Obama/Edwards: The Ticket That Never Was

November 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Election 2008, Election 2012, Hillary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

In recent months little has been heard about the scandal that forced former Senator (and 2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate) John Edwards from political life. A grand jury in North Carolina is now hearing testimony regarding the question of whether funds earmarked for his 2008 presidential campaign were diverted to pay the living expenses of Rielle Hunter, who in February 2008 gave birth to a daughter who, it is widely reported, was fathered by Edwards. I wrote about “the Edwards Zone” a number of times in 2008 at TNN, but developments since I last discussed the case have been as bizarre and murky as ever, so I’m waiting to see what comes out of the grand jury’s deliberations.

But a passage in the new book The Audacity To Win by David Plouffe is worth mentioning. Plouffe, the campaign manager who handled President Obama’s race for the White House last year, says in it that just after then-Senator Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Obama in the New Hampshire primary in January 2008, “a senior Edwards advisor” telephoned him with a remarkable offer.

The advisor pointed out that Edwards’s failure to win in Iowa (where he finished second, just ahead of Clinton but well behind Obama) or in New Hampshire made it unlikely that he would be the nominee. The advisor also observed that Clinton’s win in the Granite State had put Obama in a difficult position going into the next primary in South Carolina. He proposed a solution: that Edwards drop out of the race, endorse Obama, and be anointed by the Illinois senator as his running-mate should he receive the nomination. The two senators would then campaign jointly. The Edwards advisor argued that this would give Obama the edge in South Carolina, Edwards’s native state, and in the other Southern states on Super Tuesday, and thus guarantee him the nomination.

Plouffe took this offer to Obama, who rejected the idea. The advisor then informed Plouffe that he would approach Clinton instead, but if the notion was even presented to Hillary, no evidence has turned up so far.

Leaving aside the question of why Edwards thought he might help lead a Democratic ticket to victory in the fall when his onetime mistress was due to give birth in a few weeks after this idea was floated, the proposal had one obvious flaw. In 2004, when Edwards ran with John Kerry, it was widely trumpeted by his supporters that as a Southerner he would help win North Carolina, and perhaps Florida, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, for the Democrats. As things turned out, the whole South (and mid-South) went Republican. In 2008, Obama won Florida, Virginia and North Carolina on his own; having Joe Biden, a Pennsylvanian serving from Delaware, was no particular plus.

Obama was also probably aware of an earlier case where a presidential hopeful committed himself to a running-mate before actually being nominated (or having the nomination locked up). In 1976, just before the GOP convention got underway, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, in the hope of gaining the support of enough delegates to overtake President Gerald Ford’s lead, announced that he would select Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, regarded as a moderate-to-liberal figure, as his running-mate.

This choice generated little enthusiasm among the delegates Reagan sought, but it did upset his conservative base, with Sen. Jesse Helms urging the drafting of Sen. James Buckley to be Reagan’s running-mate instead. As a result, Reagan lost the nomination – though so narrowly that, though few liberal pundits believed it at the time, his ultimate journey to the White House was a sure bet.

For Obama to do something similar would have been a grave misstep; even if Edwards didn’t have the baggage he carried, had the Obama/Edwards ticket gone down to defeat in November 2008, it’s all but impossible that the Illinois senator would have been a viable candidate in 2012 or any time after. So, as the President looks back on 2008, he can rest assured that he made a wise choice.

RN, BHO, and KSM, continued

November 21, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Annals of the Obama Administration, Election 2008, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

When RN mistakenly declared Charles Manson guilty during his trial, problems ensued.  From a contemporaneous report in Time:

In Los Angeles, the effect of Nixon’s remarks on the Manson trial was instant and dramatic. While the Los Angeles Times came out the same afternoon with a four-inch headline reading MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES, Judge Charles Older went to great lengths to ensure that the jury, which has been sequestered since the trial began, would not learn of Nixon’s remarks. The windows of the jury bus were whited over with Bon Ami so that no juror could glimpse the headline on street newsstands. If the jury discovered Nixon’s verdict, the defense might have grounds for a mistrial. His efforts were to no avail. Next day Manson himself displayed a copy of the Times to the jury for some ten seconds before a bailiff grabbed the newspaper from his hands. Judge Older called a recess, then questioned the jurors one by one to satisfy himself that their judgment would not be affected. An alternate juror convulsed the courtroom when he announced his disclaimer: “I didn’t vote for Nixon in the first place.”

Bob Greene, Richard Nixon, Civility, And Mystique

September 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Interviews, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Vietnam | 3 Comments 

Yesterday, Bob Greene – the veteran journalist, not Oprah’s trainer – wrote a column for CNN.com about the nation’s winter of partisan discontent. (Well, yes, it is September, but the air did get perceptively colder this morning.)

For decades, Greene’s column at the Chicago Sun-Times, then the Chicago Tribune, was syndicated across the country, and many of his two dozen books were bestsellers. Seven years ago this week, a scandalous incident from 1988 involving a female high-school reporter surfaced and resulted in Greene’s dismissal from the Tribune. Since then he has maintained a much lower profile, but from time to time he still has unexpected and fairly perceptive things to say.

Sunday’s column opens with a reference to high-school “chicken” races. As longtime readers of Greene know, the days of his adolescence in the early 1960s, and his childhood memories of the 1950s, are never far away from his mind, so the allusion to Rebel Without A Cause is not unexpected. Then he draws a comparison between teenagers frantically racing toward a collision, and the intensity of the current debate over health care and “big government.” Greene expresses the view that when compared to the feelings generated in the last few months, even the arguments surrounding the 2008 election seem to evoke a vanishing atmosphere of civility.

To prove this point, he tells of traveling the country last fall, asking various ordinary Joes (plumbers or not) and Janes whether they planned to vote for then-Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain – and then asking them what they found to admire in the man they did not plan to vote for. He quotes an Obama voter who, not unexpectedly, admired McCain’s fortitude as a POW in Vietnam, and a McCain voter who observed that Obama was energetic, charismatic, intelligent. “People seemed to welcome this exercise,” says Greene, but then he glumly muses: “Somehow, it feels that a similar experiment would be doomed to failure now,” and that “it feels like we’re all in one of those old hot-rod movies[....], speeding straight toward each other’s headlights.” And then he wonders what can be done about it:

One answer may be found in an unlikely place — in words spoken by the most divisive political figure of his era.

Richard Nixon, in his first inaugural address during a time of widespread public rage in the United States, talked about “reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.”

Nixon’s presidency would end in shambles. But on its first day, here is what he said about how to soothe the anger that was consuming the nation:

“To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. … To lower our voices would be a simple thing.”

Some people’s feelings about Nixon undoubtedly cloud their opinion of everything he ever did. Yet what he said as he took office in a time of nonstop partisan conflict is worth considering as we pass through similar days:

“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

Bob Greene has thought about RN’s life, and the lessons to be learned from it, for a long time. Indeed, in his mid-twenties he covered the 1972 campaign and wrote a book about it, Running. a decade later, he scored a one-on-one interview with the ex-President, which stretched over several of his columns and is included in his 1985 book Cheeseburgers, and extensively excerpted in his 2004 book Fraternity: A Journey In Search Of Five Presidents.

In that interview, Nixon reflected at some length about how a President should be perceived by the public. He told Greene: “A president must not be one of the crowd. He must maintain a certain figure. People want him to be that way. They don’t want him to be down there saying, `Look, I’m the same as you.’ . . .In all the years I was in the White House, I never recall running around in a sport shirt, let alone a T-shirt. Or sneakers and the rest.”

