Unsung Hero

December 12, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

David Axelrod gets most of the credit for his fancy images and faint-inspired speeches, but David Plouffe raised all that cash and built the campaign network from scratch. Portfolio Magazine has an interesting profile on the Delaware native.

How Hillary Lost One Vote In Pennsylvania

December 12, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

If someone says, “Habari yako?”, what do you say?

Inside the Obama TENT of Rivals

December 12, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Election 2012, History, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

As President-Elect Barack Obama moves toward the transition finish line, he has been busy putting his cabinet together, collecting what is now routinely referred to as a “team of rivals.” But this may be more than a reference to the fact that he is trying to avoid “group-think.” The man seems, in fact, to be putting together a team of former-and-would-be pretenders to his political throne.

It is certainly understandable that the party out of executive branch power for the past eight years would find positions for the faithful. Though for a man who campaigned on yes-we-can change there is more than a little irony in many of Mr. Obama’s decisions since the election.

What I find curious is something few seem to be noticing. History tells us that accepting a position in the cabinet, though a great way to serve, is not at all a good move for anyone who has ultimate presidential aspirations.

The last man to move directly from a cabinet position to the presidency was Herbert Hoover.

Mr. Hoover was the long-time and highly effective Secretary of Commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge and by 1928 was widely seen as the inevitable Republican nominee. He probably brought the best resume ever to the White House. The rest is, as they say, history.

Across the pond in Great Britain, a cabinet post is not only prestigious – it is absolutely essential to anyone desiring to be Prime Minister. Since the days of David Lloyd George who molded the modern role of his nation’s PM during the demanding days of the Great War, all of the realm’s ultimate political leaders have come from the ranks of the cabinet. That’s the way their system works. A lot of real political power resides in the cabinet.

Nearly all British Prime Ministers, since the days of Sir Robert Walpole (c. 1741), have also held the title First Lord of the Treasury – the original designation for the PM’s role. In fact, 10 Downing Street is technically known as the residence of the person holding this title.

The point is that over there one must be a member of the cabinet of the party in power (and the leader of the shadow cabinet of the party out of power) to become Prime Minister. Most recent residents of 10 Downing Street have served as either Chancellor of the Exchequer (their big cabinet kahuna) or Foreign Secretary. Anthony Eden, who succeeded the retiring Winston Churchill in 1955, had been serving as Deputy Prime Minister – also a cabinet position.

But none of this transfers to American politics, due in large part to the fact that we have separate and distinct branches of government. For example, cabinet members in Great Britain retain their membership in the House of Commons.

In the United States, politicians tend to run for high office from the platform of a current (or previous) electoral position (or occasionally – as with General Eisenhower – from personal and heroic stature that transcends mere politics). In fact, history tells us that being a part of the cabinet du jour in this country is just about a sure ticket to the political graveyard.

If someone is in the Senate, or House of Representatives, or a Statehouse somewhere, they – even if in the same party as the president – can effectively mount a significant political challenge. But when you are “in” the government your hands are tied and any voice you might have is largely silenced.

For Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson, this means that they are, for all practical purposes, out of politics for quite some time – maybe even for good. Perhaps this is a conscious choice – maybe they have made peace with the idea that Barack Obama will be a formidable president to oppose or follow.

Whatever the case, these savvy politicians have made a serious tactical mistake if they hope to succeed their new boss in the White House, either via a failed single term, or at the end of eight years of Obama. The cabinet is not a place for the politically ambitious – it is a pasture for the politically resigned.

The other observation I have about the make up of Mr. Obama’s emerging administration is one that has been covered to death by the pundits. But I can’t resist a comment or two.

Mr. “Change” has turned out to have only really thus far changed one thing – his mind. What should we make of the fact that his “new” administration looks a lot like the third Clinton term he derided while campaigning against Hillary? And what’s the deal with keeping some of the Bush people in key posts?

The answer is obvious. President-Elect Barack Obama is not a messiah, nor is he a man who will usher in a new golden era of non-political post-partisanship. The fact is that he is every bit a politician.

And he is a very good politician at that – at least thus far. He is showing himself to be much more pragmatic than idealistic. He may not be in bed with the bad stuff coming out of Chicago these days, but he did learn the game there.

