that it could care less about honest, hard-working Americans; unfortunately, it was the American company.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Mid-week Reading
Not the Berks County city where I sometimes work; just some good links today.
First, if you ever watch cable news and wondered what the heck a "Democratic/Republican Strategist" is, read this Politico story about who gets on TV and why. The most funny thing is that none of the people involved think of themselves as strategists. The word "strategist" has really just come to mean "sympathizer" in cable parlance. I will say this, though: I'd rather have something descriptive, even if it's not denotatively accurate, than nothing. Amy Holmes, who they quote in the story, is not a Republican Strategist; she was a speechwriter for Bill Frist. But she is a Republican, and I'd like to know that when she's analyzing issues on TV. On the other hand, I guess you could argue that, if her arguments are compelling (which Holmes' often are), who cares about her personal views?
If you missed it, McCain's Chief Political Adviser, Charlie Black, was a lobbyist for guys like Ferdinand Marcos and Mubuto Sese Seko, and many other African mass-murderers you can think of. Then, this week, he said that a terror attack would "certainly" help John McCain's chances of getting elected. He apologized, McCain said it was a bad thing to say, no one got fired. But he said it in this very interesting story in Fortune, which profiles McCain's evolution from maverick to populist/panderist (depending on your point of view) nominee. This is a pretty good example of how one throwaway line overtakes pages of solid journalism in the public eye. And let's let Charlie Black off the hook: He was just saying what he believes to be true, which I encourage. He wasn't saying he hopes there will be an attack, just that if there were it would probably be good for his candidate's campaign. We can't constantly denounce lying if we get upset when guys like that finally tell the truth. Plus, Charlie Black has something going for him in this regard: No matter what he says, it can not be the worst thing he has said or done. No matter his actions on the campaign, he will have said and done many, many worse things in his career as a lobbyist for mass murderers.
Here's a cute little editorial from the USA Today saying that No Child Left Behind is working, because achievement gaps are narrowing. Puzzlingly, this attempt to defend the policy is draped in acknowledgments of its shortcomings, including - especially puzzlingly - a statement that the system is better at identifying troubles than fixing them. So, then, how did a program that doesn't fix things get credit for fixing things? Okay, let's say I take a baseball team, and I say "You guys stink. We're going to institute standards, and a test, and you all have to pass the test in two years," and I the test I give them is a basic drill of fly fishing skills. Well, if the coach and manager know that their jobs depend on performing well on the fishing test, they'll teach fishing, and the achievement gaps in fishing will close. That does not mean I have created a good baseball team. NCLB does have merits, mostly in its conception. The results you are seeing are not due to any of them.
For those of you looking for something to read, the Washington Post's OnFaith contributors have a list of the best books they've ever read.
For those of you foreign policy wonks, what's going on between Syria and Israel is really, really frikkin' interesting. David Ignatius summarizes how this might work out better than anyone thought.
And for those of you Pennsylvanians, it's that time of year where we have a budget crisis showdown. I'm still about four and a half days from getting annoyed that we don't have a budget.
In many administrations, this would be a new low: When the EPA sent the administration an email containing a policy the Bush team knew it would not like, they decided they had only three options: Break their own law by refusing to follow it, follow the policy and force businesses to spend money regulating greenhouse gases, or just ignore the email. They chose door number three, which is the governmental equivalent of sticking ones fingers in ones ears and screaming "I can't hear you." Sadly, it barely registers as a surprise to me.
Via RCP:
First, if you ever watch cable news and wondered what the heck a "Democratic/Republican Strategist" is, read this Politico story about who gets on TV and why. The most funny thing is that none of the people involved think of themselves as strategists. The word "strategist" has really just come to mean "sympathizer" in cable parlance. I will say this, though: I'd rather have something descriptive, even if it's not denotatively accurate, than nothing. Amy Holmes, who they quote in the story, is not a Republican Strategist; she was a speechwriter for Bill Frist. But she is a Republican, and I'd like to know that when she's analyzing issues on TV. On the other hand, I guess you could argue that, if her arguments are compelling (which Holmes' often are), who cares about her personal views?
If you missed it, McCain's Chief Political Adviser, Charlie Black, was a lobbyist for guys like Ferdinand Marcos and Mubuto Sese Seko, and many other African mass-murderers you can think of. Then, this week, he said that a terror attack would "certainly" help John McCain's chances of getting elected. He apologized, McCain said it was a bad thing to say, no one got fired. But he said it in this very interesting story in Fortune, which profiles McCain's evolution from maverick to populist/panderist (depending on your point of view) nominee. This is a pretty good example of how one throwaway line overtakes pages of solid journalism in the public eye. And let's let Charlie Black off the hook: He was just saying what he believes to be true, which I encourage. He wasn't saying he hopes there will be an attack, just that if there were it would probably be good for his candidate's campaign. We can't constantly denounce lying if we get upset when guys like that finally tell the truth. Plus, Charlie Black has something going for him in this regard: No matter what he says, it can not be the worst thing he has said or done. No matter his actions on the campaign, he will have said and done many, many worse things in his career as a lobbyist for mass murderers.
Here's a cute little editorial from the USA Today saying that No Child Left Behind is working, because achievement gaps are narrowing. Puzzlingly, this attempt to defend the policy is draped in acknowledgments of its shortcomings, including - especially puzzlingly - a statement that the system is better at identifying troubles than fixing them. So, then, how did a program that doesn't fix things get credit for fixing things? Okay, let's say I take a baseball team, and I say "You guys stink. We're going to institute standards, and a test, and you all have to pass the test in two years," and I the test I give them is a basic drill of fly fishing skills. Well, if the coach and manager know that their jobs depend on performing well on the fishing test, they'll teach fishing, and the achievement gaps in fishing will close. That does not mean I have created a good baseball team. NCLB does have merits, mostly in its conception. The results you are seeing are not due to any of them.
For those of you looking for something to read, the Washington Post's OnFaith contributors have a list of the best books they've ever read.
For those of you foreign policy wonks, what's going on between Syria and Israel is really, really frikkin' interesting. David Ignatius summarizes how this might work out better than anyone thought.
And for those of you Pennsylvanians, it's that time of year where we have a budget crisis showdown. I'm still about four and a half days from getting annoyed that we don't have a budget.
In many administrations, this would be a new low: When the EPA sent the administration an email containing a policy the Bush team knew it would not like, they decided they had only three options: Break their own law by refusing to follow it, follow the policy and force businesses to spend money regulating greenhouse gases, or just ignore the email. They chose door number three, which is the governmental equivalent of sticking ones fingers in ones ears and screaming "I can't hear you." Sadly, it barely registers as a surprise to me.
Via RCP:
- Free-marketeer John Stossel on why speculating is grrrrr-eat!
- Donald Luskin is appalled to find out that Obama's Social Security plan might cause rich people to be taxed on ALL (gasp) of their wages! What do you think we are, poor? Middle class? The cap on S.S. is one of the least fair things in our tax code.
- Paul Wolfowitz says the key to getting Mugabe out of power is more carrots, fewer sticks. Insert irony reference here, if you like, but in this case he's probably right.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Breaking News: Barack Obama is a Politician
The media theme this week seems to be that columnists who spent the last 18 months writing about Obama are shocked - shocked! - to find out that he is a politician. David Broder's column this week on Barack Obama says that this is when people are starting to make up their minds about fall, and that Barack's not going in for the 10 town hall meetings and now not doing public financing are making him seem unconcerned about the people. Another David, this one Brooks of the NYT, writes about the Two Obamas:
Perhaps I was not naive enough to be an Obama supporter in the primary, but was anyone operating under the assumption he didn't want to win? You can't run for president hoping to lose, or not really caring that much about the outcome. It's just too hard and life-consuming, and it doesn't pay that well. Everyone who runs for president and gets anywhere does so because he or she legitimately believes that he or she is the single best person for the job, and that winning that job makes the world a better place. Consequently, winning is a big, big deal. It's the reason you run.
Of course Barack Obama, son of a single mother, first black editor of the Yale Law Review, Chicago community organizer, keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, has some sense of how to play politics. He's actually, as you may have noticed, quite good at it. That's part of what people like me like about him; he's not the "Obambi" that he got tagged with earlier, not in the slightest. The analogies to Lincoln work here; Lincoln, too was underestimated because of his somber, quiet demeanor, but was a shrewd political operator. And, just in case we forget what we're talking about here, that's what you want in office!
Look, I have lost a lot of respect for John McCain over the past year, as he has come to embrace the right-wing policies that haven't worked in a trade for institutional support. But if he had just sold out on, say, immigration or something, it wouldn't bother me that much. Trading off on social issues (where the president has limited reach, anyway) to gain support is just something a president is going to have to do; it's how compromise works. What bothered me is how quickly and completely McCain just gave up the views most dear to him (taxes for the uber-wealthy, religious fanatics backing him) if only someone would donate to his campaign. Making compromises I expect of a politician; making strategic campaign decisions (like Obama's) I thought went without saying.
I think part of the problem with this is that so much of Obama's appeal is that he's new and fresh and wants to clean up Washington, etc., so people have mapped onto him what they want to see. Many politicians do that successfully (Clinton, JFK, Reagan, recently), so that's a virtue. In the frenzy of hope and change, we saw that this man has the potential to be a different type of politician. I still believe that, and I think what we're seeing even now indicates that. Of course, we could be wrong, and things can change (many once thought similarly about McCain). But being a different kind of politician is not the same as being an anti-politician.
Brooks' piece is in the form of a warning to Republicans, who he suspects were thinking Obama was just that. The warning is clear: Just because he's different, don't assume he isn't good. For you sports fans out there, Randall Cunningham was a different type of quarterback than the 1980s were used to, but those who thought he didn't belong on the field often got beat by him (if you're old school, Fran Tarkenton works just as well). Now, Brooks' points all individually have flaws. He criticizes Obama for not working hard in the Senate, which most reports say he did in his short time there. He hits Obama for voting present in the Illinois legislature, but as I pointed out here, facts don't indicate that Obama did that much more more than anyone else. The current gossip on the nixed joint town hall meetings was that the McCain camp wanted all 10 forums or none at all, and refused to negotiate with the Obama camp, probably hoping they'd back out so they could attack him for it. But all of the individual points not being right doesn't stop Brooks' greater point from being accurate: If you thought this person was somehow not a real politician with real ambitions, you were fooling yourself.
Leave it to George Will to inject actual policy substance to the debate. In his column analyzing Barack's advisors' strategies, he finds a lot to like. In this, Will and I are on the same page. Restricting choices goes against my Libertarian grain; I dislike mandating that citizens do things. Obama's team, though, tends toward a middle path of allowing people to opt out of certain plans, but setting the "default" to opting in. Sort of like magazine subscriptions or cell phone plans: You have to tell them if you DON'T want to continue, rather than if you do. Except, instead of this being for products you might not want, this would be for government programs about which you might not have known. It's a good and solid Libertarian-esque answer to a tough question of how to get the government to serve its citizens without infringing.
Last, some Veep buzz. Chris Cillizza points out that Chuck Hagel didn't say no to the idea of being Obama's VP. The Politico lists three women who might be McCain's options: Former Hewlett- Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. I've always been underwhelmed with Fiorina, who was at best an uninspiring corporate suit at H-P, pursuing old-school, not-particularly-successful strategies and left after a few years with the company worse off than when she took the helm (that said, the right wing business guys love her). Hutchinson has certainly upped her TV presence; she's been all over the programs of the last few months, schilling for McCain and GOP policy. But she's a senator from a state they'll win already. Palin is the most interesting; at 42, the former Miss Alaska candidate is the most popular in the country (85-5 approval/disapproval), and puts an attractive, young new face to go with McCain's, and current polling in Alaska has it a toss-up. Still, hard to imagine the youth breaking away from Obama at all, and Palin doesn't do much to help McCain with his base. Plus, if McCain really loses Alaska's 3 reliably Republican electoral votes, then he has bigger problems than losing Alaska.
On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes. This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator.
Perhaps I was not naive enough to be an Obama supporter in the primary, but was anyone operating under the assumption he didn't want to win? You can't run for president hoping to lose, or not really caring that much about the outcome. It's just too hard and life-consuming, and it doesn't pay that well. Everyone who runs for president and gets anywhere does so because he or she legitimately believes that he or she is the single best person for the job, and that winning that job makes the world a better place. Consequently, winning is a big, big deal. It's the reason you run.
