Today’s Reads
Pakistan votes today:
Voting Lahore by Arif Ali, AFP.
Why I’m for a Super Convention
I’m trying to listen to all sides and figure out why, exactly, horse-trading right up through the Democratic Convention in Denver in August is a bad thing. The reasons don’t hold up, and I think the Dems could use a nasty brawl in Denver. And here’s why.
The Dems’ Congressional hold is a sham. They haven’t accomplished anything. Denver could be a chance for the Dems to be jostled up, ripped apart even, in a way that could reconfigure a broken party. With every major party official forced to choose sides before the nation, transparency would be the biggest winner. Sorry, but Al Gore isn’t going to save the Party. And Nancy Pelosi especially isn’t going to save the Party. The Super Delegating should be done in August, in the open, at the Convention.
I understand the argument that a nasty protracted fight for Super Delegates would benefit the GOP. But really, is that a reason for a back door deal? The GOP will likely be weaker albeit more unified and oraganized in August than now—the economy ain’t getting better, nor is Iraq. Still, why not hold a genuine Convention?
I also understand Obama’s team’s argument thaht Super D’s should go to the leader in delegates and popular vote. But then what of Florida (third largest state and one that caused 2000 deadlock) and Michigan (huge Union state)? I say: Dean and the DNC should find a way for MI and FL to vote again. And no offense to Obama, but many of his delegates come from Red States where Hillary barely campaigned. If Clinton does in fact win Texas, Ohio, and Penn, that’ll give her a virtual sweep of major States.
Finally, the other reason I’m hoping for a drag em out DNC in August is Party identity itself. Since coming to New York, the Clintons (the Establishment) have moved further left on everything sans National Security (9/11 kind of forbade NY politicians to be anything but hawkish). Obama is more the Centrist candidate, policy-wise. So technically Obama the up-start would push the Dems further towards the middle. That’s bad for lefty’s like me. We should want a more liberal Democratic Party, as our nation’s not been as unequal since the 20s, and we haven’t killed this many since Nam.
Vetting Obama
Anyway, I was inspired by John Heilerman’s NY Mag column this week, who writes, “Both [H and O] of them have gotten an enormous amount of play,” says Marion Just, a political scientist at Wellesley who has made a systematic study of the coverage of the race. “But the coverage of Hillary has been primarily negative, while the coverage of Obama has been so positive that you have to call him, though I really hate this term, a media darling.” So today we’re going to “vett” Obama. Or to borrow his own phrase, “shake and boil him a little bit.” More from Heilerman:
Theories abound as to why the media has treated Clinton and Obama so differently. The simplest is that reporters simply like Obama better; that he’s new and fresh and unburdened with anything resembling Clinton fatigue. Another theory revolves around cultural bias. “The fact is that the national press is a bunch of northeastern liberals,” says the adviser to an erstwhile Democratic runner, “and they just love the idea of this post-racial black dude being the nominee.” A third revolves around the respective dramatic arcs embodied by Clinton and Obama. Citing the Times primary-beat reporters assigned to the candidates, a competitor of theirs observes, “Pat Healy’s job is to challenge the Clinton myth and machine. Jeff Zeleny’s is to write the epic rise of Barack Obama. That’s generally the media’s approach—Clinton and Obama are just at different points in their stories.”
Campaigns are, at bottom, a competition between memes: infectious ideas that gather force through sheer repetition. Obama was in the enviable position of being able to author his own meta-narrative. With his two autobiographies, he was able at once to accentuate his positive qualities and, in pointing out the potentially damaging aspects of his past (his teenage drug use preeminent among them), to inoculate himself against attack.
1. Charisma and the Presidency
If you read one thing all week, here it is: Kate Zernike’s Week in Review lead story. She gets original quotes from Robert Caro, Sean Wilentz, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, (three leading presidential historians) and adds context from Arthur Schleisenger and Norman Mailer (both RIP). The thesis: Charisma helps but doesn’t guarentee shit once in office. The last line: “Ideally, Ms. Goodwin said, you’d have the combination of experience and charisma, “if you could mush Clinton and Obama together as one person.” Now there’s a ticket! More:
The “cult of personality” is used in the pejorative. But recast as a different name — call it charisma — and, as Roosevelt and other examples show, it can be a critical element of politics and its practical cousin, governance. It just can’t be the only element.