In fairness, there is historical precedent for someone coming from a place where corrupt politics reigned, yet emerging untainted. His name was Harry Truman, who rose to power with the help of a notorious Kansas City machine, but who proved himself to be a man of courage and integrity. This reference point should be kept in mind before many rush to judgment and try to tie the president-elect to anything before all the facts come out.

One of Mr. Obama’s heroes – John F. Kennedy – campaigned in 1960 on the promise to get the country “moving again.” But among his first appointments after he was elected (much to the chagrin of many who had voted for his promise of change) were J. Edgar Hoover to remain at the FBI and Allen Dulles at CIA.

Putting a cabinet team together is harder to do than it is to promise. Most presidential victors realize this early on. A close look at new presidents putting teams together yields many stories about surprises and notable oversights.

When Jack Kennedy decided (strongly influenced by dear-old-dad) to appoint his younger brother Bobby as Attorney General (though RFK was anemic in the legal experience department), he knew it would be controversial. He joked: “Well, I think I’ll open the door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2:00 A.M., look up and down the street, and, if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’”

The actual announcement was not made that way – but JFK did tell his brother to comb his messy hair to look more grown up before meeting the press.

When Richard Nixon was putting his first cabinet together, someone suggested the name of David Rockefeller for the treasury post – then immediately said, “but obviously we can’t have two Rockefellers in the cabinet.” This comment was based on the presumption that Nixon was going to give long-time rival Nelson Rockefeller a role in his administration. Nixon’s reply to the “we can’t have two Rockefellers” comment was: “Who says we have to have one?”

Nixon did, however, tap George Romney – the rival who just 18 months before was the number one contender for the Republican nomination – to serve as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Romney accepted and faded away politically.

It will be interesting to see how the new Obama “team of rivals” fares. Lyndon Johnson used to say that sometimes it was better to “have someone inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

We’ll see.

Ron Howard On The Daily Show

December 5, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Comedy, Election 2008, Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Last night, Frost/Nixon director Ron Howard appeared on The Daily Show for the customary six-and-a-half-minute interview.  He spoke about how nearly everyone he met when he was researching the film felt obliged to do a really awful Nixon impression, and, to illustrate the point, did one himself. Before you watch it, be warned: Ron is not wearing his baseball cap and is directly facing the camera, so the effect is not what it would be if this were an old Happy Days episode with Richie getting a laugh out of the gang at Arnold’s, but instead makes one wonder if the director might follow up his new film by resuming acting to star in a remake of Silent Honor directed by David Cronenberg.

(Speaking of Nixon impressions, in the interview to which John Taylor linked here some days ago, Frost/Nixon’s Frank Langella mentioned that before the decision was made to have him repeat his acclaimed stage performance as RN on celluoid, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Kevin Spacey had wanted to do the role, as had already been noted in a number of articles when the film was in its early stages.  But Langella also stated that Dan Aykroyd had gunned for the part as well.  The idea of old Dan repeating his popular Saturday Night Life portrayal of thirty years ago as high drama instead of comedy thoroughly boggles the mind.)

Also noteworthy is Jon Stewart’s praise of Howard’s online Obama endorsement starring himself, Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler, which I discussed in a post here in October.  Stewart told Ron that he was a “kingmaker,” and though the director modestly demurred, I think there might be something to this. As I said in the previous post, for Howard to get as revered a figure as Andy Griffith to appear in the spot was quite a coup, even though the concluding dialogue with the Fonz diminished its overall effectiveness to some degree.

The clip got an enormous number of views, and it may well have helped put the President-elect over the top in states such as North Carolina, Virginia, and Indiana, where The Andy Griffith Show is very much a bedrock cultural reference point to this day.   And it may also have helped in Florida, which, by virtue of having the largest population of retirees in the nation, thereby has the largest population of residents who watch Matlock whenever it’s on.   Ergo, it seems a pretty solid bet that Ron will spend at least one night in the Lincoln Bedroom in the next four years.  Won’t that be something to tell the folks back in Mayberry?

McCain Is The New McGovern

December 4, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008 | 1 Comment 

An election post mortem, awash in cash and sour grapes.

Meanwhile In Minnesota….

