The Democratic primaries this year reminded me a little of a football game. In football, for a fast running back, one good way to break a long run (if no one’s looking for it) is to outrun everyone to the sideline, then outrun them down the field. That’s more or less what Sen. Obama did: he outran the field to the left sideline, then outran everyone clear to the endzone. On this read, I guess John Edwards was the blitzing linebacker who gets taken clean out of the play by the fullback, while Hillary Clinton was the safety in deep coverage who initially misreads the play and can’t quite get back into it—she laid a hand on Gayle Sayers Obama (need to keep the Chicago tie; I suppose you could also call him Devin Hester Obama) as he streaked by, but that was about it.Now, this sort of thing is a great way to produce exciting results, get the crowd stirred up and on their feet; but unlike for the Chicago Bears, for the Chicago senator, it has some negative consequences: namely, it ties him pretty closely to the voting record that earned him the label of the most liberal politician in Congress. In the primaries, this was a good thing, because most of those who vote in Democratic primaries are liberals; what’s more, this drove an incredible Internet fundraising machine which raked in unprecedented amounts for Sen. Obama from the liberal Democratic netroots. In the general election, however, this isn’t a good thing, because America’s a pretty centrist place; even if Sen. Obama’s the most exciting politician this country has seen in a long time, and even if the chance to elect a dark-skinned President is extremely alluring (even though he isn’t the descendant of slaves), in the end, the most liberal politician in Congress is going to be too far away from most voters to win in November.So, naturally, having won the primaries by running left as fast as he could, Sen. Obama has now attempted to cut back in toward the middle of the field, rather than just taking the ball down the sideline. The problem is, that isn’t always easy to do, and the early returns might suggest that it isn’t working all that well. I noted a few days ago the drop in Sen. Obama’s poll numbers, offering my own conclusion that the main lesson from them is that we don’t know as much as we think we do; for what it’s worth, though, Dick Morris and Ed Morissey, a pair of savvy political operators, have drawn the conclusion that Sen. Obama’s “series of policy reversals and gaffes” were the primary cause. Morris even went so far as to declare that “Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights.” I think that’s hyperbole, but Morris does have an important point: “As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters.” This is particularly important given the thinness of Sen. Obama’s record; we really don’t know much about him as a leader, and he doesn’t have much to point us to beyond what he tells us during the campaign. If his actions tell us that his political convictions are at the service of political expediency—which seems to be what a lot of the netroots folks who’ve driven his fundraising are concluding—then that could really hurt him in the long run, especially against a candidate like John McCain who’s broadly respected for his political integrity (and especially if Sen. McCain chooses a running mate like Sarah Palin who will further point up that contrast).Sen. Obama is a formidably gifted politician who’s shown some remarkable instincts, even as he’s also made a lot of high-profile gaffes; he’s still the favorite in November, though I still think it will be close and I’m personally still betting on the underdog. If he can’t find a way to credibly move to the center without looking like just another politician, though, he could lose that favorite status in a hurry. Archimedes is credited with saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Sen. Obama has the lever; can he find the place to stand?
Category Archives: Politics
A politician of principle
Eight years ago, I told any number of people that my main problem with the presidential race is that the wrong people were on top of the tickets—I’d rather have voted for either Joe Lieberman or Dick Cheney than either George W. Bush or Al Gore. I’ve admired Sen. Lieberman ever since William F. Buckley formed BuckPac to help him beat Republican incumbent Lowell Weicker in Connecticut, and the subsequent years have proven that admiration well-founded. From everything I’ve seen, Lieberman’s an honorable and principled politician, a man of integrity who’s kept his integrity basically intact, which is hard to do in D.C.; it’s a pity he’s not an exciting political figure, because he’s the sort of person who would serve us well as president.Unfortunately, that integrity, combined with his stubborn loyalty, means he’s now in hot water with the Democratic Party leadership (though he had to run as an independent two years ago to keep his Senate seat, he’s still functionally a Democrat). I can certainly understand where the Democratic leadership is coming from; it’s hard to blame them when Sen. Lieberman is openly campaigning for the Republican nominee, and equally openly critical of their own nominee. At the same time, though, I respect Sen. Lieberman for having the courage of his convictions; and at a time when the Republicans have nominated a man who has angered many in his own party for putting his convictions ahead of party loyalty and party discipline, it would be a sad commentary for the Democrats to disfellowship one of their own for doing the same thing.
