HNN

Archived Blog Posts from Gil Troy’s HNN Blog, December 2007-June 2008

Sunday, June 8, 2008
Clintonism not Sexism Defeated Hillary

Hillary Clintons’ supporters, justifiably, are devastated. She came so close to winning. Having waited so long for a Mrs. President, millions of women shared Hillary Clinton’s assumption that this year would witness that historic breakthrough. Especially in the last three months, Hillary Clinton found her groove, honing her message, campaigning effectively, winning the big states. But she could not overcome the lead she unwillingly spotted Barack Obama. More than 17 million voters later, Hillary’s camp has every right to mourn, yet little basis for claiming she endured discrimination. Clintonism – Hillary’s and Bill’s peculiar combination of pathologies – defeated Hillary Clinton in 2008, not sexism.

In 2007, many toasted the Democrats for having a viable female candidate whose fame made her far more than a gender-based candidate and a viable African-American candidate whose message made him far more than a race-based candidate. Overlooking the ugly identity politics to which Democrats in particular and Americans in general have been addicted, we hoped that the candidates would run on message and their records, not on a sense of group frustration or entitlement – and that the candidates would be judged on their merits not by the color of their skin or the combination of their chromosomes.

It is hard to quantify prejudice when both racism and sexism have been delegitimized. Our favorite tools, surveys, require honesty, while many racists and sexists know to camouflage their ugly feelings. Still, just as John Kennedy played the Catholic card cleverly, and mobilized Republican-leaning Catholics to vote for him and the Democratic Party in 1960, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama benefited from great enthusiasm among women and blacks, respectively. This mass mobilization appears to have delivered far more votes for their respective camps than were lost to prejudice.

But, as the conflict intensified, it was, alas, inevitable, that had Obama lost, some blacks would have yelled racism – just as some women are now attributing Clinton’s loss to sexism. The bills in the indictment are feeble. If the charges are limited to a handful of poorly-chosen phrases journalists and politicians used, in the heat of a campaign wordfest, America is a far more enlightened place than most Democrats acknowledge.

Clearly, the media – if we can speak in these general terms – was rougher on Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama, especially at first. But to attribute the media bias to sexism requires some evidence. Barack Obama benefited from great coverage because he offered reporters a fresh face and a great story. From the start of the campaign, Hillary Clinton’s problems had far more to do with the baggage she carried from the 1990s than the baggage she shares with her sisters in arms.

What really defeated Hillary Clinton was Clintonism. Her arrogant air of presumption, her preference for staffers better known for loyalty than competence, and her and her husband’s aggressive tactics backfired this year. Americans, it seems, are not just fed up with George W. Bush but with politics in general. And the two Clintons represent the polarizing, do-or-die, hyper-partisan, exceedingly personal politics of the baby boomers, both right and left – that both Barack Obama and John McCain repudiate by their respective ages and by the message each generates.

It would be easier to make the charge of sexism stick had Hillary Clinton run the kind of campaign she ran from March to May for the year-and-a-half before that. Instead, we watched an overpaid staff fritter away money, opportunities, and ultimately, a chance at victory. We watched a candidate with obvious talents and passion, fail to deliver a compelling message and try inheriting the White House rather than earning it. We watched the candidate’s husband engage in the sharp-elbow tactics and self-destructive sloppiness for which he was so famous in the 1990s, but which so many seem to have forgotten in the haze of Bush-generated nostalgia for the Clinton era. The changes in the Clinton campaign after March, in personnel, messaging and tactics implicitly acknowledge the failures before March.

Hillary Clinton has always been a fast learner, smart, able to improvise, willing to be self-critical, and effective at recovering. She displayed all those qualities in this campaign – and was rewarded with hundreds of delegates and millions of votes. That she did not start changing soon enough, or recover fast enough to surmount the lead she and her incompetent campaign staff gave Obama, is not due to sexism.

Part of breaking the glass ceiling and competing with everyone else is avoiding the tendency to attribute criticism or setbacks to bias. In fairness, Hillary Clinton has not complained about gender bias. Her disappointed supporters should follow her example, celebrating how far she came, and learning from her how to learn from mistakes and defeats not simply wallow in them.

CONSOLATION PRIZE: For all those Democrats depressed by Hillary’s loss – and for all those Republicans worried about the – dare we call it – Obamomentum I prescribe a simple Rx: watch Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. It is hard for anyone who loves America, and loves democracy, not to be moved by his centrist, inclusive, nationalist vision. Whether he can implement it, of course, is the big question…

Posted on Sunday, June 8, 2008 at 9:48 AM | Comments (7) | Top
ShareThis
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
If It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over, When Is It Over?

We have already started rifling through our thesauruses – or more accurately scanning them – trying to find the right, over the top, description for the titanic primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – extraordinary, historic, unprecedented. Both Clinton’s people and Obama’s people are invested in emphasizing just how many people voted, how intense the process was, how hard-fought the battle was. For Clintonites, this becomes a way of still trying to eke out a win, or, at very least, preserving some dignity, some bragging rights – and a shot at 2012 if Obama falters. For Obamaniacs, this becomes a way of graciously saluting Hillary and her supporters as worthy opponents, while also trying to make these last few weeks a triumphal victory over a superstar, rather than an exhausted stumble toward the finish line.

Still, as we tally up the thousands of delegates, tens of millions of votes, and hundreds of millions of dollars, most Democrats seek closure. One of the extraordinary, historic, unprecedented moves Hillary Clinton made was that she simply refused to concede defeat. As a result, she not only ended up winning many more big state primaries than Obama did, she also demonstrated the depth of her support. Had she quit in February or early March, she would have been remembered as the Ed Muskie of 2008, an over-confident frontrunner whose aides spent too much time debating who would get which West Wing office but produced as little as Muskie did in his 1972 Democratic presidential primary collapse. Instead, Hillary Clinton proved quite formidable – she and her husband angered many Democrats in this campaign, but she mobilized millions.

Today, after the final state primaries, Hillary Clinton must make a critical decision. Her impressive swing-state victories and her historic vote total have vindicated her decision to hang on for dear life these last few months. Grumbling from John Edwards’ camp that he should not have quit so soon emphasizes one of the probable legacies from Clinton’s never-say-die campaign: in the future it will be harder to get candidates to give up, and thus harder for parties to rally around one winner early in the process. But with Obama on the verge of sewing up enough delegates, with party leaders starting to beg for unity, the time has come to end the campaign.

Ending the campaign when there remains even a slight chance of winning – a knock- out Obama scandal, a sudden shift in super-delegate sentiments – violates Hillary Clinton’s deepest instincts and most enduring political lessons. She frequently has recalled that when she was young, a neighboring girl bullied her, reducing Hillary to tears. Her mother, Dorothy Rodham, banned young Hillary from the house, refusing to give refuge to a coward. Hillary went out, walloped her rival, and earned the respect of the boys – and this girl’s eventual friendship. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s marriage to Bill Clinton has been a decades-long exercise in refusing to quit, no matter how personal the hurt, no matter how public the humiliation. And throughout the 1990s, both Hillary and Bill Clinton distinguished themselves as public figures who frequently beat the odds by hanging on – from eventually winning as the “Comeback Kid” in 1992 to defying widespread calls for his resignation during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, then seeing Bill emerge as a presidential rock star in and out of office, while Hillary ended up as a powerful New York Senator and leading presidential candidate.

While there is nothing like winning, there are better and worse ways to lose. If Hillary Clinton concedes gracefully now that the last vote has been cast, and works enthusiastically for an Obama victory, she may restore some of the Clinton sheen that this vicious primary battle tarnished. Talk about the Clintons’ 2012 strategy – sabotage Obama so she has a shot four years later – the absurd claim that by remembering that Bobby Kennedy ran in June she was calling for Obama’s assassination – both reveal how angry Obama Democrats are with the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton must make the right, gracious, conciliatory moves, sooner rather than later. If she does it right, she will position herself as the next-in-line to lead the Democratic party if Obama falls, or continue to be a power-player in Washington during an Obama Administration. There are second acts in presidential politics. Ronald Reagan lost a heartbreaker in the Republican nomination fight in 1976 – but he did okay after that, I think. Moreover, she will help rebuild the Clinton legacy and restore some of the Clinton magic that has dissipated amid the stench of sweat and bile this extraordinary, historic, unprecedented campaign generated.

Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 at 4:09 AM | Comments (4) | Top
ShareThis
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Historians Should Defend HRC’s RFK Comments

Hillary Clinton’s supposedly controversial invocation of Robert Kennedy’s assassination was not only benign, it was precisely the kind of thing historians do all the time. Trying to explain why she did not think it unreasonable to remain in the presidential race, Senator Clinton first noted that her husband’s successful 1992 campaign ran until June. Then, logically, reasonably, she mentioned the most famous June primary in American history, Robert Kennedy’s surprise win in California, which was followed by his assassination.

The fact that we are approaching the fortieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, and that his surviving brother Ted Kennedy has been in the news lately, made Clinton’s mention even more reasonable. As she mentioned while backpedaling, she — along with many other Americans – has certainly had the Kennedy family on her mind lately.

Whether pro-Hillary or not, historians in particular should defend Hillary. Historians frequently refer to previous incidents to explain current behavior. To perceive hidden agendas in such analogizing is unreasonable. True, Robert Kennedy was tragically assassinated that June; but he also was running in a race that remained wide open that month too. Senator Clinton was in no way calling for an assassination or warning of one. Simply writing that previous statement emphasizes how absurd the charges are. Analogies by nature are selective. The analogizer has the right to pick or choose within reason, as Senator Clinton did in this case.

The real question, of course, is why people are so quick to pounce on Hillary Clinton’s words and impute such horrific motives to her. The answer points to one of the big surprises of this campaign season: the way the partly anticipated Clinton-fatigue has morphed into Clinton-disgust. Democrats who were the chief enablers of Bill Clinton’s hardball politics in the 1990s now profess surprise at both Clintons’ hardball tactics. The cheers have turned into jeers. Clearly, it is one thing when Democrats play tough with Republicans; that seems to be okay. But seeing the Clintons deploy their characteristic sharp-elbow tactics against a fellow Democrat – -and an idealistic African-American Democrat at that – has led to this Democratic wake-up call, slowed Hillary Clinton’s momentum at critical moments, and badly tarnished Bill Clinton’s legacy.

Still, in a long list of Clinton curveballs, sleights-of-hand, manipulations and lies, Hillary Clinton’s innocent Kennedy comments don’t rank. But, for most candidates, when even harmless comments cause massive headaches, that usually is one more sign that it is time to call it quits. So far, Hillary Clinton has refused to read any of those signs. Whether that obtuseness ultimately leads to victory or to even more backlash remains to be seen, but the smart money remains on the latter.

Posted on Sunday, May 25, 2008 at 8:53 PM | Comments (7) | Top
ShareThis
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Obama Stumbles into Bush’s Appeasement Trap

To counterattack or not to counterattack, is one of the most vexing questions campaigns face. Democrats – with the dramatic exception of Bill Clinton and his War Room – have frequently taken the high road when attacked, and lost. The failures of Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004 to respond to Republican assaults seem to justify more aggressive responses. But sometimes, silence is golden. Sometimes counterattacking simply publicizes the initial attack. Looking at last week’s great appeasement brouhaha, Barack Obama overreacted by counterattacking, and may have fallen into a White House trap.

George W. Bush clearly was being mischievous when, speaking to the Israeli Knesset, he quoted Senator William Borah’s tragically naïve and utterly self-involved exclamation at the start of World War II. Dismissing talk of negotiating with “terrorists and radicals” as a “foolish delusion” we have heard before, Bush said: “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,” Bush proclaimed.

Obama condemned this “false political attack” and led a chorus of Democrats shocked that a president would politick on foreign soil. All innocence, the White House press secretary Dana Perino denied that the Knesset remark had anything to do with Obama: “I understand when you’re running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you. That is not always true. And it is not true in this case,” she said. This was White House speak for the old schoolyard taunt, “if the shoe fits, wear it.”

