As we emerge from the other side of Super Duper Tuesday, we begin to count the dead and the wounded. The most obvious casualty, of course, is Mitt Romney, whose ability to spend millions of dollars without any significant payoff would, in at least that sense, have made him a worthy successor to George W. Bush. Romney, however, squandered his own fortune rather than the country's, so the comparison with Bush is not entirely fair. Regardless, the Mittster's 2008 experience will likely provide a cautionary tale to the next good looking rich guy who thinks he can buy his way from obscurity into the White House.
Yesterday, news arrived that Hillary Clinton's campaign may also be in trouble. The difficulty does not stem from her electoral performance, which was reasonably strong and included victories in Massachusetts and California that blunted Barack Obama's staggering January momentum. Instead, the one-tine odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination finds herself running low on cash. News stories indicate that the New York senator loaned her campaign five million dollars just to get through Super Tuesday and has temporarily stopped paying some key staffers. This puts her at a decided disadvantage against Obama, who apparently raised several million bucks in just the last 48 hours.
There are two reasons to decry the influence of money in presidential campaigns. The first, obviously, is the concern that office holders may consider themselves beholden to the special interest groups that have donated generously to their successful campaigns. Both Obama and John Edwards have attacked Clinton for her willingness to accept money from political action committees, claiming that such funding would create a conflict of interest should she win the White House. Obama is, in that regard, relatively clean; his contributions have primarily come in relatively small increments from private citizens enthusiastic about the candidate and his message.
But there is another reason to be concerned about the role of money in the primary election process. The object of any party's nomination system is to select the strongest and most viable candidate to do battle with the other side in November. It may certainly be the case that, for the Democrats, that person is Barack Obama. But it seems increasingly possible that Obama may wrest the nomination from Clinton almost by default, as her flagging resources increasingly limit her ability to run television commercials and jet back and forth between key primary and caucus states. More than any other candidate, the relatively inexperienced Obama needs to be tested as strongly and relentlessly as possible before he goes up against the GOP attack machine later in the year. Now this may not happen.
One could, of course, argue that Obama's fundraising numbers are themselves a sign of viability and a strong indicator that he would be the superior nominee to take on and defeat the Republicans. There is certainly a grain of truth to that. Nevertheless, a successful candidate needs far more than a small army of generous supporters to win a presidential election. As impressive as Obama's totals may be, they pale in comparison to the amount of money that will be raised and spent in the general election campaign. And if fundraising prowess among the middle class were an accurate barometer of electoral viability, then Ron Paul would have finished in first place somewhere by now.
This has been a primary election year like no other. Not only did everything start sooner (the New Hampshire primary used to take place in February, at the earliest), but the frontloading was far more severe than ever before. Barely a month elapsed between the first caucus in Iowa and the largest collection of primaries and caucuses on a single day in U.S. history. As recently as 1984, the Iowa caucuses took place on February 20 and the New Hampshire primary a week later. This time around, over half the states had completed the process by the first Tuesday after Groundhog Day. As we approached 2008, speculation abounded about how this new system would work out.
Today we have the answer: we have created the worst of all possible worlds.
Let me explain. Since the primary and caucus system started to dominate the presidential selection process back in the 1970s, people have complained that small, unrepresentative states were given too much influence over the parties' nominations. Clearly, that has not changed. John Edwards' failure to win in Iowa or place in New Hampshire doomed his campaign even before the other 97% of the electorate had a chance to weigh in. Candidates who decided that they were not a good fit in these states learned once again that it is essentially impossible to sit out the first two contests of the season and have any chance at eventual victory.
As usual, narrow victories exploded in significance because they occurred at the beginning of the process. Consider, for example, how much things might have changed had Mitt Romney edged past Mike Huckabee in Iowa, rather than vice versa. Instead, for a lack of a few thousand votes in a single state, Romney was condemned to playing catch-up for the rest of the campaign.
And has any January election in recent memory had the overwhelming significance of the 2008 South Carolina Democratic Primary? Hillary Clinton was the clear frontrunner after her wins in New Hampshire and Nevada, but Obama's lopsided triumph in the Palmetto State became the last and most important story voters heard leading into the Super Tuesday contests a couple of weeks later. Why the Democrats would want to grant that level of influence to such an overwhelmingly Republican state has no sensible answer. In all likelihood, they had no idea that things would shake out this way. A lot of people—and it seems foolish now—probably believed that the looming specter of Super Tuesday would actually minimize the impact of the smaller, earlier states. They were, obviously, wrong.
As states rushed to leapfrog each other to get closer to the starting gate, further unforeseen problems developed. Michigan and Florida, seeking not to get lost in the Super Tuesday cacophony, scheduled their primaries in advance of the Democratic Party's February 5 limit. As a consequence, they were punished with the loss of their convention delegates. Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean will have to answer for this if offended voters in these states, especially Florida, abandon the party in November.
There is another potential landmine awaiting the Dems as well. If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama arrive at the party's Denver convention nearly equal in the delegate count, the Clinton camp will exert enormous pressure to allow the Michigan and Florida delegations to be seated. Obama, the candidate of positivity and inclusion, will be forced to oppose this tactic. If Clinton wins, her victory will be considered tainted; if Obama prevails, his opponents may regard the nomination as having been stolen on a technicality. It's hard to imagine how this benefits anyone but John McCain.
But even as the primary election system has been criticized over the past three decades, there were always those willing to come to its defense. The process, they say, allows less known, underfunded candidates to engage in retail politics, building strength through the power of their personality and the persuasiveness of their message. A national primary would, by contrast, make it impossible for any but the richest candidates with the greatest name recognition to succeed. Money, they argue, shouldn't decide who gets each party's nomination.
This year, however, we have somehow found a way not only to make the earlier states even more disproportionately influential, we have also elevated the role of funding to a status it has not enjoyed since the age of Nixon. Rather than allowing candidates to build a war chest and empty their coffers gradually, Super Duper Tuesday demanded an orgy of spending that some candidacies simply could not endure and others may not survive. While it is certainly true that money isn't everything—McCain and Huckabee, after all, triumphed over Romney and Rudy Giuliani—it is equally clear that the 22-state lineup facing the candidates on February 5 caused some to give up the ghost earlier than they otherwise would have, and others to emerge in grave danger of extinction despite a generally strong performance at the polls.
This is, indeed, the worst of all possible worlds.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Semi-Super Tuesday
A few thoughts on last night's results:
1. Forgive the Republican Party if it woke up this morning with a severe case of heartburn. John McCain may be crowing about his coastal victories and his rising delegate count, but any smiles on the faces of GOP officials are decidedly forced. The weeklong effort by cultural and economic conservatives to demonize the Arizona senator met with astounding success. With the exception of his home turf of Arizona, as well as Oklahoma, and Missouri (which he barely won), every state in which McCain emerged triumphant voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections. According to CNN, only 49% of John McCain's voters in over a dozen Republican primaries and caucuses labeled themselves as conservatives.
Had either Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney exited the race two weeks ago, it is clear that the GOP nomination picture would be altogether different. But with the two of them splitting the right-wing vote, McCain was able to survive on a diet of moderates, independents, and a few active duty and veteran military conservatives. The winner-take-all nature of many of the Republican primaries exaggerated McCain's delegate count far out of proportion to his actual success at the polls. In what should have been a bad day for him, therefore, John McCain came away from Super Tuesday the prohibitive favorite for his party's nomination.
Think of this, then, as the sort of buyers' remorse that occurs two days after the warranty expires. A clear majority of conservative Republican voters disapprove of the choice that their party is almost certain to make at its Minneapolis convention this summer. But their inability to select a champion effectively thwarted their efforts to deny McCain the GOP bid. As well as Mike Huckabee did yesterday, he might as well have been running for President of the Confederacy. His campaign was irrelevant outside the Deep South and a few neighboring states. Mitt Romney's loss was devastating and total, but he still pulled in most of the Red State conservative vote north and west of Dixie.
The great hope of the McCain campaign was that their overwhelming delegate count after Super Tuesday would permit the senator to begin running against the Democrats and positioning himself for the November election. Instead, he must continue his efforts to earn the votes of hard line conservatives whose opinion leaders have already persuaded them that John McCain is a sellout, free-speech limiting, illegal immigrant pandering, tax-loving liberal. If it is possible to win big and lose big on the same night, the Arizona senator has somehow pulled it off.
2. The popular talk in the cable TV newsrooms involved the possibility that Senator McCain might be forced to select former Governor Huckabee as his vice presidential candidate. Huckabee, after all, has clear credibility with Christian conservatives and other red meat Republicans, as evidenced by his dominance south of the Mason-Dixon Line. A McCain-Huckabee ticket, suggested the blowhards, would bring the fundamentalists back home in November while allowing the presidential nominee to take the contest to the Democrats in blue states like Illinois and California and New York.
Permit me to disagree. Huckabee may earn the post of Minister of Family Values in a McCain Administration (they'll call it Secretary of Education), but there is precisely zero chance that he will share the convention podium with his rival when the GOP ticket is introduced in September. The man has simply talked himself out of the job. It is one thing to question evolution; it is another thing to do so publicly before a debate audience of millions, as Huckabee did last year. Then there's Huckabee's avowed desire to amend the U.S. Constitution to bring it into line with the Holy Bible. That position may win you Alabama and Georgia, but it would be devastating in the more moderate and libertarian swing states of the West and Midwest.