Of course Barack Obama, son of a single mother, first black editor of the Yale Law Review, Chicago community organizer, keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, has some sense of how to play politics. He's actually, as you may have noticed, quite good at it. That's part of what people like me like about him; he's not the "Obambi" that he got tagged with earlier, not in the slightest. The analogies to Lincoln work here; Lincoln, too was underestimated because of his somber, quiet demeanor, but was a shrewd political operator. And, just in case we forget what we're talking about here, that's what you want in office!
Look, I have lost a lot of respect for John McCain over the past year, as he has come to embrace the right-wing policies that haven't worked in a trade for institutional support. But if he had just sold out on, say, immigration or something, it wouldn't bother me that much. Trading off on social issues (where the president has limited reach, anyway) to gain support is just something a president is going to have to do; it's how compromise works. What bothered me is how quickly and completely McCain just gave up the views most dear to him (taxes for the uber-wealthy, religious fanatics backing him) if only someone would donate to his campaign. Making compromises I expect of a politician; making strategic campaign decisions (like Obama's) I thought went without saying.
I think part of the problem with this is that so much of Obama's appeal is that he's new and fresh and wants to clean up Washington, etc., so people have mapped onto him what they want to see. Many politicians do that successfully (Clinton, JFK, Reagan, recently), so that's a virtue. In the frenzy of hope and change, we saw that this man has the potential to be a different type of politician. I still believe that, and I think what we're seeing even now indicates that. Of course, we could be wrong, and things can change (many once thought similarly about McCain). But being a different kind of politician is not the same as being an anti-politician.
Brooks' piece is in the form of a warning to Republicans, who he suspects were thinking Obama was just that. The warning is clear: Just because he's different, don't assume he isn't good. For you sports fans out there, Randall Cunningham was a different type of quarterback than the 1980s were used to, but those who thought he didn't belong on the field often got beat by him (if you're old school, Fran Tarkenton works just as well). Now, Brooks' points all individually have flaws. He criticizes Obama for not working hard in the Senate, which most reports say he did in his short time there. He hits Obama for voting present in the Illinois legislature, but as I pointed out here, facts don't indicate that Obama did that much more more than anyone else. The current gossip on the nixed joint town hall meetings was that the McCain camp wanted all 10 forums or none at all, and refused to negotiate with the Obama camp, probably hoping they'd back out so they could attack him for it. But all of the individual points not being right doesn't stop Brooks' greater point from being accurate: If you thought this person was somehow not a real politician with real ambitions, you were fooling yourself.
Leave it to George Will to inject actual policy substance to the debate. In his column analyzing Barack's advisors' strategies, he finds a lot to like. In this, Will and I are on the same page. Restricting choices goes against my Libertarian grain; I dislike mandating that citizens do things. Obama's team, though, tends toward a middle path of allowing people to opt out of certain plans, but setting the "default" to opting in. Sort of like magazine subscriptions or cell phone plans: You have to tell them if you DON'T want to continue, rather than if you do. Except, instead of this being for products you might not want, this would be for government programs about which you might not have known. It's a good and solid Libertarian-esque answer to a tough question of how to get the government to serve its citizens without infringing.
Last, some Veep buzz. Chris Cillizza points out that Chuck Hagel didn't say no to the idea of being Obama's VP. The Politico lists three women who might be McCain's options: Former Hewlett- Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. I've always been underwhelmed with Fiorina, who was at best an uninspiring corporate suit at H-P, pursuing old-school, not-particularly-successful strategies and left after a few years with the company worse off than when she took the helm (that said, the right wing business guys love her). Hutchinson has certainly upped her TV presence; she's been all over the programs of the last few months, schilling for McCain and GOP policy. But she's a senator from a state they'll win already. Palin is the most interesting; at 42, the former Miss Alaska candidate is the most popular in the country (85-5 approval/disapproval), and puts an attractive, young new face to go with McCain's, and current polling in Alaska has it a toss-up. Still, hard to imagine the youth breaking away from Obama at all, and Palin doesn't do much to help McCain with his base. Plus, if McCain really loses Alaska's 3 reliably Republican electoral votes, then he has bigger problems than losing Alaska.
Monday, June 23, 2008
On the Public Financing System
Good morning. Later today, we'll examine some of the kerfuffle around campaign finance reform and Barack Obama's recent and unprecedented decision to opt out of the public financing system.
But first: In re the plight of local Morning Call reporters, my father the doctor pointed me to a couple of cases this spring in which a similar move was aimed at peer-reviewed medical journals.
Medical journals, like most academic journals, publish their scholarly articles based on a process of "peer review," where other academics look at the articles submitted and then determine which ones are the most important to publish. Those meetings are closed, and all of the discussions about what to publish are confidential. As you might imagine, drug companies fund a lot of studies, many of them set up to showcase the virtues of their products, or occasionally just outright rigged. The peer review process is what ensures that the studies doctors see in the big journals are well-done and significant in their findings.
Perhaps not stunningly, Pfizer is currently embroiled in some litigation for saying some things about a certain type of painkiller that weren't so much true as designed to boost sales. It's a drug company; who can be stunned at a little bit of truth-hedging? What was more surprising was that they grabbed a page out of the gangster playbook, and just subpeonaed everything from the internal meeting of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Annals of Internal Medicine. Pfizer wasn't looking for anything specific, they just asked the journals to turn over everything in case there was something there Pfizer could use to humiliate, intimidate, or discredit AIM and JAMA or doctors involved.
In March, the district courts in Chicago and elsewhere said no, Pfizer, you can't just destroy a working system because you're unhappy someone caught you lying. But one would be surprised if this is the last we hear of this. There is no federal law on this, just state law, and peer-reviewed journals are one step removed from the freedom of the press the First Amendment addresses. Certainly, a strict constructionist like Scalia would say that there is no Constitutional protection as it stands (though Alito might be more receptive). Drug companies are not renowned for their sense of civic spirit, and they are major donors to lots of politicians, especially Republicans. Peer review is a long-held practice in all academic journals, and while it has its flaws, it is a good one that usually results in the best research getting published. And whatever it doesn't do perfectly can not be remedied by letting the drug companies sit in on every meeting. If academics aren't free to make their own decisions, how can we know those decisions are in our best interests? If the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that when companies regulate their own industries, we get disaster.
Okay, on to campaign finance.
As you may have heard, Barack Obama announced last week that he will be the first general election candidate to opt out of the public financing system since it was . This system gives the candidate matching funds for every dollar raised, but the ways he can spend the money are limited. It's quite complex, and the system is funded largely by tax money directed from about 8 percent of Americans who check that box on our taxes that sends three bucks to the system. Since it ends up being in the $80 million range, every candidate so far has decided it's worth the limitations, especially since you can get other people to spend money that doesn't count toward your limit. Of course, given that Barack Obama can raise hundreds of millions with his broad donor base, that number doesn't seem so big to him.
The big dustup is that he signed a paper early in his candidacy. I am quoting now from 2008 Central's excellent dissection of the issue:
In September 2007, [Obama] responded “yes” to a survey question from Midwest Democracy Network that asked: “If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?.”
Obama also wrote a longer, more detailed response:
In February 2007, I proposed a novel way to preserve the strength of the public financing system in the 2008 election. My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.
I am getting a little tired of the endless talking-head mantra of how Obama "broke his pledge," "went back on his word" and "flip-flopped." A read of that statement pretty clearly shows that he never exactly promised to just opt into the system, no matter what. In a field where the major actors break words, change minds, and flip-flop all the time, we should be diligent about what it actually means when someone says they will do something. In this case, he agreed to use public financing if he could reach an agreement with the Republican.
Now, he is open to several other criticisms. This is certainly a legalistic reading (perhaps to be expected from a law professor), and is definitely some Clintonesque linguistic wriggling. Additionally, as 2008 Central points out, Obama's video message spoke of the public financing system as "broken," and it hasn't changed since he signed this pledge, where he seems to think it's not bad. And, even if he is sincere in his comments, Obama is clearly guilty of taking a stance that benefits him. All of those things are fair to say about Obama. But what McCain and the pundits keep saying is that he somehow went back on a promise that he never exactly made.
There are, to me, some other things that might be going on here, as I re-watch Obama's video message. One is about politics, and that is that, when you can out-raise your opponent for the first time in your party's recent history, you take that advantage if you want to win. So this was a no-brainer. More money is better, even if the pundits don't like it for the moment. But, then, does that make Obama the same type of politician as everyone else? All I can say is that I'm happy he opted out.
First, it's a little strange that being the first to do something could result in someone being criticized for being like everyone else. Put it this way: If George W. Bush, who was renowned for his fundraising and creative use of soft money, used the same system twice, how groundbreakingly anti-Washington could it really be? And, in the one meeting between Obama and McCain camps on fundraising, I am sure that the agreement Obama alluded to last September was not in the works; how could McCain eschew 527 groups, when they are his primary change to win? He's not going to reign in the swift-boaters, he's going to use them as best he can. No one runs for president without wanting to win, and McCain has proven this time that winning is more important than any personal stance he might have. Obama has no agreement, only a guy who wants to beat him at all costs. So why adhere to a system that only hurts him? Also, whether or not this is the reason he wants to do it, Obama's system is more honest than the public one. As someone who has worked around the money that these laws supposedly control, I can firmly say that they do nothing to control how much of it raised, spent, or shuffled around. When Obama speaks about his broad base of donors as an effective public financing system, he's kind of right. Of course, he still has large donors to whom he will be indebted, but none of them will be as important as any one guy at the head of a 527 would be under the public system. This way, his name can be on every ad he wants to run. And, unlike the public system, everyone who sends money to Obama is choosing to.
So, Obama is guilty of wanting to win, and of changing his mind on the virtues of public financing (as I did), and of making decisions that help him. In exchange, even if you assume the worst intentions, the system he will use in the end is the most honest one we will have seen in a long time. Also, we may see the end of our current attempts at campaign finance reform, which are somewhere between unconstitutional and completely ineffectual. And the worst thing you can even claim he did is not adhere - in spirit, not letter - to a pledge he signed with no one a year ago? Perhaps I am guilty of seeing this as not that bad because I agree with the decision he came to (whereas I find McCain's switches, to pro-torture, pro-Bush tax cuts, and anti-immigration reform, all poor policy), but it just doesn't seem that bad to me.
But first: In re the plight of local Morning Call reporters, my father the doctor pointed me to a couple of cases this spring in which a similar move was aimed at peer-reviewed medical journals.
Medical journals, like most academic journals, publish their scholarly articles based on a process of "peer review," where other academics look at the articles submitted and then determine which ones are the most important to publish. Those meetings are closed, and all of the discussions about what to publish are confidential. As you might imagine, drug companies fund a lot of studies, many of them set up to showcase the virtues of their products, or occasionally just outright rigged. The peer review process is what ensures that the studies doctors see in the big journals are well-done and significant in their findings.
Perhaps not stunningly, Pfizer is currently embroiled in some litigation for saying some things about a certain type of painkiller that weren't so much true as designed to boost sales. It's a drug company; who can be stunned at a little bit of truth-hedging? What was more surprising was that they grabbed a page out of the gangster playbook, and just subpeonaed everything from the internal meeting of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Annals of Internal Medicine. Pfizer wasn't looking for anything specific, they just asked the journals to turn over everything in case there was something there Pfizer could use to humiliate, intimidate, or discredit AIM and JAMA or doctors involved.
In March, the district courts in Chicago and elsewhere said no, Pfizer, you can't just destroy a working system because you're unhappy someone caught you lying. But one would be surprised if this is the last we hear of this. There is no federal law on this, just state law, and peer-reviewed journals are one step removed from the freedom of the press the First Amendment addresses. Certainly, a strict constructionist like Scalia would say that there is no Constitutional protection as it stands (though Alito might be more receptive). Drug companies are not renowned for their sense of civic spirit, and they are major donors to lots of politicians, especially Republicans. Peer review is a long-held practice in all academic journals, and while it has its flaws, it is a good one that usually results in the best research getting published. And whatever it doesn't do perfectly can not be remedied by letting the drug companies sit in on every meeting. If academics aren't free to make their own decisions, how can we know those decisions are in our best interests? If the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that when companies regulate their own industries, we get disaster.
Okay, on to campaign finance.
As you may have heard, Barack Obama announced last week that he will be the first general election candidate to opt out of the public financing system since it was . This system gives the candidate matching funds for every dollar raised, but the ways he can spend the money are limited. It's quite complex, and the system is funded largely by tax money directed from about 8 percent of Americans who check that box on our taxes that sends three bucks to the system. Since it ends up being in the $80 million range, every candidate so far has decided it's worth the limitations, especially since you can get other people to spend money that doesn't count toward your limit. Of course, given that Barack Obama can raise hundreds of millions with his broad donor base, that number doesn't seem so big to him.