November 28, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Obama administration, Republican Party | Leave a Comment 

….the recount in the contest between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken for the former’s Senate seat continues.  As of 8 pm last night, with a shade over 86% of the ballots counted, Coleman led the former Saturday Night Live cast member by little more than 4000 votes.  Some days ago Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, who caused a sensation on Election Day when it turned out that his arcane figuring had produced a forecast of Obama’s electoral victory with state-by-state precision, offered his prediction about the results of the recount; he forecasts that Franken will prevail in it by all of twenty-seven votes, a margin that would make Lyndon Johnson’s 87-vote spread against Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Democratic primary for the Senate seat from Texas look like a downright landslide.  (Silver buttresses his argument with calculations that only your neighborhood graduate-school math professor could decipher.)

As spectacularly narrow as that margin would be, it already has been beat a few times during this election season, albeit in local races.  For instance, in a borough council election in New Jersey, Republican Jerry Stevenson defeated his Democratic opponent Dan Dunham by eight votes, out of about 6700 cast.  A recount was requested.  This time, Stevenson won again – by a single vote, thus going a long way – as will the results in Minnesota - to support the old saw that “every vote counts.” 

And should Franken prevail in the land of a thousand lakes, then even if Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss wins the recount in Georgia, Obama could still obtain a filibuster-proof majority of 60 in the upper chamber by naming either of Maine’s two GOP senators, Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, to the Cabinet, thus enabling the state’s Democratic governor to name a replacement.  It will be an eventful five weeks before the new Congress convenes on January 3.

Shut Up And Read Me

November 24, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Election 2008, Entertainment, Media, Music, Sarah Palin | Leave a Comment 

With all the hoopla surrounding the President-elect’s Cabinet and staff choices last week it’s understandable that last Friday’s introduction of a new columnist to the stable of that conservative daily the Washington Times went nearly unnoticed, even though that columnist is also a chart-topping country music star.

Let me guess, says the reader.  It has to be Toby Keith, right? He’s a perfectly natural fit.

No, not Toby – although last night, appearing on Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Central holiday special, he sang about the true meaning of Christmas in his trademark red-blooded fashion.  (This clip is of subpar visual quality but contains the entire song.)

Not Toby?  Well, it’s got to be Lee Greenwood, then.

No, not Lee.

Bocephus?

No.

How about Darryl Worley of “Have You Forgotten” fame? Or maybe Aaron Tippin?

Neither of them.  It’s Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Mary Chapin Carpenter? As in the Ivy League graduate and frequent 1990s hitmaker who defended the Dixie Chicks, both in interviews and in a song, earlier this decade after they drew controversy for attacking George W. Bush on stage?

Yes, it’s her byline on the column which, according to the Times, will run every other Friday in the paper’s entertainment section.  The debut column touts the virtues of a new group, Hem, and opens with Ms. Carpenter explaining that she’s spent much of this fall glued to political coverage on TV at her Charlottesville home, with the suggestion that this has cut into her songwriting time.  (In recent years the performer has battled depression and the effects of a pulmonary embolism, and has released just two albums since 2000.)  She does not specify for whom she voted earlier this month, but since the column finishes with a lengthy quote from one of then-Sen. Obama’s campaign speeches, I’m willing to guess that packets of Governor Sarah’s Five-Alarm Moose Chili Mix are not in her pantry.

And so Donna Brazile has some company among the Times’s liberal pundits.  I have to wonder if the paper, after a few months of a thoroughly liberal Obama presidency, might be up for signing on Victoria Jackson, the former Saturday Night Live regular who called the then-candidate a “Communist” just before Election Day on Bill O’Reilly’s show.  Or bringing Hank Jr. aboard – football season’s winding down, after all.

Catch-2008

November 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, Economic issues, Election 2008, Entertainment, Humor, Nixon Administration figures, Obama administration, Sarah Palin, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Erica Heller is a New Yorker in her fifties.  In her twenties and thirties she worked in advertising. Then she dropped out of the field and wrote a novel, Splinters - a natural thing to do when one is the daughter of the late Joseph Heller, author of Something Happened, God Knows, Good As Gold, and that all-time bestselling antiwar novel Catch-22. 

Splinters was published in 1990 and, unlike most of her father’s books, was not well-received; Publishers Weekly called it “pretentious and self-indulgent.”  So Ms. Heller went back to advertising, where she remains.  Recently she began blogging on The Huffington Post.  Just before election day, she wrote there that her father – who, she acknowledged, never voted in any election in his life, because he was, by his own admission, “anti-political” – would surely have trooped down to the booth, were he still living, to choose Sen. Barack Obama. 

