So far during this craziest of presidential-election seasons, I haven’t been right about much of anything yet (though I take solace in the fact that neither have many other people). Still, I keep hoping that will change; and in that spirit, I’m officially hopping on the Sarah Palin bandwagon. Gov. Palin isn’t all that well known as yet, since she’s the governor of Alaska, which isn’t exactly a media hub, and an Alaska native to boot; that’s the one argument against John McCain choosing her as his running mate. The rest of the arguments all line up in her favor. Ann Althouse points out a few, Jack Kelly of RealClearPolitics adds some of his own, while Fred Barnes’ piece in The Weekly Standard, though written last year, lays out a few more, and they’re compelling; aside from the fact that she’s not from a populous, media-heavy state, she’s about as perfect a fit for Sen. McCain as one could imagine. (Update: Beldar thinks so too, as does Jonah Goldberg.)One, she’s young, just 44; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s age.Two, she has proven herself as an able executive and administrator, serving as mayor, head of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and now as governor; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s legislative experience (though he does have command experience in the Navy).Three, she has strong conservative credentials, both socially (she’s strongly pro-life, politically and personally) and fiscally (as her use of the line-item veto has shown); she would assuage concerns about Sen. McCain’s conservatism.Four, she’s independent, having risen to power against the Alaska GOP machine, not through it; she’s worked hard against the corruption in both her party and her state’s government. She would reinforce Sen. McCain’s maverick image, which is one of his greatest strengths in this election, but in a more conservative direction.Five, for the reasons listed above, she’s incredibly popular in Alaska. That might seem a minor factor to some, but it’s indicative of her abilities as a politician.Six, she has a remarkable personal story, of the sort the media would love. She’s a former beauty-pageant winner, the mother of five children (the oldest serving in the Army, preparing to deploy to Iraq, the youngest a Down Syndrome baby), an outdoorsy figure who rides snowmobiles and eats mooseburgers—and a tough, take-no-prisoners competitor who was known as “Sarah Barracuda” when she led her underdog high-school basketball team to the state championship, and who now has accomplished a similar feat in cutting her way to the governor’s office. No one now in American politics can match Sen. McCain’s life story (no, not even Barack Obama), but she comes as close as anyone can (including Sen. Obama); she fits his image.Seven, she would give the McCain campaign the “Wow!” factor it can really use in a vice-presidential nominee. As a young, attractive, tough, successful, independent-minded, appealing female politician, though not well known yet, she would make American voters sit up and take notice; and given her past history, there could be no doubt that she would be a strong, independent voice in a McCain administration, should there be one.Eight, choosing Gov. Palin as his running mate, especially if coupled with actions like giving Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the keynote slot at the GOP convention, would help the party going forward. The GOP needs to rebuild its bench of plausible strong future presidential candidates, and perhaps the best thing Sen. McCain can do for the party is to help with this. The party needs Gov. Jindal to stay where he is for another term or two (as, I believe, does the state of Louisiana), but in giving him the convention slot that launched Sen. Obama to prominence four years ago and putting Gov. Palin on the ticket, Sen. McCain would put two of the GOP’s best people and brightest hopes for the future in a perfect position to claim the White House themselves; in so doing, he would make them the face of the GOP for the future.
Category Archives: Politics
What’s the rush?
He doesn’t look all that natural in front of a TV camera, and when he smiles, he tends to look as if he were doing an impression of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker, but John McCain has a good sense of humor for all that; he dropped by SNL recently for a brief bit on Weekend Update, encouraging Democrats to keep the primary contest going. Take a look:
This is noxious
My thanks to Pauline at Perennial Student for catching this. One of the more fun stories in recent years for those interested in the Constitution is the 27th Amendment, which was originally proposed as the 11th Amendment back in 1789; it wasn’t ratified at the time, but no deadline was set for ratification, so when a student at the University of Texas discovered it, the states were still able to consider it, and it was ultimately ratified in May 1992. The Amendment states,
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
The problem is, Congress is cheating, and the judiciary is letting them get away with it. Congress has continued to vote itself pay raises, it’s just called them COLAs (cost of living adjustments) instead, and the courts have refused to call them on it. Never mind that COLAs still “vary the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives,” the D.C. circuit of the Court of Appeals has ruled that the Amendment doesn’t apply to them—a flatly unreasonable and illogical reading of the text—and the Supreme Court has refused to hear any challenge to it.Why? Because Congress sets their pay. Congress can’t cut their pay, but only Congress can increase it. Our federal judiciary is letting Congress circumvent the Constitution and keep voting themselves pay raises to ensure they’ll keep raising the judges’ pay, too. In the larger scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal—but you know what? It’s still unconscionable.
“The great challenge in this decade . . . is social revival.”