When RN said this, he had in mind leaders he greatly admired like Charles De Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – men whose rather austere and remote personal style nonetheless commanded enormous respect and admiration from their countrymen (or, as would be said now, countrypersons). While this sort of political style has generally been less admired by American voters, as the careers of John Quincy Adams – or Richard Nixon – demonstrate, there’s no doubt that most Americans do want their Presidents not to be too folksy or too accessible to the public. Dwight Eisenhower certainly struck the right balance. He was from middle-class, heartland America – but he was not “the same as” the ordinary voter. Ronald Reagan, as “down-home” as he could be, was always meticulous about keeping a certain mystique around his personality.

In the case of Barack Obama, the mystique has started to fall away, in a rapid and, for many of his followers, disillusioning manner. Twelve days ago he delivered a speech before Congress on health care which, in itself, was a good effort at rallying the nation to his cause, though far from a grand slam or a home run – more like a double. Then the Congressional leadership became preoccupied with punishing Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” during the address, and forced a vote on the matter which seemed to many Americans like an exercise in pointless overkill. Obama’s latter-day Brain Trust seemed aware of this, but no one in the Capitol Hill Democratic leadership was bothering to take heed of their concerns.

Today, Newsweek.com has a blogpost about the latest poll data. It turns out that most of the surveys do find an increase in Obama’s favorability ratings following the speech – but by one or two or, in CNN.com’s survey, five points, from 53 to 58. Compare this to the polls following Richard Nixon’s November 3, 1969 speech on Vietnam, when 77 percent of Americans expressed support for his policies – a spectacular rise from the President’s numbers before the speech. Even Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech in 1979 temporarily lifted his approval rating from 25 to 37 percent, before the Iranian hostage crisis lowered it for good.

Last weekend President Obama, evidently wishing to build on what small momentum his speech generated, took the unprecedented step – for a President, anyway – of appearing on five Sunday-morning talk shows on the same day: NBC’s Meet The Press, CBS’s Face The Nation, ABC’s This Week, CNN’s State Of The Union (formerly Late Edition) and Univision’s Al Punto.

This garnered the President the distinction of having achieved something approaching what media folk call a “full Ginsburg.” Back in 1998, in the first frenzied Sunday after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, that ex-intern’s attorney, William Ginsburg, appeared on the first four of the aforementioned shows as well as Fox News Sunday. This achievement remained unique for about five years, then Vice President Cheney duplicated it, to be followed by then-Senator John Edwards (during his weeks as Sen. John Kerry’s running-mate) and then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. The last to manage it was then-Senator Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2007 when she was still the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent (and, in the minds of many in the media, virtually the President-elect).

But it’s one thing for even a Vice-President to undertake such a feat – and another for a President to think he has to make the rounds of the talking-heads programs. (Or, for that matter, the talk shows – if the Chief Executive feels he needs to make his case on The Late Show With David Letterman as I write this, can Carson Daly or Chelsea Handler be that far behind?) When that President pointedly declines to appear on Fox News Sunday, apparently because the network decided not to broadcast his speech to Congress, the semblance of a mystique certainly diminishes, and some, like Dwight Schwab of examiner.com, are even ready to compare Obama’s quarrel with Fox to Nixon’s difficult relationship with the networks. (For me, another analogy comes more readily to mind – former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s honeymoon with the media in 1998 that so rapidly turned sour. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So it makes sense for President Obama to try to follow in the path RN outlined in that first inaugural – a path RN himself found difficult to follow, because of the polarization that he inherited – and also to maintain an image befitting a President instead of a Sunday-morning regular. The right approach for him is not to start thinking about going on Olbermann, Matthews, King and Maddow – or Conan, Colin, and the two Jimmies – on the same night, but instead to focus on the effectiveness of getting his message across on the stage that only a President can command.

Palin, Nixon, Power, And The GOP

July 15, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Nixon in the News, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin | 5 Comments 

In the Times of London, Daniel Finkelstein writes:

There is no more eloquent statement of modern Republicanism than resigning office with time still on the clock. Mrs Palin has chosen to talk about power, rather than exercise it. She would rather write a book and give lectures about being a governor than actually be a governor. And her party has made the same choice.

Yet the anger of Nixon’s coalition has never quite left it, even after years of huge political success. They see themselves as the eternally frustrated rebels knocking on the barred doors of Washington DC, when they have been on the inside themselves for years.

It has cast itself, deliberately, as the opposition, the angry outsider, and it is more comfortable in this role than it is as the party of power. As Rick Perlstein describes in his book Nixonland, being the party of the angry outsider began as an election strategy. Richard Nixon wanted to mop up votes that went to urban machine “law-and-order” Democratic mayors such as Richard Daley in the North and populist rabble rousers such as the segregationist Democrat George Wallace in the South.

Others attack the GOP from exactly the opposite direction. For years, we have heard that Republicans are elitist insiders who only want power.  ”It is power that attracts them,” wrote John Dean in Broken Government, “it is a tropism for authoritarian personalities, like moths to the flame.”  In 2006, Thomas B. Edsall wrote Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power.   He called the GOP “the party of the socially and economically dominant and of those who identify with the dominant.”

Both lines of attack are caricatures. Republican politicians do want power — like Democratic politicians — but they are often inept and disorganized in pursuing it.  As for economic dominance, one need only note that a majority of those among those making $200,000 a year or more supported Barack Obama.

There is a bit of truth to Finkelstein’s analysis: Republicans have indeed cast themselves as the opposition. Since Democrats control the White House and Congress, that’s what Republicans are. When the GOP was in power, Democrats were the opposition. Barack Obama deliberately cast himself as an outsider, hence his Secret Service code name — and the title of an admiring biography — “Renegade.”

Unclubbable Man Joins World’s Most Exclusive Club

June 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Senate | 1 Comment 

Robert Nedelkoff has examined the mathematics of Senator-Elect Franken’s “victory.”

The Wall Street Journal today examines the ethics of the Franken camp’s found-votes recount strategy:

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don’t end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

In politics, as in life, you make your own luck.  Republicans tend to take a half-hearted —not to say half-assed— approach to the rough and tumble of electoral politics.  This is through excesses of timidity rather than of virtue, to be sure — but the result is the same.  And the word for the candidate who comes in second is still “loser.”

As far as the Senate Democrats who have so eagerly awaited the arrival of this new colleague — good luck to them.  I suspect that they may soon be experiencing a case of the “be careful what you wish for” syndrome.  As Robert Nedelkoff indicates, the world’s most exclusive club will now be welcoming an unclubbable man.  During my several years at Late Night with David Letterman and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, I only dealt with a handful of people who were truly  unpleasant and disagreeable.  The soon-to-be Junior Senator from Minnesota was a member in bad standing of that unappealing club.

The President At Notre Dame

May 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, California politics, Congress, Culture, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Lifestyle, Media, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Religion, Republican Party, Supreme Court, Vice President Biden, economy, education | 1 Comment 

Tomorrow President Obama will receive an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s quintessential Catholic institution of higher learning, and will deliver an address to the assembled graduates. The invitation extended by the school’s president has stirred considerable controversy (and plenty of vocal protests) because of the President’s espousal of the pro-choice viewpoint on abortion throughout his career. (It has been noted here and there that other pro-choice politicians like New York’s onetime Governor Mario Cuomo and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan appeared at previous Notre Dame commencements without much incident. But it may have helped that they were lifelong Catholics, unlike Obama.)

The Chief Executive’s appearance tomorrow is an opportunity for him to extend a conciliatory hand to the large number of Americans who, whether or not they voted for him in November, are not supporters of some of the radical programs being espoused by a considerable number of Democratic-affiliated groups, such as an expansion of legal abortion, decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs, and gay marriage.