Don't forget, too, that John McCain, if elected, will be the oldest incoming president in American history. Thus, his proposed veep will get a little more attention than usual. And the prospect of a theocratic President Huckabee would almost certainly drag down McCain's vote share in many of the states he needs to win.
Besides, there are plenty of culturally conservative Republicans out there who bring all of Huckabee's positives to the table without the obvious negatives. Pick pretty much any southern GOP governor and you get a safer alternative to the outspoken Arkansan. Barbour of Mississippi, Riley of Alabama, Crist of Florida, and Sanford of South Carolina would balance a McCain ticket without frightening the soccer moms in suburban Cleveland. They would also bring a record of fiscal conservatism that would compare favorably to Huckabee's, at least from the point of view of the supply side dead enders.
3. It is much harder to say who the big Democratic winner was last night, but I think I'll go with Hillary Clinton. She withstood an enormous surge in support for Barack Obama and survived to pull off victories in most of the key states, including California. The Obama wave, which had developed furious momentum ever since the senator's unexpectedly lopsided victory in South Carolina, evidently crested just in time to save Hillary from an embarrassing defeat. Forget the spin doctors who remind us of how far ahead Senator Clinton was back in December. Simply remember this: after nearly three solid weeks of devastatingly negative press coverage, she remains standing.
She's not out of danger yet, of course. Obama has huge cash reserves, an enormously appealing message, and a primary calendar for the remainder of February that provides him with a strong advantage. But increasingly, the "Obama States", those dominated by African Americans and/or highly educated "limousine liberals", have mostly completed their work. Ahead we have places like Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where demographics would seem to be more favorable to the former First Lady.
Hillary has another huge advantage as well: she can play for a tie. The majority of Democratic superdelegates who have committed so far, have endorsed the New York senator. So long as she arrives at the convention more or less evenly matched with Barack Obama, that should give her the edge she needs to emerge victorious.
4. Nobody talks about potential Democratic vice presidential nominees, but I have a few ideas. Should Senator Obama win the nomination, I would look toward a moderate woman as a running mate, particularly one from a swing state. There are a number from whom to choose, but two strong contenders would be Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Governor Jane Napolitano of Arizona (sure, it's McCain's home state, but you'll notice that he couldn't even crack the 50% barrier there yesterday).
Hillary Clinton would obviously face enormous pressure to select Obama and complete the "dream ticket" that everyone keeps jabbering about. My guess is that she would not, calculating that she would suffer from the resultant charisma gap. Bill Richardson remains a possibility (and incidentally, keep that beard, Bill; it makes you look much more vice presidential), though he did not distinguish himself as a presidential candidate. Otherwise, look for a liberal, white male governor, preferably one who has strong ties to his state's African American community. I don't have a name in mind, but there must be someone out there.
5. The Kennedy magic expired at least one generation ago. Now everyone knows it. (And don't you think the Republicans are salivating at the possibility of using Teddy's endorsement against Barack Obama come October?)
1. Forgive the Republican Party if it woke up this morning with a severe case of heartburn. John McCain may be crowing about his coastal victories and his rising delegate count, but any smiles on the faces of GOP officials are decidedly forced. The weeklong effort by cultural and economic conservatives to demonize the Arizona senator met with astounding success. With the exception of his home turf of Arizona, as well as Oklahoma, and Missouri (which he barely won), every state in which McCain emerged triumphant voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections. According to CNN, only 49% of John McCain's voters in over a dozen Republican primaries and caucuses labeled themselves as conservatives.
Had either Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney exited the race two weeks ago, it is clear that the GOP nomination picture would be altogether different. But with the two of them splitting the right-wing vote, McCain was able to survive on a diet of moderates, independents, and a few active duty and veteran military conservatives. The winner-take-all nature of many of the Republican primaries exaggerated McCain's delegate count far out of proportion to his actual success at the polls. In what should have been a bad day for him, therefore, John McCain came away from Super Tuesday the prohibitive favorite for his party's nomination.
Think of this, then, as the sort of buyers' remorse that occurs two days after the warranty expires. A clear majority of conservative Republican voters disapprove of the choice that their party is almost certain to make at its Minneapolis convention this summer. But their inability to select a champion effectively thwarted their efforts to deny McCain the GOP bid. As well as Mike Huckabee did yesterday, he might as well have been running for President of the Confederacy. His campaign was irrelevant outside the Deep South and a few neighboring states. Mitt Romney's loss was devastating and total, but he still pulled in most of the Red State conservative vote north and west of Dixie.
The great hope of the McCain campaign was that their overwhelming delegate count after Super Tuesday would permit the senator to begin running against the Democrats and positioning himself for the November election. Instead, he must continue his efforts to earn the votes of hard line conservatives whose opinion leaders have already persuaded them that John McCain is a sellout, free-speech limiting, illegal immigrant pandering, tax-loving liberal. If it is possible to win big and lose big on the same night, the Arizona senator has somehow pulled it off.
2. The popular talk in the cable TV newsrooms involved the possibility that Senator McCain might be forced to select former Governor Huckabee as his vice presidential candidate. Huckabee, after all, has clear credibility with Christian conservatives and other red meat Republicans, as evidenced by his dominance south of the Mason-Dixon Line. A McCain-Huckabee ticket, suggested the blowhards, would bring the fundamentalists back home in November while allowing the presidential nominee to take the contest to the Democrats in blue states like Illinois and California and New York.
Permit me to disagree. Huckabee may earn the post of Minister of Family Values in a McCain Administration (they'll call it Secretary of Education), but there is precisely zero chance that he will share the convention podium with his rival when the GOP ticket is introduced in September. The man has simply talked himself out of the job. It is one thing to question evolution; it is another thing to do so publicly before a debate audience of millions, as Huckabee did last year. Then there's Huckabee's avowed desire to amend the U.S. Constitution to bring it into line with the Holy Bible. That position may win you Alabama and Georgia, but it would be devastating in the more moderate and libertarian swing states of the West and Midwest.
Don't forget, too, that John McCain, if elected, will be the oldest incoming president in American history. Thus, his proposed veep will get a little more attention than usual. And the prospect of a theocratic President Huckabee would almost certainly drag down McCain's vote share in many of the states he needs to win.
Besides, there are plenty of culturally conservative Republicans out there who bring all of Huckabee's positives to the table without the obvious negatives. Pick pretty much any southern GOP governor and you get a safer alternative to the outspoken Arkansan. Barbour of Mississippi, Riley of Alabama, Crist of Florida, and Sanford of South Carolina would balance a McCain ticket without frightening the soccer moms in suburban Cleveland. They would also bring a record of fiscal conservatism that would compare favorably to Huckabee's, at least from the point of view of the supply side dead enders.
3. It is much harder to say who the big Democratic winner was last night, but I think I'll go with Hillary Clinton. She withstood an enormous surge in support for Barack Obama and survived to pull off victories in most of the key states, including California. The Obama wave, which had developed furious momentum ever since the senator's unexpectedly lopsided victory in South Carolina, evidently crested just in time to save Hillary from an embarrassing defeat. Forget the spin doctors who remind us of how far ahead Senator Clinton was back in December. Simply remember this: after nearly three solid weeks of devastatingly negative press coverage, she remains standing.
She's not out of danger yet, of course. Obama has huge cash reserves, an enormously appealing message, and a primary calendar for the remainder of February that provides him with a strong advantage. But increasingly, the "Obama States", those dominated by African Americans and/or highly educated "limousine liberals", have mostly completed their work. Ahead we have places like Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where demographics would seem to be more favorable to the former First Lady.
Hillary has another huge advantage as well: she can play for a tie. The majority of Democratic superdelegates who have committed so far, have endorsed the New York senator. So long as she arrives at the convention more or less evenly matched with Barack Obama, that should give her the edge she needs to emerge victorious.
4. Nobody talks about potential Democratic vice presidential nominees, but I have a few ideas. Should Senator Obama win the nomination, I would look toward a moderate woman as a running mate, particularly one from a swing state. There are a number from whom to choose, but two strong contenders would be Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Governor Jane Napolitano of Arizona (sure, it's McCain's home state, but you'll notice that he couldn't even crack the 50% barrier there yesterday).
Hillary Clinton would obviously face enormous pressure to select Obama and complete the "dream ticket" that everyone keeps jabbering about. My guess is that she would not, calculating that she would suffer from the resultant charisma gap. Bill Richardson remains a possibility (and incidentally, keep that beard, Bill; it makes you look much more vice presidential), though he did not distinguish himself as a presidential candidate. Otherwise, look for a liberal, white male governor, preferably one who has strong ties to his state's African American community. I don't have a name in mind, but there must be someone out there.
5. The Kennedy magic expired at least one generation ago. Now everyone knows it. (And don't you think the Republicans are salivating at the possibility of using Teddy's endorsement against Barack Obama come October?)
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
The Fantasies of the Campaign Trail
If you watched the Democratic presidential debate last Thursday, you'll recall that the candidates spent the first half hour addressing their health care proposals. Hillary Clinton derided Barack Obama for offering a plan that did not guarantee 100% coverage. Obama insisted that his blueprint for national health care differed only marginally from that of his opponent. By the time the mini-seminar had concluded, everyone in the audience, ballroom and television, was well acquainted with what an Obama or Clinton presidency would mean to their ability to find affordable insurance.