Thought on the volatility of polls
I was interested to see, a couple days ago, that John McCain had caught Barack Obama in the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll, making up a seven-point deficit in a week, and almost caught him in the Newsweek poll. The latter was particularly interesting since it was that poll last month that showed Sen. Obama with a 15-point lead; now, it has him up just three points. I’m not sure what real significance there might be to all this (especially as today’s Rasmussen poll has Obama back up a few points); I know there are folks out there working carefully to mine every last nugget out of every twitch in the polls, but for my part, I think there’s only two things we can say with any real certainty:
It’s still too early to know anything for sure.
Even when it isn’t, we still know less than we think we do.
The only poll that matters, after all, is the one our various state governments will jointly conduct on the first Tuesday in November. Until then, I suspect all the other polls we take are more likely to give us anti-knowledge than knowledge, unless somebody really fouls up. I realize we aren’t going to stop polling, but I think the best favor we can do ourselves is not to take the results too seriously.
Oh, and Sen. McCain, if you happen to be reading: pick Sarah Palin. Thank you and good night.
Offshore drilling, pro and con
Pauline at Perennial Student has a post up about offshore drilling (which is just as much about the different ways the story can be spun by the media, depending on whom you read and what their agenda is); she has some good links and even better commentary. I particularly appreciated the introduction to SOS California, a group working to find ways to capture/recover oil that naturally seeps into the ocean—thereby both providing energy and reducing pollution. I’d never heard of them before, but may their tribe increase.
Advertising Sarah Palin
This is a nice piece of work boosting Gov. Palin as a potential running mate for John McCain; the further along this campaign goes, the more I think Sen. McCain really needs to make this move, and not to wait much longer to do it.
HT: Adam Brickley
Is there such a thing as a moderate Democrat?
In some senses, yes; obviously, individuals can be. As a matter of practical national politics, though, Dick Morris says “No,” and he has history to back him up. Barack Obama may be moving to the center now, but if he wins in November, the Democratic leadership in Congress will pull him back to his hard-left primary positions, just as they pulled Bill Clinton hard left after his election; and the same sort of thing will happen to all those moderate Democrats the party’s raised up to run in conservative House districts around the country. Whatever their personal positions, they’ll either be reliable votes for the Democratic leadership or they’ll be marginalized right out of Congress. Which is to say, on the national level, there’s really no such thing as a moderate Democrat: whatever they say now, when it comes down to votes, they’ll vote with Nancy Pelosi.
When the bank is your sweetheart
Apparently, when Sen. Barack and Michelle Obama bought their Hyde Park mansion, they got “an unusually low discount interest rate” on their $1.3 million home loan from Illinois’ Northern Trust Bank, well below what others could have expected to get. As political news, this isn’t in the same category as Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-ND, getting sweetheart deals from Countrywide Financial Corp.—unlike Countrywide, Northern Trust isn’t in the middle of a financial scandal—or even the news that Sen. John and Cindy McCain were four years behind on the taxes on their California beachfront condo (they had nearly caught up on their back taxes when the story broke); but it does highlight the fact that when you’re a rising star, when you have influence and your influence is increasing, everybody wants a piece of you, and everybody wants to get on your good side. It also highlights the fact that the appearance of impropriety, or of partiality, can be as damaging as the real thing. (Just ask Sen. McCain, who’s been criticized in some quarters for having lobbyists on his staff even though he’s never yet changed positions at a lobbyist’s behest.) This is yet one more thing at which Sen. Obama doesn’t have much experience; I hope for his sake (and for all of ours) that he’s guarding his heart, and his integrity, carefully.“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men.”—Lord Acton
A bipartisan prescription for health care
This is an Atlantic article from nearly eight years ago in which columnist Matthew Miller got Rep. Jim McDermott, long the Democratic standard-bearer for socialized medicine, and Rep. Jim McCrery, one of his conservative Republican counterparts on the House Ways and Means Committee, together to talk about how to fix the health care system; much to everyone’s surprise, they ended by thrashing out a rough approach to doing exactly that. Unfortunately, while there was real hope in the room that conditions were right to address this problem, circumstances (chiefly, I expect, the disputed end to the 2000 election, followed by 9/11) intervened to scuttle that hope. Still, it’s an excellent discussion, and I think points the way forward out of our current, increasingly unworkable situation.