It seems to become more evident by the month that when voters sought “change” in voting for Obama and Vice President Biden last month, a substantial percentage of them were mainly concerned with the economy, health care, and perhaps increased opportunity of education, and were not that keen on the other aspects of “change” as defined in the agendas of MoveOn.org or other groups. This would especially apply to voters in the states surrounding the Deep South, large portions of the Catholic electorate, and churchgoing African-American voters nationwide.

In California, the voters in the latter group helped Obama carry the state, but at the same time provided the margin that passed Proposition 8 which reversed the California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. And it turns out that on abortion, the percentage of voters supporting Roe vs. Wade and the pro-choice line, after peaking during the Clinton years, has steadily been declining, to the point that this week, a Gallup poll revealed that a bare majority of those whose opinion was sampled – 51% – described themselves as “pro-life.”

This strongly indicates that a considerable number of voters – perhaps poised on becoming the majority – would not be looking forward to Al Franken taking his seat in the Senate and locking in a (theoretically) filibuster-proof majority that would then fulfill all the left’s fondest dreams in the social arena.

The events of the last few weeks involving Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, might prove a harbinger of things to come. A few weeks ago, during the Miss USA pageant, Ms. Prejean, educated at Christian schools, was asked by the online gossip columnist Perez Hilton, one of the pageant’s judges, what her opinion was of gay marriage. The contestant replied that her own view was that marriage could only exist between a man and woman – which is still officially the view of Congress, as expressed in the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a majority of both parties and signed by President Clinton a decade ago.

Hilton (followed by an avalanche of bloggers and left-leaning pundits) subjected Ms. Prejean to ridicule. But instant polls soon made it clear that most Americans supported her right to express her opinion, and even Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who spearheaded the legalization of same-sex unions in his city, acknowledged her right to free speech.

Ms. Prejean was then ridiculed as a hypocrite, after some rather mild and fairly tasteful photos of her in an unclad state appeared online. But Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA pageant, rejected pressure to strip her of her crown, and so in recent days the beauty queen has managed to largely prevail in the court of public opinion.

The way this particular controversy has played out has not been conveniently timed for the supporters of same-sex marriage. As I noted last week in my post “Gay Marriage At The Crossroads,”  the District of Columbia city council just voted to recognize such unions as performed in other states. Under the Home Rule Bill, Congress has a right to challenge this decision – and GOP lawmakers have made it clear that they will pursue this option, which means that in a matter of months each member of Congress will have to vote yes or no on this question.

The issues of abortion, gay marriage, and narcotics delegalization will also be prominent when the President selects a nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. It seems less and less likely that any thoroughly liberal, MoveOn-approved choice would automatically sail through the Senate.

So I think that the best approach for the President tomorrow is not to mouth a series of platitudes predicated on the idea that his listeners (or the American public in general) will automatically accept all of his positions, but to acknowledge that there are differences of opinion and to express a willingness to work within the Constitution to achieve a consensus that will bridge these differences. If he does that, and follows through, he may considerably improve the chances of his party maintaining control of Congress in 2010. If he pursues a partisan path, however, the GOP – perhaps as early as the Virginia election this year – could be on the comeback trail.

Gay Marriage Reaches The Crossroads

May 8, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Election 2012, News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Senate | 2 Comments 

The Obama Administration enjoyed a number of small triumphs this week.  The Dow stayed well over 8500. Despite an increase in unemployment, the overall economic picture has been showing signs of improvement.  The President announced some budget trims here and there, to the tune of $17 billion – just to make sure that the country understood that, when faced with an obsolete directional system, for example, he was not going to keep it around just because he’s a Democrat.

But on Tuesday an event happened that may well snowball into something that the White House, and Democrats on Capitol Hill, would probably not care to get involved with just yet. But more and more, it is becoming inescapable: after a Presidential campaign in which Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel (neither much of a mainstream figure) were the only candidates to support gay marriage, a situation is looming in which every Senate and House member may have to declare themselves on one side or another of the issue, and very soon.

Last year, there was talk about introducing a gay-marriage bill into the District of Columbia City Council. At the time, the capital’s newspaper for the gay community, the Washington Blade, argued that such a move was premature; it urged waiting until 2009. And so the proposal went unintroduced, as the nation elected a President who expressed support for the civil-union concept for gay couples, but drew the line at marriage.

This week,a few days after NBC News and the Washington Post announced poll results indicating, for the first time, that a plurality of Americans favor gay marriage (49%, with 46% opposed), the supporters of this legislation made their move, and so the City Council of the nation’s capital passed a bill recognizing gay marriages from other states, by a vote of 12 to 1.

The sole dissenting vote was cast by former Washington mayor Marion Barry. When it became evident that he would vote against the bill, this caused some surprise and consternation. For one thing, long before Barry’s drug use and lackadaisical administrative style gained him notoriety, he was one of the founders – indeed, the first chairman – of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee and, in those days, fought for civil rights alongside the iconic John Lewis, who now, as a Congressman, is a vocal champion of gay marriage.

And there’s also the fact that in his early years as mayor in the 1970s and early 1980s, Barry was a friend of gay rights, and his administration’s tolerant attitude had much to do with making the Dupont Circle neighborhood as much of a magnet for gays as Castro Street or the West Village. He also was a firm supporter of the Whitman-Walker clinic in the early days of its fight against AIDS, and Jim Graham, the longtime executive director of the clinic and one of the two openly gay City Council members, pointed this out (as seen in this Youtube clip) as he expressed his disappointment with Barry’s decision against the bill on Tuesday. (Meanwhile, David Catania, the council’s other gay member, represented the no-compromise attitude of younger gays in his remarks to Barry.)

Barry had actually gone on record as a sponsor of the bill when it was introduced. In the Youtube clip he suggests that his staffers had somehow arranged for this without his knowledge, but what is more likely is that strong opposition to recognition of gay marriages from churchgoers and older voters in Ward 8, which he represents, caused him to change his mind.

The council’s vote was greeted with a furious response from several African-American ministers in the area outside the meeting room, and it took the police to restore order, as seen in the clip. But this was far from the end of the story. On Wednesday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a onetime Brigham Young University football star and convert to the Mormon faith (and also to the Republican Party – his Democratic father’s first wife, Kitty, later married 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis), stated that he and other GOP lawmakers stood ready to challenge the new law within 30 days, as the Home Rule Charter provides.

Although the District’s representative in Congress, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, dismissed the idea that Congress will overturn the law, the situation is distinctly a worrisome one for the Democrats. It seems very likely that Republican lawmakers can garner enough support from their Democratic colleagues in the South and in the more conservative areas of the Midwest to force a vote.

And if the House votes to endorse the Council’s action, the next step for gay activists and their allies is plainly to seek the repeal of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by majorities of both parties and signed into law by President Clinton. Although voters, especially younger ones, seem to be steadily shifting toward support of gay unions, opposition still runs strong in a number of House districts that the Democrats only managed to recapture in the last two years, and in states, such as North Carolina, that were essential to Obama’s victory and which he would need in 2012. Therefore, both the White House and Congressional Democrats are walking a fine line for the next 18 months.

And the gay community is now determined to keep up the pressure, as shown in this editorial by Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff. He points out that President Obama, throughout his campaign, assured voters that he meant to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay service personnel in place since 1993, and this language was repeated on the White House website after his inauguration. But then, the text was altered to refer to the President’s intention to change the policy “in a sensible way.” Following protests, this text was changed yet again, to state that the Admistration’s intention again is to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” – but, to the irritation of activists, the “in a sensible way” phrase was kept. Given the eagle-eyed attention directed at the website’s statements, it’s a sure thing that every statement Obama makes about the District’s new law, when it comes up for Congressional review, will be meticulously analyzed. This may be as thorny a situation as any Obama faces in his first term.