Presidential pronouncements from Israel about American-Israeli friendship rarely generate headlines. But all of a sudden, whether or not Obama had been accused of appeasement – and was an appeaser – dominated the news. As a result, Obama’s name became more linked than ever with the appeasement charge. This linkage is doubly problematic for Obama. Not only does the controversy broadcast the Republican charge that Obama is too soft, too left, too willing to negotiate away American honor. It also publicizes the broader question: having talked his way from obscurity to the precipice of the presidency so quickly, will the 46-year-old wunderkind be too enamored of his own skills, too swayed by his own silver tongue? By contrast, John McCain, the grizzled war veteran, looks sober, mature, reliable.

In fairness to Obama, he also has to prove that he is not a wimp. Especially after the “swiftboating” of John Kerry, Democrats are anxious for a return to the days of the Clinton counterpunchers – although it seems without a Clinton in charge. One of Bill Clinton’s great triangulating skills was playing off two political personae, as the populist and the progressive, as “Bubba” and the Yalie, or, as was often said “Saturday night Bill” and “Sunday morning Bill.” Obama has a harder task here. Having floated to the top so quickly as the saint of centrism, as a seeker of civility, Obama cannot emphasize the hand-to-hand political combat skills he must have picked up during his apprentice in Chicago politics. At the same time, if Republicans smell weakness, they will pounce.

Fortunately for Obama, McCain is encased in a similar pair of silk handcuffs. McCain also has built his reputation as the Republican rebel, as the party maverick always willing to cross lines, build bridges, promote civility. It is hard to make nice while brandishing a stiletto.

Moreover, while Obama took the White House bait and bristled defensively that he was not an appeaser, the White House trap did not help McCain as much as it could have. One of McCain’s great strengths is appearing to be the Republican most distant from Bush; embraces from an unpopular lameduck president are not what the party maverick needs. And, as in 1992, when another young, relatively unknown Democratic politician defeated an older, more experienced, former war hero, this election does not appear to be about foreign policy thus far – it is, as it was in the election wherein Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton unseated the incumbent President George H.W. Bush, “the economy, stupid.”

Posted on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 3:29 AM | Comments (3) | Top
ShareThis

Thursday, May 15, 2008
Why is this Race about Race?

Hillary Clinton’s crass appeal to “hard-working,” white voters, along with her big victories in mostly white states like West Virginia, risk making this race about race. Lower-class white men, once overwhelmingly hostile to Hillary Clinton, have rallied around her. Unfortunately, it took a black man to rehabilitate this most hated woman. Barack Obama’s North Carolina victory last week, based on the large African-American vote, reinforced the impression of growing racial polarization. It is easy to blame America’s tortured racial past for this unfortunate development. But Republicans and Democrats are also guilty of stoking the race issue.

It is tragic that race now looms so large. In his magnificent national debut at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama positioned himself to heal America’s great divides, not exacerbate them. Moreover, although Toni Morrison’s labeling Bill Clinton “our first black president” may have been one of the stupidest, and racially stereotypical, comments made during the whole Monica Lewinsky farce, no one can deny the once-strong ties between both Clintons and the African-American community. Throughout 2007, as Obama and Hillary Clinton gathered support, he seemed less like the “black candidate,” she seemed less like the “woman candidate.” Clinton’s problems were that she was “Hillary” and a “Clinton” not that she was a she. Obama’s obstacle was he was too green not too black.

Unfortunately, despite America’s tremendous racial progress, both political parties frequently make racial appeals. The elusive white, male, working class voter, sometimes called Joe Six Pack, sometimes called the Reagan (formerly Roosevelt) Democrat, has been subjected to steady if subtle racially-based appeals. Since Richard Nixon demanded “Law and Order” in 1968, too many Republicans have indulged in subtle racial demagoguery. The failure of the society – and particularly of liberal Democrats – to face the challenge of crime made it easier, but this politics of resentment has not just been a politics of fear. Fights over busing and affirmative action in the 1970s and 1980s exceeded the rational clash of interests, becoming irrational – and pathological. Ronald Reagan was not personally racist – and took great offense when he was accused of bigotry. But he was tone deaf to African-American sensitivities. I have found no evidence that he ever discouraged the Republican Southern white strategy, using crime, busing and affirmative action to gain white votes by stirring white fears.

Jack Kemp, the veteran Republican Congressman and 1996 vice presidential nominee, stood out as the rare national Republican who wooed African-Americans. Describing himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative,” Kemp proved it as George H.W. Bush’s Housing Secretary. In visiting inner-cities repeatedly, constantly denouncing South African Apartheid, and recoiling at racist appeals, no matter how subtle, Kemp showed how to be a tax-cutting but not race-baiting conservative.

At the same time, the Democratic commitment to identity politics guaranteed that race and gender would become major factors in 2008, as they have been for decades. So much of Democratic politics is predicated on identity politics, treating individuals as part of their subgroup rather than as independent-minded Americans. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have tapped into that consciousness. Obama has used his base in the black community, and the exciting prospects of becoming the first black president, just as Clinton has exploited her shot to become the first woman president.

Moreover, both have had major supporters quick to characterize standard campaign criticism as sexist or racist. The New York Times op-ed page has been particularly complicit here. The Times published a William Julius Wilson op-ed claiming that the Clinton campaign’s ad wondering who should be in charge at 3 A.M. was rife with racist allusions. The Times also published Gloria Steinem’s equally absurd lament that Hillary Clinton’s well-deserved loss in the Iowa caucus proved that Americans were more sexist than racist.

Identity politics demands a one-way street. Blacks can appeal to blacks, and perceive racism, even when it may not exist. Women are praised for reaching out to their sisters, and crying “sexism” if criticized. True, campaigns are about mobilizing key supporters and trying to turn any criticisms back on the accuser. But, as long as blacks, women or members of other groups perceive prejudice in the normal flow of campaigning, identity politics will breed Balkanization not unity.

This campaign has already demonstrated how emphasizing the racial component or gender appeals damages the body politic. American race relations and gender relations remain fragile. But in a polyglot democracy, subgroup appeals are inevitable. In 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis tapped Greek-American pride to raise Greek-American money in his bid to become the first Greek-American President. Twelve years later, Senator Joe Lieberman tapped American Jewish pride to raise American Jewish money in his bid to become the first American Jewish Vice President. These actions were less fraught with baggage, because the white ethnic immigrants who were perceived as so foreign when Al Smith ran for President in 1928 are today so much better integrated.

Barack Obama’s campaign testifies to the great racial progress achieved in twenty-first century America. But given some of the poison that has seeped out from the grassroots – or been stirred by his rivals – Obama’s quest for the presidency shows that America still has a long way to go. In fact, Americans no longer are even sure if they desire an America without any subgroup consciousness, which is hard enough to achieve, or the impossible dream of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too society where Americans have strong but only positive subgroup associations with no attending backlash or rival resentments.

Posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2:59 AM | Comments (1) | Top
ShareThis
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Obama Should Thank Clinton for Strengthening Him

Historians should be careful not to pronounce a contest over till it’s over, so I will not join the pundit pile-on eulogizing Hillary Clinton’s campaign. However, the conventional wisdom about this fight’s impact may be wrong. Hillary Clinton’s relentless push for the nomination may have strengthened Barack Obama not weakened him.

The lengthy American presidential campaign does not proceed in straight lines but in waves, with dramatic ups and downs. This is not necessarily a natural phenomenon but usually a media-driven mania. Reporters frequently build up candidates, then knock them down or build them up after knocking them down. Skilled – and lucky – candidates can win by having the inevitable downturns far enough away from Election Day not to hurt. John McCain, for example, benefited from bottoming out last summer and fall, long before Republicans started choosing their nominee. He was able to come on strong in the winter when it counted.

Moreover, Democratic primary voters are prone to buyers’ remorse. The modern politician who has most benefited from this tendency is that old warhorse, Jerry Brown. Brown, the current Attorney General of California and former wunderkind Governor of the same state, enjoyed late surges in two presidential campaigns. Each time, Brown eventually lost but only after giving a relatively inexperienced contender enough of a scare so that the come-from-nowhere Democrat became the eventual winner in the general election campaign. In 1976, Democrats turned to Brown when they started wondering about Jimmy Carter; sixteen years later, Brown’s campaign attracted votes in the spring from Bill Clinton, as he marched toward the nomination.

In fact, thanks to Brown, the rise of Ross Perot, and his own scandal-laden past, Bill Clinton faced a major crisis in the late spring of 1992. His advisers launched the grandiosely named “Manhattan Project,” a secret initiative to analyze Clinton’s weaknesses and figure out the secret ingredients needed to propel him to victory. Given Clinton’s victories in 1992 and 1996, people tend to forget how unpopular he was, even after he had clinched the nomination.

When his advisers presented him with data detailing how little Americans trusted him, Clinton exploded: “So far as I’m concerned, we’re at zero,” the Arkansas governor fumed. “We’re a negative. We’re off the screen. We don’t exist in the national consciousness. We might as well have been like any member of Congress and kissed every ass in the Democratic Party. I don’t think you can minimize how horrible I feel, having worked all my life to stand for things, having busted my butt for seven months and the American people don’t know crap about it after I poured $10 million worth of information into their heads.”

Ultimately, this crisis helped Clinton and his advisors recast the campaign’s message – and take the White House. Candidates need to be tested. One of the unlucky breaks Hillary Clinton experienced was that she — and her staffers – floated to re-election during the 2006 New York Senate race. As a result, they entered the 2008 presidential campaign soft, relatively un-tested, and far too self-assured.

Similarly, had Barack Obama seized the nomination after his meteoric rise in February, his campaign would have been an overinflated balloon, soaring high but easily popped. Most notably, given how deep Obama’s ties are to the ministerial hate-monger Jeremiah Wright, it was far better for that embarrassment to be aired this spring than next fall. Obama has had time to figure out how to deal with this and — after repeated hesitations — make the necessary break. Timing counts. Just as the Clinton campaign probably could have derailed the entire Obama phenomenama had Hillary’s people done their homework and exposed the wrongheaded Wright in January, if Obama is lucky, by the fall Americans will be more concerned with “the economy, stupid,” than with Obama’s passivity in the face of Wright’ repeated affront to American values.

Hillary Clinton’s tough fight against Barack Obama has toughened Obama. The Democratic primary campaign has focused Obama on the need to hone a message that reaches working class whites. The early exposure to the Wright controversy may have inoculated the public against further outbreaks of this particular affliction. If – and I make no predictions – Barack Obama ends up winning the White House, he just may have to thank Hillary Clinton for her unintended help along the way.

Posted on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 8:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Quick Coaching: How Obama Should Get Right with Americans about Wright’s Wrongs

Now that Senator Barack Obama has denounced his pastor in clear, unequivocal language, he should make two more statements to put this unhappy episode behind him. For starters, Obama should apologize for not breaking with Wright sooner, and for failing to stand up to him over the years, especially after Wright’s hurtful “chickens coming home to roost” remarks after 9/11. In this apology, Obama could acknowledge what so many Americans in this nation of armchair psychologists seem to know already – that Wright served as a father-figure to Obama, who grew up basically fatherless, making a confrontation earlier very difficult. Americans love personal apologies – just ask the former apologist-in-chief Bill Clinton, or the nation’s most unrepentant celebrity, Pete Rose. Moreover, the one false note Obama made in his North Carolina press conference came in claiming that Wright had never been his spiritual mentor.

But the second and more important move Obama must make, is to resurrect the magic from his great national political debut, his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. Obama has to explain why he chose to reject Wright’s path. He should acknowledge how tempting it is to succumb to African-American anger or Ivy League cynicism, as so many people he knows have done. What makes Obama exceptional is that he chose a different path – and articulated it so beautifully in 2004. Obama’s Philadelphia speech was more intellectual and more guarded. If Obama lets loose emotionally and rhetorically, soaring past his controversial minister to again conjure up a compelling vision of a united America, we might be able to stop the cries for Obama to right Wright’s wrongs, and return to the heady days, just weeks ago, of “Yes we can.”

Posted on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 7:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top
Carter’s Hamas Hug Hurts Obama

During Senator Barack Obama’s bad week last week, when he lost Pennsylvania, Jimmy Carter’s rogue diplomatic mission to the Middle East did not help. I know of no surveys tracking the impact of Carter’s Hamas hug on Obama’s popularity. Still, Democrats who want a muscular, effective American response to Islamism noticed. Having this presidential has-been embracing terrorists haunted Obama, with Carter as the ghost of Christmas past preying on fears that Obama himself will be the ghost of Christmas future, perpetually globetrotting, blinded by moral relativism, imprisoned by lovely rhetoric and high ideals, absolving dictators and terrorists of their anti-American sins and crimes against humanity.