 (That strikes me as doubtful. Heller, a very shrewd fellow as his many interviews attest, would have likely foreseen that doing so would help bring about the situation this week where Dr. Henry Kissinger, the target of innumerable venomous barbs in Good As Gold, expressed his support for the President-elect’s choosing Sen. Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State.)

This week, Ms. Heller, perhaps like many another writer with an Amazon sales ranking in the low seven digits, is on the warpath about the book deals being rumored for Gov. Sarah Palin and secured by Joe the Plumber.  She seems convinced that S. J. Wurzelbacher is receiving a fortune from a small press for his book.  In fact, what Joe is earning is probably just a shade above the $1000 or so her dad got for what was then Catch-18 nearly a half-century ago, and far below the advances for every other book he wrote. 

 Ms Heller also fulminates about the $7 million that’s being tossed around where the Palin book is concerned, bemoaning all the trees that will fall to make it.  Well, President Clinton was paid considerably better for his memoirs.  And a lot of trees fell to get it to the stores.  And, most strikingly of all, that rather soporific tome was edited by none other than Robert Gottlieb, the brilliant editor who helped make Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 a classic.  (I should point out Mr. Gottlieb always has my admiration.  Imagine being in one’s late seventies and fielding 3 am calls from the man who remains the First Night Owl, not to mention trying to get Robert Caro to finish those last thousand pages of his LBJ saga.)

Most bizarre of all is an aside where Ms. Heller reminisces about the good old days when Catch-22 is published and in which the series Mad Men is set.  She reminds us that back when Roger Maris was earning his asterisk, gas was 33 cents a gallon and stamps were four cents.  Well, guess what?  If her liberal idols in Congress and the White House can’t figure out how to get us out of the recession and deflation sets in, prices may drop to those levels again.  The difference will be that you won’t see too many people wearing clothes as good as the ones in Mad Men.  On the bright side, there will be plenty of free grass, growing up from the sidewalks, and in some places from the floorboards.

Speaking of Robert Gottlieb, time for me to tell my favorite story about his many quirks.  A friend of mine – we’ll call him Hank, because his first name’s the same as Gottlieb’s – was in the early ’60s an up-and-coming editor, as Gottlieb was.  One day he got a call from his colleague.  “Come over for lunch,” quoth young Bob.  His habit, then as now, was always to eat a sandwich at his own desk at Simon & Schuster (and, later, Knopf), so Hank stopped at an Italian deli, got some antipasto, and proceeded to S&S’s offices.

This particular afternoon, incidentally, was a day or two after JFK’s speech announcing the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba.  Things were pretty weird in Manhattan all around. Even so, Hank was a bit surprised, when he arrived at Bob’s office, to find it unoccupied.  Assuming that the editor was in the restroom, he waited a while in the hallway.  Then he asked Gottlieb’s secretary where he was.  “In there – he hasn’t left all day,” she replied.

So Hank stepped in and approached his friend’s desk.  There came a whisper – from under it. “That you, Hank?”  Hank stepped around and found Gottlieb crouched underneath, sandwich in hand. “I talked to my shrink this morning – he sounded kinda worried,” Bob said by way of explanation. “There’s some space here – sit down.” So Hank squeezed in and took out the antipasto.  “Just a second,” said Bob. He then emerged from the desk, went to the window, lowered the blinds, and got back under.  Thus suitably protected from the threat of The Big One – in an office in the midsection of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan – the two young editors dined and chatted as usual.

Ah, those wild, crazy days of Mad Men.

Reaching For The Fifteenth And A Half Minute Of Fame

November 20, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Joe the Plumber has signed a book deal. The book is clearly intended to be a serious literary effort — as indicated by the currently requisite colon in its title: Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream

Having written off, so to speak, the option of dealing with one of the big publishers, the book will be the second tome from a fledgling Texas outfit called PearlGate.

The author told The New York Times that he could have gone with a larger publisher, “But they don’t need help. They are already rich. So that’s spreading the wealth to me.”

As New York Magazine’s‘ “Daily Intel” blog notes, “The book will be published December 1, an amazingly quick turnaround time, which indicates that probably Joe the Plumber doesn’t have a problem spreading the wealth to China, either.”