Rude Awakening, or The Edwards Zone Redux

May 5, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Ethics, News media, Nixonland Nitpicks, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Senate | 1 Comment 

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Napoleon (1851)

Most of what Marx said has been proven wrong by history, but that quote still holds up with a vengeance. The opening pages of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland describe vividly the days in which Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, having seemingly vanquished the forces of the Right for all eternity, was on the verge of ushering in a second Era Of Good Feelings (as defined by Democrats and seconded by Rockefeller Republicans) when the Watts riots gave the nation a brutal slap on the face and ushered in a series of violent and chaotic events that brought about the resurgence of conservatism.

In much the same way, as President Obama’s first 100 days closed last Wednesday with Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats and David Souter’s notifying the White House of his planned retirement, the stage seemed set for the final triumph of liberalism for this century, if not millennium. All that was needed was for Al Franken’s smirk to materialize in one chair in the Senate, and all would be well.

But alas, in the preceding weeks, a distant rumble of things to come could be heard. Early last month Knopf published How It Ended, the collected stories of Jay McInerney. best known for Bright Lights, Big City. This volume garnered its author the best reviews of his career. And, in some of these, it was mentioned that one of the tales in the book, “Penelope On The Pond,” imagined Alison Poole, the heroine of McInerney’s 1988 novel Story Of My Life, as a discarded mistress of a presidential candidate, biding her time in a quiet cabin somewhere in the Rockies. The reviews further noted that McInerney has often acknowledged that Alison Poole was based on Rielle Hunter.

Rielle Hunter? Wasn’t she involved with that guy who had the most famous hairdo in politics before Rod Blagojevich came along? Didn’t he once run for Vice President or something? What was his name, um…Edwards, John Edwards, right?

Yes, John Edwards, who, in the eight months since I last posted about him, heeded the bidding of the Democratic establishment and faded into the woodwork, appearing in public only at University of North Carolina basketball games, while Rielle Hunter, the mother of an infant girl whose precocious head of hair somehow brought him to mind, was banished from her mansion in Santa Barbara (after the death of her benefactor and Edwards’s finance chairman for his 2008 presidential run, Fred Baron, in October) and exiled to a modest house in South Orange, New Jersey. It seemed a sure thing that neither would be heard from again.

But that was before it was reported that Elizabeth Edwards, the terminally ill wife of the ex-Senator, was about to publish a new book, Resilience, in which she discusses her husband’s affair. And before the Raleigh News and Observer, which has quietly followed the ins and outs of the Edwards scandal ever since the onetime Veep-presumptive bamboozled the paper’s executive editor into killing an article about his affair in late 2007 (by denying it and claiming that such a story would cause needless suffering to his wife), informed America last Sunday that a Federal investigation into the financing of his 2008 campaign was now underway.

Yes, like the most evil genie imaginable, the Edwards Zone, with all its many mysteries involving campaign operatives with a taste for high-stakes gambling (and a propensity to claim parentage of babies whom they then completely ignore), trial lawyers who send their private planes on round trips from Texas to make hour-long stopovers in Caribbean islands noted for offshore banking, and nonprofit foundations that manage to channel millions to LLCs that abruptly vanish, has come back.

In a column to appear in tomorrow’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd articulates the frustration that many liberals in the media must feel. It’s been long understood that John Edwards’s narcissism was close to uncontrollable; it took all the weight of the Democratic establishment to prevent him from touring college campuses last fall and to quietly go back to the Tar Heel State.

But what drives Elizabeth Edwards to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show, as she did today (for a taping that will be broadcast on Thursday), to speculate on how much or how little young Frances Quinn Hunter resembles the man who might have been a heartbeat away from the Oval Office if a few thousand votes had gone the other way in Ohio four and a half years ago? What is going to happen when Andrew Young (not the venerated lieutenant of Martin Luther King and former UN Ambassador, but the aforementioned operative) goes before a grand jury and is asked to explain why his own mother told a reporter she does not believe his claim, made through a lawyer, that he fathered Rielle Hunter’s daughter? Or when such a body ponders the question of why the chartered plane carrying Ms. Hunter and her daughter from California to the US Virgin Islands would make a quick stop in Mobile, Alabama, to acquire a passport for the infant – a passport not needed for travel to those islands, but necessary for, say, a visit to the Grand Turks and Caicos, to which the aforementioned private jet traveled for an hour during Ms. Hunter’s sojourn?

Last year, I wrote a dozen posts on this subject, and posed the questions that I think need to be raised by diligent Federal prosecutors to a grand jury. Some more have arisen, notably regarding the three million or so dollars donated to a nonprofit affiliated with Edwards by Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, the 98-year-old heiress who, until now, has been best known for providing her nation with the beautiful landscaping design that the South Lawn of the White House has had since the Kennedy Administration. (The nonprofit then paid an equivalent sum to an LLC – with the same address as the nonprofit, and which vanished from the records at the same time the nonprofit closed up shop in 2008 – for “consulting” work.)

If the Democrats have any luck, sullying Ms. Mellon’s legacy of Camelot will be the worst that John Edwards will do to the liberal tradition. But I have the feeling that there’s a considerable chance that the true dimensions of the events involving Edwards and his associates between 2006 and 2008 will  emerge, little by little. The question is how many journalists will follow the lead of the News and Observer (and some other North Carolina media) in looking into the scarifying revelations in the heart of….the Edwards Zone.

A New Chapter In Revisionist History

March 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, China, Cold War, Election 2008, Europe, History, International Affairs, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Russia, U.S. History, UN, White House | Leave a Comment 

As President Obama travels to Europe to confer with leaders there about how to come to grips with the worldwide recession, Kate Pickert, at Time.com, compares the trip to earlier Presidential travels overseas.

Ms. Pickert is a native of Watertown, New York, and started her career at the Watertown Daily Times, a very highly regarded newspaper; for decades it has been one of the smallest dailies in the country to have a full-time reporter in Washington. The late Alan Emory, who ran its DC bureau from the 1950s to the 1990s, was one of the most respected figures in the Beltway press corps.

Unfortunately, Ms. Pickert seems to have some way to go to fill his shoes.

The reporter starts with a pretty good point – that Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs, at a briefing the day before the President’s departure, was not asked a single question about the trip, since the members of the Fourth Estate present were more concerned about the forced resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner. Ms. Pickert notes that days of old “a President could dominate the news by simply leaving the country and posing for some photo ops. Maybe he’d even sneak in some history-making diplomatic feats. Exhibit A: Richard Nixon.”

Yes, she’s talking about the China trip. The round-the-clock TV coverage that event received – the first time all but a handful of Americans had been able to see China up close and personal – was apparently, in the reporter’s mind, equivalent to a series of “photo ops.”

After giving an account of the visit which reads like a condensation of its Wikipedia entry, Ms. Pickert continues:

Nixon’s China trip was successful, but it’s not as if he ended a war. Woodrow Wilson’s trips in 1919 to the Paris Peace Conference, however, led to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the first World War.

Let’s leave aside the perennial debate about the degree to which the terms which Germany had to accept at Versailles, mainly at the insistence of the French government, set the stage for the rise of Hitler and another world war.  The useful point to make here is that, while RN’s visit to the PRC may not have ended a fighting war, it brought one major part of the Cold War – the isolation of China from the United States for nearly a quarter-century – to an end, and thus helped to diminish the possibility of a third world war.