In fact, Obama forcefully condemned Carter’s meeting with the Hamas leadership. Nevertheless, acting more shrewdly than fairly, Senator John McCain pounced. McCain understood that Carter’s trip made the time right to exploit one Hamas leader’s recent pronouncement that “We like Mr. Obama.” McCain responded: “I never expect for the leader of Hamas… to say that he wants me as president of the United States.” The Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory reappearance on Monday, praising Carter, denouncing Zionism, further eased McCain’s Obama-Carter-Hamas bankshot.

Had Jimmy Carter succeeded as president, Barack Obama would be emphasizing their parallels. Like Carter in 1976, Obama has rocketed to presidential-level prominence with a simple, compelling message. Like Carter, Obama has little formal foreign policy experience. And like Carter, Obama seems most comfortable with the Democratic Party’s post-Vietnam, anti-war wing.

Unfortunately, Carter’s high ideals often produced great disasters. Although he successfully facilitated the Camp David Accords and Panama Canal return, Jimmy Carter inherited a demoralized nation — and left it deeply depressed. In abandoning the Shah of Iran, Carter eased the Islamist takeover there, a critical turning point in Islamism’s rise worldwide. When the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary goons kidnapped American diplomats, Carter’s impotence saddled America with the image of a musclebound giant in ways still haunting the country.

Like a substitute teacher losing control, Carter ricocheted between being contemptibly weak, and unduly harsh. Carter’s mix of high ideals and rank amateurism in dealing with the Soviet Union made him take everything too personally, and miss the mark tactically. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan he felt insulted, after all his lovely overtures. In 1980, Ronald Reagan did not win a mandate for conservative revolution but triumphed in an ABC election – voters wanted Anybody But Carter.

As an ex-President, despite his laudable commitment to fighting disease and building houses for the homeless, Carter’s diplomatic efforts are often laughable. Carter has frittered away his credibility by kowtowing to dictators and outlaws, from China to North Korea, from Zimbabwe to Nepal. His perceptions of Israel have been particularly skewed and harsh. His book accusing Israel of the South African crime of Apartheid, was sloppy and intellectually lazy – slapping on an inflammatory title while only perfunctorily discussing the charge in the text.

On this recent Middle East trip, Carter demonstrated his bias and self-delusion. By laying a wreath at Yasir Arafat’s grave, Carrer dishonored the memory of two American diplomats Arafat ordered killed in Khartoum in 1973, George Curtis Moore and Cleo Noel, in addition to thousands of other terrorist victims. After undermining American policy by meeting with Hamas’s leaders, Carter proclaimed that Hamas was clearly committed to a cease fire – until his hosts clarified that their offer was more ambiguous. And in his post-trip New York Times op-ed, Carter again showed that his delusional diplomacy rests on his distorting of history. Carter said “Hamas had been declared a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel,” without mentioning the terrorism that prompted the designation. Carter said “Eventually, Hamas gained control of Gaza,” without mentioning the violence Hamas used against fellow Palestinians to gain that control.

There is nothing wrong with Carter being pro-Palestinian. He errs by failing to use his credibility with Palestinians to wean destructive Palestinian forces like Hamas from their addiction to terrorism. Sanitizing Hamas feeds delusions that enable more violence.

Unfortunately, Carter is a hero to those in the Democratic Party who, doubly traumatized by the Vietnam and Iraq wars, pooh-pooh any threats to America because America does not always handle the threats effectively. Some prominent liberals such as Paul Berman and Peter Beinart have argued that it is particularly absurd for liberals, academics, intellectuals, students, feminists, and gays to ignore the dangers of Islamism.

As a prominent opponent of the Iraq War, Barack Obama has deep roots in this “Peace Camp” that too often overlooks grave threats to peace. Moreover, Obama’s stated willingness to meet with America’s enemies, including the anti-American, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also reeks of this appeasement-oriented Carterism.

Obama’s challenge – and opportunity – is to move beyond American foreign policy’s simplistic hawk-versus-dove, deluded-peacenik-versus-paranoid-warrior polarities. Obama must bury Carterism and Bushism along with the assumption that the only choice is the false choice between them. He must show he recognizes that there is a time for peace and a time for war, a time to boycott and a time to negotiate, a time to defy and a time to concede.

The world is too complicated, for someone to become president stuck singing in only one key. America’s next leader must synthesize Jimmy Carter’s idealism with George W. Bush’s anger, George H.W. Bush’s coalition-building patience with Ronald Reagan’s saber-rattling resolve, Bill Clinton’s ability to charm the world with Richard Nixon’s ability to understand it.

Those skills are difficult to demonstrate while campaigning. But Obama was right to distance himself from Carter’s amoral grandstanding and Wright’s wrongheaded rants. Obama should worry about how to reassure American voters who see the evil in the world, without alienating his base among those who are far quicker to see faults in America than in America’s enemies.

Posted on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 6:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top
Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Hillary’s Old-Fashioned but Postmodern Campaign

With her substantial Pennsylvania primary victory, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has again proven to be the Timex candidate. Like the occasionally unfashionable but always durable watch, she “takes a licking but keeps on ticking.” As the Democratic nomination standoff starts resembling World War I’s relentless trench warfare, worried Democrats wonder when it will end. Paradoxically, despite running a campaign as anachronistic and as twentieth-century as the Timex slogan, Hillary Clinton is hinging her campaign on a postmodern argument that the stronger candidate may not be the one with the most popular votes – or delegates won.

Hillary Clinton has proved Thomas Edison correct. In politics as in technology perspiration frequently trumps inspiration. No one can deny that she has been impressively indefatigable, unyielding and buoyant. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton are indomitable political thoroughbreds. Just as they persisted despite repeated humiliations during Bill’s 1992 campaign, just as both she and her husband soldiered on throughout the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998-1999, Hillary Clinton has come back and won, whenever she needed to, whenever pundits eulogized her.

Barack Obama has successfully flummoxed the Clintons. These once cutting-edge, fresh-faced baby boomers have run a surprisingly flat, frequently outdated campaign, more television-based than internet-savvy, more rooted in yesterday’s techniques and agendas than today’s technologies and trends. In one nostalgia-drenched campaign ad in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton reminisced about playing pinochle. Young voters are as likely to have played pinochle as they are to have pinned their first loves – or, to be more accurate, their first casual hook-ups. Earlier, while Barack Obama’s supporters led by the hip-hop-star will.i.am transformed a lyrical Obama speech into the addictive, infectious music video “Yes We Can,” a Silicon Valley hotshot supporting Hillary Clinton produced a cheesy, kitschy, Disneyfied ditty pronouncing “Hillary for you and me – bring back our de-mo-cra-cy.” Predictably, in Pennsylvania Clinton voters again skewed older and more traditional while Senator Barack Obama’s voters were younger and hipper.

Yet by refusing to quit, Hillary Clinton has made a case that she might be the stronger candidate against John McCain. Just as her husband turned a simple case of obstructing justice to hide adultery into a postmodern, multi-dimensional nationwide morality seminar that depended on what the meaning of the word “is” was, many of Hillary Clinton’s arguments would make my most Derrida-dazzled, postmodern colleagues proud. McCain, like most nominees before him, won the nomination by winning the most votes and thus the most delegates. Today, we find ourselves balancing out Hillary Clinton’s eight big state wins versus Barack Obama’s small state wins, assessing her strength among swing voters versus his deep ties to the base. One Web site, www.realclearpolitics.com offers five different estimates for the popular vote totals, with Obama leading by half a million in the first, to Clinton leading by 122,000 votes, counting Florida and Michigan.

In fairness, this is more than a Clinton con. Just as state electors chosen by popular vote select America’s president, party nominations rely on delegates to the national convention chosen by popular vote – except for the 795 Democratic leaders and officeholders designated as super-delegates. To confuse further, state Democratic parties have generated a thicket of obscure exceptions and rules, the national Democratic Party undemocratically and punitively invalidated the votes of Michigan and Florida for holding primaries too early, and our computer age invites wacky multivariate analysis that look compelling with full-color visual aids.

Democrats are justifiably worried that this continuing battle may threaten their chances of winning the presidency. Then again, the Clintons teach the opposite. Perhaps, whoever can survive this Clinton-Obama knockdown will have precisely what it takes to win in November – then lead America effectively.

AFTERTHOUGHT on Barack Obama’s thoughts while wolfing down proletarian food in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Reporters asked about Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas leaders, Obama replied: “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” Perhaps this incident was misreported. Maybe the candidate said: Why can’t I just continue to waffle?

Posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 6:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, April 13, 2008
Clinton Should Be More Honest — Obama Should Be Less

If Otto von Bismarck’s longstanding bon mot still holds that law-making is as messy as sausage-making, a carnivore’s codicil suggests that tough campaigns frequently make mincemeat out of candidates’ reputations. The great risk to Democrats as the Pennsylvania primary looms is that the process will diminish both their talented front-runners. Recently, both Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama unintentionally highlighted fundamental paradoxes defining their respective campaigns — and political identities. Hillary Clinton continued twisting and turning her First Lady legacy every which way, so it could either appear like all things to all people – or like one distorted mishmash alienating everybody. At the same time, Barack Obama committed a classic gaffe, wherein he said what he really believed, which of course required him to backtrack from it repeatedly and apologize profusely.

Hillary Clinton’s have-her-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to the 1990s plays out on two dimensions. She simultaneously exaggerates her influence within the Clinton administration and the greatness of the Clinton record. But what happens when a Clinton policy which she opposed sours? On Friday April 11, the New York Times ran a front page article about this Clinton conundrum regarding Bill Clinton’s 1996 controversial welfare reform.

Back in ‘96, to shore up his re-election effort, President Clinton signed a bill that fulfilled his 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” The President had already vetoed welfare legislation the Republican-dominated Congress passed twice. Clinton’s pragmatic political guru Dick Morris insisted he sign this third bill, which forced welfare recipients to work and limited individuals’ benefits. This legislation deeply divided the already fractious Clinton White House. First Lady Hillary Clinton and her liberal allies fought the legislation intensely. Ultimately, Bill Clinton overcame his doubts to avoid giving the Republicans a club they could use to bash him.

During the next, relatively prosperous, ten years, the welfare reform appeared to be one of Bill Clinton’s great successes. Now, the Times reported, with the economy souring, criticism of the legislation is mounting. But what’s a former First Lady to do? If she repudiated her husband’s record by telling the truth about how much she hated the policy she risked reminding everyone about how politically impotent she had been. Instead, Hillary pulled the Clinton twist, claiming she supported the legislation for pragmatic reasons, tried to fix it as a Senator but the evil George W. Bush thwarted her efforts, and, besides, the legislation was pretty darned good anyway. Voters have every right to wonder if the policy was so good why it needed fixing, and how one of Hillary Clinton’s great internal defeats became one of Billary’s shared triumphs.

Voters should be equally vexed with Barack Obama who, in a private fundraiser on April 6, revealed the Ivy League elitism lurking behind his “Yes We Can” populism. Showing an unhealthy ability to alienate the “Reagan Democrats” and swing voters Democrats desperately need to recapture the White House, Obama speculated that rural voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” due to their bitterness over their economic situation. In one pithy comment, Obama insulted gun owners, church-goers, opponents of illegal immigration, and, for good measure, suggested that economic frustrations clouded the little people’s good judgment.

The comment was a pretty apt summary of Thomas Frank’s popular analysis of Republican success, “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.” In that 2004 book, Frank captured the frustrations of a generation of Democrats who could not understand how so many people could be so stupid as to abandon the noble Democrats for the benighted Republicans. The only possible explanation, Frank suggested, was what Marx would have called “false consciousness,” that millions of voters in the heartland, distracted by the “culture wars” voted against their best economic interests. This analysis resonated among the Democratic activists, and Ivy League thinkers who form the backbone of the Democratic party – and represent Obama’s core constituency.