“Today, attacks on the cult of personality seem really to mean attacks on the ability to make speeches that inspire,” Robert Caro, LBJ’s biographer, said in an interview. “But you only have to look at crucial moments in the history of our time to see how crucial it was to have a leader who could inspire, who could rally a nation to a standard, who could infuse a country with confidence, to remind people of the justice of a cause.”
Still, Mr. Caro adds a caveat: “That doesn’t always translate into a great presidency.”
Charisma, as defined by the early sociologist Max Weber, was one of three “ideal types” of authority — the others were legal, as in a bureaucracy, and traditional, as in a tribe — and rested upon a kind of magical power and hero worship. That definition was, of course, unsuitable for modern times, as one of Weber’s many interpreters, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., wrote in “The Politics of Hope.” Its use became metaphorical, as Mr. Schlesinger wrote, “a chic synonym for heroic, or for demagogic, or even just for ‘popular.’ ”
But it was also a coolness that Norman Mailer captured in Kennedy — for whom Mr. Schlesinger became a kind of official hero-worshiper — writing about the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. Mr. Mailer described how Kennedy’s convertible, then his suntan and his teeth, emerged before a camera-filled crowd in Pershing Square, “the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street.”
There was, Mr. Mailer wrote: “an elusive detachment to everything he did. One did not have the feeling of a man present in the room with all his weight and all his mind. Johnson gave you all of himself, he was a political animal, he breathed like an animal, sweated like one, you knew his mind was entirely absorbed with the compendium of political fact and maneuver; Kennedy seemed at times like a young professor whose manner was adequate for the classroom but whose mind was off in some intricacy of the Ph.D. thesis he was writing.”
“What is troubling about the campaign is that it’s gone beyond hope and change to redemption,” said Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton (and a longtime friend of the Clintons). “It’s posing as a figure who is the one person who will redeem our politics. And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver.”
“If you don’t talk about issues in great detail, if you do it in a way that is not the centerpiece of your campaign, of your rhetoric, then you become a blank screen,” Mr. Wilentz said. “Everybody thinks you are the vehicle of their hopes.”
“To confuse this with Teddy Roosevelt or J.F.K. or F.D.R. is to make a fundamental historical error,” he said. “It’s confusing the offer of leadership with the offer of redemption. One offers specific programs, the other is hope and change. Certainly F.D.R. gave hope, but he was going to do it through these various programs.”
The Economist gives Obama the cover:
The magazine’s Leader, or editorial in Brit-speak, says, “It is time for America to evaluate Obama the potential president, not Obama the phenomenon”:
To many Americans, a black man who eschews both racial politics and the conservative-liberal divide is a chance to heal the country’s two deepest divisions. To many foreigners, he represents an idealistic version of America—the hope of a more benevolent superpower.
His immediate effect on international relations could be dramatic: a black president, partly brought up in a Muslim country, would transform America’s image. And his youthful optimism could work at home too. After the bitterness of the Bush years, America needs a dose of unity: Mr Obama has a rare ability to deliver it. And the power of charisma should not be underrated, especially in the context of the American presidency which is, constitutionally, quite a weak office. The best presidents are like magnets below a piece of paper, invisibly aligning iron filings into a new pattern of their making. Anyone can get experts to produce policy papers. The trick is to forge consensus to get those policies enacted.
But what policies exactly? Mr Obama’s voting record in the Senate is one of the most left-wing of any Democrat. Even if he never voted for the Iraq war, his policy for dealing with that country now seems to amount to little more than pulling out quickly, convening a peace conference, inviting the Iranians and the Syrians along and hoping for the best. On the economy, his plans are more thought out, but he often tells people only that they deserve more money and more opportunities. If one lesson from the wasted Bush years is that needless division is bad, another is that incompetence is perhaps even worse. A man who has never run any public body of any note is a risk, even if his campaign has been a model of discipline.
And the Obama phenomenon would not always be helpful, because it would raise expectations to undue heights. Budgets do not magically cut themselves, even if both parties are in awe of the president; the Middle East will not heal, just because a president’s second name is Hussein. Choices will have to be made—and foes created even when there is no intention to do so. Indeed, something like that has already happened in his campaign. The post-racial candidate has ended up relying heavily on black votes (and in some places even highlighting the divide between Latinos and blacks).