The big dustup is that he signed a paper early in his candidacy. I am quoting now from 2008 Central's excellent dissection of the issue:
In September 2007, [Obama] responded “yes” to a survey question from Midwest Democracy Network that asked: “If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?.”
Obama also wrote a longer, more detailed response:
In February 2007, I proposed a novel way to preserve the strength of the public financing system in the 2008 election. My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.
I am getting a little tired of the endless talking-head mantra of how Obama "broke his pledge," "went back on his word" and "flip-flopped." A read of that statement pretty clearly shows that he never exactly promised to just opt into the system, no matter what. In a field where the major actors break words, change minds, and flip-flop all the time, we should be diligent about what it actually means when someone says they will do something. In this case, he agreed to use public financing if he could reach an agreement with the Republican.
Now, he is open to several other criticisms. This is certainly a legalistic reading (perhaps to be expected from a law professor), and is definitely some Clintonesque linguistic wriggling. Additionally, as 2008 Central points out, Obama's video message spoke of the public financing system as "broken," and it hasn't changed since he signed this pledge, where he seems to think it's not bad. And, even if he is sincere in his comments, Obama is clearly guilty of taking a stance that benefits him. All of those things are fair to say about Obama. But what McCain and the pundits keep saying is that he somehow went back on a promise that he never exactly made.
There are, to me, some other things that might be going on here, as I re-watch Obama's video message. One is about politics, and that is that, when you can out-raise your opponent for the first time in your party's recent history, you take that advantage if you want to win. So this was a no-brainer. More money is better, even if the pundits don't like it for the moment. But, then, does that make Obama the same type of politician as everyone else? All I can say is that I'm happy he opted out.
First, it's a little strange that being the first to do something could result in someone being criticized for being like everyone else. Put it this way: If George W. Bush, who was renowned for his fundraising and creative use of soft money, used the same system twice, how groundbreakingly anti-Washington could it really be? And, in the one meeting between Obama and McCain camps on fundraising, I am sure that the agreement Obama alluded to last September was not in the works; how could McCain eschew 527 groups, when they are his primary change to win? He's not going to reign in the swift-boaters, he's going to use them as best he can. No one runs for president without wanting to win, and McCain has proven this time that winning is more important than any personal stance he might have. Obama has no agreement, only a guy who wants to beat him at all costs. So why adhere to a system that only hurts him? Also, whether or not this is the reason he wants to do it, Obama's system is more honest than the public one. As someone who has worked around the money that these laws supposedly control, I can firmly say that they do nothing to control how much of it raised, spent, or shuffled around. When Obama speaks about his broad base of donors as an effective public financing system, he's kind of right. Of course, he still has large donors to whom he will be indebted, but none of them will be as important as any one guy at the head of a 527 would be under the public system. This way, his name can be on every ad he wants to run. And, unlike the public system, everyone who sends money to Obama is choosing to.
So, Obama is guilty of wanting to win, and of changing his mind on the virtues of public financing (as I did), and of making decisions that help him. In exchange, even if you assume the worst intentions, the system he will use in the end is the most honest one we will have seen in a long time. Also, we may see the end of our current attempts at campaign finance reform, which are somewhere between unconstitutional and completely ineffectual. And the worst thing you can even claim he did is not adhere - in spirit, not letter - to a pledge he signed with no one a year ago? Perhaps I am guilty of seeing this as not that bad because I agree with the decision he came to (whereas I find McCain's switches, to pro-torture, pro-Bush tax cuts, and anti-immigration reform, all poor policy), but it just doesn't seem that bad to me.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
New Media, Old Veeps, and Butler County
Good morning.
There are two buzzes today that I find compelling. One is the ongoing Veepstakes. In the past few days, Gov. Ted Strickland (D-Oh) has flatly said he does not want the job. He was the favorite of many people, including SJS, and while Chris Cillizza's point that no does not always mean no is well-taken, it's hard to see Strickland turning that impressive statement around. Which means that John Edwards might be back in the mill, along with names like Kathleen Sibelius (governor of Kansas) and Evan Bayh. As I've mentioned, I have issues with Sibelius (whose post-SoU speech was a dud) and I have questions about Bayh (Who starts an exploratory committee, then abandons it less than two weeks later?). But the overarching theme for me is that, as long as it's not Hillary, lots of people work as Obama's veep. Incidentally, the Obama camp hired Patti Solis Doyle to be the chief of staff for the vp-to-be-named-later. PSD, you may remember, was fired by Hillary after screwing up her campaign for the first few months. She'll be a fine CoS, but it certainly implies that they're not looking in Hill-dog's direction. McCain is the one who needs the right kind of help. And the front-runner for that help remains Tim Pawlenty (reasons included in the link).
The other buzz is about ads. One of them, by MoveOn, is a gut-wrencher that at the very best pushes the limits of fair. People are denouncing it left and right, but I actually thought it was more in bounds than many. War has human costs, even if there are no casualties. I understand McCain's point that we have troops in Korea, Bosnia and Germany, and nobody demands we withdraw them, but Iraq is not any of those places, and the psychological costs of this war have been terrible already. Still, it's definitely the left-wing version of fear-mongering, since neither McCain nor anyone else have talked about a draft (aside from the backdoor draft that we use when stop-lossing troops who are supposed to be going home), so Alex isn't getting whisked off. Still, on my internal fairness radar, this is somewhere around the 3 a.m. phone call - maybe a cheap shot, but not necessarily an illegitimate one. I mean, turn on Fox News any of these days and you're likely to see completely fabricated smears (they've decided to give up any pretense of anything), so just wait until the GOP 527s get out there.
Another ad, this one viral, is so far the best piece of video art in the campaign. It's smooth tone gives it the perfect edge for a biting satire piece.
The Politico has a great feature on the importance of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC).
As some of you may know, I've taken to designing based on a long-held belief that many historical figures deserve t-shirts more than Che Guevara. Since they're in blatant violation of copyright laws, I just make them myself and sell them for cost. If you want to gander: Che What?
And last, a humorous, if depressing, note from the wilds of Pennsylvania comes via John Micek's rundown of PA politics.
There are two buzzes today that I find compelling. One is the ongoing Veepstakes. In the past few days, Gov. Ted Strickland (D-Oh) has flatly said he does not want the job. He was the favorite of many people, including SJS, and while Chris Cillizza's point that no does not always mean no is well-taken, it's hard to see Strickland turning that impressive statement around. Which means that John Edwards might be back in the mill, along with names like Kathleen Sibelius (governor of Kansas) and Evan Bayh. As I've mentioned, I have issues with Sibelius (whose post-SoU speech was a dud) and I have questions about Bayh (Who starts an exploratory committee, then abandons it less than two weeks later?). But the overarching theme for me is that, as long as it's not Hillary, lots of people work as Obama's veep. Incidentally, the Obama camp hired Patti Solis Doyle to be the chief of staff for the vp-to-be-named-later. PSD, you may remember, was fired by Hillary after screwing up her campaign for the first few months. She'll be a fine CoS, but it certainly implies that they're not looking in Hill-dog's direction. McCain is the one who needs the right kind of help. And the front-runner for that help remains Tim Pawlenty (reasons included in the link).
The other buzz is about ads. One of them, by MoveOn, is a gut-wrencher that at the very best pushes the limits of fair. People are denouncing it left and right, but I actually thought it was more in bounds than many. War has human costs, even if there are no casualties. I understand McCain's point that we have troops in Korea, Bosnia and Germany, and nobody demands we withdraw them, but Iraq is not any of those places, and the psychological costs of this war have been terrible already. Still, it's definitely the left-wing version of fear-mongering, since neither McCain nor anyone else have talked about a draft (aside from the backdoor draft that we use when stop-lossing troops who are supposed to be going home), so Alex isn't getting whisked off. Still, on my internal fairness radar, this is somewhere around the 3 a.m. phone call - maybe a cheap shot, but not necessarily an illegitimate one. I mean, turn on Fox News any of these days and you're likely to see completely fabricated smears (they've decided to give up any pretense of anything), so just wait until the GOP 527s get out there.
Another ad, this one viral, is so far the best piece of video art in the campaign. It's smooth tone gives it the perfect edge for a biting satire piece.
The Politico has a great feature on the importance of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC).
As some of you may know, I've taken to designing based on a long-held belief that many historical figures deserve t-shirts more than Che Guevara. Since they're in blatant violation of copyright laws, I just make them myself and sell them for cost. If you want to gander: Che What?
And last, a humorous, if depressing, note from the wilds of Pennsylvania comes via John Micek's rundown of PA politics.
Though the House is allegedly non-sectarian, Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, said he opposed the House's formal recognition of the 60th annual convention in Harrisburg of the U.S.chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.Yikes, Butler County.
"The Muslims do not recognize Jesus Christ as God and I will be voting negative," Metcalfe said on the House floor, the AP reported.
The two-page resolution, sponsored by House Speaker Dennis O'Brien, R/D-Philadelphia, noted that the convention's mission was to "increase faith and harmony and introduce various humanitarian, social and religious services."
Metcalfe's remarks prompted a spanking from Rep. Jewell Williams, D-Philadelphia, who is African-American and Rep. Babette Josephs, D-Philadelphia, who is Jewish, and as far as we can recall, does not follow the teachings of the World's Most Famous Carpenter.
"We should be careful in making these remarks and we should support all people in America," Williams said.
Josephs, meanwhile, mused to the AP, "I wonder what I would not also qualify for – being on the floor myself?" Having the right to vote? Having the right to practice my religion? That's what I was responding to. And we have other people who are not Jewish and not Christian on the floor – some elected, some not."
Lawmakers passed over the resolution after Rep. Gordon Denlinger, R-Lancaster, said it should be sent back to committee.
As an added bonus, Denlinger invoked the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, noting that, "Certainly this nation went through an attack some years ago that is well-burned into the subconscious of our society.
"What I sense on our floor today is that, for some people, this evokes very strong passion and emotion," he said.
Through a spokesman, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community's national president, Dr. Ahsan Zafar, said his group respects Jesus as a prophet of God, the AP reported.
"We regret that [Rep. Metcalfe] objected to the resolution," Zafar said. "We firmly believe in the oneness of God."
Monday, June 16, 2008
Stop. Just Stop... Trying to Throw Reporters in Jail for Doing Their Jobs
What? Two posts in one day? I know what you're thinking: Either Rocco Mediate beat Tiger and announced that he is using the winnings to bring Rolling Rock back to Latrobe, or someone has done something truly goonish.
I was busy last week, so I forgot to devote some time to my once and future local paper, the Morning Call. Once a bit of a local scandalmonger, the Call has in the past 10 years become a fantastic mid-size paper, breaking some major news and doing in-depth, fair reporting that is often completely misused by state and local authorities.
They've done some truly great work in reporting on a man named Louis DeNaples. DeNaples is the Scranton-area businessman who got a slots license for the Mt. Airy Casino Resort he owns. Here he is, in 2006, happy that he's gotten a slots license:
Turns out Mr. DeNaples has some unsavory business associates. The Call, has done months of great reporting detailing how unsavory, and exactly how bad the gaming board was at, well, doing its job and investigating those associates. It was somewhere between gross negligence and outright conspiracy to give someone a license, and if you want to read a whole bunch of stories on the extent, check this page out.
So it's bad. Though I'd like to point out that I, personally, mind this less than most, since I expect that most people in the gambling business will know those who are not, say, ideal son-in-law material. Here at SJS, sleazy industries are expected to come with some sleazy characters. If Mr. DeNaples is a good businessman and can run his Resort to the benefit of the state, then I'm cool with him.
What I am not cool with, however, is attacking reporters. As many of you are aware, SJS has a journalistic history, and maintains a solidarity with those strong enough to stay in the profession I left. Reporters are important, and freedom of the press is cornerstone of our society. People who go after reporters, in my experience, are usually either vindictive, megalomaniacal or outright evil.
Mr. DeNaples has decided to join that fraternity. Not, mind you, because the Call reporters got anything wrong, but because they've screwed up his life. In this, he has some allies. They are the same allies who got him the license in the first place, and then were embarrassed by the stories. So powerful businessman + appointed friends of Ed Rendell = ....
Subpoenas.
So now we're investigating how a grand jury investigation was leaked. Or we're pretending to. For one thing, no one cares. For another, everyone knows how this goes down: Haul reporters in, demand they give up their sources, the reporters say no, the state threatens to throw them in jail.