The problem is that, for some crazy reason, American voters, even the lower class ones, don’t like being told they are stupid. This dismissive approach is particularly problematic coming from a well-educated newcomer promising to heal America’s wounds – and gearing up to face the former war hero John McCain in November.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are no less elitist than Barack Obama, but years in Arkansas taught them to hide it better. Barack Obama is no less inconsistent than Hillary Clinton on welfare reform, but his experience as a community organizer in Chicago allows him to obscure it better. With less than two weeks to go before the Pennsylvania showdown, both candidates are going to campaign aggressively. Yet, both in promoting themselves and in knocking down their opponent, they have to be thinking about winning in early November as well as in late April. To do that, it seems, Hillary Clinton may need to tell a bit more of the truth – and Barack Obama may need to tell a bit less of it.

Posted on Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 4:33 AM | Comments (3) | Top
ShareThis
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Poisoned Penn – and Hillary’s Clinton Fatigue

With the resignation of Hillary Clinton’s top – and highly overpaid – strategist, Mark Penn, the Clinton campaign once again appears to be a Keystone Cops operation. (Penn’s private public relations firm was lobbying for Colombia and Free Trade agreements precisely when Hillary Clinton was opposing expanding such agreements, or forging new ones). In 1992 and 1996 Bill Clinton did Better Than Expected, wowing observers with smart, disciplined, nimble campaigns. In 2008, Hillary Clinton has done far Worse Than Expected, depressing even many devotees with her cloddish, clunky, top-heavy, poorly managed and often clumsy campaign.

True, campaign reputations are often circular. In the all-or-nothing world of politics, winning campaigns become brilliant; losing campaigns become mismanaged. Sometimes, however, candidates have run great campaigns and lost – such as Ronald Reagan in 1976 against Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, and Gerald Ford in 1976 against Jimmy Carter for the Presidency. Reagan left Republicans so keyed up, his nomination in 1980 was virtually assured; Ford forded a 30 point gap in the public opinion polls, falling just short of winning.

Win or lose – and the contest is still not over – Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be remembered as a series of miscalculations and missed opportunities. The arrogance of her operation, dismissing Barack Obama’s challenge as insignificant and failing to develop a strategy after Super Tuesday, is inexcusable. The sloppiness of her operation, failing to find the Reverend Jeremiah Wright videotapes in December and January when they could have killed Obama’s campaign, or holding on to failing leaders for far too long is unjustifiable.

In the continuing American psychodrama that is the Clintons’ public life, the contrast between Bill Clinton’s professionalism and Hillary Clinton’s amateurishness is striking. It highlights the fact that Bill Clinton is both a natural and a well-practiced politician, trained in the art of wooing Americans for over thirty years. Despite all her self-puffery as a leader for three decades, Hillary Clinton is a relative newcomer to the art of selling yourself to the American people. She lacks her husband’s natural grace and his years of experience – and it shows.

But watching the debacle unfold, it is hard not to wonder if, once again, we have all been given front row seats to the latest round of the operatic Clinton marriage. Does Bill Clinton’s fall in the campaign from revered ex-president as rock star to overbearing political hack reveal some kind of unconscious death wish he has for her candidacy? Does Hillary Clinton’s inability to manage her people more effectively and her odd choice to resume her identity as Bill’s partner after eight independent years in the Senate spotlight reflect a deep neediness disguised as aggressiveness or loyalty?

Such speculation emerges because the story is so full of pathologies – and of anomalies. Hillary Clinton’s operation should have been as formidable as her husband’s, even if she lacks his experience. Could the first serious woman candidate for the American presidency be undermining herself somehow? Perhaps Clinton fatigue has not only set in among so many Democrats – but among the Clintons as well.

Posted on Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 1:56 AM | Comments (3) | Top
ShareThis

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Let’s Face It: All Three Leading Candidates Lack Executive Experience

Let’s face it. While the three leading presidential candidates are all talented, they all lack an essential qualification for the presidency – executive experience. Barack Obama may be a silver-tongued orator, but his background as an academic, a community organizer, and a lawyer did not hone much managerial expertise. Hillary Clinton may be a passionate activist, but – despite her famous 3 A.M. commercial — her background as an academic, a First Lady, and a lawyer did not give her many tough decisions to make, under pressure, with different factions in her office advancing opposing ideas. And Senator John McCain may have spent years in the United States Military, one of the world’s best training grounds for management, but he started as a flyboy and when he returned was at the Naval War College then at the Senate as military liaison. In fact, all three would have to say that their Senate offices were the most complex bureaucracies they even ran – which is not saying much. Clearly, being governor is better training for the presidency which is, after all in the executive branch.

This shared shortcoming is important. As an academic I know what of I speak. Having been minimally managed and having done minimal managing, I am well aware of the skill set I lack. I don’t know about creating a vision for an organization, about seeing how it is implemented in levels below me, about how to reconcile my vision and views with those of others, or with my institution’s organizational culture. I happily avoid all the interpersonal baggage that comes from all these interpersonal dynamics, but I recognize that this is not my realm.

This problem is intensified because the modern presidency has grown too big for one person. In each election, Americans are actually choosing between two opposing teams. In an age of weakened parties, the teams have a Republican or Democratic flavor, but are most affected by the leader at the top. Like a privately held corporation, the modern presidency ostensibly reflects the boss’s desires, but the hundreds of key appointees in the executive branch, managing thousands of government workers, enjoy wide discretion. Franklin D. Roosevelt had less than a hundred White House staffers, only 71 presidential appointees in 1933, and 50 different agencies reporting directly to him; half a century later, Ronald Reagan had over 350 White House staffers, 600 presidential appointees, 1700 employees in the Executive Office of the President, and approximately two million governmental employees overall.

Of course, in this game of presidential campaigning, biography is not destiny. Former senator John F. Kennedy figured out how to lead, and former governor George W. Bush would get a “needs improvement” on his management report card if presidents underwent the same kind of supervisory process many corporate managers endure. Moreover, it is hard for any of the three leading candidates to claim more substantive executive experience than the other. Still, given the complexity of the presidency, the federal bureaucracy, and the challenges America currently faces, the combined managerial inexperience of Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama is unnerving.

Posted on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 4:36 AM | Comments (3) | Top

Wednesday, March 26, 2008
When is a misstatement a lie? When is an endorsement an embrace? The O-Ring Factor

As the long, arduous, battle for the Democratic nomination inspires comparisons with the trench warfare of World War I, both candidates are struggling to stay positive and “on message.” Despite his well-received speech on race, Barack Obama is still trying to explain how he could sit through so many vituperative Reverend Wright sermons and apparently never object. (Particularly problematic is the post September 11 sermon. Whether or not Obama was in the pews Sunday September 16, he was already a State Senator from Illinois. Obama should have been outraged that his pastor chose to blame America for being attacked just days after America was attacked). And despite enjoying her opponent’s controversy-filled March, Hillary Clinton is now trying to explain how she could remember a warm, First-Lady-like welcome in Bosnia as a difficult landing under a hail of gunfire.

The controversies must make both candidates pine for the good-old days of early 20th-century campaigning, when candidates went around the country saying the same thing again and again. Crowds did not expect new twists, new content, new explanations – but actually wanted to hear a William Jennings Bryan, a Woodrow Wilson, do his well-practiced thing. As the advent of radio in the 1920s started emphasizing the new, the fresh, the unrehearsed, Herbert Hoover, the Republican candidate in 1928, missed what he called those “happier speaking times.” Once upon a time, Hoover sighed, candidates “could repeat the same speech with small variations…. Then paragraphs could be polished up, epigrams used again and again, and eloquence invented by repeated tryouts.”

But the candidates are not just stumbling because, as Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed “the millions of words” they are forced to launch into the ether week after week. The two latest controversies strike at the heart of the respective candidate’s identities, zeroing in on particular vulnerabilities. I call this the “O-Ring Factor,” named after the rubber seals whose failures contributed to the first shuttle disaster. As the late scientist Richard Feynman brilliantly demonstrated at the time, the O-Rings failed during the Challenger’s launch only because of the particular combination of the Florida winter frost and the improper seals. In other circumstances, the launch would have been flawless, the O-Rings would have withstood the pressure.

In that spirit, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy is hurting Obama not, as the Senator suggests, because of race, but because Obama is so unknown – and so defined by his words not his actions. Obama’s passivity amid Wright’s invective, and the disconnect between Obama’s words and his preacher’s teachings, emphasize just how little is known about Obama, how he is far more defined by his rhetoric than his record. With Americans trying to figure out just who he is, individuals who have mentored him, leaders who endorse him, take on added significance.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s problem is that she is, perhaps, too well known – or defined. Her unduly heroic description of her Bosnia adventure raises questions about how serious her record was as First Lady. But, even worse, it resurrects all those worries about both Bill Clinton’s and Hillary Clinton’s elusive relationship with the truth. Hillary Clinton’s camp responded that Obama called himself a constitutional law professor when he was merely a lecturer, and took credit for passing legislation that never left committee. But Obama is not the one with the credibility gap, Hillary is. John McCain could stumble on some details during his Middle East trip without appearing to be an ignoramus; he would be much more vulnerable if he slipped up when talking about the economy.

Similarly, the Obama camp’s delight in producing a photograph of Bill Clinton greeting Jeremiah Wright was meaningless. The Clintons are in no way defined by Obama’s pastor – and if the campaign wants Americans to believe that Obama was being reasonable in keeping relations with Wright, trying to make Bill Clinton’s meeting with Wright appear controversial or more meaningful than it was is not helpful to Obama’s case.

All candidates have their strengths and their weaknesses. Inevitably, they will misspeak, controversies will erupt, mistakes, as they like to say, will be made. Ultimately, successful campaigns, in addition to minimizing the errors, will learn to respond quickly, and, with any luck, make sure that the gaffes don’t exacerbate existing problems, that amid the ever-mounting pressure of a campaign, the candidate’s particular O-Rings will hold, at least until the finish.

Posted on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 8:46 AM | Comments (2) | Top
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Update: Obama’s Speech Moves from Political Spin to Historic Vision

After a week of disappointing political pussyfooting, on Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama’s speech analyzing America’s racial issues was masterful. Once again, Illinois’ rookie Senator hit a grand slam with two strikes against him. Obama’s speech was thoughtful, thought-provoking, rich, complex, effective, poetic, and inspiring.

Finally, on Tuesday, Obama did what he needed to do (and in my previous blog posting I said I hoped he would do) – he told the truth. Overlooking his previous Clintonesque denials, he admitted he had heard Reverend Wright make outrageous statements. Obama rejected Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country.” Obama said “white racism” is not “endemic. He warned of the tendency to elevate “what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” And Obama refused to blame the Middle East conflict on “stalwart allies like Israel,” instead blaming “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”

At the same time, Obama rooted these statements in African-Americans’ historic anguish and affirmed his loyalty to his pastor and his community. By explaining the anger, Obama did what modern politicians rarely do, he acknowledged complexity. By refusing to disown Reverend Wright while disavowing Wright’s ideology, Obama avoided charges that he lacked steadfastness while showing his independence of mind and the courage of his convictions.

Having staunched the bleeding, Obama then offered some healing. He eloquently highlighted his distinctive, patriotic message of self-awareness, self-criticism and reconciliation. Without explaining how he personally transcended this rage, he repudiated it. “That anger is not always productive,” Obama confessed; “indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.” Obama boldly mentioned moments of deep racial division like the O.J. Simpson trial, a risky but accurate comparison because it too showed the clashing perceptions and sensibilities of whites and blacks. Moreover, Obama thoughtfully acknowledged white resentment over issues such as busing and affirmative action. Characteristically, he refused to dwell in the land of wrongs and recriminations, offering a clever formulation to push the country toward healing and hope. “This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected,” he proclaimed, inviting his fellow Americans to help transcend the divisions and perfect their union.

True, Obama overstepped occasionally. He unfairly compared the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s years of invective with former Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro’s one foolish comment attributing Obama’s success to his race. And true, Obama was far too forgiving of his pastor’s hate-mongering, and his own passivity. But it was hard to resist the speech’s – or the speaker’s – appeal. Americans are looking for redemption, and Barack Obama plays the redeemer brilliantly. If the speech works politically as well as it worked rhetorically and substantively, historians will compare it to John F. Kennedy’s speech in Houston to the Baptist ministers on religious tolerance in America.

