Wes Clark for VP?

There was much blog-praise for this article by Matt Stoller on Open Left entitled and arguing for The Unifying Choice: Wes Clark for VP.

SPOILER ALERT
It's a good article but not as good as this one by Lawrence O’Donnell from NY Magazine; O’Donnell was a West Wing writer and he describes, in West Wing theatrical fashion, what could have happened in the convention were neither candidate were to have reached the necessary number of delegates. It's a great great read and thank God it won't come to pass.
/SPOILER ALERT

Stoller's point has been made by others, and I could be resisting the allure of Clark because a colleague of mine - whom I think is wrong on everything - was advocating Clark while I was advocating Daschle. I just don't want to be wrong to that guy.

Anyway, the reason why I he thinks Clark is necessary is (a) Clark is a full-bore Clintonite and it would heal the wounds of the primary, (b) Clark is a talented and successful wartime general and brings that foreign policy/military credibility to the ticket, (c) Clark has run for president and has that experience.

Ironically I reject Clark for those reasons and a few more: (a) any connection to the Clintons should be seen as poison right now. The only way the Clintons will be mollified is if Obama were killed by a scandal (or, who knows, a bullet). Even having her as VP won't calm them down (and, as someone wrote, if he does pick her as VP he also better hire a food-taster).

(b) Obama actually has all the foreign policy credibility he desires right now - he opposed the Iraq War, McCain loves that war, and the Americans hate the war. All Obama needs for credibility is to have surrogates (Webb, Nunn etc) do the military talking to rebut McCain. Moreover, as many have pointed out, to admit you need a military man on the ticket is to admit you aren't military enough. Look at Bill Clinton in '92 - he had far less foreign policy experience than Obama (he was a governor of a land-locked state and a draft-dodger) and he picked a virtual clone as his VP (who, admittedly, had been in the Senate for 8 years).

(c) Clark's presidential run was a joke. And he has never won an election! OK, he won the 2004 Oklahoma primary, whatever. Stoller argues that since '04, Clark has a highly requested speaker: "In 2006, Jon Soltz of Votevets tells me, Clark was the single most requested surrogate in the country, with the possible exceptions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton." Whatever. While I think he is an impressive person (four star general, Rhodes scholar, military Democrat) I don't think he's been nearly tested enough in politics. Make him Secretary of Defense, or NSA, let him be a politician for a while.

I still back the idea of Sebelius.

The Jacket Can Come Off

Obama has (putatively) won the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in what may be the biggest upset in (modern) American political history. Now the jacket comes off. Two jackets, really. The first jacket is doffed when gentlemen prepare for fisticuffs. Or a duel. Of all Republicans, McCain is a gentleman, and we know over and over that Obama is, so this battle of two men of honor will be as bloody as a hillside duel, but it portends to be on a higher level than other contests in the past.

The other jacket is a straight-jacket that Obama has had to wear since Hillary announced her intention to run for president. Bill Clinton was enormously popular in America and even moreso in the Democratic party, where he was the Democrat to leave office as popular and powerful (contrast to Carter, LBJ, Truman; this point was first made by Marshall). And the Clinton's fought dirty.

Obama was straight-jacketed, hamstrung, shackled by having his opponents be the most popular Democrats in a generation. And Hillary compounded the trouble by invoking female-disempowerment at every slight. Her "unconcession" speech last night - a disgusting display of narcissism, hubris, and neurosis - contained an especially galling line in this vein. I was fortunate to hear the line uttered live (we get only one TV news channel, it was showing her speech, and I could only listen to her for a minute or two at a time), transcribed passage from here:

You know, I understand that a lot of people are asking, what does Hillary want? ... I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard and no longer to be invisible.

What's galling about the 'invisible' line is that it is red-meat to angry feminists who have cried 'sexism' at every criticism of Holy St. Hillary.

I won't refute the 'invisible' remark because it is beneath contempt; I bring it up to show the lines of the straight-jacket that has now been removed. Other bindings that have been loosed: now every single Democrat can, with full voice, support Obama. Many have been silenced because (a) they don't want to unleash the Clinton fury or worse (b) the fury of Clinton voters. So Reid, Pelosi, Webb, Emmanuel, Salazar, Gore - all big names with set constituencies who have had to remain 'neutral' can now plaster the walls of America with pro-Democratic, pro-Obama words and ideas.