The call lawyers are looking things over, and are going to point out the tons of legal evidence that establishes a reporter's sources as confidential, and then, I expect, will point out that confidential sources tell us about shady things that taxpayers and citizens deserve to know, and that confidentiality allows that to happen. So getting pissed at the reporters is sort of the opposite of solving problems. Speaking of which, the chair of the gaming board who oversaw all of this moronicism got a nice little severance package of $120,000, as John L. Micek reports. Also, SJS thanks Micek for the shout-out he gave us a few days ago.
I write about this not because there's anything we can do at the moment, but just as a reminder that the media, for all that we beat up on it, does some really good things for really little money, and we still treat them like dirt, largely. Tim Russert wasn't the only newsman or -woman working to make the country better. Next time you want to complain about reporters not doing enough or misquoting something, ask yourself this: Would you go to jail to keep a secret that you heard from a criminal, or even just a real jerk? I know, I know, you're not crazy, and that's why you're not a journalist, but it's worth recognizing that that type of devotion to an idea is a rare and admirable quality just about every print journalist has.
Stay strong, Matt Birkbeck and Christinia Gostomski. As my old Latin teacher, Mr. Hall, would say: Nill illigitimi carborundum.
I was busy last week, so I forgot to devote some time to my once and future local paper, the Morning Call. Once a bit of a local scandalmonger, the Call has in the past 10 years become a fantastic mid-size paper, breaking some major news and doing in-depth, fair reporting that is often completely misused by state and local authorities.
They've done some truly great work in reporting on a man named Louis DeNaples. DeNaples is the Scranton-area businessman who got a slots license for the Mt. Airy Casino Resort he owns. Here he is, in 2006, happy that he's gotten a slots license:
Turns out Mr. DeNaples has some unsavory business associates. The Call, has done months of great reporting detailing how unsavory, and exactly how bad the gaming board was at, well, doing its job and investigating those associates. It was somewhere between gross negligence and outright conspiracy to give someone a license, and if you want to read a whole bunch of stories on the extent, check this page out.So it's bad. Though I'd like to point out that I, personally, mind this less than most, since I expect that most people in the gambling business will know those who are not, say, ideal son-in-law material. Here at SJS, sleazy industries are expected to come with some sleazy characters. If Mr. DeNaples is a good businessman and can run his Resort to the benefit of the state, then I'm cool with him.
What I am not cool with, however, is attacking reporters. As many of you are aware, SJS has a journalistic history, and maintains a solidarity with those strong enough to stay in the profession I left. Reporters are important, and freedom of the press is cornerstone of our society. People who go after reporters, in my experience, are usually either vindictive, megalomaniacal or outright evil.
Mr. DeNaples has decided to join that fraternity. Not, mind you, because the Call reporters got anything wrong, but because they've screwed up his life. In this, he has some allies. They are the same allies who got him the license in the first place, and then were embarrassed by the stories. So powerful businessman + appointed friends of Ed Rendell = ....
Subpoenas.
So now we're investigating how a grand jury investigation was leaked. Or we're pretending to. For one thing, no one cares. For another, everyone knows how this goes down: Haul reporters in, demand they give up their sources, the reporters say no, the state threatens to throw them in jail.
The call lawyers are looking things over, and are going to point out the tons of legal evidence that establishes a reporter's sources as confidential, and then, I expect, will point out that confidential sources tell us about shady things that taxpayers and citizens deserve to know, and that confidentiality allows that to happen. So getting pissed at the reporters is sort of the opposite of solving problems. Speaking of which, the chair of the gaming board who oversaw all of this moronicism got a nice little severance package of $120,000, as John L. Micek reports. Also, SJS thanks Micek for the shout-out he gave us a few days ago.
I write about this not because there's anything we can do at the moment, but just as a reminder that the media, for all that we beat up on it, does some really good things for really little money, and we still treat them like dirt, largely. Tim Russert wasn't the only newsman or -woman working to make the country better. Next time you want to complain about reporters not doing enough or misquoting something, ask yourself this: Would you go to jail to keep a secret that you heard from a criminal, or even just a real jerk? I know, I know, you're not crazy, and that's why you're not a journalist, but it's worth recognizing that that type of devotion to an idea is a rare and admirable quality just about every print journalist has.
Stay strong, Matt Birkbeck and Christinia Gostomski. As my old Latin teacher, Mr. Hall, would say: Nill illigitimi carborundum.
Veepstakes and Meetstakes
Happy Monday, friends.
The past few days on many networks have seen a funereal tribute to the late Tim Russert. While it's easy to overstate a man's greatness after his death, in this case I really get the sense that the people who speak about him had every bit the reverence and respect that they describe. He was truly a monumental figure in his field, which needs more like him.
Of course, there is now the question of who takes his place. Unsurprisingly, the Politico takes the most clear-sighted view of the Meetstakes (excuse the flipness of my term). They quote a consultant saying NBC will stay in-house, which means the list is limited and familiar. They quote another consultant, Jon Friedman, backing David Gregory, NBC's White House reporter, as the best man for the job. He's a good place to start my little rundown.
Gregory is familiar and steady, and has guest-hosted MTP in the past. There's no question he's a safe choice. However, I really, really, REALLY hope they don't pick him. Gregory is, simply put, a jerk who acts like a jerk on the air. He thinks extremely highly of himself, which isn't a crime, but it comes through in a smug air of superiority, which is for a newsman. He's also been undistinguished in his coverage. When Scott McClellan's book criticized the media for swallowing wholesale the swill that the White House fed them about the Iraq War, Gregory was absolutely obnoxious in his defensive self-excusing. Rather than take a serious self-examination and expect the best, which Russert would have done (and did), Gregory gave a thousand reasons why he was not to blame. It's true that he and the other reporters were misled, but this is Washington, jerkface, assume people are lying to you and investigate a little. Anyway, I can't envision looking forward to David Gregory on Sunday Mornings.
A more appealing option is Andrea Mitchell, a close friend of Russert's who has been a team player at NBC since they bumped her to the Senate from her promised White House beat. She's a great reporter, equally steady, and devoid of the smugness I find in Gregory. She also lacks his edge. I could believe she just hasn't had to be hard yet, and has it in her to ask the tough questions, but we've seen that stridency from Gregory, and not from her. That said, I think it's time for another woman to moderate MTP, who hasn't had once since their inaugural moderator, Martha Rountree, more than 50 years ago. "Mitch," as only Russert and her father called her, has guest-hosted MTP and is also fairly unpartisan; her husband, Alan Greenspan, similarly is connected but has no real political affiliation.
The politico lists some MSNBC analysts as dark horses, including Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough. I'll add Keith Olbermann to that, even though no one's mentioning his name. While Matthews and KO both have the same everyman appeal that made Russert great, they're all just too partisan for me to see it working well. KO likes being a firecracker and making special comments, Chris Matthews is a caricature of himself and wants to run for Senate. Joe Scarborough is too much of a pundit and not enough of a journalist. Dan Abrams would bring the same lawyer's mentality, but he, like the others, is just too lightweight.
Tom Brokaw could do it, but why would he come back to a prominent role after leaving the most prominent one two years ago? Plus, at a time like this, looking forward is a virtue. A very interesting idea is Chuck Todd, who was a protege of Russert's and who the NBC family credit, along with Russert, for making the networks the strongest news source on air right now, top to bottom. There's also some Russert parallels, as he's a guy with a position that's not usually on the air. Russert coaxed him out to the point where we all know his face and name now. He's also worked for Atlantic Monthly and National Journal, so there's balance to his views, and his research and technical skills are second to none. He's also young and not much of an interviewer so far, but he has a cult following (see: Viva Chuck Todd, and Chuck Todd Facts) among people like myself who appreciate the much-needed depth, complexity and energy he has brought to NBC political news.
Aside from that, there are some others out there I find intriguing, if unlikely. Washington Post's Dana Milbank is often an MSNBC guest analyst. His star has been rising in journalism circles over the past year, but he turned down a Newsweek offer not long ago, and one wonders if he's interested in leaving. Also, it's a big leap from bespectacled writer guest pundit to MTP moderator. Other frequent guests are too soft (like Eugene Robinson, Jonathan Alter, or Chris Cillizza) or too nuts (Rachel Maddow, Pat Buchanan), but Milbank's got enough cache to be a respectable not-gonna-happen choice.
For the promised veepstakes update, rumors about Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) will not die for McCain. I'm pretty sure that would make Lieberman the first-ever veep candidate for both major parties. Anyway, I don't see it. Picking an old guy who many of us think is a little nuts, whose supposed strength is foreign policy, and is completely opposite the country on the Iraq War = balancing the ticket? Uh, no. Someone mentioned Fred Thompson at a McCain forum the other day, because another old guy with cancer is apparently what the campaign needs? My money remains on Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Especially with the evangelicals coming out for Obama more and more, McCain's going to need someone who speaks their language.
On the other side, perhaps you will remember that John Edwards said he was not interested in the veep position to an Italian publication last week. Well, he was on This Week Sunday, and said that wasn't exactly what he meant. He's not seeking the position, but if asked he'd think about it. So, to recap, his position on the second spot is exactly the same as Hillary's, which to me sounds like he's in it. Not that it matters; I appear to be the only one in the country who likes the idea of an Obama/Edwards ticket.
Polling currently indicates that 20% of people say the veep will not influence their decision on Obama, and the remainder split 40-40 that Hillary would make them either more likely or less likely to vote for him. This, to me, says two things: 1. People pretend veep selection matters more than it does. 2. Hillary is just not that great a choice. With somewhat less confidence, my money here remains on Ted Strickland. Nice, bland, good Midwestern white man who probably delivers a big swing state and was a Hillary backer? Done.
As for the voters (mostly women) who claim they will vote for McCain out of spite, because somehow it's Barack Obama's fault there's sexism: 1. Voting against what you believe in, and against what Hillary believes in, neither helps Hillary nor honors her accomplishment. 2. There can't be that many people who are driven that weird by spite alone. 3. Voting for a man who favors the repeal of Roe v. Wade and uses the c word like it's the latest slang does not help eliminate sexism.
The past few days on many networks have seen a funereal tribute to the late Tim Russert. While it's easy to overstate a man's greatness after his death, in this case I really get the sense that the people who speak about him had every bit the reverence and respect that they describe. He was truly a monumental figure in his field, which needs more like him.
Of course, there is now the question of who takes his place. Unsurprisingly, the Politico takes the most clear-sighted view of the Meetstakes (excuse the flipness of my term). They quote a consultant saying NBC will stay in-house, which means the list is limited and familiar. They quote another consultant, Jon Friedman, backing David Gregory, NBC's White House reporter, as the best man for the job. He's a good place to start my little rundown.
Gregory is familiar and steady, and has guest-hosted MTP in the past. There's no question he's a safe choice. However, I really, really, REALLY hope they don't pick him. Gregory is, simply put, a jerk who acts like a jerk on the air. He thinks extremely highly of himself, which isn't a crime, but it comes through in a smug air of superiority, which is for a newsman. He's also been undistinguished in his coverage. When Scott McClellan's book criticized the media for swallowing wholesale the swill that the White House fed them about the Iraq War, Gregory was absolutely obnoxious in his defensive self-excusing. Rather than take a serious self-examination and expect the best, which Russert would have done (and did), Gregory gave a thousand reasons why he was not to blame. It's true that he and the other reporters were misled, but this is Washington, jerkface, assume people are lying to you and investigate a little. Anyway, I can't envision looking forward to David Gregory on Sunday Mornings.
A more appealing option is Andrea Mitchell, a close friend of Russert's who has been a team player at NBC since they bumped her to the Senate from her promised White House beat. She's a great reporter, equally steady, and devoid of the smugness I find in Gregory. She also lacks his edge. I could believe she just hasn't had to be hard yet, and has it in her to ask the tough questions, but we've seen that stridency from Gregory, and not from her. That said, I think it's time for another woman to moderate MTP, who hasn't had once since their inaugural moderator, Martha Rountree, more than 50 years ago. "Mitch," as only Russert and her father called her, has guest-hosted MTP and is also fairly unpartisan; her husband, Alan Greenspan, similarly is connected but has no real political affiliation.
The politico lists some MSNBC analysts as dark horses, including Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough. I'll add Keith Olbermann to that, even though no one's mentioning his name. While Matthews and KO both have the same everyman appeal that made Russert great, they're all just too partisan for me to see it working well. KO likes being a firecracker and making special comments, Chris Matthews is a caricature of himself and wants to run for Senate. Joe Scarborough is too much of a pundit and not enough of a journalist. Dan Abrams would bring the same lawyer's mentality, but he, like the others, is just too lightweight.