Here, then, remains the Obama campaign’s great mystery. Many Americans want to believe, to trust that he is what he purports to be, that his gift for words will translate into a genius for governance. But the questions cropping up are not simply about his inexperience but his inaction. He never confronted Jeremiah Wright. He sat silently by as the United Church of Christ to which he belongs passed a resolution singling out Israel, among all countries for opprobrium and possible divestment. Still, in our media-besotted age, words do matter, presidential rhetoric can shape an era. Americans of all parties and races should be proud that this presidential candidate is willing to tackle difficult topics, build rhetorical bridges, and try healing some of the nation’s deepest wounds.

Posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 5:03 AM | Comments (2) | Top
ShareThis
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Obama’s Mealy-Mouthed Reaction to His Pastor’s Venom

NOTE: SEE THE NEXT POSTING FOR AN UPDATE AFTER OBAMA’S MASTERFUL SPEECH

Senator Barack Obama’s response to his pastor’s anti-Americanism is mealy-mouthed and disingenuous. It is impossible to believe Obama’s claim he was unaware of this dimension of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s preaching. Actually, if handled more shrewdly – and honestly – both the Reverend Wright’s venom and Michelle Obama’s unpatriotic comments could highlight one of Obama’s great gifts to America. Obama has tasted the bitterness of black life, but emerged with a song in his heart, and a deep, constructive patriotism. His initial failures to respond nimbly and honestly to the complaints about his demagogic pastor suggests he may be afflicted with advancing political sclerosis – the paralysis that hits successful candidates, especially insurgents, as they get ever cagier and more cowardly, forgetting the bold message that first fueled their success.

Barack Obama’s reverend – and mentor – Jeremiah Wright is a spell-binder. The video clips of Wright’s preaching capture a demagogue working his audience masterfully. Someone who continually calls America, “the U.S. of KKK-A,” someone who bombastically, but lyrically, repeats that he would not say “God Bless America,” but “God Damn America,” someone who chose the Sunday after 9/11 to condemn American foreign policy, is not a casual America-basher. Clearly, his ministry has played to African-American anger, demonizing whites, and blasting America as an oppressor at home and abroad. Consider his now-infamous Sunday sermon on September 16, 2001, as the fires at the Pentagon and at Ground Zero still smoldered. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Wright shouted. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens” – he exclaimed triumphantly, channeling the black radical Malcolm X — “are coming home to roost.”

Consider Barack Obama’s mild reaction to these ugly declarations. Once he needed to distance himself from the pastor who officiated at his wedding and baptized both his children, Obama compared his spiritual leader for nearly two decades to a crotchety old uncle. Obama also tried suggesting that regarding 9/11, Wright was simply being “provocative” – which is not the role of a man of the cloth entering a house of mourning. Most recently, as the appalling video clips spread, Obama released an eight paragraph response on the Huffington Post Blog repudiating Wright’s remarks and is preparing a major speech on race today (Tuesday, March 18).

Alas, Obama’s carefully parsed statement was downright Clintonesque. “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments.” Let us take the good Senator at his word, and assume we will not soon be watching videos or still photographs date stamped “9/16/2001” showing Obama sitting in the church, or, even worse, videos of Obama clapping and laughing to one of Wright’s I-hate-America riffs. Still, only denying what occurred as he sat in the pews, lays a thicket of facts that gives the appearance of specificity while issuing a smokescreen of denial. Obama is smart. He knows that fair-minded Americans are wondering why he did not condemn the Reverend’s remarks when first uttered, or ever walk out on one of these harsh sermons – which the Reverend and the church were so proud of, they peddled on videotape. Moreover, did Obama ever argue with his “old uncle” as many of us do with older relatives or preachers who say something offensive? Obama’s lawyerly statement makes one wonder, did anyone mention Wright’s hateful analysis of 9/11 to Barack Obama, at the time an Illinois state senator? Or was this tirade so typical of Wright’s worldview that it did not generate much attention? Either scenario is damning – and suggests Obama failed when he waited until now to denounce these views.

It is easy to see the simplistic equation attack ads will make: Wright’s wrongheaded views plus Michelle Obama’s recent exclamation that for the first time in her life she was proud of her country equal proof that Barack Obama is no patriot, and not presidential material. The truth, however, is more complicated, and disturbing.

The Reverend Wright thrived at Trinity Church not despite these views but partially because of these views. The African-Americans who have flocked to hear Reverend Wright’s sermons – and have “Amened” his denunciations of America — reflect the fury many African-Americans feel. Michelle Obama’s comments show that even many blacks who “made it” to the Ivy League, still feel disenfranchised – and bitter. This was the topic of a Princeton sociology senior thesis from 1985, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community” written by Michelle Robinson – who married a fellow Harvard lawyer named Barack Obama seven years later.

Since the 1960s, such black anger at America has not impeded advancement in the American meritocracy. America-bashing among those who most benefit from America’s bounty has become quite trendy. The white liberal elite circles in which the Obamas travel would echo Michelle Obama’s comments about not feeling proud of their country – even if some would find Reverend Wright’s venom unnerving.

This background is what makes Barack Obama’s rhetoric and message so extraordinary. His 2004 convention speech marked the national debut of a fresh voice who refused to indulge in African-American anger toward America and rejected Ivy League cynicism. He promised to cross the racial divide, blur the red-blue divide, heal the anger, end the cynicism. In that spirit, when reporters asked him about Reverend Wright, Obama should have said, “Yes, I’ve lived with that anger, I’ve confronted that anger, I’ve overcome that anger.” And wouldn’t it have been great, if Obama could also have said – honestly, before any of these video clips spread – “and I want you to know that seven years ago, with no thoughts of running for President, I confronted my pastor, saying he needed to teach about love not hate, about hope not recriminations.”

Obama’s political rise has been launched on the wings of Americans’ hopes that the healers will defeat the haters. His continued political progress would be more assured if he could point to actions backing up this rhetoric, to strong stands he has taken against divisive demagogues. Barack Obama is not too young to have had the opportunity to prove whether he stands by his statements. Americans have the right to ask what he has done when confronted with the world’s Jeremiah Wrights and Louis Farrakhans – and to be disappointed if only now, under the gun politically, is he pretending to have the backbone he needed in the past – and will certainly need if he wins the election.

Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 5:38 AM | Comments (13) | Top
ShareThis

Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Hillary’s 3 A.M. Ad – Neither Racist Nor Accurate

So far, the most talked about political campaign commercial in 2008 seems to be Hillary Clinton’s 30-second spot that begins with the phone ringing as children are sleeping. “It’s 3 A.M. and your children are safely asleep,” the narrator asks in a too-calm voice, with patriotic music purring in the background. “Who do you want answering the phone?” Six rings later, Hillary Clinton, the supposedly tested, experienced, leader answers the phone. Color streams into the picture, as America sleeps safely and soundly, with the right person in charge.

Putting aside the cynics’ question about why the White House phone would have to ring six times before being answered in a crisis, the ad boosts the Clinton campaign’s main contention that Hillary Clinton is ready to govern from day one. You don’t have to be the former Clinton anti-impeachment flack and now Obama supporter Greg Craig to doubt Hillary’s claim. Craig, however, has written an absolutely devastating memo that goes through each of the foreign policy hot spots where Hillary Clinton claims she helped as First Lady – and shows how marginal a player she actually was. The Clinton camp has responded, and Salon posted both memos.

In this battle, Craig is right. Clinton’s people can make the claim that living in the White House for eight years, being in Washington since 1993, has given Hillary Clinton a front-row seat on the use (and occasional abuse) of power that makes her more experienced than Barack Obama. But she has gone further than that, running a campaign pretending that she was able to be the co-president she hoped she could be, rather than the frequently marginalized and frustrated First Lady she usually was.

However an unreasonable criticism of the ad comes from the Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson in yesterday’s New York Times. Patterson is a thoughtful, thought-provoking scholar whose work on race in America is usually on the mark, and frequently refreshingly out-of-the-box. In this op-ed he deploys his scholarly authority to accuse the Clinton camp of race-baiting unfairly, saying: “I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past.” Patterson then claims that it stirs traditional fears of the black man, meaning Obama, as a threat to white women and children.

This interpretation reads far too much into the advertisement. From the start, the central criticism of Barack Obama’s campaign has not been that he is black, but that he is too green. In an age of terrorism, when it is clear that the “enemy” being spoken about in this fear-mongering ad is from outside not from within, it was downright irresponsible for the New York Times to print Patterson’s complaint. It raises the charge of racism in an inaccurate, demagogic, and unhelpful way.

It is particularly ironic that Patterson’s essay appeared the same day that the Obama camp objected to Geraldine Ferraro’s offensive and foolish remarks. Ferraro suggested that Obama’s rise was due to his race –- raising fears that Gloria Steinem’s feminist foot-in-mouth-disease may be contagious. Offended, Senator Obama responded: “I don’t think that Geraldine Ferraro’s comments have any place in our politics or the Democratic Party. I think they were divisive.”

Obama is correct. But his analysis applies to Professor Patterson’s remarks too.

Posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 11:57 AM | Comments (1) | Top
ShareThis
Thursday, March 6, 2008
The Comeback Queen

Clinton knew it was do or die. All the campaign staffers and the media agreed that without a big win Tuesday, the campaign was over. The ultimately winning strategy entailed putting the media and the opposition on the defensive, and tempering this negativity with the right pop-culture flourish.

While the above describes Hillary Clinton’s impressive comeback this past Tuesday, with decisive wins in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island, it also describes Bill Clinton’s incredible comeback in 1992. Bill Clinton became the “Comeback Kid” by scoring impressively – not even winning – in the New Hampshire primary after being devastated by Gennifer Flowers’ reports of her lengthy affair with him, and by the scandal surrounding his creative feints to avoid being drafted in 1969. Perhaps the defining moment in Clinton’s turnaround occurred on Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” show. Smoldering just enough, he delivered a line a consultant fed him: “All I’ve been asked about by the press are a woman I didn’t sleep with and a draft I didn’t dodge.” Later in the spring, when Governor Clinton’s poll numbers sagged yet again, he donned cool sunglasses and whipped out his saxophone to play some tunes on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Once again, his approval ratings soared.

Hillary Clinton became the Comeback Queen this week by making these familiar moves from the Clinton playbook. She jumped on a Saturday Night Live skit accusing the press of coddling Barack Obama, by sarcastically suggesting that reporters should offer her rival a pillow to make him comfy during their debate. She was so pleased with Saturday Night Live’s assistance, she guest-hosted days later. And while pummeling the press for handling Senator Obama with kid gloves, Senator Clinton and her staffers roughed him up over his friendship with a shady Chicago operator, over his NAFTA two-step, wherein one of his advisers supposedly reassured the Canadian embassy not to worry about his anti-Free Trade demagoguery, and over his general inexperience, especially on national security matters.

Exit polls showed that most of the voters who decided in the last two weeks chose Hillary Clinton. In Ohio, exit polls showed that Midwestern voters thought she would make a better Commander in Chief than Barack Obama by 57 percent to 40 percent. Those kinds of numbers suggest that Americans do not have a problem with a woman at the helm and that much of the opposition she has encountered is more aimed at her specifically, than at women in general.

Ironically, while following her husband’s lead, Hillary Clinton shrewdly kept him under wraps. Unlike in South Carolina, where Bill Clinton overestimated how loyal African-Americans would be to him when faced with the first African-American candidate in history with a real shot at the White House, the former President was relatively subdued in Ohio and Texas.

Senator Clinton re-learned what she had realized throughout her senatorial career: that Bill Clinton simply commands too much attention, and undermines her claim to be an independent national leader – even when he is not overplaying his hand. Senator Clinton also re-learned the lessons of 1992 – and much of the White House years – Americans do not want a husband-wife co-presidency. Voters recoiled when the Clintons pitched “two for the price of one” on the campaign trail in 1992. Hillary Clinton saw that her poll ratings sagged when Americans feared she was overstepping, and that her popularity as First Lady increased when she kept to more traditional First Lady-like roles.