Pen to Paper (or Finger to Keyboard)

November 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Bush Administration, Election 2008, First Ladies, Media, Presidents, Sarah Palin, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Ted Stevens conceded defeat in his bid for re-election to the Senate today, strengthening the Democratic hand in the upper chamber but at least saving the GOP elders some embarrassment.  This eliminates the prospect, at least immediately, that Gov. Sarah Palin, as speculated by some earlier this month, might appoint herself to the seat (if Stevens had won and then resigned to avoid expulsion), leave the statehouse in Juneau, and bring Todd and the young’uns down to teach Georgetowners about the virtues of moose chili.

But her other options, as the days go by until 2012, remain plentiful.  The book business, according to a Yahoo News article, is thoroughly agog about the idea of a Palin-penned book.  The article quotes several agents and editors as suggesting that the bidding might go up to $7 million and beyond – just a million less than Sen. Hillary Clinton received for her autobiography Living HIstory, which was merely about spending eight years as First Lady.  ($7 million might seem like a lot, but Tina Fey just got $6 million for agreeing to write a book which, very likely, will partly be about impersonating Sarah Palin, so why shouldn’t the real McCoy cost a tad more?)

The article also discusses the prospects for the post-White House memoirs of President and Mrs. Bush.  One book-biz veteran states that the President, given his present unpopularity, should wait for a while to seek a deal for his memoirs, on the assumption that publishers now would assume the book wouldn’t sell and would offer a smaller advance.  It’s hard to say if that line of reasoning holds water.  Jimmy Carter left office in 1981 with a popularity rating not much higher than Dubya’s and immediately managed to score a very sizable advance from Bantam for his memoirs Keeping Faith. But then again, he was a Democrat, as are most book editors.  But the sources quoted in the article believe that Laura Bush’s autobiography would attract offers comparable to what Hillary received in 2001.  That often is the case with First Ladies; Lady Bird Johnson’s A White House Diary sold considerably better than her husband’s The Vantage Point, and Nancy Reagan’s My Turn left her spouse’s An American Life completely in the dust at the cash registers.

The article doesn’t discuss how other figures in the Bush White House will fare on the literary scene. My guess is that Condoleeza Rice and Henry Paulson’s memoirs will be the ones most in demand.

58 And Counting

November 18, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Obama administration, Republican Party | Leave a Comment 

From Alaska tonight comes word that with all but a handful of ballots counted Mark Begich appears to have defeated Sen. Ted Stevens by less than a percentage point.  Thus ends Stevens’ 40 years in the Senate, the longest period served by a Republican, which saw him usually re-elected by large majorities but concluded with his felony conviction and the threat of expulsion from the chamber (now a moot point, it would seem).

And so the Democrats, counting independent Sens. Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman (who was today reprimanded, after a fashion, for campaigning with Sen. John McCain, but kept his committee chairmanship), have 58 votes.  Two remain to achieve a filibuster-proof majority and bring about the rebirth of the Great Society, the New Deal redux, or at least a second wind for the New Frontier.  (And if the Dems come up one short, is anyone up for the return of the New Foundation? For an explanation Google “Jimmy Carter,” “1979,” and “State Of The Union.”)

In Minnesota, the minions of Al Franken, somewhere between St. Cloud and Hibbing, perhaps carefully cradle the box numbered 13, which contains several hundred ballots cast by Mia L. Frankin,  M. E. Alfranken,  etc, as well as the dreaded deleted scenes from Stuart Saves His Family. In Georgia, during the next few weeks until Saxbe Chambliss faces a runoff vote, we’ll see an avalanche of ads and a lot of crossed fingers as Democratic bigwigs from Macon to Athens, and up in Washington, hope that GOP voters are just too exhausted and dispirited to show up at the polls.

And, meanwhile, the question lingers: will Sen. Hillary Clinton go to Foggy Bottom or stay put? Today came some vague reports that the junior senator from New York might decline the chance.  I’m inclined to think she’ll remain where she is.  William Jennings Bryan comes to mind.  It was unlikely that the “Boy Orator of the Platte” would be renominated after he lost his third presidential run in 1908, but when Woodrow Wilson made him Secretary of State in 1913, it was a signal that at the age of 53 he had risen to the status of Statesman and left the cares and travails of electoral politics behind.  I doubt Hillary wants to run a similar risk.