Tom Brokaw could do it, but why would he come back to a prominent role after leaving the most prominent one two years ago? Plus, at a time like this, looking forward is a virtue. A very interesting idea is Chuck Todd, who was a protege of Russert's and who the NBC family credit, along with Russert, for making the networks the strongest news source on air right now, top to bottom. There's also some Russert parallels, as he's a guy with a position that's not usually on the air. Russert coaxed him out to the point where we all know his face and name now. He's also worked for Atlantic Monthly and National Journal, so there's balance to his views, and his research and technical skills are second to none. He's also young and not much of an interviewer so far, but he has a cult following (see: Viva Chuck Todd, and Chuck Todd Facts) among people like myself who appreciate the much-needed depth, complexity and energy he has brought to NBC political news.
Aside from that, there are some others out there I find intriguing, if unlikely. Washington Post's Dana Milbank is often an MSNBC guest analyst. His star has been rising in journalism circles over the past year, but he turned down a Newsweek offer not long ago, and one wonders if he's interested in leaving. Also, it's a big leap from bespectacled writer guest pundit to MTP moderator. Other frequent guests are too soft (like Eugene Robinson, Jonathan Alter, or Chris Cillizza) or too nuts (Rachel Maddow, Pat Buchanan), but Milbank's got enough cache to be a respectable not-gonna-happen choice.
For the promised veepstakes update, rumors about Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) will not die for McCain. I'm pretty sure that would make Lieberman the first-ever veep candidate for both major parties. Anyway, I don't see it. Picking an old guy who many of us think is a little nuts, whose supposed strength is foreign policy, and is completely opposite the country on the Iraq War = balancing the ticket? Uh, no. Someone mentioned Fred Thompson at a McCain forum the other day, because another old guy with cancer is apparently what the campaign needs? My money remains on Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Especially with the evangelicals coming out for Obama more and more, McCain's going to need someone who speaks their language.
On the other side, perhaps you will remember that John Edwards said he was not interested in the veep position to an Italian publication last week. Well, he was on This Week Sunday, and said that wasn't exactly what he meant. He's not seeking the position, but if asked he'd think about it. So, to recap, his position on the second spot is exactly the same as Hillary's, which to me sounds like he's in it. Not that it matters; I appear to be the only one in the country who likes the idea of an Obama/Edwards ticket.
Polling currently indicates that 20% of people say the veep will not influence their decision on Obama, and the remainder split 40-40 that Hillary would make them either more likely or less likely to vote for him. This, to me, says two things: 1. People pretend veep selection matters more than it does. 2. Hillary is just not that great a choice. With somewhat less confidence, my money here remains on Ted Strickland. Nice, bland, good Midwestern white man who probably delivers a big swing state and was a Hillary backer? Done.
As for the voters (mostly women) who claim they will vote for McCain out of spite, because somehow it's Barack Obama's fault there's sexism: 1. Voting against what you believe in, and against what Hillary believes in, neither helps Hillary nor honors her accomplishment. 2. There can't be that many people who are driven that weird by spite alone. 3. Voting for a man who favors the repeal of Roe v. Wade and uses the c word like it's the latest slang does not help eliminate sexism.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Sad News
Friends, it's rare that I devote a whole post to one person, but today I and many others are mourning the sudden loss of one of journalism's most respected voices.
My extended family on my mother's side is from Western New York. I was raised a Buffalo Bills fan, despite growing up in Pittsburgh and then Philadelphia territory. Though I celebrate and love the Steelers, I will always be a Buffalo fan first. One of the best moments of my recent years was seeing a Steelers-Bills game at Ralph Wilson stadium. They were two similarly ardent fan bases, devoid of pretense, proud of a blue-collar heritage, and sharing the same Rust Belt challenges; every fan of either team would tell you the two should play each other every year, the way they used to. I still recall my tenth birthday, when I went to a Bills-Steelers game at what was then Rich Stadium. I got a kitten for that birthday, who I named Amber and who is now, older and more cranky, sleeping next to me on the couch. It was freezing cold and snow was falling from the sky; my mother and I took turns putting the kitten in our coats, where she confusedly stuck her head out to marvel at how people could be having a good time in such hideous weather. All of this personal anecdote serves, aside from letting me put off the next sentence, only to illustrate the type of things that make someone strange enough to be a fan of the Buffalo Bills, and enjoy being so.
Tim Russert was a Bills fan, from his birth in the industrial slightly-post-heyday of Buffalo until his sudden and fatal heart attack today at the age of 58.
From his Irish Catholic, working-class family, he rose through an unpretentious education, attending schools the rest of the world attends like John Carrol University and Cleveland State, where he went to law school. In 1969, he attended Woodstock in a Buffalo Bill Jersey with a case of beer. Through hard work and a gift for analytical thinking, Russert rose through the Senatorial campaign of Daniel Patrick Moynahan (D-NY), who became one of our country's great Senatorial statesmen. He worked for Mario Cuomo, as well, until 1984, when NBC news approached him about joining their news team. It took four years for him to become Washington Bureau Chief.
Some of you know that I love the Sunday morning "intellectual ghetto" of talk shows. The longest-running show of that kind is NBC's Meet the Press. The man who spent more time on that show than any other was Tim Russert, moderating it from 1991 until five days ago. Shortly after he took over, the show expanded to 60 minutes in length, with very few commercials. Renowned for his aggressive, tough questioning of even the most revered figures, under Russert the show became the most grueling gauntlet through which a political newsmaker can put him or herself. He would often sign off the program with a word of encouragement for the Buffalo Bills.
I just saw Russert's good friend and colleague, Tom Brokaw, deliver the news to the NBC nation. I have no internal catalog of Brokaw moments, but I've never seen the veteran newsman do such a terrible job of reading copy. His usual smoothness and comfortingly serious voice was gone, and replaced with a person who anyone can realize was just trying to stay afloat in spite of incredible emotion.
I believe Tim Russert may well have had the best job in the world, and it was made better because he never took it for granted. He brought to it a sense of perspective and analysis that was second-to-none. More importantly to me, though, he brought a lack of pretension and a hard-nosed work ethic befitting his Buffalo roots. A tireless researcher who never shrank from a hard question, Russert interviewed everyone who mattered to Washington and beyond over the past 17 years. Unlike so many of the current crop of talking heads, he was no ivy league academic, but a real person who had lived in that part of our real country bordering Lake Erie, before taking his experiences to Washington, where so little is ever real.
Brokaw made the massive understatement that the news division at NBC will never be the same. For those of us who grew up looking forward to Russert's unflinching grilling of newsmakers every week, neither will Sunday mornings.
My extended family on my mother's side is from Western New York. I was raised a Buffalo Bills fan, despite growing up in Pittsburgh and then Philadelphia territory. Though I celebrate and love the Steelers, I will always be a Buffalo fan first. One of the best moments of my recent years was seeing a Steelers-Bills game at Ralph Wilson stadium. They were two similarly ardent fan bases, devoid of pretense, proud of a blue-collar heritage, and sharing the same Rust Belt challenges; every fan of either team would tell you the two should play each other every year, the way they used to. I still recall my tenth birthday, when I went to a Bills-Steelers game at what was then Rich Stadium. I got a kitten for that birthday, who I named Amber and who is now, older and more cranky, sleeping next to me on the couch. It was freezing cold and snow was falling from the sky; my mother and I took turns putting the kitten in our coats, where she confusedly stuck her head out to marvel at how people could be having a good time in such hideous weather. All of this personal anecdote serves, aside from letting me put off the next sentence, only to illustrate the type of things that make someone strange enough to be a fan of the Buffalo Bills, and enjoy being so.
Tim Russert was a Bills fan, from his birth in the industrial slightly-post-heyday of Buffalo until his sudden and fatal heart attack today at the age of 58.
From his Irish Catholic, working-class family, he rose through an unpretentious education, attending schools the rest of the world attends like John Carrol University and Cleveland State, where he went to law school. In 1969, he attended Woodstock in a Buffalo Bill Jersey with a case of beer. Through hard work and a gift for analytical thinking, Russert rose through the Senatorial campaign of Daniel Patrick Moynahan (D-NY), who became one of our country's great Senatorial statesmen. He worked for Mario Cuomo, as well, until 1984, when NBC news approached him about joining their news team. It took four years for him to become Washington Bureau Chief.
Some of you know that I love the Sunday morning "intellectual ghetto" of talk shows. The longest-running show of that kind is NBC's Meet the Press. The man who spent more time on that show than any other was Tim Russert, moderating it from 1991 until five days ago. Shortly after he took over, the show expanded to 60 minutes in length, with very few commercials. Renowned for his aggressive, tough questioning of even the most revered figures, under Russert the show became the most grueling gauntlet through which a political newsmaker can put him or herself. He would often sign off the program with a word of encouragement for the Buffalo Bills.
I just saw Russert's good friend and colleague, Tom Brokaw, deliver the news to the NBC nation. I have no internal catalog of Brokaw moments, but I've never seen the veteran newsman do such a terrible job of reading copy. His usual smoothness and comfortingly serious voice was gone, and replaced with a person who anyone can realize was just trying to stay afloat in spite of incredible emotion.
I believe Tim Russert may well have had the best job in the world, and it was made better because he never took it for granted. He brought to it a sense of perspective and analysis that was second-to-none. More importantly to me, though, he brought a lack of pretension and a hard-nosed work ethic befitting his Buffalo roots. A tireless researcher who never shrank from a hard question, Russert interviewed everyone who mattered to Washington and beyond over the past 17 years. Unlike so many of the current crop of talking heads, he was no ivy league academic, but a real person who had lived in that part of our real country bordering Lake Erie, before taking his experiences to Washington, where so little is ever real.
Brokaw made the massive understatement that the news division at NBC will never be the same. For those of us who grew up looking forward to Russert's unflinching grilling of newsmakers every week, neither will Sunday mornings.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Worst Answer of the Campaign
Well, if you missed it, Obama hired Jim Johnson to head his VP search committee. This would be the same Jim Johnson who got some "preferential" loans from Countrywide, the lender who Obama and every moral person thinks was particularly crappy during the mortgage crisis. So, someone asked the nominee how he could lambaste Countrywide and then employ someone who benefited from their malignant practices.
Obama's answer was so bad it defies description. Here are the words, as edited by MSNBC:
"Well, look ... first of all, I am not vetting my vice presidential search committee for their mortgages," Obama answered. "I mean this is a game that can be played -- everybody you know who is anybody who is tangentially related to our campaign I think is going to have a whole host of relationships."
"I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters. I mean at some point you know we just asked people to do their assignments. Jim Johnson has a very discreet task, as does Eric Holder, and that is to gather up information about potential vice presidential candidates -- they are performing that job well, it's a volunteer, unpaid position. And they are giving me information and then I will then exercise judgment in terms of who I want to select as a vice presidential candidate."
This will begin a new, irregular segment, of Worst Answer of the Campaign so far, but it will take a lot to beat this doozy. If someone has video of the answer (couldn't find it on YouTube), please post it.
Obama's answer was so bad it defies description. Here are the words, as edited by MSNBC:
"Well, look ... first of all, I am not vetting my vice presidential search committee for their mortgages," Obama answered. "I mean this is a game that can be played -- everybody you know who is anybody who is tangentially related to our campaign I think is going to have a whole host of relationships."
"I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters. I mean at some point you know we just asked people to do their assignments. Jim Johnson has a very discreet task, as does Eric Holder, and that is to gather up information about potential vice presidential candidates -- they are performing that job well, it's a volunteer, unpaid position. And they are giving me information and then I will then exercise judgment in terms of who I want to select as a vice presidential candidate."
"These aren't folks who are working for me. They are not people, you know, who I have assigned to a job in the future administration. And ultimately, my assumption is that this is a discreet task that they are going to performing for me in the next two months."
That doesn't begin to convey how halting and awkward he sounded delivering the terrible non-answer.This will begin a new, irregular segment, of Worst Answer of the Campaign so far, but it will take a lot to beat this doozy. If someone has video of the answer (couldn't find it on YouTube), please post it.
McCain on the Economy
So I'm watching McCain do his economy thing, and he's just now hitting a stretch where he looks good. It took a long time of him looking quite terrible and doing that laugh that just looks fake and old, but he's on a role and sounding tough now. He says he'll cut taxes, get tough on corporate welfare, end subsidies and discretionary spending (except for military), and veto any bill with earmarks (he displayed a Sharpie to demonstrate).
Wait, what?
Veto any bill with earmarks? Seriously?