None of this is to take away from Mr Obama’s achievement—or to imply that he could not rise to the challenges of the job in hand. But there is a sense in which he has hitherto had to jump over a lower bar than his main rivals have. For America’s sake (and the world’s), that bar should now be raised—or all kinds of brutal disappointment could follow.
David Ignatius goes “beyond hope” in WaPost yest:
“Why is the press going so easy on Barack Obama?” asks a prominent Democratic Party strategist, echoing a criticism frequently made by the Clinton campaign. It’s a fair question, and now that Obama appears to be the front-runner in terms of his delegate count, he deserves a closer look, especially from people like me who have written positively about him. The reason to look closely now, quite simply, is to avoid buyer’s remorse later. (ED NOTE: Italics added. I get a lot of shit for being so hard on Bam, but Ignatius echoes my thinking…)
What Obama would actually do as president remains a mystery in too many areas.
Let’s start with Obama’s economic policies. Like all the major candidates, he has a Web site brimming with plans and proposals. But it has been hard to tell how these different strands come together. Is Obama a “New Democrat,” in the tradition of Bill Clinton, who would look skeptically at traditional welfare programs? Is he a neopopulist, in the style of his former rival John Edwards, who would make job protection and tax equity his top domestic priorities? Or is he a technocrat, whose economic answers wouldn’t be all that different from those of Hillary Clinton?
I’m still puzzled about where to locate Obama on this policy map. Until the past few weeks, I would have put him somewhere between “New Democrat” and “technocrat.” But as he reaches for votes in big industrial states, Obama has been sounding more like Edwards. He proposed a middle-class tax cut a few months ago that would provide a credit of up to $1,000 per family. That’s a big policy change that deserves real debate.
Obama added more Edwardsian flourishes in a speech Wednesday at an auto plant in Wisconsin. He called for a $150 billion program to develop “green collar” jobs and new energy sources. Meanwhile, to fix all the highways and bridges of our automotive society, he proposed a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that would spend $60 billion over 10 years. Obama should be pressed on whether these big programs are affordable for an economy that appears to be in a tailspin.
Foreign policy is the area on which Obama has been longest on rhetoric and shortest on details. I’ve always liked his line about Iraq, that “we have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” And when I asked Obama last summer what this might mean in practice, he talked about the need for a residual force in and around Iraq and for a gradual, measured pace of troop withdrawals. But in recent months, his tone has suggested a speedier and more decisive departure from Iraq. I fear that Obama is creating public expectations for a quick solution in Iraq that cannot responsibly be achieved.
To understand why Obama needs tougher scrutiny now, we need only recall his political avatar, President John F. Kennedy. Like Obama, JFK had served a relatively short time in the Senate without compiling a significant legislative record. He was young and charismatic, but uncertain in his foreign and domestic policies, and during his first 18 months JFK was often rebuffed at home and abroad. The CIA suckered him into a half-baked invasion of Cuba. And Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev concluded after an initial meeting that Kennedy was so weak and uncertain that he could be pushed around — a judgment that led to the Cuban missile crisis.
Obama’s inexperience is not a fatal flaw, but it’s a real issue. He should use the rest of this campaign to give voters a clearer picture of how he would govern — not in style but in substance.
Bill Keller, NYT’s Executive Editor, aka the most important man news, compares Obama to Mandela (Keller used to cover South Africa):
You want to be careful about drawing historical parallels between societies that are so different, but there are a couple of similarities that, if you watch what happened South Africa, that are unmistakable in the Obama campaign.
One is the inspirational quality of it. Mandela, like Obama, although he wasn’t always the most riveting public speaker, was the kind of speaker who didn’t dwell on the details of his ten-point program, but went for emotional lift. He was appealing to the higher sense of purpose and history in his public appearances, as Obama does.
And the other thing is that both of them, in a way, transcended race — at least, to a degree transcended race. Colin Powell used to use this line when people used to try to draw him into conversations abot race and what it was like to be the first black secretary of state, the first black this, the first black that, and he would say, “I ain’t that black.”
And what I think what he meant by that was not just that he was light-skinned, but that he didn’t grow up as preoccupied by race as a lot of other African-Ameircans who rose to prominence.
And Something of the same thing can be said about either Mandela or Obama — that they somehow rose above race while still clearly being black.
There you have it. Obama deconstructed.
Why Bush is a puss, Texas and the Clintons, and more after…
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