Except, of course, that neither of these plans, at least in their current incarnation, have any real chance of becoming law.
We've been down this road before, most notably when Bill Clinton promised in 1992 that he would provide national health care in his first year as president. Our new insurance cards would, presumably, show up in our mailboxes on the same day that Clinton's proposed jobs package was signed into law and openly gay men and women enlisted, at the new president's invitation, in the United States Marine Corps. As we all found out sixteen years ago, however, the soaring words of the campaign trail often fail to translate into public policy.
History records that Bill Clinton ran into a buzz saw of conservative Democrats and obstructionist Republicans who prevented him from securing the majorities he needed to enact his ambitious domestic program. Even with his party in control of both houses of Congress, Clinton quickly discovered that being the president of the United States is at least a bit more difficult than governing Arkansas. But his real difficulty was not with the bomb-throwing Gingrich or even Georgia's Sam Nunn, a right-wing Democratic senator who earned a small footnote in history as the Lester Maddox of gay civil rights. Bill Clinton's real enemy was a man who had been dead for over 150 years on Election Day, 1992: James Madison.
Madison, himself a generally ineffective president, designed a Constitution that would thwart the will of ambitious men (and now women). We celebrate his system of checks and balances in the civics classroom, but we often resent it when it prevents our leaders from coalescing around the latest plan that will rescue America from recession or moral decay or a deluge of illegal immigrants. Historically ignorant (or intentionally disingenuous) blowhards like Lou Dobbs and Jack Cafferty decry the inability of elected officials to break the bonds of gridlock, neglecting to remind viewers that our constitutional system of government is uniquely constructed to favor inaction over its opposite.
Sometimes, our system does manage to lurch forward but usually only under dire political circumstances. The Democrats' unexpected loss of the U.S. Senate and a large portion of the House of Representatives in 1980 intimidated the party into signing onto Ronald Reagan's fairly extreme plans to cut taxes and spending (though the final impetus likely came from the burst of public sympathy Reagan received after nearly being assassinated in March, 1981). For his part, George W. Bush was able, for nearly six years, to bend a shell-shocked Congress to his will following the horrifying terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In general, though, substantial change has come to America only when one party not only controls the presidency, but enjoys supermajorities in both congressional chambers. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society would not have been realized without overwhelming Democratic control of the Senate and House of Representatives. And even then, as FDR found out, it is critical that the U.S. Supreme Court not be hostile to the whole enterprise.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will, if successful, benefit from staggering congressional majorities. Nor will the results of the 2008 election, however one-sided, likely intimidate an ideologically supercharged, southern-based GOP minority, particularly one in which most members represent safely conservative constituencies. As current congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have discovered, the combination of the Senate filibuster and the timidity of vulnerable centrist Democratic colleagues makes it difficult even to unite in opposition to an unpopular president. How, then, will Clinton or Obama have any hope of navigating these same waters in support of any sort of ambitious domestic program?
As we have re-learned in recent years, the most important powers of the president exist in those constitutional mandates that were poorly defined by Madison and his coauthors. The vague notion of Commander-in-Chief, for example, has been interpreted by presidents (and accepted by Congress and the American people) to mean that the chief executive can pretty much commit the armed forces anywhere at any time for any reason. The new president will, in short, have far more power over war and peace than over health care and the economy.
The other area of enormous significance is in the selection of federal judges, and especially justices to the United States Supreme Court. Even with the need for Senate confirmation, the ability to stock the judicial branch of government may be more important than any other presidential legacy. The power of judicial review, i.e., the ability of judges to make authoritative decisions about the meaning of the Constitution, does not exist in Madison's original document. But ever since it was grabbed by the Supremes in the case of Marbury v. (of all people) Madison, it has persisted as an unchecked mandate that has changed American society in myriad ways (think abortion and school prayer, just to name two).
Consider that Bill Clinton's most important legislative accomplishments involved compromises with a Republican Congress on matters that, for the most part, came straight out of the GOP playbook: free trade, a balanced budget, welfare reform. If Clinton has any sort of liberal legacy at all, it rests with the men and women he appointed to the federal bench. Unless you are a fan of NAFTA or workfare, you might, assuming you are a Democrat, conclude that the only lasting benefits of eight years of Clintonism were Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
What does all this mean? First, it means that we shouldn't bother asking our candidates to produce detailed plans on domestic issues. Let them simply share their goals with us, knowing that whatever bill, if any, is signed into law will have little overlap with whatever blueprints might be discussed on the campaign trail. Second, it means that voters are entirely right to emphasize electability and experience in choosing between candidates for the presidency. Obviously, winning is important, but so is the ability to negotiate the legislative landmines that James Madison planted throughout his Constitution.
Finally, despite our current—and legitimate—worries about recession and immigration and health care, we ought to ask our presidential candidates to speak more specifically about their foreign policy goals and their standards for warmaking, and not just in Iraq. Precisely how would they use this singular presidential power? Would Hillary Clinton ever take military action against an enemy that is gathering weapons of mass destruction? Can Barack Obama truly think of no circumstances under which pre-emptive war might be justified?
And we should also demand more discussion about the candidates' philosophy on appointing federal judges. Yes, we want to know what their litmus tests will be (and they shouldn't lie; everyone has them). But we also need to learn how they intend to deal with the process of advice and consent. For example, does Senator Obama's oft-stated commitment to bipartisan unity include the selection of compromise, centrist Supreme Court nominees? Would Senator Clinton favor employing the "nuclear option" if the GOP were to filibuster all of her appointments?
Unless something amazing happens tonight, we will likely have these two candidates with us for at least a few more weeks. Perhaps now is the time to begin a more reasonable conversation about the realities of presidential power and their implications. Or, we can force them to continue piling up promises about domestic policy that they will almost certainly have to scale back or even break a year or so from now.
I say we might as well stop tossing pies into the air and get real.
Except, of course, that neither of these plans, at least in their current incarnation, have any real chance of becoming law.
We've been down this road before, most notably when Bill Clinton promised in 1992 that he would provide national health care in his first year as president. Our new insurance cards would, presumably, show up in our mailboxes on the same day that Clinton's proposed jobs package was signed into law and openly gay men and women enlisted, at the new president's invitation, in the United States Marine Corps. As we all found out sixteen years ago, however, the soaring words of the campaign trail often fail to translate into public policy.
History records that Bill Clinton ran into a buzz saw of conservative Democrats and obstructionist Republicans who prevented him from securing the majorities he needed to enact his ambitious domestic program. Even with his party in control of both houses of Congress, Clinton quickly discovered that being the president of the United States is at least a bit more difficult than governing Arkansas. But his real difficulty was not with the bomb-throwing Gingrich or even Georgia's Sam Nunn, a right-wing Democratic senator who earned a small footnote in history as the Lester Maddox of gay civil rights. Bill Clinton's real enemy was a man who had been dead for over 150 years on Election Day, 1992: James Madison.
Madison, himself a generally ineffective president, designed a Constitution that would thwart the will of ambitious men (and now women). We celebrate his system of checks and balances in the civics classroom, but we often resent it when it prevents our leaders from coalescing around the latest plan that will rescue America from recession or moral decay or a deluge of illegal immigrants. Historically ignorant (or intentionally disingenuous) blowhards like Lou Dobbs and Jack Cafferty decry the inability of elected officials to break the bonds of gridlock, neglecting to remind viewers that our constitutional system of government is uniquely constructed to favor inaction over its opposite.
Sometimes, our system does manage to lurch forward but usually only under dire political circumstances. The Democrats' unexpected loss of the U.S. Senate and a large portion of the House of Representatives in 1980 intimidated the party into signing onto Ronald Reagan's fairly extreme plans to cut taxes and spending (though the final impetus likely came from the burst of public sympathy Reagan received after nearly being assassinated in March, 1981). For his part, George W. Bush was able, for nearly six years, to bend a shell-shocked Congress to his will following the horrifying terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In general, though, substantial change has come to America only when one party not only controls the presidency, but enjoys supermajorities in both congressional chambers. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society would not have been realized without overwhelming Democratic control of the Senate and House of Representatives. And even then, as FDR found out, it is critical that the U.S. Supreme Court not be hostile to the whole enterprise.
Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will, if successful, benefit from staggering congressional majorities. Nor will the results of the 2008 election, however one-sided, likely intimidate an ideologically supercharged, southern-based GOP minority, particularly one in which most members represent safely conservative constituencies. As current congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have discovered, the combination of the Senate filibuster and the timidity of vulnerable centrist Democratic colleagues makes it difficult even to unite in opposition to an unpopular president. How, then, will Clinton or Obama have any hope of navigating these same waters in support of any sort of ambitious domestic program?
As we have re-learned in recent years, the most important powers of the president exist in those constitutional mandates that were poorly defined by Madison and his coauthors. The vague notion of Commander-in-Chief, for example, has been interpreted by presidents (and accepted by Congress and the American people) to mean that the chief executive can pretty much commit the armed forces anywhere at any time for any reason. The new president will, in short, have far more power over war and peace than over health care and the economy.