Maybe now's a good moment to talk about pork, my favorite scapegoat of the federal government. Here's how it works (if you already know this, then my apologies):
You are a mayor, or businesswoman, or nonprofit. Your city or county has a big piece of land, and you want to make it into a park, or mixed-use green development, or new highway between cities to generate much-needed revenue. The fact that the revenue is much-needed means that the city and county can't fund this. You're willing to kick in a few tens of millions, the state can throw you a few million, but this is a big project (in the 9 figures range) that you think will really improve the region's health, economically, and make it a more attractive place to live. So you call your local U.S. Representative, or Senator, or both. The federal government has tons of money for things like this, and you'd like them to chip in the rest. Plus, you are a moderately influential person (maybe a donor?), and your elected representatives are good, civic-minded people who want their constituents to have the best, or at least this terrific project, so they go to the Hill. Sometimes, it comes in a fitting bill, like an economic stimulus package, or a bill to encourage green development, where lots of districts get some money shuffled to them. More often, it comes like this: There's a bill about energy, or banking reform. It's close, right on the cusp of passing or not. Your rep (or senator) is on the fence. The energy bill's author says, "hey, what if I told you I could kick in $200 mil for that project your district wanted? Does that sound like something you might be interested in?"
Obviously, sometimes those projects suck. Sometimes they're really expensive bridges to nowhere (thanks, Ted Stevens), or just big, obnoxious buildings with your elected officials' names on them. But often, they're actually necessary, or at least helpful, projects. Think of your municipality. When was the last time you heard about a big project there? Maybe it was centered around a new stadium, or a vacant plot of industrial brownfield, or an unused office tower. Remember the big, impressive drawings you saw in the newspaper? You probably thought, "that looks really cool, but it'll never happen. Who's gonna pay for that?" You were probably right. But the answer, at least in the mind of the person who paid for that drawing, often involved different levels of government, including the federal. Every now and then, one of those projects get through, and when they do, it usually involved some pork.
So let's get rid of that!
Oh, wait.
Pork, or earmarks, is part of how our process is supposed to work. It's true that the Libertarian argument would be that the money should be just returned to voters and districts, not earmarked, but, like a lot of pure Libertarian ideas, that doesn't work so well in practice. It would doom poorer states, while flooding richer areas with even more money to fight over, which is not what a Union of States is supposed to do. Earmarks help broaden our base of functioning regions, which is an ultimately more consistent and less divided country. Still, maybe McCain has seen the Libertarian light?
Vetoing every bill with any earmarks will result in the veto of the vast majority of bills our Congress passes. How, one wonders, could he do this? "With a Congressionally-approved line-item veto."
Oh.
So much for the Libertarian argument.
The line-item veto, you may remember, is the ability for the president to veto only the parts of bills he doesn't like. Imagine the separation of powers upon which our country's government was built is a nice, safe Ford Taurus. It's got some dents from being beaten up the last few years. It's still motoring, nothing some maintenance can't fix, but it's taken some shots. The line-item veto (which just about every president wants) is a tractor trailer trying to merge into your lane by driving on top of your car. It says "hey, that whole checks and balances thing? Who needs it? Congress stinks anyway."
Saying you're going to reign in government's lack of discretion by getting a line-item veto is like saying you're going to decrease teen drug use by handing out ecstasy pills.
And it's real likely that, in the event of his election, John McCain will convince the Democratic Congress to give him the authority to ignore them whenever he wants. Oh wait, no, that'll never happen. And does anyone believe that he'd really veto ALL earmarks? Even ones proposed by his friends in the GOP? Remember, this is the guy whose campaign is run by lobbyists for industries that love earmarks.
Still, for all that it might be terrible policy, McCain is starting to get better at sounding good when he makes false promises.
Wait, what?
Veto any bill with earmarks? Seriously?
Maybe now's a good moment to talk about pork, my favorite scapegoat of the federal government. Here's how it works (if you already know this, then my apologies):
You are a mayor, or businesswoman, or nonprofit. Your city or county has a big piece of land, and you want to make it into a park, or mixed-use green development, or new highway between cities to generate much-needed revenue. The fact that the revenue is much-needed means that the city and county can't fund this. You're willing to kick in a few tens of millions, the state can throw you a few million, but this is a big project (in the 9 figures range) that you think will really improve the region's health, economically, and make it a more attractive place to live. So you call your local U.S. Representative, or Senator, or both. The federal government has tons of money for things like this, and you'd like them to chip in the rest. Plus, you are a moderately influential person (maybe a donor?), and your elected representatives are good, civic-minded people who want their constituents to have the best, or at least this terrific project, so they go to the Hill. Sometimes, it comes in a fitting bill, like an economic stimulus package, or a bill to encourage green development, where lots of districts get some money shuffled to them. More often, it comes like this: There's a bill about energy, or banking reform. It's close, right on the cusp of passing or not. Your rep (or senator) is on the fence. The energy bill's author says, "hey, what if I told you I could kick in $200 mil for that project your district wanted? Does that sound like something you might be interested in?"
Obviously, sometimes those projects suck. Sometimes they're really expensive bridges to nowhere (thanks, Ted Stevens), or just big, obnoxious buildings with your elected officials' names on them. But often, they're actually necessary, or at least helpful, projects. Think of your municipality. When was the last time you heard about a big project there? Maybe it was centered around a new stadium, or a vacant plot of industrial brownfield, or an unused office tower. Remember the big, impressive drawings you saw in the newspaper? You probably thought, "that looks really cool, but it'll never happen. Who's gonna pay for that?" You were probably right. But the answer, at least in the mind of the person who paid for that drawing, often involved different levels of government, including the federal. Every now and then, one of those projects get through, and when they do, it usually involved some pork.
So let's get rid of that!
Oh, wait.
Pork, or earmarks, is part of how our process is supposed to work. It's true that the Libertarian argument would be that the money should be just returned to voters and districts, not earmarked, but, like a lot of pure Libertarian ideas, that doesn't work so well in practice. It would doom poorer states, while flooding richer areas with even more money to fight over, which is not what a Union of States is supposed to do. Earmarks help broaden our base of functioning regions, which is an ultimately more consistent and less divided country. Still, maybe McCain has seen the Libertarian light?
Vetoing every bill with any earmarks will result in the veto of the vast majority of bills our Congress passes. How, one wonders, could he do this? "With a Congressionally-approved line-item veto."
Oh.
So much for the Libertarian argument.
The line-item veto, you may remember, is the ability for the president to veto only the parts of bills he doesn't like. Imagine the separation of powers upon which our country's government was built is a nice, safe Ford Taurus. It's got some dents from being beaten up the last few years. It's still motoring, nothing some maintenance can't fix, but it's taken some shots. The line-item veto (which just about every president wants) is a tractor trailer trying to merge into your lane by driving on top of your car. It says "hey, that whole checks and balances thing? Who needs it? Congress stinks anyway."
Saying you're going to reign in government's lack of discretion by getting a line-item veto is like saying you're going to decrease teen drug use by handing out ecstasy pills.
And it's real likely that, in the event of his election, John McCain will convince the Democratic Congress to give him the authority to ignore them whenever he wants. Oh wait, no, that'll never happen. And does anyone believe that he'd really veto ALL earmarks? Even ones proposed by his friends in the GOP? Remember, this is the guy whose campaign is run by lobbyists for industries that love earmarks.
Still, for all that it might be terrible policy, McCain is starting to get better at sounding good when he makes false promises.
Monday, June 9, 2008
More on Hillary
Two days in a row? As the kids say, OMG.
First, some notes.
First, I'll refer you to a great blog post by SJS friend DuxFemFac Chronicles on another historic candidacy. This one was 36 years ago, and it was Shirley Chisolm's bid for Congress. We too quickly forget about the history that brought us here.
Second, I feel my post yesterday requires an explanatory footnote. I listed five things that seem to me a person could blame for Hillary's loss; I was in no way saying that I know which ones did and did not. That was sort of the point of the last one; that it's entirely possible all of our reworking and analyzing is more for us than actually accomplishing anything. It's also possible that this was just like any other race, and that a combination of strategy and luck delivered a winner; I don't know that Obama is the special politician some think he is, I just know it's a possibility. One commenter yesterday suggested that it wasn't competing in Iowa that hurt Hillary, but failing to learn from it. I like that idea a great deal, that one campaign under, Mark Penn et al., failed to adapt as fast as the other did. Anyway, my overarching point wasn't that five things contributed to her loss, or that I have some secret knowledge of why Obama won. My point, which runs through a lot of my commentary here, is that we write our own narratives after these things are over, and that those narratives vary based on outcome and what we want to believe, but are not particularly useful when understanding what happened, which is always a bit of a mystery.
Ben Smith of the Politico has been following the Dems since the beginning of the campaign, so I'm interested by his take, which is on the politico site today. Unlike me, he does have insider knowledge, and I trust most of the things he reports. The problem he sees is that, for all of her aggressive rep, Clinton was essentially reactive in every major decision, always having the pace dictated to her. That seems a bit too strong to me, but his reports of the internal problems with the campaign are important, especially the dysfunction of Patti Solis Doyle, who had been campaign manager through after Super Tuesday.
Having worked on a campaign, I can attest to the important of morale. For all our talk of media markets and air time and debates, campaigns in this country are still won and lost on the ground, especially statewide. The people who cram into rented offices and then go out and knock on doors or spend hours making phone calls for no or laughable pay are the ones who, more often than not, are the ones who win voters over. Those people are largely insane and willing to do ridiculous tasks because they believe they are making a difference. Building competent ground games also, incidentally, is how you get more people on board volunteering and donating. Obama was stunningly good at this part of the process for a first-time national campaigner, but what was more interesting was how we all assumed Hillary was going to be better. She had experienced people around her, had run through two national campaigns already, and had every contact in the world. But those under and unpaid people on the ground in those crappy offices, remember, are really only there because they believe. If, as we've heard, Patti Solis Doyle and Mark Penn ran crappy campaigns, making tons of money while botching operations and making people feel not listened to, that can have a huge effect on those ground troops.
To put it anecdotally, I thought a few times about working for the Obama campaign in PA, mostly because I wanted to experience some of this phenomenon people described. I of course didn't, because I didn't want to work against Hillary, for whom I have too much respect and admiration; it was the draw of the campaign itself that I felt. I never thought about working for Hillary, though, because no one ever described her campaign as fun or exciting or inspiring. Instead, the word was that things were extremely hierarchical and that there was a barrier between ground troops and management, sort of like a corporate culture. Now, of course, there was a great deal of mythology in both of those stories, and most campaigns have more in common than they do different, but myth is important if it influences people to join your campaign - or not. So maybe there's something to Ben Smith's impression of a Hillary that never took ownership of the campaign for herself. Maybe that's what bothered me about the tone I mentioned yesterday - there was too much Hillary for President, and too little actual Hillary.
SJS tangential friend Jeremy Gerard is back on the Huffington Post, with an emotional column about the end of the Hillary campaign. His main grievance is the way MSNBC, with basically an all-male team of analysts, broke down the speech, which he called "heroic." When I saw it, the commentary did not strike me as particularly negative, but I'll also confess to not paying that much attention to what Keith Olbermann said. The speech was terrific, and professional, and well-delivered. But I think Gerard's column is evidence of the emotion that comes from losing a tough race to someone you think is less qualified. Imagine every time you were passed over for a job for someone you thought was less good; that's what Hillary supporters feel like. There's a great deal of anger there, and it will take some time for this to subside. I do think the vast majority of those Dems will vote for Obama, and I think Hillary will work insanely hard to beat John McCain, no matter what her role is. I suppose, being a process person, losses are less sad to me, because I have faith in a system that allows us to survive even morons in office, and I think victories are achieved even in unsuccessful bids (certainly, that is the case with Hillary and her "18 million cracks in the glass ceiling." Then again, I'm a white man, so that's pretty easy for me to say.
Another Politico story joins the growing consensus that it was Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel - the man who started Hillary in the Senate and her most ardent supporter - who actually played the biggest role in ending her campaign.
Chris Cillizza ran down his list of most likely veeps last week. Hillary has the fifth spot on the Dem list, Ohio gov Ted Strickland the number one. On the other side, the spots range from Lieberman up to Tim Pawlenty. On this, Chris and I agree almost completely. I have thought it was going to be Pawlenty for the GOP for about 16 months now, no matter who won the primary. And I liked Edwards, until he took his name out of consideration. Ted Strickland is very popular in Ohio, a Hillary supporter, and just a decent Midwestern guy.