John McCain and his fellow Republicans are delighting in their opponents’ predicament. The Democrats now have two strong candidates with legitimate claims to be considered the most viable nominee. And both candidates have masses of supporters who risk being deeply disappointed – and alienated – if their candidate loses. Barack Obama still retains a slight yet possibly insurmountable lead in the number of delegates won in the Democratic parties’ particularly complicated nominating process. But having won New York, California, Texas, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and with a strong lead in Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton now can claim that she holds the key to winning the states with the biggest electoral vote totals, and some of the most critical swing states for the November general election.

Once again, the curse of the Clintons worked its black magic – negative campaigning swayed the electorate. Predicting electoral outcomes has proved to be a tricky business this campaign season. But it is a reasonably safe prediction to make that, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s wins and Barack Obama’s losses on Tuesday, both are going to be tempted to keep going negative. Hillary Clinton has already drawn blood, and has no choice but to continue trying to drain excitement and credibility from the Obama phenomenama.

Obama has to figure out how to be aggressive enough to show he is tough – on the campaign trail as well as in the Oval Office if he wins – without being so nasty that he loses the aura of hope he has built up with his Yes We Can message of healing. And even though the Clintons scored some points against the media, sending reporters scrambling to prove that they had not been too soft on Obama, political reporters must be thrilled. They were the big winners Tuesday, as this already most compelling election season just received a new surge and a guarantee of continued excitement – and front-page coverage.

(first published in the Montreal Gazette, March 6, 2008)

Posted on Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 7:46 AM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
America’s Shame: The Absurd Primary System

Just as the 2000 election deadlock between George W. Bush and Al Gore highlighted all the dysfunctional elements in America’s general electoral system, this titanic battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is showcasing all the absurdities of the system for nominating presidential candidates. It is not much of a partisan statement to say that the Democrats seem to have an even stupider system than the Republicans. Hillary Clinton’s victories in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island guarantee that the system is going to get tested in ways it has never been before. As Clinton and Obama get closer and closer to the Democratic National Convention, the strains on the system – and the Democrats’ remarkably un-democratic approach to nominating standard-bearers — will show more and more.

I have already complained about the outrageous way millions of voters in Florida and Michigan were disenfranchised, merely to satisfy petty dictators from the small, unrepresentative states of New Hampshire and Iowa. Now, the fact that the Democratic Party poohbahs in their wisdom decided that the delegates who were properly selected in the Florida and Michigan primaries should not be counted is going to take on dramatic significance. Hillary Clinton, who was wrong to buy into the Florida and Michigan boycott, is going to argue for the rights of those voters to be heard. Obviously, this has less to do with a newfound appreciation for democracy and more to do with, shock of all shocks, advancing her self-interest.

Similarly, the difficulty explaining the Texas prima-caucus, combining New Hampshire-style beauty contest general voting with Iowa-style caucusing, also demands scrutiny. From poor people who had to leave work early or spend precious resources to get to the voting booth, to overstressed executives who had to carve time out of their overscheduled days, voters are going to wonder why they bothered participating in a charade, if their votes don’t count fully.

Ironically, one of the features many people criticize about the general election may help solve another one of the primary problems. This morning, the Clinton people are feeling frustrated that their big wins in crucial states like Texas, Ohio, New York, California and New Jersey have not had the impact they should. Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s success in these big states – along with Florida and Michigan – make her a surprisingly compelling candidate, despite the awful campaign she has run. A winner-take-all approach in those states would have drastically changed this race – and given Hillary Clinton at this point at better chance at overtaking Obama in Pennsylvania. If most states on Election Day are going to be winner-take-all, and if the Electoral College is going to continue favoring the large states, maybe the nominating systems needs to be aligned with the electoral system by becoming winner-take-all too.

Finally, the fact that this Democratic nomination is going to be decided by the super-delegates is particularly tragic. Thanks largely to Barack Obama, there has been a populist energy and excitement in this race that has not been seen in at least sixteen years – since the previous Clinton first ran (that guy named Bill, currently under wraps as the Hillary Clinton campaign tries to avoid more embarrassment). Both Democrats have to think about how to win without losing the ardent supporters of their primary opponent. A feeling of “we wuz robbed” by the elites and not by the people, will not be conducive to the party healing the aftermath of such a knock-down, drag-out nominating contest will require.

From a perspective of democratic theory, the super-delegates face a fascinating super-conundrum. What should be the basis of their vote – their district’s expressed desire, if they represent a particular locale; their state’s expressed desire; the overall leader in delegates; the overall leader in popular votes – which could be different; the overall leader in states’ won – which could also be different; the candidate to whom they are closest or from whom they have received the most favors in the past; the candidate they think most likely to win in November; or the person they think will make the best president? This is the kind of question that could launch a dozen fascinating dissertations – but should not, in a functioning democracy, have to be posed.

One of the most sacred acts in a democracy is the act of voting for your leader. This popular input should carry over into the nominating process. We need clean, clear, direct, above-board primaries and general elections. It is a source of great sadness to me that I have to write the following words: the United States is failing that fundamental democratic test. Whoever wins in November, let us hope that he – or she – undertakes to fix this Rube Goldberg system for electing the President of the United States of America.

Posted on Wednesday, March 5, 2008 at 8:29 AM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Obama Should be a Muscular Moderate Overseas

Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN.

As the Obama Phenomenama grows, many who are not completely starry-eyed fear his foreign policy may be too starry-eyed. The 46-year-old Senator’s foreign policy can best be summarized in two words: “Leave Iraq.” Echoing the 1960s’ get-out-of-Vietnam movement, this approach risks perpetuating the delusions of the Clinton 1990s he usually rejects, ignoring the ugly realities facing post-9/11 America.

As a former community organizer, Obama cares most about domestic issues. His experience overseas is limited – beyond his oft-distorted Indonesian sojourn when young. Like most Ivy League-educated idealistic Americans, he assumes compromises can be found for every foreign conflict, while viewing “evil” as a right-wing Republican construct not a force in today’s world. And considering how high he has soared with his charisma and eloquence, he naturally assumes he can handle any world leader, one on one.

The transcripts of his recent speeches and his Obama ’08 Website indicate he and most Democrats prefer ignoring the world beyond America’s borders. He even turns most references to Iraq into a domestic critique, lamenting that the money wasted could rebuild America. Such neo-isolationism offers cheap populist applause lines not serious policy analysis. George W. Bush’s staggering budget deficits will swallow up any Iraqi war savings.

Even more sobering, Obama most frequently mentions 9/11 by complaining about using it “to scare up votes.” This posture blasts President Bush without engaging the Islamist terrorist challenge. In fact, Obama’s world rarely links the words “Islam” or “Islamist” with terrorism. In his few major foreign policy addresses during 2007 he preferred affirming the 1.3 billion Muslims’ peaceful intentions rather than tackling the challenge the rabid minority of Islamist Jihadists pose. In fairness, Hillary Clinton’s campaign also downplays the terrorist threat as an ideological challenge, mentioning “terrorists” or “extremists” without acknowledging Islam’s centrality in their identities.

By contrast, Senator John McCain emphasizes the fight against what he calls “global terrorism and Islamist extremism.” On his Website, in the section “Election 2008: What’s at Stake?” the first answer warns, in boldface: “America faces a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists.”

McCain has other flaws but he recognizes that terrorism cannot be stopped without confronting its underlying ideology. The distinction shouldn’t need emphasizing but let us be clear – no, most Muslims are not terrorists, but all Jihadist terrorists are Muslims. Ignoring that unhappy fact blinds us to the threat we face. This divide is less about personalities and more about the Republican-Democrat split following Bush’s polarizing approach to fighting terrorism. Rather than building on the national consensus forged in the fires of September 11, Bush allowed the war on terror to become a partisan flashpoint. In fairness, Democrats are also guilty, frequently allowing their hatred of Bush to blind them to the Islamist threat. “The villains are no longer the terrorists,” New York’s Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler claimed at a news conference in 2007. “The villains live in the White House.”

If elected President, Barack Obama will have to govern as a muscular moderate not a spineless centrist. He will have to show that behind his fine words and high ideals lies a savvy leader who can fight Islamist terror, Iran’s nuclear-driven genocidal aims, North Korea’s saber-rattling, Venezuela’s anti-Americanism. He will have to repudiate the Clinton administration’s delusional holiday from history. He will have to learn from his hero John Kennedy, a Cold Warrior with no illusions about Soviet aggression. At his best, Kennedy understood how to export American values through programs like the Peace Corps while confronting the Soviets when they snuck missiles into Cuba. President Bush recognizes the seriousness of the Islamist threat. His historic failures to embody, elevate and export American ideals while fighting against these serious existential threats, cannot be repaired with a naïve worldview.

Presidencies are full of surprises. Campaigns churn out superficial applause lines not detailed plans candidates follow if elected. But the dangers facing America and all Western democracies, combined with his thin foreign policy resume, make it incumbent on Obama to work harder articulating a sophisticated, realistic foreign policy vision. Michelle Obama’s admission that only her husband’s success has made her proud of America, makes it even more important for Barack Obama to show he is a tough, proud, patriot, who will govern in the assertive but inspirational foreign policy tradition of liberal Democrats such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy.

Obama should deliver some speeches advocating “tough-minded diplomacy” while addressing America’s external challenges more regularly when campaigning. He should remind fellow Bush critics: “Just because the President misrepresents our enemies does not mean we do not have them.” He should reassure his fellow Americans that he knows “The terrorists are at war with us” and “the threat is real.” He must reaffirm Americans’ historic understanding that “we cannot win a war unless we maintain the high ground” and that we need not make “a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.”

And yes, he should boldly proclaim that “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad’s regime is a threat to all of us,” that “when Israel is attacked, we must stand up for Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself,” and that America needs “to finally end the tyranny of oil, and develop our own alternative sources of energy to drive the price of oil down.” Wouldn’t it be great, if he sprinkled some Obama rhetorical magic around, saying “We will author our own story,” rather than being defined by our enemies.

Actually, all these quotations came from speeches Obama delivered in 2007. Obama has written the right lyrics to a strong, effective foreign policy song. Will he showcase them when campaigning? And if he becomes President will he turn them from beautiful words to guiding principles, from political postures to effective policies?

Posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 1:59 AM | Comments (4) | Top

Monday, February 18, 2008
Is Obama a Plagiarist?

With the glee of a conservative in the 1990s catching Bill Clinton with a new girlfriend, the Hillary Clinton campaign has accused the 21st century Teflon man, Barack Obama, of plagiarizing one of his speeches from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. As reported by the Politico’s Mike Allen, and others, the Clinton campaign publicized two YouTube links showing the two friends’ overlapping rhetoric.

On October 15, 2006, speaking of his female opponent Kerry Healey, Patrick said: “But her dismissive point, and I hear it a lot from her staff, is that all I have to offer is words — just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, [applause and cheers] that all men are created equal.’ [Sustained applause and cheers.] Just words – just words! ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words! ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Just words! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words!” Last Saturday night in Milwaukee, Obama said: “Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words! [Applause.] ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words — just speeches!” In response someone only identified as “an Obama official” said: “They’re friends who share similar views and talk and trade good lines all the time.”

Plagiarism is a serious charge, especially to those of us in the academy. But this is a confusing case. On the one hand, as historians familiar with the history of campaigning, we immediately think of Senator Joe Biden, who withdrew from the 1988 campaign in disgrace when the Dukakis campaign circulated a videotape of Biden stealing a biographical riff from the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. (It turns out that Biden usually did acknowledge Kinnock but that particular time lapsed – and watched his campaign implode). Like Biden, Obama should be held to a high standard because so much of his political identity rests on his rhetoric. On the other hand, as historians who assess many speeches, we know that great oratory resonates because it builds on our collective memory banks, offering original twists on familiar phrases. Moreover, as lecturers, we know that when we speak spontaneously we cannot be as scrupulous about not echoing others as we are in our writing – and Obama’s riff was spontaneous, it was not written out in his prepared remarks.