The other area of enormous significance is in the selection of federal judges, and especially justices to the United States Supreme Court. Even with the need for Senate confirmation, the ability to stock the judicial branch of government may be more important than any other presidential legacy. The power of judicial review, i.e., the ability of judges to make authoritative decisions about the meaning of the Constitution, does not exist in Madison's original document. But ever since it was grabbed by the Supremes in the case of Marbury v. (of all people) Madison, it has persisted as an unchecked mandate that has changed American society in myriad ways (think abortion and school prayer, just to name two).
Consider that Bill Clinton's most important legislative accomplishments involved compromises with a Republican Congress on matters that, for the most part, came straight out of the GOP playbook: free trade, a balanced budget, welfare reform. If Clinton has any sort of liberal legacy at all, it rests with the men and women he appointed to the federal bench. Unless you are a fan of NAFTA or workfare, you might, assuming you are a Democrat, conclude that the only lasting benefits of eight years of Clintonism were Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
What does all this mean? First, it means that we shouldn't bother asking our candidates to produce detailed plans on domestic issues. Let them simply share their goals with us, knowing that whatever bill, if any, is signed into law will have little overlap with whatever blueprints might be discussed on the campaign trail. Second, it means that voters are entirely right to emphasize electability and experience in choosing between candidates for the presidency. Obviously, winning is important, but so is the ability to negotiate the legislative landmines that James Madison planted throughout his Constitution.
Finally, despite our current—and legitimate—worries about recession and immigration and health care, we ought to ask our presidential candidates to speak more specifically about their foreign policy goals and their standards for warmaking, and not just in Iraq. Precisely how would they use this singular presidential power? Would Hillary Clinton ever take military action against an enemy that is gathering weapons of mass destruction? Can Barack Obama truly think of no circumstances under which pre-emptive war might be justified?
And we should also demand more discussion about the candidates' philosophy on appointing federal judges. Yes, we want to know what their litmus tests will be (and they shouldn't lie; everyone has them). But we also need to learn how they intend to deal with the process of advice and consent. For example, does Senator Obama's oft-stated commitment to bipartisan unity include the selection of compromise, centrist Supreme Court nominees? Would Senator Clinton favor employing the "nuclear option" if the GOP were to filibuster all of her appointments?
Unless something amazing happens tonight, we will likely have these two candidates with us for at least a few more weeks. Perhaps now is the time to begin a more reasonable conversation about the realities of presidential power and their implications. Or, we can force them to continue piling up promises about domestic policy that they will almost certainly have to scale back or even break a year or so from now.
I say we might as well stop tossing pies into the air and get real.
Monday, February 4, 2008
The Super Bowl of Higher Education
The country took a break from politics yesterday to participate in that national bonding ritual that is the Super Bowl. After 256 regular season games and ten playoff contests, the NFL decides its champion in a spectacle that is now better known for its ads and halftime show than for its gridiron exploits. Don’t believe me? Well, consider this: everyone remembers Apple's "1984" commercial introducing the Macintosh, as well as Janet Jackson's breast-revealing "wardrobe malfunction" in 2004. But can anybody tell me who won the Big Game during those years? If you named the Los Angeles Raiders and New England Patriots, feel free to sign up for "Stump the Schwab". The rest of you get my point.
Well, it's not my point exactly; it has been made by plenty of other people. I could as easily have mentioned the roll out of the Budweiser frogs in 1995 instead, or the improbable Aerosmith-Britney Spears pairing in 2001. In any event, I tend to resist this sort of thing, so I rarely watch the Super Bowl in full. For some reason, I did happen to witness Ms. Jackson's notorious public exposure (I thought the nipple ring was a pasty, so my pulse did not quicken), but that may be the only halftime show I ever actually endured. I do wish now that I had sat through the performances by Up With People during the 1970s just so I could say that I did.
The commercialization of the Super Bowl did come full circle this year, with the teams mixing it up on the field of University of Phoenix stadium. I love this name, creating as it does the paradox of an institution of higher education with more stadiums (1) than football teams (0). Many people tuning in last night probably even assumed that the Big Game was being played on some college campus, the way Super Bowl XXX took place at Arizona State's Sun Devil Stadium in 1996.
While I am amused by the idea of a university without sports buying the naming rights to an athletic venue, I am less sanguine about what it represents. The University of Phoenix provides a model of higher learning that challenges the entire notion of what the college experience ought to be. Obviously, a strong relationship must exist between a college education and employability. That, however, should be only part of the overall equation.
Too often, those of us in the professoring business do an inadequate job of justifying our lives and our salaries. It is all too easy to tell skeptical taxpayers that our role is to punch their kids' tickets into the middle class. If we can convince state legislators that our value is quantifiable, we can avoid more difficult conversations about what it means to be an educated person. (Private universities do not have to answer to politicians, but they still must account to parents for high tuition rates.)
In part, of course, we act in the interest of self-preservation. A good liberal education demands that students question everything in which they have ever believed, including their faith, their patriotism, their political attitudes, and their conception of morality. Most emerge with views that are stronger and more firmly rooted than before, but try convincing a state senator that challenging notions of God and Country is a good thing.
The dilemma, however, should be clear. The more we explain ourselves in terms of job training and preparation, the less we can distinguish ourselves from models, such as Phoenix's, in which higher education is little more than a narrow means to a specific end. Indeed, many colleges in the United States have spent the past decade moving in a direction that further blurs the lines between trade schools and four-year universities. The sudden explosion of on-line courses and distance learning violates multiple centuries of collected wisdom about teaching and learning. If a student can receive his or her diploma entirely from a remote location, unmonitored by real faculty, then why should any state want to bill its taxpayers for sprawling campuses and full professors of philosophy? Why don't they just adopt the University of Phoenix model and be done with troubling matters such as deferred maintenance, not to mention tenure and promotion?
Let's say out loud what we already know: on-line and correspondence courses are vastly inferior to the on campus experience. Teaching—actual, good teaching—is inherently an interactive process, even in a large lecture hall. Anyone who has done this job knows that only by physically watching your students can you recognize when they understand and when additional description is required, when true engagement is achieved and when boredom has set in. Nobody ever waxed poetic about the inspiration they received from an online prof, and none ever will. The dirty little secret of higher education is that professors provide little information that students cannot get directly out of their books. The value added—to use the educrats' annoying term—exists in the ability of good educators to make that information meaningful and to give it life.
There is certainly nothing wrong with measuring and documenting student learning. Arrogant faculty members may think that accountability is for the little people, but they are wrong and always have been. Nevertheless, as we move (or are forced by accreditors) in this direction, we must resist the temptation to take the easy way out by simply measuring concepts defined and facts remembered. The difference between our education and that provided by Phoenix must be our efforts to make students reflect critically on what they read and hear, and to help them separate between superior and inferior lines of argument. If we do not take the measurement of learning—deep, textured learning—seriously, we will undermine our most important advantage in the battle for legitimacy in this new era.
We also must insist on the value of research. The average state legislator probably wonders why she must divert money away from highway construction to pay for some overpaid professor who writes critical analyses of eighteenth century Scandinavian literature. For too long, we have limited ourselves to playing defense as every philistine demagogue with a constituency steps before a microphone to make fun of the titles of serious (and some not-so-serious) conference papers. As schools like Phoenix increasingly challenge the existing model of higher ed, we have to spend at least some of our substantial political capital making the case for pure research and the kind of knowledge that doesn't lead to patents and cures.
More than anything else, though, we have to make clear a very simple fact. Despite their claims to the contrary, the University of Phoenix and its fellow for-profit travelers do not level the playing field for working class students or first-generation college attendees. Rather, such schools, by pushing many state universities in their stripped-down, online direction, have only widened the gap between elite education and the empty vocational training increasingly received by those left behind. Harvard will always be Harvard, of course, but the real danger is the growing chasm between the state flagship institutions and those smaller satellite campuses that have traditionally served the upwardly mobile.
Yesterday, a smug, seemingly unbeatable football team took the field at University of Phoenix Stadium and learned that you don't win simply by showing up. Those of us who value American higher education better take that lesson to heart. The challenges we currently face are enormous and, to some extent, existential. If we lose our will to fight, the most successful system of higher education the world has ever known may be diminished forever. And then we'll all be playing at University of Phoenix Stadium.
Well, it's not my point exactly; it has been made by plenty of other people. I could as easily have mentioned the roll out of the Budweiser frogs in 1995 instead, or the improbable Aerosmith-Britney Spears pairing in 2001. In any event, I tend to resist this sort of thing, so I rarely watch the Super Bowl in full. For some reason, I did happen to witness Ms. Jackson's notorious public exposure (I thought the nipple ring was a pasty, so my pulse did not quicken), but that may be the only halftime show I ever actually endured. I do wish now that I had sat through the performances by Up With People during the 1970s just so I could say that I did.
The commercialization of the Super Bowl did come full circle this year, with the teams mixing it up on the field of University of Phoenix stadium. I love this name, creating as it does the paradox of an institution of higher education with more stadiums (1) than football teams (0). Many people tuning in last night probably even assumed that the Big Game was being played on some college campus, the way Super Bowl XXX took place at Arizona State's Sun Devil Stadium in 1996.
While I am amused by the idea of a university without sports buying the naming rights to an athletic venue, I am less sanguine about what it represents. The University of Phoenix provides a model of higher learning that challenges the entire notion of what the college experience ought to be. Obviously, a strong relationship must exist between a college education and employability. That, however, should be only part of the overall equation.