As a number of smart commentators have noted, until last night McCain was at the highest point he could be and Obama the lowest. McCain enjoyed a unified GOP and comparitively little press scrutiny while Obama had a deeply divided party and attacks coming from three sides (GOP, Clinton Democrats, the Press) with only 1/4 of a defense (his part of the party). No longer.

McCain and Obama may be in a dead-heat today, but now that Obama is unrestrained? It's going to be a slaughter.

As an anonymous blogger from the Economist online (UK) wrote last night, comparing the speeches of all three candidates:

At the risk of bolstering the reporters-mooning-at-Obama stereotype, if this evening's speeches were a video game, a wrinkled wizard would be hollering "Finish Him!" to Barack Obama while a dizzied John McCain wobbled. And Hillary Clinton would be frenetically mashing the buttons on an unplugged controller.

The biggest proof that Obama will destroy McCain comes from simple structure. The same structure that elected Harding in 1920 and Carter in 1976: that when the populace has had enough of the status-quo, they will elect the other party.

The only person, truly, who could have screwed that up this year was Hillary. Because she's so divisive, so hated, and quite frankly such a bad campaigner, that it would have been possible for the Democrats to have lost. It would have been a repeat of '04, when an unpopular incumbent was ALMOST unseated by a deeply flawed, lackluster candidate. And while I'm no fan of Kerry, he didn't prompt the deep visceral hatred that Hillary can and does. We just dodged the bullet.

Ah, but I hear you cry, what about Obama's weaknesses? The ones that are skin-deep, if you catch my drift. Well, 16 months ago, I thought the strongest ticket for the fall was Edwards-Obama, and I claimed that I didn't think America would vote for an inexperienced Black man with Hussein for a middle name. But, uh, he won. He won over whites, blacks, hispanics, in all the states.

Yeah, but he lost Ohio and Pennsylvania! Yes, and no. As I said earlier, he lost *closed primaries* in those states. A closed primary has no bearing on the fall general election. All a closed-primary proves is that he's not as popular to Democrats. And while, intuitively, that may bother people (how can a guy win when his party doesn't like him as much as another), it also repudiates the biggest weakness of the primary process which is that it rewards the extremists of each party, which give a rather poor general election contender.

More open primaries may have spared us from Dukakis and Kerry. And if PA/OH were open, I would wager that Obama would have won them handily, like he did in Virginia, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Minnesota (all open).

Obama is a very strong candidate, which is how he beat the Clintons. Let that settle into your skin for a moment: he beat Bill and Hillary Clinton. Nobody beat the Clintons since 1980! And Obama is inspiring, a historic orator, a gifted thinker, a talented writer, and damn near perfect campaigner. He has also just campaigned in all 50 states - something not done in any previous primary - which means he has already run a general election campaign once. From now til November, it's just picking up the lost sheaves.

And the structural reason why Obama/Democrats will win? The Iraq War is enough. And McCain, god love him, has decided to embrace the Iraq War as his running mate. It's the one thing which may be more unpopular than Bush, and McCain's embracing it?! And he embraces Bush, too. Why else would McCain reject the improved GI Bill? In an election year, the Republican nominee rejects a veteran-friendly piece of pork, a rejection not shared by his party but only by the incumbant president who enjoys the lowest approval rating since Andrew Johnson.

And you think McCain can win? Running on a platform of "I like the Iraq War and Bush's treatment of the country!" The only way Obama can lose now is if there's a crippling scandal. Could happen, sure. But I don't play lotto, and I don't bet on long-shots when the stakes are this high.

The twin jackets are now off. It's a great day for America.

The Purple Rule

I've referred to this rule a few times in my blogging, so this entry is to make it easily indexed. The purple rule states that the Democratic president should not appoint into his cabinet a sitting office-holder of a swing ("purple") state for fear that the Democrats will not be able to get another party-member in that office. This is especially critical for the Senate, where every one of the 100 votes matters for filibusters and other nonsense.

Application of the purple rule: Pennsylvania and Virgina are especially vulnerable. Otherwise appealing candidates like VA Governor Kaine and Senator Webb and PA Sen. Casey are thus rendered un-nominate-able by the Purple Rule.

VP, Cabinet Watch, part 1: VP

I've discussed different ideas for VP, especially for Obama (who I most care about) here, here, and here. To recap these issues, for all three candidates, and to expand into a discussion of major cabinet officials.