60 is the Magic Number

November 16, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

The Democrats won’t stop campaigning till they get it:

Democrats also have an excellent opportunity to pick up a Georgia Senate seat if President-elect Obama decides it’s vital for his party to win the December 2 runoff between GOP incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin. With a snap of Mr. Obama’s fingers, money and resources from Team Obama’s vaunted organization would pour in. Dispirited Republicans might well stay home, allowing Democrats to capture the seat much as Republicans took a Georgia Senate seat in a similar 1992 runoff. “We’re a long way away from having the resources we need to match the Democrats,” Senator Chambliss told reporters.

Then there’s Minnesota, where GOP Senator Norm Coleman’s lead over comedian Al Franken has just dwindled to 206 votes even before a statewide recount begins next week. Republicans fear that Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, an ally of the activist group ACORN, will attempt to put his thumb on the scale during the process.

If bad breaks occur in all of these races, Democrats will win the important strategic and psychological prize of 60 seats, and Republicans will have lost 15 Senate seats in just two election cycles — a modern record.

Just Asking

November 15, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Those considering speaking truth to power during the new administration might want to consider the consequences —as revealed in today’s Akron Beacon Journal— of merely asking power a question:

The election is over, but the Joe the Plumber case is not.

Ohio Inspector General Tom Charles said his office is now looking at a half-dozen agencies that accessed state records on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.

The Beacon Journal has learned that, in addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, two other state offices — the Ohio Department of Taxation and Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers — conducted database searches of Joe the Plumber.

Before becoming Ohio’s AG, Ms. Rogers was the Dean of Ohio State University’s Law School.

Did a Social Fundamentalist Almost Save McCain?

November 14, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Sarah Palin | Leave a Comment 

Kyle Anne-Shriver counters the claim that Gov. Sarah Palin repulsed voters:

This is not a minority opinion. When Rasmussen conducted detailed exit polling among Republicans, they found that a full 69% of respondents thought Sarah Palin helped — not hurt — McCain. Governor Palin has not garnered the status as America’s most highly regarded, most popular governor for nothing.

The Land of At Least 10,519 Lakes

November 13, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

For many  years Minnesota has been known as The Land of 10,000 Lakes.  But at the rate votes in the recent Senate race are still being “discovered” —519 have so far miraculously surfaced post facto— it must be expected that new lakes can’t be far behind.

And the votes do have something in common with Minnesota’s lakes — they’re fishy.  They have been seriously out of proportion with other votes in other contests, and they have all favored Al Franken.  Thanks to these “found” votes, incumbent Norm Coleman’s 725 vote lead (out of almost 2.9 million cast) has now shrunk to 239.  As John R. Lott of the University of Maryland puts it:

Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate race. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.2 times the gain from corrections for Barack Obama, 2.7 times the gain Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races and 5.6 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.

In total, the 519 net pro-Franken corrections were greater than the total changes for all precincts in the state for the presidential race, all congressional races and all state House races combined.

But it isn’t only the size of the corrections that make these changes so surprising. The majority of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4,130 precincts. Almost half the gain (248 votes) occurred in one precinct: Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior, a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama got 64 percent of the vote.

No other race had any changes in its vote total in that precinct. That single precinct’s corrections produced a much larger net swing in votes than occurred for all the precincts in the state for the presidential, congressional or state House races.

The actual recount, which will be ripe for abuse in its own ways, doesn’t even begin until next Friday.

The Republican Wilderness: Four Years – or Forty?

November 13, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Culture, Election 2008, Election 2012, History, Political Philosophy, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

The Grand Old Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, & Ronald Reagan, has entered the proverbial wilderness. It moves from the box seats to the cheap seats, or better – to mix the metaphor a bit – the backbenches.

How Republicans handle this exile, and just how long the era lasts, will depend largely on what is done with and in the wilderness.

The idea of a wilderness period as a picture of exile is actually much older than American politics, or even anything from our ancestors across the pond. It is a concept dating back to Biblical history and the frustrations and wanderings of the ancient children of Israel. Poised to enter the “Promised Land” of abundance and fulfillment following centuries of bondage and privation, and in the wake of the clearly providential exodus led by Moses, that generation fell tragically short.

They missed their rendezvous with destiny.

Entering the wilderness – a place, but also a process – they lived out a forty-year reminder of what had left been behind, while also grieving the loss of a compelling future. They had allowed short-term frustration to short-circuit long-held principles and dreams.