Ms. Pickert goes on to discuss the 1945 Yalta Conference, which she says produced as its “end result [...] the partition of Germany and the creation of the United Nations.” It was the Dunbarton Oaks meeting in 1944 which laid the plans for the founding session of the UN, which took place a few days after Yalta; what FDR accomplished at the Black Sea resort was to get a commitment from Stalin to have the USSR join the UN.

But the really startling paragraph in the article is this one:

Of course, not all presidential trips abroad are known for altering the course of world politics. John F. Kennedy’s 1963 trip to Berlin was notable for the speech expressing support for a free West Germany, but infamous because of the four words he used to drive the point home: “Ich bin ein Berliner,” which can be interpreted to literally mean “I am a jelly-filled doughnut.” Some reports say the statement wasn’t mocked in Berlin at the time, but this hardly matters. In popular memory, Kennedy committed an embarrassing gaffe, something presidents try hard not to do while abroad, where they operate under more scrutiny than usual.

Really. JFK’s speech was “infamous?” Then why does Ms. Pickert think Obama, when a candidate last year, chose Berlin to make his one major appearance outside the US during his campaign – an appearance which drew hundreds of thousands? Why is JFK’s speech so prominently featured in his library in Boston? Why was it one of the highlights of former Nixon White House staffer Bruce Herschensohn’s acclaimed documentary Years Of Lightning, Day Of Drums? Why does the “Berliner” line inspire fond memories in older Europeans to this day, many of whom, I daresay, would regard it as a very significant event of the Cold War?

The Watertown Daily Times article about Ms. Pickert’s hiring by Time states that she has a master’s degree from Columbia. The major is not identified, but I’ve got my doubts that it was American history.

Blue Orange?

March 14, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, California politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Orange County, Republican Party, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

(Cross posted from Epic Journey)

Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon, may be on the cusp of political upheaval. In the Orange County Register, Dena Bunis reports:

Orange County Democrats have become so emboldened by how well President Barack Obama did here on election night that as far as they’re concerned they can compete for any seat in this Republican rich environment. Case in point: Irvine Councilwoman and former Mayor Beth Krom. She made it official this week that she is going to take on Republican Rep. John Campbell.

Outside of Southern California, Orange County is synonymous with wealth, glamour (e.g., The OC) and conservative politics. The reality is more complicated. Republicans have generally won there, but in 2008, McCain took the county by a slim 50-48 percent margin. What’s up?

• First, it’s now a majority-minority county, about 33 percent Hispanic, 16 percent Asian, and 2 percent African American.
• Second, while coastal areas are indeed as affluent as the stereotype holds, there are gritty working-class areas farther inland. (I used to live in one of them.)
• Third, it is home to large numbers of high-income professionals, who liked Obama. Nationwide, he won narrowly among voters making more than $200k a year, and by a 58-40 percent margin among those with postgraduate study. As Michael Barone has argued convincingly, The GOP cannot take upscale voters for granted.

Orange County Republicans will have to work hard to keep their turf from turning blue.

Nixon The Communicator

February 28, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Featured Articles, George W. Bush, History, International Affairs, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 1 Comment 

The recently released C-SPAN 2009 Historians Presidential Leadership Survey is an interesting, if predictable, snapshot of scholarly opinion about past chief executives. Honest Abe towers over the list, his position secured by history and his frequent postmortem appearances during the 2008 campaign and beyond. The rail-splitter has never been hotter. Look soon for some imagery morphing Lincoln and Che Guevera on a t-shirt near you.

Surprisingly – at least a bit – is that George Washington knocked Franklin Roosevelt out of the number two spot. Apparently the father of our country still trumps the father of modern big government.

Go figure.

Of course, recent retiree George W. Bush ranks in the lower tier – just above my ancestor (really) Millard Fillmore. But in fairness, a lot of modern historians have to actually die off before Mr. 43 will get much of a real without-the-venom look.

Richard M. Nixon ranks 27th on the list. Jimmy Carter ranks 25th. WhatEVER.

Clearly without Watergate, as well as every actual day of the Carter administration, Nixon would rank much higher. However, that’s asking a lot – even of historians. To so many, Nixon without Watergate would be like Kennedy without the Cuban Missile Crisis. In other words, the particular presidency defined by the crucial episode. However, it may just be that Nixon without Watergate would be more like JFK without the Bay of Pigs, or drugs and bimbos, but I am not going to win that one in most arenas, I know.

Jack Kennedy, by the way, moved from number eight to six in the recent survey. But again in all fairness – as with Lincoln, he did rise from the dead to campaign for candidate Obama.

These surveys analyze a president’s leadership in matters foreign and domestic. But I wonder what a ranking would look like if we tried to find out who the best communicators in the White House were?

It is quite clear that the public at large is enamored of our new president’s communication skills and, in fact, they are quite impressive. He is a gifted speaker and he knows how to use this ability very well. His predecessor was, by all accounts, not as accomplished as a speaker. It is like JFK following Ike. Both the great general and George W. had more than a few syntax challenges.

The list of presidents known as highly effective communicators usually includes Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Clearly that’s a solid list. Most would not instinctively put Richard Nixon on such a list, but he was in many ways one of the most effective communicators ever to rise to the presidency.

Nixon cadence may not now be recalled as Rooseveltian, nor do many remember his eloquence as matching that of JFK/Sorenson, but he was an absolute master of the spoken word in a particular method that is often overlooked – the extemporaneous speech.

By this I mean he spoke very often without notes – or just a few notes – though with extraordinarily thorough preparation. He used a written text for major remarks and addresses (acceptance speeches, inaugurals, Oval Office remarks, etc.). However, he never used a teleprompter – often to the chagrin of younger staffers and others (such as Billy Graham) who constantly encouraged its use.

It would be hard to imagine a leader today saying no to the teleprompter. It has become the well-traveled rhetorical road. Nixon stuck with the road less traveled.

Richard Nixon preferred to make a thoroughly detailed outline and then deliver the remarks sans notes. His famous “Checkers Speech,” which I have written about before, is a classic example of this. And throughout his career he used the same method – working out his thoughts on yellow legal pads and much of the time delivering them in a conversational manner. The concepts were fixed in his mind, but the language was that of the moment.

Some confuse extemporaneous with impromptu – but they are not the same. The former describes a method of delivering something very well prepared. The latter is “off the top” of the head, and Mr. Nixon despised this. In fact, history tells us that he really only did this once – when he gave his concession remarks after losing the California governor’s race in 1962. And we all know that didn’t turn out very well.

The key to Mr. Nixon’s ability to speak so effectively without notes was, I believe, his love for reading. He lived out what Francis Bacon famously said roughly 400 years ago: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

In his book In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal, Nixon wrote about reading and the presidency:

A president must spend many hours a day reading for work. He should not forget to read for pleasure. Theodore Roosevelt, the most prolific reader of all American presidents, once said he would never go anywhere ‘not even to the jungles of Africa,’ without books to read. On safari he always had a book or two packed in his saddlebag or pocket so that no opportunity for reading would be lost. I did the same thing in the jungles of Washington.

It is considered clichéd these days to say, “leaders are readers” – but it’s still true. And great leaders tend to be effective speakers – the kind of people who read before they speak, not just while the teleprompter is on.

Tending Toward Statism

February 14, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Election 2008, economy | Leave a Comment 

During the Oct. 15 Presidential debate, Sen. Obama ducked a $200 billion question from Bob Schieffer. If he’d answered it, would he still have won the election? Read more here.

Michael Steele’s Moment

January 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Election 2012, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Republican Party | 2 Comments 

“This is the moment,” President Obama was fond of saying many, many times on the campaign trail. (Although he would vary it from time to time by speaking, in vaguely Churchillian fashion, of a time when future generations would look back on the present and say that “this was the moment when we as a people” etc.)