Vice President:

1. Hillary
   Don't know why I care, but I still think it's going to be Evan Bayh.
   
   
2. Obama:
   I used to believe that he'd need some old white ex-Senator to offset his foreign policy credential problems, but over this long primary I think new pressures have arisen. First, his war-cred has been bolstered by new supporters like Sam Nunn. And since McCain is a warrior, there's no good way to offset that advantage except, possibly, with your own warrior (cue: Clark or Webb), but even then I'm not sure how much that will help. But, bottom line, while '04 was a "war" election, '08 is about the economy. Getting a warrior may be irrelevant; Obama needs managerial help. Ironically Bloomberg would be good for that, but as I've said before, the VP is about votes and perception not actual talent.
   
   In the past few weeks, many have stated that Hillary's polarizing presence is almost forcing that she be put on the ticket. Even Sullivan has floated the idea, but (as I emailed him), this idea is daft and to suggest it means that Hillary has managed to get into your head. It is what she wants right now, but it would add all of her negatives with the only positive coming from her disgruntled supporters and surrogates who, I must reiterate, are die-hard Democrats. The people who support her because they can't vote for a 46 year old, and/or an African American, won't vote for Obama just because Hillary is there. If so, who needs her to offset the young/race biases... anybody and everybody would help.
   
   Moreover, a lot of her support comes from people who want to vote for 4 more years of Bill Clinton. Why else would the guns-and-church crackers, who think that Obama is a crack smoking Muslim terrorist, support the pantsuit posterchild of feminism?! It's because she's married to "the Big Dog" who is a card-carrying member of the Good Ol' Boy Klub. And you won't get 4 years of Bill again unless she's in the #1 slot; because if she's #2, then what more influence does the VP's spouse have over policy than he would if he were on his own? Billy C will be able to advise Obama better as a freelancer (no government oversight if he's just called three times a day) as opposed to being in the executive branch again.
   
   Bottom line, I'm sticking with my analysis from here - the only bloc that will leave the party if Hillary ain't on the ticket are the over-50s women. And they can be mollified with a woman VP. I'm sticking with Sebelius or Napolitano.
   
   
3. McCain
   I haven't thought about this as much recently. I thought he'd need a die-hard conservative, but that looks less likely. It does depend on who is the Democrat. I used to think Brownback; recently people have floated as the top 2: Pawlenty (Gov. MN) or Crist (Gov. FL). Some even have suggested Sec. of State Rice. However knowing McCain as well I do (we shot skeet back in the 1960s), and reading a bunch of articles, I think these things are clear: McCain is a military man through-and-through; he will want a veteran and a strong national-security ticket. This rules out anybody who doesn't have decent war experience. Christ and Pawlenty aren't veterans. And Rice? While it's great for pundits and predictors, I think it's D.O.A. Because for all of McCain's lack of general knowledge, I think he's smart enough to know that Rice is a total Bush-toady and incompetent. Anybody from the Bush cabinet will be poison in '08 (doing to McCain what Hillary would do to Obama) and Rice is one of the worst: responsible for both 9/11 and Iraq. Yipe.
   
   To my eyes the favorite for VP would be McCain's senate foxhole buddy Lindsey Graham (Sen. SC). The two are connected at the hip; both are "mavericks" in the GOP (meaning they are all bluster, no action) and I think McCain's going to go for comfort over electoral math. Graham is 53, a veteran, as true-red conservative as McCain (which is considerable, in the old sense). I'd put money on this.
   
   
4. If I'm wrong, and I will likely be wrong, I think the two tickets should at least be Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain-Jeb Bush, just to drive the anti-legacy corps crazy!

Part 2 will discuss the cabinet.

Second Amendment

No, I didn't receive a memo ordering me to write about today's horrific massacre: (32 Shot Dead on Virginia Tech Campus - New York Times). These are just how the blogger personality type responds to tragedy. Some cry, some pray, most blog.

Naturally, this type of incident makes we bloggy types revisit the issue of guns in America and the interpretation of the second amendment. Just as all the anti-gun types look at this and say 'were there no easy access to guns, this type of thing wouldn't happen.' While pro-gun people see this as a perfect example of how having a whole mess of students with concealed weapons would have put a stop to this right then and there.