So says David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, who has brought about a considerable transformation in the party of Thatcher, a transformation he describes this way: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood—in a word, for society.” It seems to be working, since the Conservatives (or Tories) mopped the floor with the ruling Labour Party in local elections held across Britain two weeks ago—Labour even lost in London.David Brooks certainly thinks there’s cause and effect here, and sees a lesson the Republicans need to take to heart. Brooks wrote in last Friday’s column,
The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.” . . .These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. . . .They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.
As Brooks notes, this isn’t an isolated phenomenon, as center-right parties have risen to power recently in Germany, France, and Canada, among other places; the question is, as he puts it, “whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.” I don’t know if his analysis is right or not; but it needs to be considered. Carefully. Given that the direction he suggests is one that would suit John McCain well, I hope the McCain campaign is listening, and will give his analysis that consideration.
Politics in a nutshell
I’ve been reminded several times recently of the line (I forget who said it) that the difference between conservatives and liberals is summarized in Brown v. Board of Education. In Brown, if I recall correctly, the Court said that changes should be made “with deliberate speed”; conservatives emphasized deliberate, liberals emphasized speed. As a thumbnail sketch of the two political philosophies, it’s not bad.
(As a side note: it works for churches, too.)
John McCain, unnatural politician
A couple weeks ago, Karl Rove had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he asserted that “Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history,” and argued that the Senator will have to set his reticence aside and open up to American voters if he wants to win in November. Rove has a point regarding what the electorate will want, and what stories are important for Sen. McCain to tell in the course of making his case to the voters; but what I think he fails to understand is that it’s not just a matter of being a naturally private person, as if he just needed to overcome his embarrassment and brag a little more. Sen. McCain’s reticence, I believe, goes to the heart of who he is.In the first place, it seems to me that he has a real aversion to making political capital out of things that are truly meaningful to him. The stories he’s told about his life during this campaign have been stories he’s told to explain himself, to help people understand him, not to make himself look good or play on voters’ emotions. Clearly, he would prefer to inspire voters by talking about honor, duty, patriotism and courage, not by bragging about what a wonderful person he is; the stories he’s told about himself have tended to be self-deprecating rather than self-exalting. Similarly, though by any normal definition you’d have to call Sen. McCain an evangelical conservative (and one with a strong personal testimony, at that), he’s been very resistant to leading with his faith, preferring to duck such questions or answer them sidelong. I respect that; I think using one’s faith for political gain, turning Jesus into a means to an end, is spiritually a risky thing at best. That said, however, running for office is an act of self-communication; if your relationship with Jesus is at the core of who you are and why you believe and do what you believe and do, then you have to tell people that in a way that they’ll understand. Though I think his theology is notably off at points, I don’t think he deserves the skepticism he’s received from other evangelicals; if he wants their active, involved support rather than just (most of) their votes, he’s going to need to find a way to make that clear.Second, I believe there’s another issue as well with regard to Sen. McCain’s military experience. I think I’ve written about this somewhere (though I can’t find it), but having grown up in a military family, I’ve spent a lot of time around combat veterans, some of whom were Vietnamese POWs. In all that time, I’ve noticed a clear pattern in the kind of stories I hear and the kind I don’t. I hear funny stories, and stories that show what a sharp pilot Commander X was, or how good a shiphandler Captain Y was; I hear stories as object lessons about leadership and doing your job right, and sometimes I hear stories about fellow officers sold up the river by the politicians. What I do not hear, and have never heard, are stories about the blood and guts of combat (for lack of a better phrase). My brother was with my father when he went to the Wall, and saw him break down; I have never seen that side of his experience, and I would be surprised if I ever do. Because, you see, I have never been there; I don’t understand, and I can’t.From my own observations, combat veterans rarely talk about that kind of thing except among their own, with those who don’t need to be told how it was because they already understand, because they, too, were there. That’s why I never trusted John Kerry, because he was the kind of man who could make political capital out of his medals, and out of turning on those with whom he had served; which told me that he’d only gone into the military for what he could get out of it. Fundamentally, he was a political officer, someone who had put on the uniform as a politician, and such people are not to be trusted.Sen. McCain, by contrast, went into the service for very different reasons, and served out of very different motives; and though he, too, went into politics after returning to civilian life, he has made very different (and much more limited) use of his military career in the pursuit of his political goals. Karl Rove is asking him to change that, and to cross a line that I suspect he might find not only difficult but even somewhat dishonorable to cross. I think Rove is right, that his campaign will need to find a way to do that if they’re going to run successfully; but I also think it might be asking too much of the Senator himself to tell those stories. Maybe their best option would be to get folks like Col. Bud Day to cris-cross the country and tell them for him.