Too often, those of us in the professoring business do an inadequate job of justifying our lives and our salaries. It is all too easy to tell skeptical taxpayers that our role is to punch their kids' tickets into the middle class. If we can convince state legislators that our value is quantifiable, we can avoid more difficult conversations about what it means to be an educated person. (Private universities do not have to answer to politicians, but they still must account to parents for high tuition rates.)
In part, of course, we act in the interest of self-preservation. A good liberal education demands that students question everything in which they have ever believed, including their faith, their patriotism, their political attitudes, and their conception of morality. Most emerge with views that are stronger and more firmly rooted than before, but try convincing a state senator that challenging notions of God and Country is a good thing.
The dilemma, however, should be clear. The more we explain ourselves in terms of job training and preparation, the less we can distinguish ourselves from models, such as Phoenix's, in which higher education is little more than a narrow means to a specific end. Indeed, many colleges in the United States have spent the past decade moving in a direction that further blurs the lines between trade schools and four-year universities. The sudden explosion of on-line courses and distance learning violates multiple centuries of collected wisdom about teaching and learning. If a student can receive his or her diploma entirely from a remote location, unmonitored by real faculty, then why should any state want to bill its taxpayers for sprawling campuses and full professors of philosophy? Why don't they just adopt the University of Phoenix model and be done with troubling matters such as deferred maintenance, not to mention tenure and promotion?
Let's say out loud what we already know: on-line and correspondence courses are vastly inferior to the on campus experience. Teaching—actual, good teaching—is inherently an interactive process, even in a large lecture hall. Anyone who has done this job knows that only by physically watching your students can you recognize when they understand and when additional description is required, when true engagement is achieved and when boredom has set in. Nobody ever waxed poetic about the inspiration they received from an online prof, and none ever will. The dirty little secret of higher education is that professors provide little information that students cannot get directly out of their books. The value added—to use the educrats' annoying term—exists in the ability of good educators to make that information meaningful and to give it life.
There is certainly nothing wrong with measuring and documenting student learning. Arrogant faculty members may think that accountability is for the little people, but they are wrong and always have been. Nevertheless, as we move (or are forced by accreditors) in this direction, we must resist the temptation to take the easy way out by simply measuring concepts defined and facts remembered. The difference between our education and that provided by Phoenix must be our efforts to make students reflect critically on what they read and hear, and to help them separate between superior and inferior lines of argument. If we do not take the measurement of learning—deep, textured learning—seriously, we will undermine our most important advantage in the battle for legitimacy in this new era.
We also must insist on the value of research. The average state legislator probably wonders why she must divert money away from highway construction to pay for some overpaid professor who writes critical analyses of eighteenth century Scandinavian literature. For too long, we have limited ourselves to playing defense as every philistine demagogue with a constituency steps before a microphone to make fun of the titles of serious (and some not-so-serious) conference papers. As schools like Phoenix increasingly challenge the existing model of higher ed, we have to spend at least some of our substantial political capital making the case for pure research and the kind of knowledge that doesn't lead to patents and cures.
More than anything else, though, we have to make clear a very simple fact. Despite their claims to the contrary, the University of Phoenix and its fellow for-profit travelers do not level the playing field for working class students or first-generation college attendees. Rather, such schools, by pushing many state universities in their stripped-down, online direction, have only widened the gap between elite education and the empty vocational training increasingly received by those left behind. Harvard will always be Harvard, of course, but the real danger is the growing chasm between the state flagship institutions and those smaller satellite campuses that have traditionally served the upwardly mobile.
Yesterday, a smug, seemingly unbeatable football team took the field at University of Phoenix Stadium and learned that you don't win simply by showing up. Those of us who value American higher education better take that lesson to heart. The challenges we currently face are enormous and, to some extent, existential. If we lose our will to fight, the most successful system of higher education the world has ever known may be diminished forever. And then we'll all be playing at University of Phoenix Stadium.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Something Old, Something New
As we careen toward Tsunami Tuesday, a strangely insensitive metaphor given recent history, it appears increasingly possible that John McCain and Barack Obama will be the two biggest winners. McCain, of course, provides the surer bet, both because his statewide leads are generally larger and because the winner-take-all nature of most Republican primaries rewards the first place candidate far out of proportion to his vote share. Obama, however, has been closing fast from California to Connecticut to Georgia. The proportional nature of delegate distribution on the Democratic side guarantees that the contest will go on past Wednesday morning, but even narrow losses could gravely injure Hillary Clinton's image as a viable candidate, particularly if they occur in the states that border her home turf of New York. And an Obama win in heavily Hispanic California would obviously be huge.
An Obama-McCain match-up would provide for an enormous symbolic contrast during the general election campaign. Perhaps never before in American history would the two finalists for the presidency represent such a clash between disparate eras. We think of John F. Kennedy's victory in 1960 as a new generation's stampede into the corridors of power, but the truth is that Kennedy was barely four years younger than his opponent in the 1960 election, Richard Nixon. If elected, John McCain would be the oldest man ever to take the presidential oath of office for the first time; Obama would be the fifth youngest.
The clash of cultures (pre-rock and roll vs. the disco era) would be fascinating, but on a political level, there are two story lines, one involving each candidate, that haven't nearly received enough attention from the news media. The cable news networks are just now beginning to report on the enormous contempt with which Senator McCain is regarded in many conservative circles. Rush Limbaugh, in particular, has spent a substantial portion of January reminding his army of sycophant Dittoheads that McCain has betrayed their cause on numerous occasions. On campaign finance reform, he has stifled free (conservative) speech. On immigration, he has joined the forces of amnesty led by Ted Kennedy (and with this crowd, a photo op with Satan might be less damaging). He even opposed President Bush's tax cuts for the rich—Limbaugh doesn't use these words, of course—not once, but twice!
The superficial and generally hagiographic analysis McCain receives from the media ignores the larger electoral dilemma facing the Arizona senator. For the past three decades, Republican presidential candidates have prevailed by energizing the conservative base and expanding their support from there. Karl Rove's master strategy for GOP victory has depended, first and foremost, on guaranteeing that evangelical white Christians and other hardcore "values" voters come to each election highly motivated. Their enthusiasm has been the necessary foundation upon which successful campaigns have been built.
This leaves John McCain, assuming he is the nominee, two choices. He could simply appeal to independents and moderate Democrats while hoping that enough movement conservatives would grit their teeth and support him as the lesser of two evils. Particularly if Hillary Clinton is his general election opponent, this plan might just work.
But McCain would have to understand that he would be plunging into uncharted territory. The GOP is not, their pleadings to the contrary, a big-tent party. When the base is lukewarm, Republican presidential candidates tend to lose. Think Gerald Ford in 1976 or George H.W. Bush after breaking his no-new-taxes pledge in 1992. Because Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have been splitting the right-wing vote, the extent of McCain's problems with the Republican base has not always stood out in the raw polling data. But even now, there are few Super Tuesday states in which he, the prohibitive favorite, is expected to pull in anything close to fifty percent of the vote.
Alternatively, McCain could take a page out of Lee Atwater's 1988 playbook. Managing the campaign of the first George Bush, Atwater understood that his man, who had once accused Ronald Reagan of practicing "voodoo economics", did not enjoy the full faith and confidence of conservative voters. In response, he ran the ultimate red meat campaign, with Bush demonizing his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as an unpatriotic, wimpy coddler of criminals, particularly (as the vicious Willie Horton commercials implied) black ones.
Such a campaign would certainly reinvigorate the fire breathers on the GOP right. But it is less clear that McCain could pull it off with his electability still intact. The 1988 George Bush was an empty vessel into which any sort of political poison could be poured. If he had any public image at all, it was as Reagan's feckless lapdog, so even toxic levels of demagoguery could not damage him. John McCain, on the other hand, enjoys a reputation as a straight talker and man who can bring ideological enemies together in the service of the greater good. An Atwater-style campaign might undo twenty years of political goodwill and alienate critical centrists.
For his part, Barack Obama faces issues that have received virtually no attention so far from the national media. Should he win his party's nomination, he will be the most liberal Democrat to face the voters in November in at least two decades, and perhaps since George McGovern in 1972. The public, even a month into the primary season, has yet to be introduced to Barack Obama the office holder. That man is an unapologetic northern liberal whose voting record is nearly indistinguishable from that of Ted Kennedy, the left-wing icon who recently blessed Obama with his endorsement.
My point is not that a liberal Democrat cannot capture the White House in 2008. Rather, as in the case of McCain, we are again moving into uncharted waters. John Kennedy was the last northern Democrat to win a presidential election; Lyndon Johnson was the last liberal. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, is practiced in the art of triangulation, and would be hard to paint into the far left corner. Obama, however, not only has a demonstrably left-of-center record in the U.S. Senate, but also leaves behind a liberal paper trail from the Illinois State Legislature that will be fodder for dozens of attack ads in the fall.
We still do not know how things will shake out 48 hours from now. Clinton may come through on the coasts and begin to pull away from Obama. Mitt Romney might finally vanquish Mike Huckabee and slow John McCain's seemingly unstoppable momentum. Maybe we'll all be wrong and Ron Paul will be the biggest surprise of the evening (OK, that won't happen).