Look. Common sense and burning passion can only carry one so far in this type of debate. Let's get factual. Has there been a case where a civilian carrying a concealed handgun managed to subdue some mass murdering wacko? Israel doesn't count because almost everyone who packs heat also served in the army. What Michelle Malkin would want, doubtless, is for Virginia Tech freshmen to be able to tote around sidearms. So, again, any case where this worked?

We anti-gun types see the pro-gun people as not getting the point. If crazy wackos have a tough time getting guns and still manage to go on rampages every year or so, what would happen when we made getting guns EVEN EASIER?

Often, the two sides of a debate will disagree because they envision different cases in their heads. I use the example, often, of welfare. Conservatives see welfare as a way to perpetuate irresponsible crack-smoking single-mom baby machines while liberals see welfare as a way to protect noble hard-working people wronged by the system.

So too with guns. Conservatives - who in the previous example show a contempt for the majority of the country that is in financial difficulty - somehow believe that the people who can't handle the responsibility of a job will handle the responsibility of a gun.

Guns are one issue where liberals feel people are less capable, less responsible, than conservatives do. Weird, no?

But, the gun wackos will respond, who will defend you when the Islamic communists knock on your schoolroom door? The answer is the police. We liberals - and urban moderates - live in tightly packed city streets with thousands of neighbors. We don't everyone to have guns and we need to have a large, swift moving police force to protect us as a result. [This urban-rural split is the only decent argument I've heard to defend gun ownership; the same crime that would have police respond in 10 minutes in a city would be impossible to duplicate in a rural area.]

If you want to know how the Styx analyzes the current data on the Virginia massacre, it's because of a breakdown of the police. Not the police themselves, but because the moron of a school president didn't think of enforcing the law. If you see the above story, there was a first shooting at 7:15 am (killing 2) and then a second set at 9:45 am (killing 30+) from the same guy. Ample time to send in SWAT and lock down the campus. But that didn't happen. Why? As the above NYTimes story quotes:

"[School President] Mr. Steger defended the decision not to shut down or evacuate the campus after the first shootings, saying officials had believed the first incident was a self-contained event, which the campus police believed was a 'domestic' dispute. 'We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,' he said."

I'm going to perform a anthropology trick here: what type of person would describe some guy killing two people on a college campus as a 'domestic dispute' that doesn't require even a minimal enough police presence to arrest the murderer? The president is defending his decision to let a murderer run amok on campus because, hey, it was just a minor dispute.

I would say that this is the attitude of a gun owner. Virginia is gun country. Look at Democrat James Webb - caught sneaking a gun (unapologetically) into the Senate.

If this was a northern school, I believe they would've shut it down. And while this is a hearsay/circumstantial proof, I see no way of explaining the idiotic behavior of the Virginia Tech president … unless he was a Bush appointee.

Webb, The Blame for Iraq

Letter sent to TPM re: The blame the American people for Bush's screw-ups meme

Dear Josh,

1. In reference to the new GOP/Conservative talking point (Stanley Kurtz, Morton Kondracke) about blaming the American People for not letting Bush fight the war. I could give a long answer to this, refuting this disgusting accusation & complaining about how terrible Bush and his proxies are, but we already know all that. The short answer is that the American people knew about the price of the war in Iraq and paid for it: in the 2004 election.

If you remember, Bush won the 2000 election because his team successfully convinced the American Voters that he was just slightly ideologically to the right to Gore. He was another 'moderate' (which they called a 'compassionate conservative'). This pose was so convincing that the far-left consumed it whole and voted for Nader, thinking that there was no real difference between Gore and Bush. The American people back then wanted a moderate and before 9/11 Bush had low popularity numbers because Rove quickly ripped off the face-mask and shoved a hard-right agenda down America's throats. Rove needed to do this - because the country was teetering on the 50-50 edge in 2000 and Nader's people made the difference so Rove needed to galvanize the Christianists to offset the Greens.

Then 9/11.

And the American people, who disliked the Conservative crap, rallied behind Bush because we had just been savagely attacked on our own soil. And Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of the whackos from Nixon/Ford felt that the time had come to create the New Executive Branch, and to get even with Saddam, all in one fell swoop. So we attacked Iraq. But I think we need to remind ourselves, and everyone, that the American People went ahead with that war because they were told that Saddam was seeking nuclear weapons, already owned chemical & biologicals and had used them before on Kurds, was an old enemy, and was a state sponsor of Al Queda. That's why we attacked Iraq and if it was all true - the WMD, the nukes, the Al Queda link - then the war would have been the moral equivalent of the war in Afghanistan (which nobody really disputes, do they?)