And no, I do not think VP Hillary is good for either Obama or Hillary. It hurts his message, makes him look weak, and drives lots of people away from the ticket. And it puts her in a position where she can do little to make a difference. I have recently been reflecting on the Kennedys, as you noticed in yesterday's RFK closing. The youngest Kennedy, Edward, ran for president, of course, as favorite and party insider, losing a close race to an upstart from Georgia and feeling famously lousy about it. Instead of harboring bitterness, he returned to the Senate and dominated there for about 30 more years, becoming a man America will remember, perhaps, better than the man who beat him, Jimmy Carter. Ted Kennedy has been a fantastic Senator, and I think there are lessons there for Hillary Clinton, whose style similarly fits the senate. My belief in the system is accompanied by a respect for the separate skills that can make individuals dominant in each branch of government. For that matter, my understanding of the system leads me to believe that great lawmakers are more important, often, than presidents. Hillary's skills, I think, could position her to be a lion of the Senate, where her work would unquestionably benefit the country. The desire is admittedly selfish, and I know Hillary wants to be president, but I want her to be a dominant senator for decades to come. Barring that, she'd be a fantastic supreme court justice, attorney general, or even secretary of state. But we need her, as she put it, "on the front lines of democracy," not on the bench waiting for the starter to get tired.
First, some notes.
First, I'll refer you to a great blog post by SJS friend DuxFemFac Chronicles on another historic candidacy. This one was 36 years ago, and it was Shirley Chisolm's bid for Congress. We too quickly forget about the history that brought us here.
Second, I feel my post yesterday requires an explanatory footnote. I listed five things that seem to me a person could blame for Hillary's loss; I was in no way saying that I know which ones did and did not. That was sort of the point of the last one; that it's entirely possible all of our reworking and analyzing is more for us than actually accomplishing anything. It's also possible that this was just like any other race, and that a combination of strategy and luck delivered a winner; I don't know that Obama is the special politician some think he is, I just know it's a possibility. One commenter yesterday suggested that it wasn't competing in Iowa that hurt Hillary, but failing to learn from it. I like that idea a great deal, that one campaign under, Mark Penn et al., failed to adapt as fast as the other did. Anyway, my overarching point wasn't that five things contributed to her loss, or that I have some secret knowledge of why Obama won. My point, which runs through a lot of my commentary here, is that we write our own narratives after these things are over, and that those narratives vary based on outcome and what we want to believe, but are not particularly useful when understanding what happened, which is always a bit of a mystery.
Ben Smith of the Politico has been following the Dems since the beginning of the campaign, so I'm interested by his take, which is on the politico site today. Unlike me, he does have insider knowledge, and I trust most of the things he reports. The problem he sees is that, for all of her aggressive rep, Clinton was essentially reactive in every major decision, always having the pace dictated to her. That seems a bit too strong to me, but his reports of the internal problems with the campaign are important, especially the dysfunction of Patti Solis Doyle, who had been campaign manager through after Super Tuesday.
Having worked on a campaign, I can attest to the important of morale. For all our talk of media markets and air time and debates, campaigns in this country are still won and lost on the ground, especially statewide. The people who cram into rented offices and then go out and knock on doors or spend hours making phone calls for no or laughable pay are the ones who, more often than not, are the ones who win voters over. Those people are largely insane and willing to do ridiculous tasks because they believe they are making a difference. Building competent ground games also, incidentally, is how you get more people on board volunteering and donating. Obama was stunningly good at this part of the process for a first-time national campaigner, but what was more interesting was how we all assumed Hillary was going to be better. She had experienced people around her, had run through two national campaigns already, and had every contact in the world. But those under and unpaid people on the ground in those crappy offices, remember, are really only there because they believe. If, as we've heard, Patti Solis Doyle and Mark Penn ran crappy campaigns, making tons of money while botching operations and making people feel not listened to, that can have a huge effect on those ground troops.
To put it anecdotally, I thought a few times about working for the Obama campaign in PA, mostly because I wanted to experience some of this phenomenon people described. I of course didn't, because I didn't want to work against Hillary, for whom I have too much respect and admiration; it was the draw of the campaign itself that I felt. I never thought about working for Hillary, though, because no one ever described her campaign as fun or exciting or inspiring. Instead, the word was that things were extremely hierarchical and that there was a barrier between ground troops and management, sort of like a corporate culture. Now, of course, there was a great deal of mythology in both of those stories, and most campaigns have more in common than they do different, but myth is important if it influences people to join your campaign - or not. So maybe there's something to Ben Smith's impression of a Hillary that never took ownership of the campaign for herself. Maybe that's what bothered me about the tone I mentioned yesterday - there was too much Hillary for President, and too little actual Hillary.
SJS tangential friend Jeremy Gerard is back on the Huffington Post, with an emotional column about the end of the Hillary campaign. His main grievance is the way MSNBC, with basically an all-male team of analysts, broke down the speech, which he called "heroic." When I saw it, the commentary did not strike me as particularly negative, but I'll also confess to not paying that much attention to what Keith Olbermann said. The speech was terrific, and professional, and well-delivered. But I think Gerard's column is evidence of the emotion that comes from losing a tough race to someone you think is less qualified. Imagine every time you were passed over for a job for someone you thought was less good; that's what Hillary supporters feel like. There's a great deal of anger there, and it will take some time for this to subside. I do think the vast majority of those Dems will vote for Obama, and I think Hillary will work insanely hard to beat John McCain, no matter what her role is. I suppose, being a process person, losses are less sad to me, because I have faith in a system that allows us to survive even morons in office, and I think victories are achieved even in unsuccessful bids (certainly, that is the case with Hillary and her "18 million cracks in the glass ceiling." Then again, I'm a white man, so that's pretty easy for me to say.
Another Politico story joins the growing consensus that it was Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel - the man who started Hillary in the Senate and her most ardent supporter - who actually played the biggest role in ending her campaign.
Chris Cillizza ran down his list of most likely veeps last week. Hillary has the fifth spot on the Dem list, Ohio gov Ted Strickland the number one. On the other side, the spots range from Lieberman up to Tim Pawlenty. On this, Chris and I agree almost completely. I have thought it was going to be Pawlenty for the GOP for about 16 months now, no matter who won the primary. And I liked Edwards, until he took his name out of consideration. Ted Strickland is very popular in Ohio, a Hillary supporter, and just a decent Midwestern guy.
And no, I do not think VP Hillary is good for either Obama or Hillary. It hurts his message, makes him look weak, and drives lots of people away from the ticket. And it puts her in a position where she can do little to make a difference. I have recently been reflecting on the Kennedys, as you noticed in yesterday's RFK closing. The youngest Kennedy, Edward, ran for president, of course, as favorite and party insider, losing a close race to an upstart from Georgia and feeling famously lousy about it. Instead of harboring bitterness, he returned to the Senate and dominated there for about 30 more years, becoming a man America will remember, perhaps, better than the man who beat him, Jimmy Carter. Ted Kennedy has been a fantastic Senator, and I think there are lessons there for Hillary Clinton, whose style similarly fits the senate. My belief in the system is accompanied by a respect for the separate skills that can make individuals dominant in each branch of government. For that matter, my understanding of the system leads me to believe that great lawmakers are more important, often, than presidents. Hillary's skills, I think, could position her to be a lion of the Senate, where her work would unquestionably benefit the country. The desire is admittedly selfish, and I know Hillary wants to be president, but I want her to be a dominant senator for decades to come. Barring that, she'd be a fantastic supreme court justice, attorney general, or even secretary of state. But we need her, as she put it, "on the front lines of democracy," not on the bench waiting for the starter to get tired.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
I Guess Hillary Was Waiting for Me to Blog Again
Okay, I'm back. In case you're ever tempted to give it a shot, curating an exhibition is hard and time-consuming.
But enough about me, and more about the end of the Democratic primary. It's not technically over, says the part of me who still hopes for a convention fight, but with Hillary's speech yesterday endorsing Barack Obama, we seem to have an answer as far as who the nominee will be. It's true that this outcome has not, really, been in doubt for some weeks now, but the fact that Hillary has chosen to suspend her campaign now is significant in its timing and, really, in history.
I'm watching the Sunday morning intellectual ghetto on DVR right now, and a part of me very much wants to jump into the whole "will her supporters vote Obama?" question, or the "how great was her speech?" question, or take a moment to think about how completely nuts it is that a black man named Barack Obama just got nominated, or just to mock John McCain's Tuesday night speech with the green background. But I am above all a process person, so I will devote this post to dining on the ashes of the Clinton campaign.
Hillary Clinton, less than one year ago, was the runaway favorite to be the democratic nominee. I, like many other people, knew about Barack Obama's inspiring story, but still considered Hillary too big, too powerful, too experienced, and too well-organized to be at all vulnerable, let alone to a junior senator with an Islamo-African name. So what went wrong?
The Times today has a million pages on this topic, and they touch on just about everything. To me, it actually categorizes pretty easily. In no real order:
1. Iowa. It was a lousy state for Hillary at the time, and one of her campaign aides told her to skip it. She would maintain frontrunner status, relegate Iowa's contest to double-a ball, and not lose much in the way of delegates (not that anyone was thinking about such things at the time). Hillary, though, decided that the negatives of competing there were outweighed by the negatives of skipping it (i.e., looking scared, looking even more like a calculating politician, offending the Midwest). With his win in a state where there were basically no black people, Obama suddenly seemed viable, and even her strong recovery in New Hampshire didn't make him seem irrelevant.
2. Delegate math. For all the insider rap that the Clinton campaign got, it was the Obama guys who figured out that the Democratic nominating system had some quirks to it, mostly in caucus states. They also saw the race as long, whereas Clinton had put her eggs in an inevitability basket (more on this later). So, while the Clinton campaign seemed completely without a plan after Tsunami Tuesday, the Obama campaign seemed to be just hitting its stride. All our talk of momentum was basically nothing, since most of the states went the way they were supposed to. But Obama's camp (and some of us bloggers) saw a run of 10 states after Tsunami Tuesday that were all winnable, and big. Big wins in caucus states translates to big delegates, which Obama started to have mathematically after March 3.
3. Sexism. I do not believe that being an Obama supporter makes one sexist. In fact, it is some of her more stereotypically masculine traits (specifically, the constant warrior rhetoric, snideness and obvious point-scoring) that bother me the most, no matter the sex of the candidate in which they are found (those same characteristics bother me more in, say, John McCain or Rudy Giuliani than they do in Hillary). And I think saying that the same tactics one finds abhorrent in men are tolerable in women is its own type of weird sexism. But over the past few weeks, I've been reading less and watching more TV commentary, and some of the things that were said about Hillary were downright awful, and there were lots of them. I am referring to things that never would have been said if she were a man, and were unfair.
Now, her opponent also dealt with plenty of prejudice, so it's hard to tell if it was a net negative for her. But it's nonetheless important to point out that the closest analogue we have to Hillary, John McCain (lots of experience, familiar name, fighting spirit, looks crappy when he plays politics) could walk up to a puppy, shoot it with a shotgun, drop kick it into a schoolyard, and then blame the screaming kids on the media making up global warming, and the reporters around him would still say all sorts of wonderful things about the old fighter. Hillary could adopt the same puppy, and the reporters would blame her for the fact that it was homeless to begin with. Some of that is because some guys are just scared of strong women. Those guys need to get a life, but they are allowed to vote and be journalists in this country.
4. Tone. This plays into the previous point, because the bar was probably higher for the first major female candidate. But the point is separate, because she can't control her gender, but she could control her tone. The Clinton strategy of inevitability early on may have been an easy call for Mark Penn, but it left her vulnerable to an insurgent type of campaign like the one Obama ran. To process people like me, it also seemed haughty. Her mandate to her big donors that they could only donate to her pushed Obama into the Internet, where he has famously succeeded fabulously. And she just kept acting like she was owed the office. That's politics, one might say, but some can sell it well, and Hillary should have known that she can't. It's one thing I like about her, but she doesn't have the Teflon that her husband did.
And it didn't get better.
I always have been, and remain, a fan of Hillary Clinton. I think she is a tremendous leader, a great senator, and would have made an excellent president. But every time she came on, looked smug and made some obviously contrived political point, it made me cringe. She managed to convince me that she was beatable, that she could never win over the people who don't like her (who are numerous), even at times that she cared more about winning than anything else. Her husband did not help this. I am among the many Americans who liked Bill a lot, but will never again see him the same way after his racially insensitive comments. Chuck Todd just said that Bill feels he was turned into a racist by the Obama campaign. That's not it at all; no one in their right mind could think Bill was a racist. What I saw, though, was a willingness to say anything to win, even if it was counter to your beliefs. The fact that he is smart enough to know what he is doing makes it worse.
But all of it combined to a feeling of entitlement among the Clinton camp. I can only speak for myself on this front, but a sense of entitlement is one of the things I confess to always disliking, even if it is earned. This is doubly so in politics; I just do not accept entitlement as an argument, and as the Hillary campaign progressed, it seemed more and more their only argument.