And the Lord told them in the book of Deuteronomy that the reason for the wilderness was, “to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart.” In other words, the wilderness for them was a divinely ordained “time out” – the kind of thing my dad would do when he sent me to my room to “think about” what I had done (when it was really all my brother’s fault).

The wilderness was a time for purging and preparing. Attitudes, habits, and ambitions had to be dealt with, and priorities revisited and clarified. The duration of the wilderness depended on how well the lessons were learned. In that ancient case, a journey that should have taken no more than a year became a forty-year generational failure.

And something that was lost, forgotten, or just misplaced, desperately needed to be found.

As the Republican Party moves into its own desert of exile for a while, it is time for reflection. It needs to figure out what it really stands for and what it can offer the nation the next time it is called upon to lead. How it manages in the wilderness will determine whether it will come back in four years, or forty – if at all.

That another such time will come is, of course, almost inevitable – not just because of very real concerns about the capacity of recent victors to translate historically flawed policies into real success, but because of the inherent cycles of politics. What happened on November 4th was due nearly as much to the tendency of politics and history to repeat themselves and the public’s tendency to soon tire of anyone on center stage, as it was a mandate for real “yes, we can” change.

Writing in the book, In the Arena: A Memoir of Defeat and Renewal, the late and former president Richard Nixon dedicated a chapter to the phenomenon of the wilderness. He knew a thing or two about the ups and downs and ins and outs of political life. The period between his loss in the governor’s race in 1962 and the winning of the White House in 1968, is a textbook case of how to come back from the kind of defeat that tempts opponents to write someone off permanently.

Nixon mentioned something described by Arnold Toynbee in his, Study of History, described as “the phenomenon of withdrawal…a disengagement and temporary withdrawal of the creative personality from his social milieu and his subsequent return to the same milieu transfigured in a new capacity with new powers.” Throughout history, great leaders demonstrated this. Certainly Nixon did and clearly identified with others who went through deep valleys.

In the 1991 movie, City Slickers, Billy Crystal and his best friends head out west looking for adventure. Crystal’s wife in the film wanted him to, while moving cattle from point A to B, along the way find something. Something he had lost. Something he needed to recover. His smile. The movie ended happily with said smile finding its way back to Billy’s face.

For the Republicans, they do not need to find something as insignificant as a group smile. Rather, they should be looking for something much more vital if they are to have a real shot at coming back from this wilderness.

The key to this is found in another place where the ancient scriptures mention a wilderness. We learn about this from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, when in the 40th chapter of his book we come across the vital phrase, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

No doubt Winston Churchill, another frequent wilderness wanderer, identified with this little phrase during his years as a political has-been in the 1930s. He had no power, no position, and no prospects.

But he found his “voice” – and began to warn his countrymen about Hitler and dangers to come. Later, when he once again found himself in forced exile, having been voted out of office in the Labor sweep just a couple of months after the victory had been won in Europe, he found his “voice” again. This time he did not speak in the House of Commons, but rather in the gymnasium of a small college in the American mid-west. From that unlikely pulpit in the wilderness he cried out about an “iron curtain.”

The Republicans have clearly found the wilderness. Now they need to find their voice.

The GOP needs to figure out what it wants to be if and when it grows back up. Are ideas like limited government, the free market, and at least an interest in understanding the relationship between the morality of personal responsibility and self-discipline and the ills of the larger culture – now officially gone forever?

The word paradigm comes from the Greek language and the word paradeigma. It basically means a perception, or frame of reference – a lens through which to interpret reality. Author Steven Covey in his book, The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (hint: the eighth habit is “finding your voice”), insists that “if you want to make minor incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvements, work on paradigms.”

The time for tweaking is past. As the nation readies itself to enter a new era of “bold experimentation” under an activist Obama administration, it is time for the party now finding itself in the political wilderness to find what it has lost. By definition, something lost is not something new – it is something once possessed.

Republicans can find their voice during the wilderness period, but to do so will require a willingness to have the wisdom and humility to make a paradigm shift, one that surely involves a quantum journey back to the future. The must find what once worked – and has been lost.

And if anyone thinks that the idea of going to the past to find something that will resonate in the future is not politically feasible, please remember this: America just elected a guy who advocates policies and programs that failed 75 years ago.