On a personal note, I was particularly intrigued by the Obama defense that, in essence, this was part of an implicit collaboration, an ongoing partnership and brainstorming with a friend. Without mentioning names so as to avoid embarrassing the reporter yet again, I was once contacted by a reporter who accused another reporter of plagiarizing my work. The alleged plagiarist mentioned me twice in his article, but then had an unattributed riff that clearly echoed my work. I emailed the accuser, saying, that given the other citations, and the fact that I had been interviewed by the reporter numerous times, and was always mentioned in the ensuing articles, I was not offended, did not consider it plagiarism, and often gave journalists more slack considering their time and space constraints. The accusing reporter then called me up and asked me, “would it be okay if one of your students did not document part of a paper?” Cornered, I admitted that no, it would be “unacceptable” if a student submitted a paper without properly attributing a paragraph that was based so clearly on someone else’s work. With that, the accuser had his “j’accuse.” He ran the story, embarrassed his colleague, and the accused reporter never interviewed me again.

According to Peter Slevin of the Washington Post, Obama dismissed the plagiarism charges. “Well, look, I was on the stump,” he said. Speaking of his friend Governor Patrick, Obama said: “He had suggested we use these lines. I thought they were good lines. I’m sure I should have. Didn’t this time.” All in all, Obama doubted “this is too big of a deal.”

In thinking this issue through, I think it is a bigger “deal” than Obama concedes. His campaign – in fact the stolen riff itself – emphasizes just how important his words are to his campaign, and words are to American politics historically. Obama missed an opportunity with his airy dismissal. He could have said, “I’m sorry, that was wrong.” In so doing, he would have distanced himself from both George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton – two of the leading American politicians least likely to apologize. In one classy moment, Obama could have proven that his rhetoric is real, that he really is the candidate of change. Instead, the usually nimble junior Senator from Illinois gave us all the same old Washington shuffle. What a pity that he chose to imitate the ways of his new hometown when trying to defend his occasional penchant for mimicry on the stump.

Posted on Monday, February 18, 2008 at 6:26 PM | Comments (5) | Top
ShareThis
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
To Revive, Hillary Needs to Learn from Nixon and Reagan

If Hillary Clinton succeeds in winning the Democratic nomination – and it is looking more and more iffy – she and the Democrats will be grateful for the harsh reality check Barack Obama has imposed on her candidacy. Let’s face it. She has been an awful candidate running a terrible campaign. You cannot win the presidency ricocheting from the insecurity reflected in her now famous tears in New Hampshire to the arrogance of Bill Clinton’s racially-polarizing barnstorming in South Carolina. In order for this Ohio-Texas firewall of hers to work, Hillary Clinton has to retool, changing her strategy, revitalizing her campaign, and redefining her message. Otherwise, she will lose. However, if she succeeds in reviving her campaign, she will be grateful that her crisis came during the primaries, making her a more effective candidate for the general election.

All campaigns ebb and flow. John McCain was lucky to bottom-out in the fall, before many voters really paid attention. The entire Clinton franchise benefited from the myth of Bill Clinton as the (self-styled) “Comeback Kid” in 1992, when he did not even win the New Hampshire primary but stayed viable as a candidate after enduring so many scandals.

Hillary Clinton seemed to think that she could float into the presidency, or certainly into the Democratic nomination. In this way, she was not only badly served by the sycophants she loves to surround herself with, but she was deprived of an opportunity to sharpen her skills during her 2006 re-election campaign. Her easy stroll to re-election in New York State made her staffers complacent and muddied her message. Rather than being forced to come up with a compelling new message and creative new strategies in a large, diverse state, she took a stately victory lap – and frittered away tens of millions of dollars along the way.

Now, she has to prove her own abilities to rebound. To do so, she should learn from two politicians she detested, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Hillary Clinton should study Nixon’s 1968 campaign. He, too, was disliked by many, with the enmity lingering from White House controversies of the previous decade. To mollify some of his critics, Nixon and his advisers launched the “New Nixon,” a softer, friendlier incarnation, promising to restore harmony to the nation.

Part of the problem Hillary Clinton faces is that Nixon’s strategy implicitly apologized for his previous harsh partisanship. But while her husband is the great bite-your-lower-lip apologizer, she is not. Like another Republican, the current president George W. Bush, she is famously unwilling to apologize, to acknowledge imperfections. To her, apologies are a form of weakness, and she genuinely feels she has nothing that requires making amends.

Americans, however, love stories of redemption – especially in campaign season. During the 1984 campaign, after stumbling in the first debate against Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan stopped his slide with one quick quip. By coming back at the President again and again in the first debate, Mondale made Reagan look old and befuddled. Reagan responded in the second debate by quipping: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Surprisingly, that comeback line helped Reagan rebound and win the election.

Hillary Clinton should launch the new Hillary by apologizing to her supporters for running such a terrible campaign. If done right, without acknowledging any previous mistakes, without opening up all the Clinton controversies from the 1990s that linger, a broad enough, sufficiently self-critical apology could acknowledge the widespread doubts about many issues, bury the past, and look toward the future.

At the same time, Hillary Clinton has to show she has internalized the criticism by running a crisper campaign with a more passionate message. Experience – especially given how spotty her record as First Lady really was – is not enough. Americans are yearning for vision, seeking inspiration, craving redemption. Hillary cannot echo Obama as the “change” candidate; he has got that market cornered. But she can pull a classic Clinton move, triangulating between Obama’s optimism and John McCain’s real national security experience. Let the new Hillary be the candidate of true American values at home and abroad, promising to restore a sense of national virtue while maintaining American security and stability.

Rather than running away from Iraq, Hillary Clinton should run toward the complicated diplomatic issues the next American president will face, and the continuing threat of Islamist terror. She represented New York during 9/11, she knows what devastation America’s enemies can bring. She can prey on fears of Obama’s inexperience by tackling the foreign policy issues America faces directly. And if she can figure out a couple of clever, defining quips along the way – that wouldn’t hurt either.

Posted on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 5:13 AM | Comments (6) | Top
ShareThis
Thursday, February 7, 2008
A Collective Act of Historical Amnesia

We seem to be suffering from a collective act of historical amnesia. All the commentators claiming that Senator Barack Obama has generated more excitement than any candidate since John F. Kennedy have overlooked the inconvenient, embarrassing, fact that a more recent candidate generated a similar buzz. In fact, given the ubiquity of this “JFK standard,” we could say that the last candidate to trigger such Kennedyesque hopes was none other than Obama’s chief rival’s spouse (could we say rival in-law): Bill Clinton.

Remember back in 1992 Clinton was the candidate of hope, who happened to be born in a little town called Hope. Coming from nowhere, a relative unknown when he started, he was carrying the torch of a new generation, generating rock-star like crowds with his special kind of charisma and his own distinctive eloquence steeped in optimism. Clinton on the campaign trail had that “It” factor that Obama has. Clinton had millions gushing that he was their John Kennedy, the first candidate in their lifetime who inspired them and empowered them.

Clinton, like Obama, also had sex appeal. I recall meeting a leading woman academic who admitted, just after the 1992 election, that she had received one of those emails bouncing around the internet identifying ten signs that you have a crush on Bill Clinton – and that she had almost all of them.

Bill Clinton’s transitions from wunderkind to senior statesman, from man of hope to perpetual adolescent, from party renegade to ultimate insider, have all obscured the jazz and optimism of 1992. President Clinton did not indulge in the same kind of inspirational politics that candidate Clinton or President Kennedy did. Of course, Hillary Clinton’s own artlessness on the campaign trail also accounts for some of the historical haze.

In fact, the contrast between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as campaigners is striking. Obama words are lyrical, his manner is fluid, the speeches rock. Compare him — even when he lost in New Hampshire — and Hillary Clinton when she won in New Hampshire. He is as smooth, as she is stiff. His words take off, soaring like colorful balloons that you want to linger over and watch until they have disappeared from view; her clipped tones and predictable words sink like the proverbial lead balloons. It is not surprising that Obama’s words have been set to music – Hillary Clinton should not expect such treatment for her earnest addresses any time soon. This kind of ease cannot be invented or replicated — you either have it or you don’t — Bill Clinton has it, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush – who had other talents — didn’t. Ronald Reagan had it. Walter Mondale, his opponent in 1984, didn’t.

And yet, the fact that so many Americans now skip over Bill Clinton and go straight to John Kennedy when rummaging through the historical attic searching for inspiring characters, offers sobering warnings to Obama and to the American people. While Franklin D. Roosevelt was correct — the presidency is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership – governing is not the same as politicking. The transition from being an inspirational candidate to a workaday president can be rough. Ronald Reagan was more successful than Bill Clinton at remaining fired up. Bill Clinton’s experience was more typical, as the complexity of governing turned him from the poet of possibility to the king of compromise.

We know Obama knows how to wow a crowd, we don’t know how he would weather the transition from shaper of dreams to maker of policies. Ironically, the somewhat embarrassing comparison between Barack Obama circa 2008 and Bill Clinton circa 1992 reinforces one of Hillary Clinton’s most compelling arguments for her own election. She keeps saying trust the record not the rhetoric. Of course, she and her campaign team would love to find a different analogy to help bolster that argument.

Posted on Thursday, February 7, 2008 at 7:16 PM | Comments (12) | Top
ShareThis

Thursday, January 31, 2008
The Giulianomaly

A few election cycles ago, reporters started to notice that voters were becoming way too self-conscious and savvy. When speaking to television reporters, more and more American citizens tended to speak in the kind of fifteen-second sound bites that actually appeared on the news. Moreover, when reporters asked about a particular candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, more and more voters tended to handicap the candidate’s chances, rather than assess the candidates’ governing abilities. All the talk about Rudy Giuliani’s failed Florida firewall and foolishness in skipping Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina reflects this unfortunate modern tendency – caused, of course, by reporters themselves – to so focus on the horserace and forget about the actual purpose of the exercise.

The relevant fact about Giuliani’s stunning fall from popular-front runner in the polls throughout most of 2007 to primary failure in 2008 is this: the more voters got to know Rudy Giuliani the less they liked him. Giuliani’s campaign suffered from exposure not inattention. At the end of the day, the questionable business deals, the Clintonesque sloppiness in family matters, the heavyhanded governing approach, all hurt Giuliani. Voters sensed, correctly, that Giuliani combined the worst traits of America’s two recent presidents. Like President Bush, Mayor Giuliani is a divider not a uniter; and like Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani’s private immorality undermines his appealing, even self-righteous, public persona. In short, in this case, campaigns did exactly what they are supposed to do – allow voters to meet candidates, assess them and reject those who are unsuitable.

In many ways, the greater anomaly that needs to be explained is Giuliani’s sustained popularity in 2007 rather than his 2008 collapse. The short answer – 9/11 — offers a warning to the Democrats and helps explain John McCain’s surge. Although Joe Biden’s classic line, that all Giuliani needs in a sentence is a noun, a verb, and 9/11, offers a clever counter to America’s current national security obsession, millions of Americans remain very concerned about terrorism. Millions seek a leader who will fight Islamist terrorism vigorously and effectively. Rudy Giuliani was popular because he has strong national security credentials but enough distance from the Bush Administration not to be defined by Bush’s failures to find Osama Bin Laden or stabilize Iraq. John McCain may be the Democrats’ worst nightmare as a candidate because he, too, is strong on defense but weak on loyalty to Bush.

Even though it was Rudy himself and not his strategy that did him in, Giuliani’s need to resort to that strategy reinforces the message that the primary process as currently constituted is ridiculous. The Iowa-New Hampshire monopoly on starting the nominating process should end. Florida’s Democratic delegates should be counted, and both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should apologize to each and every Florida Democrat for following their national party’s ridiculous rules and refusing to campaign in the nation’s fourth most populated state. Another, less flawed, candidate like Giuliani could also have been compelled to ignore the small, heavily-rural states of Iowa and New Hampshire. During the next president’s first hundred days, he – or she – should strike a commission to fix America’s electoral system. The recommendations should of course cover the voting questions that persist from the 2000 electoral deadlock and still have not been addressed adequately. But the insane hold the little states of Iowa and New Hampshire have on the world’s most powerful country and most important democracy should be lifted, so that better candidates than Rudy Giuliani do not suffer from the caprice of the electoral calendar as many believe he did.

Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 7:59 AM | Comments (2) | Top
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Are the Democrats Ready to Stop Being Clinton Enablers?

En-a-ble (transitive verb)

1. provide somebody with means : to provide somebody with the resources, authority, or opportunity to do something.