Still, if we wind up with a McCain-Obama contest in November, a new script will be written, one way or the other. Either we will have a Republican nominee triumph in defiance of his party's base, or we will have a liberal northern Democrat enter the Oval Office for the first time since Ted Kennedy's older brother did it nearly a half century ago. Regardless, the electoral road maps of the past twenty years will suddenly become inoperative.
I wonder when these story lines will receive the full attention they deserve.
An Obama-McCain match-up would provide for an enormous symbolic contrast during the general election campaign. Perhaps never before in American history would the two finalists for the presidency represent such a clash between disparate eras. We think of John F. Kennedy's victory in 1960 as a new generation's stampede into the corridors of power, but the truth is that Kennedy was barely four years younger than his opponent in the 1960 election, Richard Nixon. If elected, John McCain would be the oldest man ever to take the presidential oath of office for the first time; Obama would be the fifth youngest.
The clash of cultures (pre-rock and roll vs. the disco era) would be fascinating, but on a political level, there are two story lines, one involving each candidate, that haven't nearly received enough attention from the news media. The cable news networks are just now beginning to report on the enormous contempt with which Senator McCain is regarded in many conservative circles. Rush Limbaugh, in particular, has spent a substantial portion of January reminding his army of sycophant Dittoheads that McCain has betrayed their cause on numerous occasions. On campaign finance reform, he has stifled free (conservative) speech. On immigration, he has joined the forces of amnesty led by Ted Kennedy (and with this crowd, a photo op with Satan might be less damaging). He even opposed President Bush's tax cuts for the rich—Limbaugh doesn't use these words, of course—not once, but twice!
The superficial and generally hagiographic analysis McCain receives from the media ignores the larger electoral dilemma facing the Arizona senator. For the past three decades, Republican presidential candidates have prevailed by energizing the conservative base and expanding their support from there. Karl Rove's master strategy for GOP victory has depended, first and foremost, on guaranteeing that evangelical white Christians and other hardcore "values" voters come to each election highly motivated. Their enthusiasm has been the necessary foundation upon which successful campaigns have been built.
This leaves John McCain, assuming he is the nominee, two choices. He could simply appeal to independents and moderate Democrats while hoping that enough movement conservatives would grit their teeth and support him as the lesser of two evils. Particularly if Hillary Clinton is his general election opponent, this plan might just work.
But McCain would have to understand that he would be plunging into uncharted territory. The GOP is not, their pleadings to the contrary, a big-tent party. When the base is lukewarm, Republican presidential candidates tend to lose. Think Gerald Ford in 1976 or George H.W. Bush after breaking his no-new-taxes pledge in 1992. Because Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have been splitting the right-wing vote, the extent of McCain's problems with the Republican base has not always stood out in the raw polling data. But even now, there are few Super Tuesday states in which he, the prohibitive favorite, is expected to pull in anything close to fifty percent of the vote.
Alternatively, McCain could take a page out of Lee Atwater's 1988 playbook. Managing the campaign of the first George Bush, Atwater understood that his man, who had once accused Ronald Reagan of practicing "voodoo economics", did not enjoy the full faith and confidence of conservative voters. In response, he ran the ultimate red meat campaign, with Bush demonizing his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as an unpatriotic, wimpy coddler of criminals, particularly (as the vicious Willie Horton commercials implied) black ones.
Such a campaign would certainly reinvigorate the fire breathers on the GOP right. But it is less clear that McCain could pull it off with his electability still intact. The 1988 George Bush was an empty vessel into which any sort of political poison could be poured. If he had any public image at all, it was as Reagan's feckless lapdog, so even toxic levels of demagoguery could not damage him. John McCain, on the other hand, enjoys a reputation as a straight talker and man who can bring ideological enemies together in the service of the greater good. An Atwater-style campaign might undo twenty years of political goodwill and alienate critical centrists.
For his part, Barack Obama faces issues that have received virtually no attention so far from the national media. Should he win his party's nomination, he will be the most liberal Democrat to face the voters in November in at least two decades, and perhaps since George McGovern in 1972. The public, even a month into the primary season, has yet to be introduced to Barack Obama the office holder. That man is an unapologetic northern liberal whose voting record is nearly indistinguishable from that of Ted Kennedy, the left-wing icon who recently blessed Obama with his endorsement.
My point is not that a liberal Democrat cannot capture the White House in 2008. Rather, as in the case of McCain, we are again moving into uncharted waters. John Kennedy was the last northern Democrat to win a presidential election; Lyndon Johnson was the last liberal. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, is practiced in the art of triangulation, and would be hard to paint into the far left corner. Obama, however, not only has a demonstrably left-of-center record in the U.S. Senate, but also leaves behind a liberal paper trail from the Illinois State Legislature that will be fodder for dozens of attack ads in the fall.
We still do not know how things will shake out 48 hours from now. Clinton may come through on the coasts and begin to pull away from Obama. Mitt Romney might finally vanquish Mike Huckabee and slow John McCain's seemingly unstoppable momentum. Maybe we'll all be wrong and Ron Paul will be the biggest surprise of the evening (OK, that won't happen).
Still, if we wind up with a McCain-Obama contest in November, a new script will be written, one way or the other. Either we will have a Republican nominee triumph in defiance of his party's base, or we will have a liberal northern Democrat enter the Oval Office for the first time since Ted Kennedy's older brother did it nearly a half century ago. Regardless, the electoral road maps of the past twenty years will suddenly become inoperative.
I wonder when these story lines will receive the full attention they deserve.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Hillary's Original Sin
If Hillary Clinton loses the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, many pundits will blame her husband, the former president. First, they will say, Bill Clinton diminished Hillary's stature by demanding too much of the spotlight for himself, and then he undercut her candidacy with ill-considered remarks about race and politics in South Carolina. Others will point to the Kennedy factor, the decision by JFK's brother and daughter to sprinkle what remained of Camelot's stardust on the young Illinois senator. And many will, of course, simply conclude that Senator Clinton was doomed by her opponent's transcendent charisma and the tendency of voters to swoon first and ask questions later.
Whatever truth there might be in these analyses, they will all miss the more important point. Assuming Hillary Clinton is denied the nomination, the turning point in the 2008 Democratic campaign will have occurred six years earlier, on October 11, 2002. On that date, the newly elected junior senator from New York joined 76 of her colleagues, including a majority of Democrats, in authorizing George W. Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in Iraq.
That vote, more than anything else, has been Senator Obama's trump card in the current race for the White House. It effectively blunts the strongest argument Clinton can offer in support of her candidacy. Whenever she touts her superior preparation for higher office, Obama quickly reminds voters that experience is no substitute for judgment, citing his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq War. The charge is devastating, particularly when leveled before an audience of left-leaning Democrats and independents: on the most important question of the past seven years, he was right and she was wrong.
Senator Clinton's response has, to this point, been both consistent and consistently ineffective. Unlike John Edwards, she refuses to admit error, apologize, and beg for the mercy of the electorate. The first woman president, she reasons, cannot be elected from a position of weakness. Instead, she argues that she did the best she could with the information she had at the time. She believed, as most experts did, that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, and she was persuaded that he would not surrender them to inspectors without the coercive threat of a military invasion pushing him in the proper direction. She never intended war to be anything but a last resort.
It is a weak response, and she delivers it without conviction. To some extent, of course, she is the victim of the unforgiving power of hindsight. The weapons were never found and the Bush administration conducted the war with such staggering ineptitude that arguments that were judged moderate and reasonable only a half decade ago now seem thoroughly discredited. Those who chose to put any faith at all in the wisdom and restraint of George W. Bush appear, in retrospect, hopelessly naïve, a word that debate moderator Wolf Blitzer unhelpfully lobbed in Hillary's direction during Thursday night's debate in Los Angeles.
Still, let us not weep over the unfairness of it all. Hillary Clinton's vote on the authorization of force clearly had its cynical side. We'll never know the degree to which she truly believed that President Bush would allow the inspectors to complete their work, but we do know this: Senator Clinton had already decided to run for president and she knew without a doubt that this vote would help define her to any future electorate.
She simply could not be on the wrong side of a war that the United States might win. Many of her colleagues made that mistake in 1990, when an earlier Bush asked for an earlier authorization to engage in combat with Saddam Hussein. When Kuwait was liberated quickly, with few American casualties and with the support of a broad international coalition, those Democrats who had opposed the war were quickly and effectively tarred as Neville Chamberlain's stepchildren.
Hillary Clinton did what she assumed was the safe thing: she took a gamble that Saddam would fall, that the weapons would be found, and that the mission would, in fact, be accomplished. Indeed, it probably didn't seem, from the vantage point of 2002, to be all that big of a gamble. Nearly everyone was certain that the WMDs were there. Besides, even if the war went poorly, Americans would blame President Bush rather than the members of Congress who erroneously put their faith in his judgment. Senator Clinton likely calculated that most of her serious opponents in 2008—Edwards, Joe Biden, etc.—would carry similar baggage into the campaign. She simply never counted on the possibility that she would be outfoxed by some obscure, ambitious Illinois state legislator who was busy announcing his opposition to the war before small crowds of Chicagoans.
Regardless, her vote is on the record and there is nothing she can do to change that fact. If things go badly for her on Super Tuesday, she may never get another opportunity to explain herself. On the other hand, given the Democrats' rules about distributing delegates in proportion to each state's vote (rather than the winner-take-all scheme allowed by the GOP), it seems more likely that the campaign will persist past February 5 and that still more debates will occur.