Today, there came two moments of considerable importance to the United States. The first one was the announcement (in terms implying that he would accept the post if offered it) by Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican, that he is under consideration for Secretary of Commerce.  This decision in itself is not that surprising; Gregg was elected to his first term by a whisker and won his second mainly because he was running against the 94-year-old activist “Granny D” Haddock, and New Hampshire has become more, not less, Democratic in recent years.

What’s surprising is that President Obama’s transition team did not offer Gregg the job of, say, Secretary of the Interior when the Cabinet was being selected last month, and, at the same time, offer either of Maine’s Republican senators (Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe) high-ranking positions, thus making it possible for the Democratic governors of these states to name replacements and thus have a filibuster-proof majority in place before Obama’s inauguration.

Indeed, with Gregg in the Cabinet and a Democratic replacement in his old seat, if Al Franken wins his court battle, the filibuster-proof majority will be in place. But that’s still a big if. Are the Democrats really certain that Franken can prevail through all the court challenges to come? Is it desirable to have 59 Democrats in the upper chamber during at least the initial legislative battles to come, when bringing either Collins or Snowe into the Administration could bring the total to 60 and thus forestall all the trouble that could be stirred up when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gets into a scrape like the one earlier this month, when he drew one line in the sand after another and Sen. Roland Burris kept crossing them?  This is a question that may be pondered in the West Wing over the weekend.

Later today, the GOP took a big step in the right direction when, after a long, drawn-out contest between a half-dozen candidates, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele emerged as the first African-American chairman in the history of the Republican National Committee.  During the last half-dozen years, Steele has emerged as not only the successor to former Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts as the most prominent black Republican, but has consistently shown himself to be a forceful critic of his party’s complacency, and a strong voice for a more inclusive GOP.

The last election showed, once and for all, that the Republicans have to get on the right side of the immigration issue.  All over the world, people dream of coming to the United States.  And the life that they dream of making here is not one burdened with gigantic bureaucracies and oppressive taxes; that’s what many want to escape from in their own countries.

Last week I saw the acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire and, as I watched the scenes of Indian life, thought to myself: Here are hundreds of millions of people who dream of a better life, a more abundant life.  If one-twentieth of them were ever to settle in the United States, the Republicans would win every election in the foreseeable future – providing they cast aside the anti-immigration rhetoric. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants, exemplifies a generation of Americans from a multitude of different heritages and histories, all united by their readiness to embrace the economic and social vision that a Republican party under the guidance of Michael Steele could provide.

Many liberal commentators, last November, forecast the end of the GOP’s ascendancy, in terms almost as emphatic as were heard the morning after Election Day in 1964.  But as the months go by, and as the Democrats get to squabbling (as Democrats tend to do), we may see a different picture.  But that depends on the willingness of the Republican Party to reach out to those parts of the American electorate — including the newest Americans — most willing to hear its message.

Bipartisanship or Groupthink?

January 29, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Book Review, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, History, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Republican Party, U.S. History, UK Politics | 5 Comments 

“They could write like angels and scheme like demons.” This is how author Edward J. Larson describes two of our nation’s founding fathers – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – in his book, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign.

Those wonderful and often cantankerous giants also grew to define the partisanship of their day. This difference of philosophy and policy was part of our national DNA just about from the beginning. Sure, there were always cries back then – as there are today – for the end of partisanship. Even General George “Father-Of-Our-Country” Washington feared the approach of party politics. But the partisanship he dreaded was the kind that would bring about change contrary to what he wanted. And there’s the rub.

It’s bipartisan if you agree with me. It’s partisan if you don’t.

Like it or not, partisanship has been part of our national fabric all along. And all Americans should fervently hope that we never actually see bipartisanship break out all over. For some reason, possibly naivety on the part of some, though maybe something more manipulative on the part of others, the cry of bipartisanship is the ultimate political trump card these days. Getting everyone to work and play together – to walk in complete utopian agreement – is seen as the ultimate political ideal.

It sounds nice. It feels good when political foes trade rancor for civility, and it makes sense on a certain level that people need to talk with, rather than at, each other. I get that. But is the current call for bipartisanship really little more than the glorification of something quite detrimental to effective governance?

I’m talking about groupthink.

As President Obama and his new administration grapple with the complex issues before them, and try to find traction dealing with a surprisingly feisty, if not recalcitrant, Republican minority in Congress, they would do well to look in depth at the age of Camelot. But they should study the fall of 1962, not the spring 1961.

President John F. Kennedy learned a thing or two from the Bay of Pigs fiasco – an early failure for his administration. What he learned, he then applied when faced with Soviet missiles in Castro’s Cuba 18 months later. He learned how to listen to many different points of view – and to temper his approach based on what he was hearing.

Of course, I realize that the analogy falls short as completely relevant to the workings of partisan politics, but there is a basic idea that rings true. In scripture we are told: “in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” The best policies are those forged out of the give and take – the “iron sharpening iron” – of contrary opinions. And the iron doesn’t get sharp without sparks flying.

The wisdom we need is usually in those sparks.

I try to watch Prime Minister’s Question Time on C-Span, when I can. This is where Great Britain’s top elected official stands in the House of Commons and wages verbal war with friend and foe alike over current policies and practices. The best days for this exchange in recent years were back when Margaret Thatcher was PM, but even a journeyman like Gordon Brown can be entertaining.

Across the pond, their big political kahuna answers to other elected officials, the way our leaders occasional face a hostile press (though mainstream media hostility toward the White House is a rarity these days). I think we would have better leaders, if they had to actual debate their stuff directly with congress – at least on occasion. Photo-ops and handshakes aside, I wonder how much better a good, heated, executive-legislative argument might be for our national political health.

Some years ago, the late psychologist Irving Janis identified some of the symptoms of groupthink, and it is interesting how relevant they are in the face of a clarion call about bipartisanship.

Back in 1977, Janis observed that groupthink is indicated when there are illusions of invulnerability, the kind that are created when a particular policy or point of view is not help up to contrary and critical analysis. Also, unquestioned belief in the morality or superiority of the group making the decision breeds groupthink.

The tendency to stereotype those who oppose is also a sign that groupthink is hovering around, as is the practice of rationalizing warnings. The bottom line is that groupthink yields flawed fruit. It leads to bad decisions, sometimes even catastrophic ones.

Groupthink is an equal opportunity problem. It is not reserved solely for democrats, republicans, or independents. It rears its ugly head any time a group takes over, or gets comfortable in power, and loses the capacity for objectivity. And when there is a “we won/it’s our turn” mindset, groupthink is usually in the air. It is a most subtle and self-deceptive toxin.

How does this relate to the current mantra of bipartisanship? Well, it would be wise for President Obama to remember that, though he and his party did win, this should not be interpreted as a mandate to get everything they desire. If 46 percent of the people voted for the other guy and party, then trying to pull off an 80-20 policy deal might not be warranted.

True bipartisanship can only happen when the party in power reaches out in a way commensurate with the percentages in the most recent election. A mandate is not a blank check. The recent election suggests that any real stimulus plan should be about 55 percent democratic ideas and 45 percent republican contribution.

That would be actual bipartisanship.

The fact is that, since the days of Adams and Jefferson we have had this national tug of war between competing ideas about what government should or should not do. The pendulum has swung both ways several times in our history. The big government vs. little government, higher tax vs. lower tax, and interventionist vs. laissez faire debate has been our country’s persistent yin and yang struggle.

And that should never change. We are better because of that tension.