The problem with historical parallels
is knowing what’s really parallel to what. This is where the deeper problem with Barack Obama’s attempt at historical equivalence comes in. After all, had he wanted to name Republicans instead of Democrats, he could have said much the same thing with greater accuracy by citing Nixon and Reagan; but though his comparison would have been correct in the letter of the matter, it would have been wrong in the spirit. When Nixon opened the SALT talks, or when Reagan went to the Reykjavik summit, they were dealing with a government that worked, fundamentally, on a modern rationalist Western understanding of power and politics in which “if you do this, you will die” is a deterrent. The ability to deter the action of other powers by making that threat is the linchpin of the Western approach to diplomacy; this is not to say that every diplomatic move rests on the threat of force, or that all such encounters are in some way fundamentally hostile, but it is to say that the rules by which the game is played have developed, over centuries, from that point and on that basis. Which raises the question: how do you address an enemy for whom death is not a deterrent? That, unfortunately, is the situation we’re in with respect to powers like Iran, and organizations like Hamas and Hizb’allah. This is the point Alan Dershowitz was trying to get across a couple months ago in his editorial “Worshippers of Death”; that’s why he hit his readers with this barrage of quotes:
“We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: “[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.” Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.””The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,” explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: “We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: “It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion.”
In other words, even if talking with our enemies has worked in the past (a dubious assertion, on the whole), there’s a lot less reason to think it might work this time, because we don’t have the same leverage here; we can’t make them behave, because we can’t deter them from acting. All we can do is stop them. (As Dershowitz points out, we’re at a disadvantage in that, as well; but that’s a subject for another post, at least.) Unfortunately, the message doesn’t seem to have taken, judging by Sen. Obama’s remarks. What matters here isn’t whether the American people think talking with, say, Iran or Syria, is a sign of weakness; what matters is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al’Assad most assuredly will—and will react accordingly.
Why lawyers shouldn’t teach history
“I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk
not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did,
and Truman did.”—Sen. Barack Obama, 5/6/08I’ve been meaning to get around to commenting on this ridiculous case of historical malpractice. This might just be the single most wrongheaded political statement I’ve heard during this campaign (which, given this campaign, is saying something). I can’t think of a single enemy with whom either Roosevelt (either Roosevelt, come to that, though I presume he’s referring to the Democrat) or Truman had diplomatic conversations except the one with whom we were allied; as for JFK, it was talking to our enemies that got him into trouble. If he’d stood up to the shoe-pounder to begin with, we would all have been better off. (Then, of course, the Kennedy Administration’s misbehaviors in Vietnam are surely nothing Sen. Obama wants to hold up as a model.)RealClearPolitics’ Jack Kelly, in his helpful survey of the senator’s historical ridiculosity, suggests Neville Chamberlain as a better historical analogue, noting that Chamberlain’s declaration of peace “didn’t work out so well.” I might add that among American Presidents, the real appeasers are folks like Carter—or, if we want to include internal enemies, James Buchanan. I presume Sen. Obama wouldn’t have been in favor of continuing to negotiate with domestic slaveowners?
Down to her last fingernail
After getting clocked in North Carolina and barely eking out a victory in Indiana, by any rational calculation, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is all but dead. Had she gotten the best-case scenario for which she was hoping—a double-digit win in Indiana and a loss within 5-7 points in NC—she could make a rational case for herself on the basis of the political situation; what the actual results indicate is that Sen. Obama has weathered the blows, at least with Democratic voters, and is still on his feet. Barring the unexpected, her hopes for the White House are over.The problem is, of course, in this craziest of all campaign seasons, how could we possibly have the cheek to bar the unexpected? When was the last time we had anything but the unexpected? Unless Sen. Obama completely self-destructs, he’s the nominee—but his self-destruction somehow seems completely possible, even if I can’t imagine anyone without Sen. Clinton’s ego actually betting on it. What’s more, I can even think of two completely possible ways by which that could happen.One, while we’ve heard all we need to hear about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s beliefs, what we haven’t heard him talk about (at least in any detail) is his relationship with Sen. Obama. If someone starts asking him those questions, depending on his answers, that could torpedo Sen. Obama.Two, final arguments open Monday in the trial of Obama associate Antoin “Tony” Rezko. As Hugh Hewitt notes, “if Rezko is convicted and is facing a long stretch in jail, won’t he have to think long and hard about naming names in order to limit his years in federal prison?” Should that happen, things could get very, very messy for Illinois Democrats; the likeliest major pol to go down would seem to be not Sen. Obama but Gov. Rod Blagojevich, but the fact that Rezko did Sen. Obama large, expensive favors would tie him closely enough to the story to be fatal to his ambitions, should it end up breaking open on that scale.What are the odds of either of these things happening? Who knows? What were the odds of any of the things we’ve seen so far? But if Sen. Clinton stays in the race until she’s pushed out, she maximizes her chance of taking advantage if either one does. So, down to her last fingernail she may be, and there may be nothing but the strength of her blood-red polish keeping it from breaking off—but as long as it holds, she’s not going anywhere.
This all made more sense on Mountain Time
Staying up to watch election returns, that is; it’s two hours earlier in Colorado. I can’t keep doing this when it means being up until midnight on a school night. (Why do elections have to be on Tuesdays, anyway?)
Political junkie or otherwise, I need to start putting sleep ahead of politics.