In my capacity as an unpaid campaign adviser to Democrats and Republicans alike, allow me to propose a new, improved response for Senator Clinton should she once again be asked to defend her vote on the Iraq War:
"My opponent claims to have 20/20 hindsight, but he had absolutely no idea whether or not Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Yet Senator Obama opposed putting any pressure on the Iraqi government to deal honestly with the weapons inspectors. His position, therefore, is an extreme one. He is saying that the United States should never act against, or even put undo pressure on, an enemy regime that may have chemical, biological, or nuclear agents. That is, in my view, a dangerous position for a future president to hold. Before you decide between us, consider this. Had the weapons of mass destruction been found in Iraq, my explanation of what I believed back in 2002 would be exactly the same as it is today; Senator Obama's, on the other hand, would be completely different.
"Like all of you, I have great respect for General Colin Powell and his word at the United Nations meant a lot to me. Further, I believe that Americans must, in a time of crisis, give at least some benefit of the doubt to their Commander in Chief. I will expect the same thing from Congress when I become president, and so will Senator Obama. President Bush promised us that he had hard evidence of WMDs in Iraq. He pledged that he would go to war only as a last resort.
"It is a tragic and unforgivable fact that he lied to Congress and the American people. History will judge him harshly for that. But I don't believe that you can simply assume without evidence, especially in a time of a great national crisis, that your president is a liar. If you want to call that naïve, feel free. I consider it patriotic. If I knew then what I know now, of course I would have voted against the authorization. But I had no way of knowing that George Bush was lying and neither did Senator Obama."
Sure, there is nothing here that will satisfy anyone who strenuously opposed the war from the start. But those Democrats have already cast their lot with the Obama campaign, and Hillary Clinton will never win them back. Instead, she needs to put her opponent of the defensive by appealing to the majority of voters who also mistakenly, but patriotically, put their faith in their president back in the dark days of 2001 and 2002.
Make Senator Obama describe exactly when he thinks America should go to war. Let him explain why he thinks that WMDs in the hands of America's enemies are no big deal. Require him to reflect on the relative costs and benefits of presupposing, without evidence, that the President of the United States is a liar. If nothing else, a spirited, affirmative defense by Senator Clinton would sound better than the weak, lawyerly response that she is currently offering. It might even save her campaign.
(Quick disclaimer: I opposed the war from the beginning. My position, however, is different from both Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's. I also believed that Saddam Hussein probably had weapons of mass destruction. I simply didn't regard that as something worth going to war over. I would have considered the war unjustified even if the Army had uncovered nerve gas factories and nuclear stockpiles. History shows that diplomacy is far more effective at limiting the spread and use of WMDs than is military action.)
Whatever truth there might be in these analyses, they will all miss the more important point. Assuming Hillary Clinton is denied the nomination, the turning point in the 2008 Democratic campaign will have occurred six years earlier, on October 11, 2002. On that date, the newly elected junior senator from New York joined 76 of her colleagues, including a majority of Democrats, in authorizing George W. Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in Iraq.
That vote, more than anything else, has been Senator Obama's trump card in the current race for the White House. It effectively blunts the strongest argument Clinton can offer in support of her candidacy. Whenever she touts her superior preparation for higher office, Obama quickly reminds voters that experience is no substitute for judgment, citing his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq War. The charge is devastating, particularly when leveled before an audience of left-leaning Democrats and independents: on the most important question of the past seven years, he was right and she was wrong.
Senator Clinton's response has, to this point, been both consistent and consistently ineffective. Unlike John Edwards, she refuses to admit error, apologize, and beg for the mercy of the electorate. The first woman president, she reasons, cannot be elected from a position of weakness. Instead, she argues that she did the best she could with the information she had at the time. She believed, as most experts did, that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, and she was persuaded that he would not surrender them to inspectors without the coercive threat of a military invasion pushing him in the proper direction. She never intended war to be anything but a last resort.
It is a weak response, and she delivers it without conviction. To some extent, of course, she is the victim of the unforgiving power of hindsight. The weapons were never found and the Bush administration conducted the war with such staggering ineptitude that arguments that were judged moderate and reasonable only a half decade ago now seem thoroughly discredited. Those who chose to put any faith at all in the wisdom and restraint of George W. Bush appear, in retrospect, hopelessly naïve, a word that debate moderator Wolf Blitzer unhelpfully lobbed in Hillary's direction during Thursday night's debate in Los Angeles.
Still, let us not weep over the unfairness of it all. Hillary Clinton's vote on the authorization of force clearly had its cynical side. We'll never know the degree to which she truly believed that President Bush would allow the inspectors to complete their work, but we do know this: Senator Clinton had already decided to run for president and she knew without a doubt that this vote would help define her to any future electorate.
She simply could not be on the wrong side of a war that the United States might win. Many of her colleagues made that mistake in 1990, when an earlier Bush asked for an earlier authorization to engage in combat with Saddam Hussein. When Kuwait was liberated quickly, with few American casualties and with the support of a broad international coalition, those Democrats who had opposed the war were quickly and effectively tarred as Neville Chamberlain's stepchildren.
Hillary Clinton did what she assumed was the safe thing: she took a gamble that Saddam would fall, that the weapons would be found, and that the mission would, in fact, be accomplished. Indeed, it probably didn't seem, from the vantage point of 2002, to be all that big of a gamble. Nearly everyone was certain that the WMDs were there. Besides, even if the war went poorly, Americans would blame President Bush rather than the members of Congress who erroneously put their faith in his judgment. Senator Clinton likely calculated that most of her serious opponents in 2008—Edwards, Joe Biden, etc.—would carry similar baggage into the campaign. She simply never counted on the possibility that she would be outfoxed by some obscure, ambitious Illinois state legislator who was busy announcing his opposition to the war before small crowds of Chicagoans.
Regardless, her vote is on the record and there is nothing she can do to change that fact. If things go badly for her on Super Tuesday, she may never get another opportunity to explain herself. On the other hand, given the Democrats' rules about distributing delegates in proportion to each state's vote (rather than the winner-take-all scheme allowed by the GOP), it seems more likely that the campaign will persist past February 5 and that still more debates will occur.
In my capacity as an unpaid campaign adviser to Democrats and Republicans alike, allow me to propose a new, improved response for Senator Clinton should she once again be asked to defend her vote on the Iraq War:
"My opponent claims to have 20/20 hindsight, but he had absolutely no idea whether or not Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Yet Senator Obama opposed putting any pressure on the Iraqi government to deal honestly with the weapons inspectors. His position, therefore, is an extreme one. He is saying that the United States should never act against, or even put undo pressure on, an enemy regime that may have chemical, biological, or nuclear agents. That is, in my view, a dangerous position for a future president to hold. Before you decide between us, consider this. Had the weapons of mass destruction been found in Iraq, my explanation of what I believed back in 2002 would be exactly the same as it is today; Senator Obama's, on the other hand, would be completely different.
"Like all of you, I have great respect for General Colin Powell and his word at the United Nations meant a lot to me. Further, I believe that Americans must, in a time of crisis, give at least some benefit of the doubt to their Commander in Chief. I will expect the same thing from Congress when I become president, and so will Senator Obama. President Bush promised us that he had hard evidence of WMDs in Iraq. He pledged that he would go to war only as a last resort.
"It is a tragic and unforgivable fact that he lied to Congress and the American people. History will judge him harshly for that. But I don't believe that you can simply assume without evidence, especially in a time of a great national crisis, that your president is a liar. If you want to call that naïve, feel free. I consider it patriotic. If I knew then what I know now, of course I would have voted against the authorization. But I had no way of knowing that George Bush was lying and neither did Senator Obama."
Sure, there is nothing here that will satisfy anyone who strenuously opposed the war from the start. But those Democrats have already cast their lot with the Obama campaign, and Hillary Clinton will never win them back. Instead, she needs to put her opponent of the defensive by appealing to the majority of voters who also mistakenly, but patriotically, put their faith in their president back in the dark days of 2001 and 2002.
Make Senator Obama describe exactly when he thinks America should go to war. Let him explain why he thinks that WMDs in the hands of America's enemies are no big deal. Require him to reflect on the relative costs and benefits of presupposing, without evidence, that the President of the United States is a liar. If nothing else, a spirited, affirmative defense by Senator Clinton would sound better than the weak, lawyerly response that she is currently offering. It might even save her campaign.
(Quick disclaimer: I opposed the war from the beginning. My position, however, is different from both Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's. I also believed that Saddam Hussein probably had weapons of mass destruction. I simply didn't regard that as something worth going to war over. I would have considered the war unjustified even if the Army had uncovered nerve gas factories and nuclear stockpiles. History shows that diplomacy is far more effective at limiting the spread and use of WMDs than is military action.)
Friday, February 1, 2008
Practice Makes Perfect
Ask any college football coach his favorite thing about being invited to a bowl game, and you’ll generally get the same answer. Sure, it’s nice to visit Miami or Honolulu in January, and it’s always an honor to be selected to represent your conference on national television. But the best part of going bowling, he will say, is the opportunity to get in a few more weeks of practice. Coaches love practice. If they had their way, student athletes would be in training sessions all year long (fortunately for the kids, NCAA rules prevent this).