Trust me, you don’t want Canadian health care
In the US, more and more people, upset by the rising cost of health care, want to turn the whole shooting match over to the government. “We want to be like Canada,” they say.I have to tell you, I lived in Canada for five years; I had surgery in Canada; I saw lots of specialists and the inside of five or six hospitals in Canada; my oldest daughter was born in Canada. America, you don’t want to be like Canada.That is not, incidentally, a slam on the people who make the Canadian health-care system go. For one thing, we were net beneficiaries, as a poor American student family living in Canada; we got a lot for not much, and I appreciated our host’s generosity. For another, we had some truly brilliant doctors, and some wonderful nurses, and the staff at BC Children’s Hospital were beyond superb; they cared deeply about their tiny patients and were past masters at making bricks without straw. The thing is, they had to be.The equipment was junk—they finally gave up on the blood-oxygen monitor on my little baby and took it off when it reported a heart rate of 24 and a blood-oxygen level of 0 (or the other way around—it’s been a few years now); while we were there, the provincial government tried to donate some of its used medical equipment, and no one would take it. The Sun quoted one veterinarian as saying the ultrasound they wanted to give him wasn’t good enough to use on his horses. Meanwhile, the doctors kept taking “reduced activity days,” or RADs (which is to say, they took scheduled one-day strikes without calling them strikes), to protest their contract. I was actually up at St. Paul’s in Vancouver for a scan one of those days; the techs were there, obviously, but no doctors. A hospital with no doctors is a very strange place.I could also tell you about the time we took our daughter to the ER (different hospital) at midnight; there were only a few patients there at the time, but it still took them three hours just to get us into a room, and another hour to see us. It was 5am before we walked out the front door. At that, we were the lucky ones—there were a couple folks still waiting to be seen who’d been waiting when we got there. Or I could tell you about friends who had other friends, or family members, die while on waiting lists for vital surgeries. Or I could tell you about doctors and nurses who got tired of it all and left for better jobs in the US. The list goes on.In case you think I only think this way because I’m an American, I’ll certainly grant you that many Canadians still loyally defend their health-care system; as I say, they have some wonderful people to defend. The fact of the matter is, though, there are many Canadians who don’t, anymore—including, among others, the (liberal) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverly McLachlin. The normal routine in Canada is, if you need a major procedure done, you get put on a waiting list. If you can afford to go south of the border and get it done in the US—or if you can get the government to pay for you to do so—you do that. If you can’t, you wait. When this system was challenged in court—a resident of Québec teamed up with his doctor to sue the province over its law forbidding private medical insurance—the Canadian Supremes threw out the law, and came very close to declaring the entire national system unconstitutional. They didn’t quite agree to do that, but they did indict the system in scathing terms; as the Wall Street Journal summed up the matter, their opinion essentially said that “Canada’s vaunted public health-care system produces intolerable inequality.”Which it did. And does, as do similar government-run systems in Britain and elsewhere. In one Ontario town, for instance, people buy lottery tickets to win appointments with the local doctor. The system doesn’t work. That’s why more Canadians are opting to sue; it’s why in Britain, seriously ill patients end up waiting in ambulances, not even admitted to the emergency room; and it’s why “the father of Quebec medicare,” Claude Castonguay, the man who started the ball rolling that produced Canada’s government-run system, now says it’s time to break it down and let the private sector take some of the load.And why not? After all, that approach is working in Sweden.
Is it Barack Obama’s time?