The 2004 election was the American voter biting the bullet and sacrificing themselves for the greater good. It wasn't a validation for Conservatism, it was in spite of that. It was the American voter thinking that they hated the Conservative politics but needing to vote for Bush anyway because the war in Iraq was still being depicted by the MSM as a necessary part of our 9/11 reaction and Kerry was a feckless, talentless, cipher. As we saw with the botched joke, if Kerry would have run against Bush in November 2006, Bush would have won.

After Katrina and after the war became exposed for its nonsense and after the American Voter was asked to give up more and more freedom (wire-taps?, torture?) the price they paid in 2004 just seemed to be too steep to pay in 2006.

2. About the Webb question: I agree with a watered-down JS. I don't think Webb was avoiding Bush as part of a sophisticated ploy. Webb reminds me of the Andrew Jackson form of politician - the straight-talk economic populist military man. And Americans would vote for Andrew Jackson over and over and over - historically I think he's the most significant president because he's the first non-Founding Father and the first American stereotype, the first non-elite, the first populist. Webb, as far as I can tell, seems to walk around as a ball of barely contained rage against all those who've slighted him in person and in the abstract. And his abstract enemies include draft-avoiders like Clinton and Bush. His hatred for Clinton is known (see that recent New yorker piece) and I imagine he hates Bush even more because of the class issue.

Bush, as we know, is a bully. He doesn't have an ounce of compassion in his putrid soul. He asked Webb about his son because he was picking a fight with someone he thinks he can beat. But as we've seen over and over, Bush underestimates his resources and strength. He doesn't know that Webb is going to mop him up. Webb truly scares the GOP because he has a better executive branch record than Cheney and Rumsfeld (who would America rather have, Sec of Defense under Ford & Bush or Sec of Navy from Reagan). Webb makes Bush look to be the wonder-wimp that he is.

And remember what Andrew Jackson (Webb) did to John Quincy Adams (Bush).

all the best, JC

Backpost put up on 2009-12-08.

Senate Predictions

If I attempt to predict the Oscars, which are meaningless, then I have to at least try the Senate. Even though it kills me... but as my brother and I often say, if the Israelites could believe 10 idiots over Moshe Rabbeinu when it came to the sin of the spies, so people can trust George Dick & Donald.

The data I use to determine the predictions - for the 14 top close races - comes from the average of the major polls as tabulated by RealClearPolitics.

My basic rule of thumb, based on 2004, is that if a Democrat is under 50% in the average polls, he will lose. The Republican machine has been shown to be super efficient at bridging the gap.

Bold = my predicted winner. *=incumbent.

Arizona = Kyl (R)* 49.3% vs. Pederson (D) 40.7%
Connecticut = Lieberman (I) 49.8% vs. Lamont (D) 38.0%
Maryland = Steele (R) 45.0% vs. Cardin (D) 48.7%
Michigan = Bouchard (R) 37.8% vs. Stabenow (D)* 52.3%
Minnesota = Kennedy (R) 37.7% vs. Klobuchar (D) 53.0%
Missouri = Talent (R)* 45.3% vs. McCaskill (D) 48.5%
Montana = Burns (R)* 45.5% vs. Tester (D) 48.5%
New Jersey = Kean (R) 41.8% vs. Menendez (D)* 48.2%
Ohio = DeWine (R)* 43.3% vs. Brown (D) 53.3%
Pennsylvania = Santorum (R)* 40.8% vs. Casey (D) 52.3%
Rhode Island = Chafee (R) 43.3% vs. Whitehouse (D) 48.7%
Tennessee = Corker (R) 50.3% vs. Ford (D) 44.3%
Virginia = Allen (R)* 46.8% vs. Webb (D) 48.3%
Washington = McGavick (R) 40.5% vs. Cantwell (D)* 53.8%

TOTALS
8 wins for Republicans (AZ, MD, MO, MT, NJ, RI, TN, VA)
6 wins for Democrats (CT, MI, MN, OH, PA, WA)

Republicans will take Democratic seats from NJ and MD. Democrats will take Republican seats in OH and PA.