I bring this up in response to a very foolish thing that television pundits tend to say during election years. They argue that political parties should select their presidential nominees as quickly as possible, avoiding drawn-out, contentious, and bitter primary campaigns. Intra-party bickering in February, they insist, spells disaster in November. Winners are damaged, losers are bitter, and the opposing party gets plenty of negative material to use against the eventual nominee later in the year.
Actually, we’re already hearing this mantra in the wake of the Democrats’ rancorous South Carolina primary just over a week ago. The talking heads have been speculating breathlessly ever since about the rifts created by the nasty exchanges between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and especially about Bill Clinton's preemptive attempts to diminish Obama's victory in the Palmetto State. Will African Americans forgive Hillary if she is the eventual nominee? Have Bill's racially tinged comments threatened Obama's ability to appeal across ethnic and cultural lines in the general election? Isn’t this just the dirtiest campaign in the whole recorded history of human civilization?
Expect these arguments to intensify now that John McCain appears on the threshold of wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination. The recent GOP debate at the Reagan Library had its nasty moments, but they smelled more of desperation than authentic personal animus. Mitt Romney acted like the losing prizefighter in the late rounds of a championship bout, reduced to throwing wild haymakers in a last chance bid to land that one elusive knockout punch. As is usual in such cases, nothing landed. By this time next week, McCain should be free of any serious remaining competition.
At that point, of course, the talking heads will be unable to resist the contrast between the two parties. On the one hand, we will witness a GOP unity-fest, with nearly every significant Republican figure—perhaps even including Romney and Mike Huckabee—coalescing around their new champion. By contrast, the Democrats will continue their two-person battle, exploiting divisions and creating still more hard feelings. Worst yet, if either Clinton or Obama emerges from Super Tuesday with anything resembling a commanding lead, the tone might even change for the worse, with the underdog increasingly desperate to get back into the race. Then things could get truly negative.
Obviously, the talking heads will conclude, the Democrats are in deep trouble. While John McCain gradually builds a war chest and hones a more moderate message and platform, his opponents will be burning millions of dollars in an effort to defeat one another, unable to broaden their appeal beyond a liberal primary constituency. Over at MSNBC, Chris Matthews will begin to refer to the presumptive GOP nominee as President-Elect John McCain, while at Fox, former journalist Brit Hume will be unable to holster his trademark smirk any time he mentions the Democratic race.
Matthews and Hume may be clueless (may be?), but the football coaches will know better. They'll see Senator McCain restlessly stalking the weight room, running sprints, studying his playbook, but otherwise losing his edge, getting rusty. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton will still be in their full pads, vigorously drilling on the practice field, perfecting each pass pattern and maybe even trying out a couple of gadget plays. The danger of injury lurks, of course, as it always does when players—even teammates—hit one another at full speed, but a good coach understands that the rewards invariably outweigh the risks.
I hate most sports analogies, by the way, particularly as they relate to politics. Elections are neither boxing matches nor football scrimmages. They are both more complicated and endlessly more important. Still, I think this particular metaphor works in this case. Forget the gridiron: practice is essential to good writers, auto mechanics, and brain surgeons, too. Nobody ever got better by sitting around waiting.
I don't know if last year's campaign debates remain available on YouTube. But if they do, I'd recommend taking a look at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the summer of 2007. The early Obama was tentative and uneasy, sometimes speaking haltingly and without confidence. For her part, Clinton frequently came across flat and lifeless, her few attempts at humor sounding stilted and false. Other candidates had been through all of this before, but these two had not. And it showed.
You may not have enjoyed the lovefest that was yesterday's two-person Democratic debate in Los Angeles, and neither did I, but you have to admit that Clinton and Obama exuded self-confidence and verbal mastery from beginning to end. Clinton truly has found her voice, and it is far more human than her detractors ever led us to expect. Obama's eloquence, once the sole province of his lectures and speeches, has finally transferred over to the debate format, and even his sound bites now carry power.
More important, the two Democratic frontrunners have increasingly mastered the art of going negative. Hillary Clinton has learned how to pull punches; Barack Obama has discovered how to throw them. (Yeah, another sports analogy; so sue me.) It now seems clear that Clinton will be able to attack John McCain without spiking her negatives. Similarly, we now know that Obama will not only fight back, but he'll do it in such a way that he never appears unpleasant.
If the Democratic contest ended today, the party's nominee would be well prepared to walk on stage with Senator McCain in October and, for the next ninety minutes, make his life just a little more difficult. But fortunately for Clinton and Obama, the race will not end today and will likely continue past next week. There will be more debates, more chances to get the message exactly right, to practice punching and counterpunching, to perfect the timing and delivery of those one-liners. John McCain should be so lucky.
Somewhere a coach is smiling.
I bring this up in response to a very foolish thing that television pundits tend to say during election years. They argue that political parties should select their presidential nominees as quickly as possible, avoiding drawn-out, contentious, and bitter primary campaigns. Intra-party bickering in February, they insist, spells disaster in November. Winners are damaged, losers are bitter, and the opposing party gets plenty of negative material to use against the eventual nominee later in the year.
Actually, we’re already hearing this mantra in the wake of the Democrats’ rancorous South Carolina primary just over a week ago. The talking heads have been speculating breathlessly ever since about the rifts created by the nasty exchanges between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and especially about Bill Clinton's preemptive attempts to diminish Obama's victory in the Palmetto State. Will African Americans forgive Hillary if she is the eventual nominee? Have Bill's racially tinged comments threatened Obama's ability to appeal across ethnic and cultural lines in the general election? Isn’t this just the dirtiest campaign in the whole recorded history of human civilization?
Expect these arguments to intensify now that John McCain appears on the threshold of wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination. The recent GOP debate at the Reagan Library had its nasty moments, but they smelled more of desperation than authentic personal animus. Mitt Romney acted like the losing prizefighter in the late rounds of a championship bout, reduced to throwing wild haymakers in a last chance bid to land that one elusive knockout punch. As is usual in such cases, nothing landed. By this time next week, McCain should be free of any serious remaining competition.
At that point, of course, the talking heads will be unable to resist the contrast between the two parties. On the one hand, we will witness a GOP unity-fest, with nearly every significant Republican figure—perhaps even including Romney and Mike Huckabee—coalescing around their new champion. By contrast, the Democrats will continue their two-person battle, exploiting divisions and creating still more hard feelings. Worst yet, if either Clinton or Obama emerges from Super Tuesday with anything resembling a commanding lead, the tone might even change for the worse, with the underdog increasingly desperate to get back into the race. Then things could get truly negative.
Obviously, the talking heads will conclude, the Democrats are in deep trouble. While John McCain gradually builds a war chest and hones a more moderate message and platform, his opponents will be burning millions of dollars in an effort to defeat one another, unable to broaden their appeal beyond a liberal primary constituency. Over at MSNBC, Chris Matthews will begin to refer to the presumptive GOP nominee as President-Elect John McCain, while at Fox, former journalist Brit Hume will be unable to holster his trademark smirk any time he mentions the Democratic race.
Matthews and Hume may be clueless (may be?), but the football coaches will know better. They'll see Senator McCain restlessly stalking the weight room, running sprints, studying his playbook, but otherwise losing his edge, getting rusty. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton will still be in their full pads, vigorously drilling on the practice field, perfecting each pass pattern and maybe even trying out a couple of gadget plays. The danger of injury lurks, of course, as it always does when players—even teammates—hit one another at full speed, but a good coach understands that the rewards invariably outweigh the risks.
I hate most sports analogies, by the way, particularly as they relate to politics. Elections are neither boxing matches nor football scrimmages. They are both more complicated and endlessly more important. Still, I think this particular metaphor works in this case. Forget the gridiron: practice is essential to good writers, auto mechanics, and brain surgeons, too. Nobody ever got better by sitting around waiting.
I don't know if last year's campaign debates remain available on YouTube. But if they do, I'd recommend taking a look at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the summer of 2007. The early Obama was tentative and uneasy, sometimes speaking haltingly and without confidence. For her part, Clinton frequently came across flat and lifeless, her few attempts at humor sounding stilted and false. Other candidates had been through all of this before, but these two had not. And it showed.
You may not have enjoyed the lovefest that was yesterday's two-person Democratic debate in Los Angeles, and neither did I, but you have to admit that Clinton and Obama exuded self-confidence and verbal mastery from beginning to end. Clinton truly has found her voice, and it is far more human than her detractors ever led us to expect. Obama's eloquence, once the sole province of his lectures and speeches, has finally transferred over to the debate format, and even his sound bites now carry power.
More important, the two Democratic frontrunners have increasingly mastered the art of going negative. Hillary Clinton has learned how to pull punches; Barack Obama has discovered how to throw them. (Yeah, another sports analogy; so sue me.) It now seems clear that Clinton will be able to attack John McCain without spiking her negatives. Similarly, we now know that Obama will not only fight back, but he'll do it in such a way that he never appears unpleasant.
If the Democratic contest ended today, the party's nominee would be well prepared to walk on stage with Senator McCain in October and, for the next ninety minutes, make his life just a little more difficult. But fortunately for Clinton and Obama, the race will not end today and will likely continue past next week. There will be more debates, more chances to get the message exactly right, to practice punching and counterpunching, to perfect the timing and delivery of those one-liners. John McCain should be so lucky.
Somewhere a coach is smiling.
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