This culminated for me in the past three months, where Hillary took to simple denial of facts. She pulled scare tactics in her 3 a.m. ad, she called Obama an elitist while she claimed to have roots in every backwoods community. The campaign rewrote math, coming up with numbers that were so selective as to be simply misleading. Terry McAuliffe's manic insistence, in the face of all evidence, that she was going to win prompted Jon Stewart to say: "Your strategy seems to be that, if you act deranged enough, people will just give you the country." Before the Hillary supporters go crazy about it being just politics, let me state that I understand that. None of it was against the rules, and none of it was exactly wrong, and I'm not suggesting it wasn't her right to do it. I'm just saying that I always respected Hillary's judgment, reason, and intelligence, and over the past few months, she seemed to decide that none of that was worth even the smallest chance to win. I'm just one voter, but the fact that it turned me off might mean something.
In a way, the most frustrating thing about this race was that I saw flashes of the Hillary I desperately wanted to vote for. It was when she stopped fighting, when she let her guard down, when she chose to stay above the fray and avoid the bickering that so often marked her campaign, that I really was torn. Sadly, the last such moment was yesterday, when she made an incredible and inspiring speech that seemed utterly genuine. Like many other similar great moments, though, it was preceded by two days where she refused to recognize Obama's accomplishments, and where her desire to win made her seem small-minded and mean-spirited. Perhaps this just reveals in my character a belief that ambition in politics is good, but too much ambition can bring out the worst in even the best candidate.
5. None of that mattered. What did George H.W. Bush do wrong? He ran into Bill Clinton. No strategic move or campaign change would have meant anything, he was just up against a better politician. What did the Penguins do wrong this year in the Stanley Cup Finals? They played the Detroit Red Wings, who were a better team. I know my father, political philosopher that he is, believes this is the case here. Hillary is a battle-scarred, pugnacious, abrasive TV personality with a controversial last name and high negatives. As George Will just said, she was by definition going to have a retrospective sheen to her campaign, because her husband was a two-term president not that long ago.
It may well be that Obama is an uncommonly great politician with an uncommonly great team, and no amount of maneuvering on the part of Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson was going to change that. Perhaps his message of change was just going to resonate after 8 years of Bush administration disaster, that his limited record was going to allow people to see what they wanted to, and that his natural oratory ability was going to be too much for Hillary, who is a very good politician.
Imagine that Hillary had skipped Iowa, had a plan for February 5, and constantly played above the fray and acted like a gracious winner and loser all the time. Am I blogging about how that worked, or about how she needed to be truer to herself and fight harder? It's hard to know, but I'm not one to discount the idea that, if Obama is as good as he seems to be, the loss is less a reflection on Hillary's shortcomings than it is on Obama's strength as a candidate.
Right now, Meet the Press is showing footage of March 17, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was on Meet the Press. His rhetoric was similar to Obama's, as I can imagine his appeal was. A young man who seemed to come from outside politics, promising unification and judgment to move the country away from an unpopular and incomprehensible war, and in a new direction of prosperity. America, of course, never got to decide if they believed he could do it all, because he was shot and killed 40 years ago this week. My girlfriend has told me of a teacher she had who felt so cheated that, to this day, he writes RFK in on every presidential ballot. Of course, the loss of the chance to vote for the best person resulted in disaster for the Democratic party in Chicago that August, and in the election that November. God willing, we'll get our chance this summer and fall to see if Barack Obama can really lead us to all of the things he says we can do. If we decide he can, we may look back on this race not as one Hillary Clinton lost, but as one where a win by anyone else was never even a real possibility, and instead of asking what went wrong, we may just celebrate two historic accomplishments by a party that has had so few in the last decade.
But enough about me, and more about the end of the Democratic primary. It's not technically over, says the part of me who still hopes for a convention fight, but with Hillary's speech yesterday endorsing Barack Obama, we seem to have an answer as far as who the nominee will be. It's true that this outcome has not, really, been in doubt for some weeks now, but the fact that Hillary has chosen to suspend her campaign now is significant in its timing and, really, in history.
I'm watching the Sunday morning intellectual ghetto on DVR right now, and a part of me very much wants to jump into the whole "will her supporters vote Obama?" question, or the "how great was her speech?" question, or take a moment to think about how completely nuts it is that a black man named Barack Obama just got nominated, or just to mock John McCain's Tuesday night speech with the green background. But I am above all a process person, so I will devote this post to dining on the ashes of the Clinton campaign.
Hillary Clinton, less than one year ago, was the runaway favorite to be the democratic nominee. I, like many other people, knew about Barack Obama's inspiring story, but still considered Hillary too big, too powerful, too experienced, and too well-organized to be at all vulnerable, let alone to a junior senator with an Islamo-African name. So what went wrong?
The Times today has a million pages on this topic, and they touch on just about everything. To me, it actually categorizes pretty easily. In no real order:
1. Iowa. It was a lousy state for Hillary at the time, and one of her campaign aides told her to skip it. She would maintain frontrunner status, relegate Iowa's contest to double-a ball, and not lose much in the way of delegates (not that anyone was thinking about such things at the time). Hillary, though, decided that the negatives of competing there were outweighed by the negatives of skipping it (i.e., looking scared, looking even more like a calculating politician, offending the Midwest). With his win in a state where there were basically no black people, Obama suddenly seemed viable, and even her strong recovery in New Hampshire didn't make him seem irrelevant.
2. Delegate math. For all the insider rap that the Clinton campaign got, it was the Obama guys who figured out that the Democratic nominating system had some quirks to it, mostly in caucus states. They also saw the race as long, whereas Clinton had put her eggs in an inevitability basket (more on this later). So, while the Clinton campaign seemed completely without a plan after Tsunami Tuesday, the Obama campaign seemed to be just hitting its stride. All our talk of momentum was basically nothing, since most of the states went the way they were supposed to. But Obama's camp (and some of us bloggers) saw a run of 10 states after Tsunami Tuesday that were all winnable, and big. Big wins in caucus states translates to big delegates, which Obama started to have mathematically after March 3.
3. Sexism. I do not believe that being an Obama supporter makes one sexist. In fact, it is some of her more stereotypically masculine traits (specifically, the constant warrior rhetoric, snideness and obvious point-scoring) that bother me the most, no matter the sex of the candidate in which they are found (those same characteristics bother me more in, say, John McCain or Rudy Giuliani than they do in Hillary). And I think saying that the same tactics one finds abhorrent in men are tolerable in women is its own type of weird sexism. But over the past few weeks, I've been reading less and watching more TV commentary, and some of the things that were said about Hillary were downright awful, and there were lots of them. I am referring to things that never would have been said if she were a man, and were unfair.
Now, her opponent also dealt with plenty of prejudice, so it's hard to tell if it was a net negative for her. But it's nonetheless important to point out that the closest analogue we have to Hillary, John McCain (lots of experience, familiar name, fighting spirit, looks crappy when he plays politics) could walk up to a puppy, shoot it with a shotgun, drop kick it into a schoolyard, and then blame the screaming kids on the media making up global warming, and the reporters around him would still say all sorts of wonderful things about the old fighter. Hillary could adopt the same puppy, and the reporters would blame her for the fact that it was homeless to begin with. Some of that is because some guys are just scared of strong women. Those guys need to get a life, but they are allowed to vote and be journalists in this country.
4. Tone. This plays into the previous point, because the bar was probably higher for the first major female candidate. But the point is separate, because she can't control her gender, but she could control her tone. The Clinton strategy of inevitability early on may have been an easy call for Mark Penn, but it left her vulnerable to an insurgent type of campaign like the one Obama ran. To process people like me, it also seemed haughty. Her mandate to her big donors that they could only donate to her pushed Obama into the Internet, where he has famously succeeded fabulously. And she just kept acting like she was owed the office. That's politics, one might say, but some can sell it well, and Hillary should have known that she can't. It's one thing I like about her, but she doesn't have the Teflon that her husband did.
And it didn't get better.
I always have been, and remain, a fan of Hillary Clinton. I think she is a tremendous leader, a great senator, and would have made an excellent president. But every time she came on, looked smug and made some obviously contrived political point, it made me cringe. She managed to convince me that she was beatable, that she could never win over the people who don't like her (who are numerous), even at times that she cared more about winning than anything else. Her husband did not help this. I am among the many Americans who liked Bill a lot, but will never again see him the same way after his racially insensitive comments. Chuck Todd just said that Bill feels he was turned into a racist by the Obama campaign. That's not it at all; no one in their right mind could think Bill was a racist. What I saw, though, was a willingness to say anything to win, even if it was counter to your beliefs. The fact that he is smart enough to know what he is doing makes it worse.
But all of it combined to a feeling of entitlement among the Clinton camp. I can only speak for myself on this front, but a sense of entitlement is one of the things I confess to always disliking, even if it is earned. This is doubly so in politics; I just do not accept entitlement as an argument, and as the Hillary campaign progressed, it seemed more and more their only argument.
This culminated for me in the past three months, where Hillary took to simple denial of facts. She pulled scare tactics in her 3 a.m. ad, she called Obama an elitist while she claimed to have roots in every backwoods community. The campaign rewrote math, coming up with numbers that were so selective as to be simply misleading. Terry McAuliffe's manic insistence, in the face of all evidence, that she was going to win prompted Jon Stewart to say: "Your strategy seems to be that, if you act deranged enough, people will just give you the country." Before the Hillary supporters go crazy about it being just politics, let me state that I understand that. None of it was against the rules, and none of it was exactly wrong, and I'm not suggesting it wasn't her right to do it. I'm just saying that I always respected Hillary's judgment, reason, and intelligence, and over the past few months, she seemed to decide that none of that was worth even the smallest chance to win. I'm just one voter, but the fact that it turned me off might mean something.
In a way, the most frustrating thing about this race was that I saw flashes of the Hillary I desperately wanted to vote for. It was when she stopped fighting, when she let her guard down, when she chose to stay above the fray and avoid the bickering that so often marked her campaign, that I really was torn. Sadly, the last such moment was yesterday, when she made an incredible and inspiring speech that seemed utterly genuine. Like many other similar great moments, though, it was preceded by two days where she refused to recognize Obama's accomplishments, and where her desire to win made her seem small-minded and mean-spirited. Perhaps this just reveals in my character a belief that ambition in politics is good, but too much ambition can bring out the worst in even the best candidate.
5. None of that mattered. What did George H.W. Bush do wrong? He ran into Bill Clinton. No strategic move or campaign change would have meant anything, he was just up against a better politician. What did the Penguins do wrong this year in the Stanley Cup Finals? They played the Detroit Red Wings, who were a better team. I know my father, political philosopher that he is, believes this is the case here. Hillary is a battle-scarred, pugnacious, abrasive TV personality with a controversial last name and high negatives. As George Will just said, she was by definition going to have a retrospective sheen to her campaign, because her husband was a two-term president not that long ago.
It may well be that Obama is an uncommonly great politician with an uncommonly great team, and no amount of maneuvering on the part of Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson was going to change that. Perhaps his message of change was just going to resonate after 8 years of Bush administration disaster, that his limited record was going to allow people to see what they wanted to, and that his natural oratory ability was going to be too much for Hillary, who is a very good politician.
Imagine that Hillary had skipped Iowa, had a plan for February 5, and constantly played above the fray and acted like a gracious winner and loser all the time. Am I blogging about how that worked, or about how she needed to be truer to herself and fight harder? It's hard to know, but I'm not one to discount the idea that, if Obama is as good as he seems to be, the loss is less a reflection on Hillary's shortcomings than it is on Obama's strength as a candidate.
Right now, Meet the Press is showing footage of March 17, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was on Meet the Press. His rhetoric was similar to Obama's, as I can imagine his appeal was. A young man who seemed to come from outside politics, promising unification and judgment to move the country away from an unpopular and incomprehensible war, and in a new direction of prosperity. America, of course, never got to decide if they believed he could do it all, because he was shot and killed 40 years ago this week. My girlfriend has told me of a teacher she had who felt so cheated that, to this day, he writes RFK in on every presidential ballot. Of course, the loss of the chance to vote for the best person resulted in disaster for the Democratic party in Chicago that August, and in the election that November. God willing, we'll get our chance this summer and fall to see if Barack Obama can really lead us to all of the things he says we can do. If we decide he can, we may look back on this race not as one Hillary Clinton lost, but as one where a win by anyone else was never even a real possibility, and instead of asking what went wrong, we may just celebrate two historic accomplishments by a party that has had so few in the last decade.
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