It certainly could be; he’s a gifted campaigner with a strong core of support running in a year when the opposing party is weak and unpopular. On the other hand, there are several good reasons to think it won’t be.First, the circumstances that made the GOP unpopular and led to the debacle of 2006 are shifting, and Sen. Obama isn’t shifting with them. For one, he continues to stick to the narrative that “Iraq is spiraling into civil war, we invaded unwisely and have botched things ever since, no good outcome is possible, and it is time to get out of there as fast as we can” (even though he only took that stance out of political expediency) when more and more people (including even the editorial board of the Washington Post) are noticing that the surge has changed all that. As Michael Barone writes, “It is beyond doubt now that the surge has been hugely successful, beyond even the hopes of its strongest advocates, like Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. Violence is down enormously, Anbar and Basra and Sadr City have been pacified, Prime Minister Maliki has led successful attempts to pacify Shiites as well as Sunnis, and the Iraqi parliament has passed almost all of the ‘benchmark’ legislation demanded by the Democratic Congress—all of which Barack Obama seems to have barely noticed or noticed not at all. He has not visited Iraq since January 2006 and did not seek a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus when he was in Washington.” This is particularly a problem for Sen. Obama given that John McCain can take a sizeable measure of credit for that success: he didn’t order the surge, but he’d been pushing for it since 2003, even when the whole idea was wildly unpopular—which means that he can legitimately associate himself with our current success in Iraq while avoiding any blame for the failure of the pre-surge approach, since he’d opposed that all along.Another change from 2006 is that Congress is no more effective or popular now than it was then, but now the Democrats are running it; which is to say that running against “those incompetent do-nothings in Congress” is a strategy that should still have bite, but now it will be biting Democratic candidates rather than Republican ones. This is particularly true since, as both Barone and Dick Morris point out, the dramatic rise in gas prices has put the Democratic Congress over a barrel (so to speak). Sen. McCain can campaign against them hard on this issue, pushing for offshore drilling (where, as he’s taking care to tell voters, even Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any spills), drilling in ANWR (especially if he has the wit to put Sarah Palin on the ticket), and even nuclear power (which has worked fine as a major power source in Europe for years now with no problems), and the Democrats will have a hard time countering him; as part of a broader argument that “you voted Democrat two years ago, and what have they done for you? Not much,” this could be devastating.Second, Sen. Obama has a major demographic problem—and no, it’s not the one you think. (Taken all in all, I’d guess that racial prejudices will mostly balance each other out.) The problem, which Noemie Emery laid out in a piece in the Weekly Standard, is the cultural divide among white voters which Barone identified in the Democratic primaries. In Barone’s terms, the split is between Academicians and Jacksonians; Emery defines it this way:
Academicians traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise. Jacksonians prefer men of action, whose achievements are tangible. Academicians love nuance, Jacksonians clarity; academicians love fairness, Jacksonians justice; academicians dislike force and think it is vulgar; Jacksonians admire it, when justly applied. Each side tends to look down on the other, though academicians do it with much more intensity: Jacksonians think academicians are inconsequential, while academicians think that Jacksonians are beneath their contempt. The academicians’ theme songs are “Kumbaya” and “Imagine,” while Jacksonians prefer Toby Keith . . . Academicians don’t think “evil forces” exist, and if they did, they would want to talk to them. This, and not color, seems to be the divide.
This division in the electorate would be the reason that, even after the May 6 primaries turned out far below her hopes, Hillary Clinton was still able to crush Sen. Obama in Kentucky and West Virginia—an outcome RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost predicted. Sen. Obama is an Academician to the bone, perhaps the most non-Jacksonian presidential candidate the Democrats have ever nominated (recall John Kerry’s emphasis on his military experience, and the powerful effect of the Republican attack on that experience); Sen. Clinton, through her toughness and tenacity, was able to keep her campaign going against him by recasting herself as a Jacksonian Democrat (something she certainly had never been before), and thus giving those voters someplace to go against Sen. Obama. Now, in the general election, we’ll see the quintessential Academician, a modern-day Adlai Stevenson, up against the quintessential Jacksonian, a warrior politician for the 21st century. Sen. Obama can certainly pull it off, if he can stop talking to Iowa farmers about arugula, but that’s a matchup which Jacksonians tend to win.Third, just as the “bimbo eruptions” didn’t stop with Gennifer Flowers, so there’s no guarantee we won’t see more problems arise out of Sen. Obama’s friends and associates. We’ve already heard about a number of his unsavory connections, but every so often, a new one makes a scene (as Fr. Michael Pfleger recently did, driving Sen. Obama to finally remove his membership from Trinity UCC); and while it might be possible to defend him by saying, “these are all past connections—Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, James Meeks, Bernadette Dohrn, Nadhmi Auchi, Michael Pfleger, they’re all past history, old stories, irrelevant to who he is now,” that doesn’t hold up very well when you look at the people he continues to associate with. How is it possible to dismiss his connections to the Chicago political machine, racist preachers, American terrorists, and international criminals as irrelevant when his first appointment as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was Eric Holder, to chair his effort to choose a VP candidate? At some point, you just have to say, this pattern of associations tells us something important about Sen. Obama—who he is, how he thinks, what he values, what matters to him; and at some point, you have to figure that the problems his associates have already given him aren’t likely to stop coming. Again, he could overcome this; but depending on what happens and when, he might not.Taken all in all, I have to say, I don’t think he will; I think it will be close, but I think in the end, Sen. McCain will come out on top. Sen. Obama might steal a few states out of the GOP column, but between Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania, I think he’ll lose a couple as well, and I think the end result will look a lot like 2004 at the presidential level—and at the lower levels, maybe not good, but not a worst-case scenario, either. (And maybe I’ll be wrong about all that; as I’ve already noted, nobody’s been right about much, this campaign season.)