If bipartisanship means the end of debate and the ushering in of an unfettered liberal nationalist hegemony over the American way of life, then we will find ourselves on a slippery slope. Many believe we are already feeling gravity’s pull that way. The danger is the idea of surrendering liberty for the promise of financial security.

We might just wind up with neither.

A Day To Remember

January 24, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Election 2008, First Ladies, George W. Bush, News media, Obama administration, Obama family, Presidents, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, White House | 2 Comments 

I have lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, since November 1997, and so have been within a twenty-minute subway ride to downtown Washington for the last three Presidential inaugurations. But I didn’t go downtown for either the 2001 or 2005 swearing-in. I was not quite up to braving the crowds, and since I was not invited to witness the event from indoors, I also was not keen on dealing with winter weather for hours.

But this year was different. Thanks to my wife Rene, we were invited to attend the inauguration as guests of a Treasury Department employee, and so, at 6 am, we awoke, met our host and some other guests, proceeded to Silver Spring’s Metro station (already phenomenally crowded at 7 am) and managed to catch a train to downtown.

We emerged at Metro Center, got breakfast, then walked to the Treasury Department’s annex, east of Lafayette Square. After going down an underground corridor, we emerged in the oldest part of the Treasury Building, constructed in the 1830s.

We then went to the Andrew Johnson Suite, got some coffee, sat down, and watched the televised proceedings for a while. This group of rooms is where the seventeenth President conducted the business of the nation from the hour that Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, until Mary Todd Lincoln moved out of the White House six weeks later.

It was here that Johnson met with his Cabinet, oversaw the concluding stages of the Civil War (such as Johnston’s surrender to Sherman), and read and listened to reports about the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and the capture of his fellow conspirators. (I thought about this on Wednesday night when I watched a History Channel show on the search for Booth.  These shows are so much more exciting to watch when you’ve been in one or another of the locations being described and depicted.)

After a while, one of the other guests called me to the window, and I watched the limousine carrying the 43rd and 44th Presidents come down the street between Treasury and the White House’s East Wing on its way to the Capitol. That was a powerful moment.

But not quite as powerful as witnessing the swearing-in ceremony itself, with the stirring music of Aretha Franklin and John Williams (as performed by a quartet including Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma), and President Obama taking the oath of office — even a somewhat botched version that enabled my fellow Indiana native, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the first man in history to swear in a President twice for the same term.

I watched the swearing-in on a big-screen TV set up in a hallway where nearly every President from Martin Van Buren to the present has walked sometime during his time in office. The sense of history in the making was palpable.

After another hour or so in the Treasury Building, our host told us we were to come outside and sit in the bleachers at the south end of Lafayette Square, almost directly across from the White House. So we braved the cold and proceeded to those seats. In front of us, Al Roker spoke to NBC viewers. A voice came on over the PA speakers set up on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was Charlie Brotman, who has provided commentary to the spectators at every inaugural parade since Eisenhower’s second term began in 1957.

After a wait that wasn’t especially long but seemed an eternity thanks to the cold and my decision not to wear jeans, the police motorcycles came down the street, followed by bands representing the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard, and, finally, President and Mrs. Obama and Vice President and Mrs. Biden. We all reached for our cameras. It was as thrilling a moment as I can remember having. Then we went back to the land of crabcakes and orioles and watched the rest of the parade in the comfortable warmth of the Tastee Diner.

I was going to call this “A Week To Remember” and cover some of the other events since Sunday, but the one that comes to mind just now – Caroline Kennedy’s bizarre withdrawal from consideration for the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by Secretary of State Clinton – seems a bit anticlimactic after the moments I just recounted. I’ll just note that Time’s “Swampland” blog put up a very interesting timeline of how the Kennedy withdrawal went down. It clearly came as a shock to much of her family and several of them seem to have attempted to get her to change her mind at the last moment, with no luck. And then there was the embarrassing attempt by her “people” to spin the withdrawal as having happened because of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health, which evidently annoyed him considerably.  This definitely has not been one of Camelot’s more shining moments, though perhaps it was just brief enough to be overlooked when the time comes for another Kennedy to seek office.

Absolutely (?) Mr. Franken; Positively (?) Mr. Burris

January 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Republican Party | Leave a Comment 

Last night, as I indicated in one of my briefer posts, comedian Al Franken borrowed the language of the Beatitudes to express his reaction to being certified the winner of the US Senate race in Minnesota by that state’s Canvassing Board.

At around the same time, the loser in the race (so far as the Canvassing Board is concerned), incumbent Senator Norm Coleman, was ordering a big steak at the Capital Grille.

Why this note of celebration?

Because almost as soon as the result of the Minnesota recount was finalized (for the time being), Senate Democratic leaders began to backtrack on their promise that Franken would be sworn in with the rest of the upper chamber posthaste. As of now, there are no plans to swear Franken in, and he is still in Minnesota and showing no sign of proceeding to Washington. Though the Canvassing Board made its decision, it is up to Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, to enforce it with his own certification of the results – and, since Coleman is to file a lawsuit today asking that such certification be enjoined for the time being, that will not be coming for a while, if it ever comes.

However, the absence of the irrepressible Playboy contributor does not mean that Capitol Hill this morning is lacking in excitement. As I write, former Illinois attorney general Roland Burris, Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s appointee to the Senate to replace President-elect Obama, has visited the office of Senate Sergeant-At-Arms Terrance Gainer, a distinguished law-enforcement veteran whose career spans the District of Columbia police department, the Capitol Police (and, as it happens, the Illinois State Police) and is now in the office of the Secretary of the Senate, seeking to make his way to the chamber itself. Though it is not likely this will happen today, he is to meet with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tomorrow. During an appearance on Meet The Press Sunday, Reid noticeably backtracked on his previous categorical assertions that Burris would not be sworn in, so it’s anybody’s guess what will happen on Wednesday.

Goodbye SNL ‘75-’95; Hello Matthew 5:5

January 5, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Comedy, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

“This victory is incredibly humbling…”

- opening words of Playboy contributor Al Franken’s statement upon being certified the victor in the US Senate race in Minnesota by that state’s Canvassing Board.

Team Of Rivals, Minus One

January 4, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Ethics, Obama administration, Obama family, UN | Leave a Comment 

This afternoon New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, President-elect Obama’s onetime competitor in the 2008 primaries and the P-E’s choice for Secretary of Commerce, announced that he was withdrawing his name from consideration. This came after reports in recent weeks that a Federal grand jury is looking into a situation in which a California company, CDR Financial Products, received contracts from the state government of New Mexico totaling almost $1.5 million after making contributions to three political action committees formed to assist Richardson’s campaigns.

Richardson’s relationship with the President-elect was bound to be awkward no matter what; such political visibility as he has on a national scale is due mainly to his close association with the Clinton Administration, in which he served, successively, as perhaps the most undistinguished UN Ambassador since the post was created, and as Secretary of Energy, in which position he accused scientist Wen Ho Lee of espionage, a charge he later had to admit was unfounded (and which resulted in Lee’s receiving a substantial legal settlement).

As a candidate in the 2008 race, Richardson accomplished little except to postpone his withdrawal from it until the day after the New Hampshire primary, which was probably the factor that kept Obama from defeating Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Granite State and wrapping up the nomination on Super Tuesday.

Ever since Richardson was elected to govern the Land of Enchantment (to use the motto on New Mexican license plates), reports have circulated of somewhat dubious doings in that state’s executive branch. With Congress convening tomorrow and the President-elect arriving today to take up residence in the historic Hay-Adams Hotel for the next week and a half, it may be that Obama’s transition team concluded that between investigative reporters looking into the CDR case, and the questions that would probably be raised at Richardson’s confirmation hearings, it was best to decide now whether to fish or cut bait.