The Campaigning Ends, The Governing Begins.2

November 13, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008, Obama administration | 1 Comment 

As reported in today’s Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama, who vowed during his campaign that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” said through a spokesman yesterday that he would allow lobbyists on his transition team as long as they work on issues unrelated to their earlier jobs.

Apparently in the Obama Administration it will be possible to be a little bit pregnant.

Radicals And Redhots

November 12, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Today, as he does every day, Jonathan Movroydis has found and linked many of the most interesting journalism of the last 24 hours.  Among them is Camile Paglia’s monthly column in Salon.

As usual, this is an omnibus affair covering a variety of topics and a multitude of sins.  (This considers, among other things, the reason the media trashed Sarah Palin, and the respect owed to Yma Sumac; there is, remarkably, no mention of Madonna.)  

I was particularly interested by the Paglian take on the Obama-Ayers controversy.  Remember that?  Think back to the presidential campaign — there were some questions asked about Senator Obama’s putative connections with this radical dude who lived down the street in Chicago.  I’m sure you remember it.

Ms. Paglia, who is very happy with the election results, is still objective enough to realize that her candidate was cut some serious slack by a complacent (and compliant) media.  Her research led her to a conclusion that Nixonians have learned long since: that in radical couples, the wife is usually the redhot.  

Pursuing the truth about Ayers, I recently rented the 2002 documentary “The Weather Underground,” from Netflix. It was riveting. Although the film seems to waver between ominous exposé and blatant whitewash, the full extent of the group’s bombing campaign is dramatically demonstrated. It’s not for everyone: The film uses gratuitous cutaways of horrifying carnage, from the Vietnam War to the Manson murders (such as Sharon Tate’s smiling corpse, bathed in blood). But the news footage of the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed in 1970 by bomb-making gone wrong in the basement still has enormous impact. Standing in the chaotic street, actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, seems like Everyman at the apocalypse.

Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of course I had heard of Dohrn — hers was one of the most notorious names of our baby-boom generation — and I knew her black-and-white police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or interacting with others. Well, it’s pretty obvious who wears the pants in that family!

The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable, attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a 1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson murders: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American citizens and both private and public property?

“The Weather Underground” never searches for answers, but it does show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely high intelligence and surprising inwardness. The audio extra of her reading the collective’s first public communiqué (“Revolutionary violence is the only way”) is chilling. But the tumultuous footage of her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized, I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer’s table while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene — with Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket — was tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her “Klute” period, androgynous shag. Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being put away on ice for a long, long time.

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

Ms. Dohrn was a vital part —perhaps the vital part— of the Ayers-Obama story that was successfully finessed.  She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the Director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center.  

Obama: Keep Joe In The Tent

November 11, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Middle East, Republican Party | 3 Comments 

During the presidential campaign this fall no appearance at a rally or fundraiser by Sen. John McCain was complete without Sen. Joe Lieberman (reportedly the Arizonan’s first choice for running-mate before he was persuaded to keep the selection within GOP ranks) introducing him.  As a result, a number of people in the print media and the blogosphere began to wonder if Lieberman, who won his most recent election as an independent in 2006, would be allowed to keep caucusing with the Democrats after the election.

But in recent days it has become evident that even if Al Franken prevails in the recount of the Minnesota Senate race, the Democrats are going to need the votes of both Senate independents (the other being Bernie Sanders of Vermont) if they are going to stand a chance of wooing some Republican in the fashion that James Jeffords was in 2001 so that a filibuster-proof majority can be put together.  Yesterday Senate majority leader Harry Reid explained that he and his colleagues saw no problem with Lieberman staying in the caucus and today, President-elect Obama also made some comments indicating that the status quo should be maintained. But at what point, as the Obama administration’s Mideast policy develops, could the Connecticut senator start to have second thoughts?

They Shouldn’t Have Tried So Hard

November 11, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

VDH explains that Obama voters and Prop. 8 supporters had all they needed for victory in California. When they went for the juggernaut, it backfired:

Here in California what was the ‘No on Prop 8′ gay lobby thinking, when the Obama registration drives in California brought in thousands of new voters–that they were really all UC Santa Cruz undergrads or absent-minded professors who forgot to register? Did they really think all those evil white Mormons and Church of Christ throngs in California would overwhelm them at the polls? In truth, each new Obama minority voter registered was a de facto vote against gay marriage.

« Previous Page — Next Page »