With Richardson’s withdrawal comes the question of who to nominate as Commerce Secretary-designate. Obama has one Hispanic American left in his proposed Cabinet, outgoing Colorado Senator Ken Salazar at Interior, so he is not politically required to find another to replace Richardson.

As it happens, while I was writing my previous post referring to the protracted contest between Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman and challenger Al Franken, more votes were tallied in the recount. These ballots, disputed though many of them may be, still manage to raise the comedian-humorist’s lead to a little over 220, and make it very likely that the Senate Democratic leadership will try to seat Franken sometime this week, once the recount is finished and assuming the lead holds. If that happens, and if Sen. Harry Reid and his cohorts in the upper chamber can reach some kind of rapprochement regarding Illinois’s Roland Burris that would permit him to be seated, then the Democratic majority in the upper chamber would stand at 59 for the time being. Might it be worth Obama’s while to look into the notion of putting either of Maine’s liberal Republican senators into the Commerce spot, permitting that state’s Democratic governor to appoint a replacement and secure the magic number of 60?

Obama has to be aware that it’s not the best start to a new era in governance to have a Cabinet controversy before one’s Cabinet choices have even come before the Senate for confirmation, or to have a pitched battle within one’s party over an appointee to the Senate who is unlikely to remain there for more than a year or so. No doubt he has a lot on his plate already, what with selecting a puppy and getting the young’uns settled in a new school, but he surely knows the above issues just can’t wait until after Inauguration Day to be resolved.

Come Monday, In The Senate….

January 3, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Obama administration, Republican Party, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Today’s Washington Post featured a highly interesting article by Paul Kane about the four seats that will be “up in the air” in the United States Senate when it convenes Monday.

One of these seats will not be unoccupied for long – the one that was held by Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado until he was chosen by President-elect Obama to be Interior Secretary-designate last month. The article says that Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat, will select Michael F. Bennet, the superintendent of Denver’s public-school system, to succeed Salazar.  As one blogger has pointed out already, this may be a weak selection which may give the GOP an opening to secure another Senate seat when the special election comes up.

Salazar’s selection raises an interesting question: why didn’t Obama choose either of Maine’s Republican senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, to be in the Cabinet (as was widely speculated, for a while in November, he would do)?  This would have allowed Maine’s Democratic governor to name a replacement that (assuming Al Franken prevails in the chaotic Minnesota Senate race) would have given the Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority at least for a while.  However, John Bresnahan at Politico thinks the chances are good that both of Maine’s senators will be going along with the Democrats on many issues, so perhaps the reasoning in Chicago last month was that it was just as well that Snowe and Collins stayed on Capitol Hill.

Kane’s article spends several paragraphs discussing the contest in Minnesota between Franken and incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman. At the moment, the Democratic challenger is ahead in the recount by a few dozen thoroughly contested votes, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee is promising a challenge in the courts if Franken is certified the winner.

I strongly believe that the best thing the Democratic majority in the Senate could do – and since it is led by the thoroughly partisan Harry Reid, this is unlikely – would be to reach some quid pro quo with Sen. Coleman, by which a consensus is reached regarding the final tally that would acknowledge him as the victor.  For one thing, it is fairly clear that the votes putting Franken in the lead are thoroughly suspect and that an honest count would give Coleman about the same lead he had before the recount.

It also has to be obvious to the Democratic leadership that perhaps the single worst burden the party could bear for the next two years would be the presence of Al Franken in the Senate chamber. Ever since Election Day he’s been carefully kept under wraps.  But were he allowed to take his seat, it is a very sure thing that the time from then until he said something that would provide prime fodder for Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity to expostulate upon could be measured in days – perhaps even hours. Franken has made his living for over thirty-five years by saying and writing things that are provocative and at times outrageous.  Could he honestly be expected to do a 180-degree turn and conform to those rules of Senate decorum that still hold?  On the contrary, he’d be so visibly an object for conservative attack and ridicule that Rep. Barney Frank would just about fade into the woodwork.  But if the Senate Democrats let Coleman stay, with his rather liberal (by GOP standards) record, they could well cajole him into more than one filibuster-breaking majority.  After all, he was a Democrat himself until the 1990s. To have Franken in the upper chamber for six years is to invite trouble in 2010, 2012, and maybe even 2014.

Kane also touches for a moment on the New York situation and Caroline Kennedy’s plans to succeed Sen. Hillary Clinton, but much of his article focuses on the immediate problem facing the Democrats next week – former Illinois Attorney General Roland W. Burris’s intention to come to Washington and ask to be seated as the appointee of that state’s Governor (for the time being), Rod Blagojevich.  The article reports that, for the moment, Senate leaders have gotten a break; Burris’s spokesman has said he does not plan to enter the Senate chamber itself unless they agree. Burris has also asked the Illinois Supreme Court to make a ruling with all possible speed on his motion seeking to compel that state’s Secretary of State, Jesse White, to reverse his refusal to certify Burris’s appointment to the seat. In recent days there had been some questions raised as to whether Burris could be appointed without this certification, but the appointee’s actions show that he, at least, thinks certification is a prerequisite, which gives Reid and his subordinates some breathing room.

Finally, Kane mentions a rather interesting sidelight.  On Monday, C-SPAN viewers will be able to watch the outgoing Vice President, Dick Cheney, administering the oath of office for the last time to the re-elected and newly elected Senators. One of those that Cheney will be swearing in is Joe Biden.  This is because Biden was already running for re-election to the Senate last year when Obama selected him as his running-mate, and stayed on the Delaware ballot.  In 1960, Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson did the same thing. As a result, on Jan. 3, 1961, Vice-President Richard Nixon swore in Johnson, the man who would succeed him in seventeen days’s time, for a third term in the Senate. Almost immediately afterwards, Johnson resigned and was replaced by William Blakley, who in turn was defeated by John Tower in a special election that summer.  It is expected that between next Monday and January 20, Biden will resign and be replaced by his longtime chief of staff, Edward E. “Ted” Kaufman, but so far no date has been set.

Trig Wins

December 16, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008, Hackosphere, News media, Sarah Palin | Leave a Comment 

Andrew Sullivan’s modified limited hang-out on the Palin pass-the-baby story. Having let his adjutant rebut him last week on his own site, “The Daily Dish,” he has announced a suspension of the distasteful campaign he has been waging to get Gov. Palin to prove she is Trig’s mother.

It’s a relief he won’t be harrassing Trig anymore. It’s a shame he wasn’t accountable for having republished a lie on his Atlantic Monthly-owned web site without checking the facts. No other “Atlantic” journalist would have, and he shouldn’t have, either. Ever since, Sullivan says he’s just been trying to get the truth.  It’s actually looked as though he’s been trying to get Palin or Sen. McCain to provide records or some other official response so that he would be able to say he had posed a legitimate question. In this effort, he has failed.

Whenever he insists, as he does yet again in his last (we hope) post, that by republishing a lie and then defending his behavior for months, he was just asking questions or expressing opinions, he underscores how desperately we need newspapers, or at least professionally-trained newspaper reporters. The Hackosphere — though not Sullivan; this was a bizarre aberration — is still too prone to sophomoric and poorly-formed content, and blatant lies carefully disguised as fact (what first fooled Sullivan). Bloggers also go to bed too early. Last week no “Atlantic” blogger had anything on the failure of the auto bailout until the next morning. 

The Trig story was the most effective libel of the ‘08 campaign, and Sullivan will always be complicit in it. He gets some credit for letting a contrarian colleague say his piece and using it as a means of making a passably graceful exit from a disgraceful episode in the history of the so-called new media.

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