It is hard to tell which moment from the recent South Carolina primary was more dishonest. The conventional wisdom is pointing to Bill Clinton’s dastardly, underhanded, too-clever-by-half, playing of the race card to type Barack Obama as “the black candidate” rather than the surprising and refreshing alternative candidate to his wife’s overhyped, no longer-so-inevitable candidacy. The ultimate expression of Clinton’s calumny came on Saturday when the former President ever-so-innocently, and oh so graciously said: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ‘84 and ‘88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”

Nevertheless, I believe that an even more dishonest moment was the sustained shock, shock, among both the Democratic rank-and-file and the punditocracy that Bill Clinton was involved in such dastardly, underhanded, too-clever-by-half tricks. Let’s face it. The Democratic party enabled – and in fact applauded – these tactics throughout the 1990s, as long as he usually pulled them on Republicans. Anyone who has watched the Clintons in action, and especially Bill Clinton when he is in full throttle, has to recognize the patent: comments that are as brilliant as they are pathological; comments that appear to be gracious and are in fact nasty; comments that simultaneously zero in on an opponent’s weakness and yet offer up a heavy dose of truth, rooted in a cynical but accurate taking of the political temperature.

What is most disturbing about Bill Clinton’s Jesse Jackson analogy is that it just might be true. As someone who saved his presidency by playing to the American people’s baser instincts, Bill Clinton has an uncanny nose for the American gutter. Just as it was premature for the Obamaniacs to pop the champagne and expect a cakewalk after Iowa, it is premature to expect a waltz to the nomination after South Carolina. It is indeed very possible that despite all the idiocy claiming Bill Clinton was “the first black president,” the demographics of South Carolina, and the identity politics of the Democratic Party were the key factors in Obama’s victory, as hundreds of thousands of African-Americans streamed to the polls inspired by the first serious black contender for a major party nomination. Exit polls show that Obama won 78 percent of the black vote, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards split 75 percent of the white vote.

I write these words with a heavy heart because I want Obama’s poetry to be true and for Bill Clinton’s reading of the electorate to be wrong. I love the politics of possibility and of non-partisanship that Obama is evoking so effectively as opposed to the politics of cunning and calculation that Clinton is playing. Still it is unfortunate but true that you could argue pretty convincingly that Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire by mobilizing the women anxious to see the first woman president, and that Barack Obama won South Carolina by mobilizing the African-Americans anxious to see the first real black president, not some poseur taking a punchline far too seriously. (The origins of this “first black President” line came from a rant of the Nobel-prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison in the October 5, 1998 issue of The New Yorker. I remember thinking it may have been the single dumbest line I read during that festival of idiocy known as the Clinton impeachment; nearly ten years later, we see that the line was dumb and destructive because too many Clintonites took her stereotype-laden riff far too seriously).

Now, of course, the big question for the Clintons is what next? What does Hillary Clinton do in the week-and-a-half remaining that can make her the super-duper winner on Super-Duper Tuesday? For starters, as I argue in a Newsday op-ed this morning, Hillary Clinton has to remember that American voters already rejected the idea of two Clintons for the price of one, back during the 1992 election. She has to go back to doing what she did so effectively during two Senatorial campaigns and in her first term as New York’s Senator. She needs to keep Bill Clinton involved but not overly engaged, so that she can shine in the spotlight, so that she can be the one dominating the room. The 2008 Democratic presidential campaign cannot be a 1990s Clinton nostalgia tour. Hillary Clinton has to win – or lose – this campaign much more on her own than as the wife-of America’s fascinating but flawed ex-President.

Posted on Sunday, January 27, 2008 at 6:21 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Hail Reagania!

[Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN. ]

So far, it seems that the most popular politician in the 2008 presidential campaign is the late Ronald Reagan, who last ran for office 24 years ago. The Republican candidates invoke “President Reagan” far more frequently and adoringly than they mention the current incumbent, and even the Democratic Senator Barack Obama has gotten into the act. Obama recently elbowed Hillary Clinton by mocking Bill Clinton’s presidential legacy. Showing that he uses the same charming grin and upbeat cadence to deliver good news and hard body blows, the Democrats’ wonder boy observed that Ronald Reagan “changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” It seems that conservative Republicans have forgotten how often he frustrated them, and Democrats have forgotten how much they despised him.

In 1989, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan waved goodbye to the American people, few would have predicted this Reagan revival. In truth, Reagan’s poll ratings throughout the 1980s fluctuated far more than even most Americans realized at the time. And by the end of Reagan’s two terms, even though many had great affection for him, many were also fed up with Reagan’s inattention to detail, his squabbling official and real families, and the various disasters on his watch, most notably the Iran-contra scandal, the huge budget deficits, the 1987 stock market crash, and the growing epidemic of materialism and selfishness in America. Similarly, conservatives were torn between worshiping Reagan the man and grumbling about his record which was more moderate than they had hoped, having failed to end the era of big government.

Ronald Reagan’s legacy has been resurrected thanks, mostly, to his three successors: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Initially, George H.W. Bush, earned press and public acclaim by distancing himself from Reagan. Bush appeared as the real Reagan, the guy who actually was a war hero, attended church, and raised a model family, rather than simply talking about it. President Bush emphasized his longer hours and his hands-on management, triggering respectful portraits of him as a functional chief executive. As the new president’s stock climbed, the old president’s lagged.

Eventually, however, President Bush stumbled in areas where President Reagan excelled. As the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics demanded their freedom, Bush behaved cautiously, fearing that if he gloated too much he would trigger a Soviet crackdown. As a result, even though the Communist grip on Eastern Europe loosened under Bush’s watch, President Reagan earned more historical credit, for having launched the process, and shaping it with dramatic moments. Bush could not match Reagan’s June, 1987 call at the Berlin Wall to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” More broadly, Bush’s awkwardness with what he mocked as “the vision thing” made Americans pine for Reagan’s poetry. And when Bush broke his famous “read my lips, no new taxes” promise, he infuriated conservatives and undermined his standing as a man of integrity.

Bill Clinton’s presidency further boosted Reagan’s reputation. With Clinton, a Democrat, becoming the prince of peace and prosperity, finding a “Third Way,” celebrating that the “era of big government is over,” it was harder for Democrats to criticize Reagan for selfishness, materialism, or budget-cutting. Moreover, the Clinton-era boom made the Reagan-era deficits appear insignificant relative to the size of America’s economy, making Reagan’s economic decisions seem visionary. Finally, the contrast between Ronald Reagan’s old-fashioned respect for the White House – reputedly, he never removed his suit jacket when he was in the Oval Office – and Bill Clinton’s anything-goes adolescent behavior, even in the president’s inner sanctum, made Americans nostalgic for Reagan’s presence, and values.

The final step in the Reagan revival has occurred thanks to George W. Bush. Many Democrats despise this President Bush so deeply they often try to prove their enmity is not partisan by claiming they didn’t hate Reagan that intensely. Many forget the constant predictions that Reagan would outlaw abortion, restore racism, stop the feminist revolution, impoverish America, and lead the world into nuclear holocaust. Moreover, as Reagan aged so tragically, as his wife Nancy handled his Alzheimer’s disease so gracefully, the angers of the 1980s faded. By the time Reagan died in 2004, and thanks to a carefully choreographed funeral in Washington and California, conservatives remembered him as their modern-day George Washington, who launched their revolution; liberals grudgingly acknowledged, as Barack Obama did, that, as the man who was in the right place at the right time, he won the Cold War, restored America’s confidence, and became a transformational leader, unlike his immediate predecessors and successors.

While George W. Bush should not bank on watching his historical legacy rebound as quickly or as magically, the Reagan resurrection does teach essential lessons as we watch the presidential campaign. America is such a multi-dimensional country. The presidency is such an impossible job. History is such a fluid arbiter. As a result, the choices that voters make, while incredibly important and often epoch-making, are also difficult judgment calls which take years to evaluate properly or authoritatively. In fact, we historians make whatever business we do off of the continuing conversation about who accomplished what to make this nation great – or make it stumble.

Posted on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 3:58 AM | Comments (10) | Top
ShareThis
Friday, January 18, 2008
The Dems are so 20th Century, and the Republicans, so 19th Century

[Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN. ]

So far, the Democratic contest is feeling very twentieth century and the Republican contest is feeling very nineteenth century. As the Democratic contest becomes a battle of two titans, it is becoming a nationwide fight between two political stars with national constituencies. This was characteristic of some of the great nomination battles of the last half-century, be it Richard Nixon versus Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 or Walter Mondale versus Gary Hart in 1988. But the more wide-open Republican contest evokes comparisons with the fragmented nomination contests of yesteryear – only in those days the constituencies were often state or at best regional and today they are less geographically-based.

While much of the focus recently has been on race and gender in the Hillary versus Obama contest, the simple fact that the two have that iconic, Cher-like, famous-enough-to-be-known-by-one-name status, suggests that we are also talking about the politics of celebrity. Let’s face it. Despite Hillary Clinton’s claim to be the candidate of “experience” both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have pretty thin resumes. Obama is famous for being a newcomer. Neither has any real executive experience. Hillary Clinton is pretending that in the 1990s she was the co-president she hoped to be rather than the frustrated first lady that she was.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have resumes more similar to George W. Bush than to his far more experienced father, former Ambassador to China, former CIA director, former Republican National Committee Chairman, and former Vice President George H.W. Bush. Hillary Clinton became senator from a state in which she had never lived, because in the modern world, celebrity is transferable. In 2000, she showed she could apply her considerable name recognition and iconic status from the 1990s and parlay it into a New York Senate seat. Barack Obama had a more conventional march to the U.S. Senate from the State Senate, but without his rock-star-like rocketing to great fame as a result of his 2004 convention speech and his brilliant book marketing, he would be yet another workaday senator, accumulating seniority before making his big presidential play. Of course, the embarrassingly futile, failed candidacies of Senator Joe Biden and Senator Chris Dodd show just how much the modern American voter (and reporter) values Senatorial seniority – along with the resulting experience and wisdom.

So far, the three Republican victors most resemble the various regional warlords who would show up to quadrennial party conventions in the 1800s, hoping either to be the critical kingmaker or, better yet, actually be crowned the party’s temporary king. With Mike Huckabee having won the Iowa caucus, John McCain having won New Hampshire, and Mitt Romney having won Michigan, we are even hearing some analysts speculate that this year’s convention may actually be relevant for the nomination of the party’s standard bearer, rather than simply celebrating a democratic coronation. Each of the three winners represent a different dimension of the legendary, multi-dimensional Reagan coalition that has dominated the GOP – and shaped American politics – for more than a quarter century. Huckabee represents the evangelicals, McCain represents the national security types and possibly the neocons, and Romney represents the business and technocratic types. Or, to think about it in a slightly different way, if the three were auditioning for parts in a play about Ronald Reagan’s famous first-term advising triumvirate, Huckabee would play the true believer, Ed Meese; McCain would play the savvy PR guy Michael Deaver, and Romney would play the emissary to the corporate and Wall Street types, James A. Baker III. Analysts looking at the Republican side are also wondering if this wideopen field will make room for Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani as well.

Regardless of how it plays out, it seems clear that the George W. Bush years have strained the Reagan coalition. The challenge for the next nominee is either to revive that broad-based coalition or transform it, finding a new political formula that works. The Democrats have the easier and yet harder time. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are mainstream Democrats. Neither nomination would threaten Democratic business as usual. Then again, as a party that has only fielded two winning candidates since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 – Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton – maybe it is time for a more dramatic change on that side of the aisle too.

Posted on Friday, January 18, 2008 at 3:30 AM | Comments (5) | Top
ShareThis
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Obama and Edwards are Libeling HRC on MLK — and Distorting History

[Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN. ]

Not surprisingly, as the Democratic race heats up, it is getting ugly, and silly. Senator Hillary Clinton is on the defensive, accused of disrespecting Martin Luther King, Jr., on the eve of King’s birthday celebrations, and just before the heavily African-American South Carolina primary. One of Senator Barack Obama’s supporters, the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, with no explanation or accompanying quotation, accused Mrs. Clinton of “taking cheap shots at, of all people, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Senator John Edwards chimed in too, equally histrionically. No matter who we support, historians should be appalled – and should object strongly – to this distorted and demagogic charge.

On Fox News the other day, Senator Clinton said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done.” Obama’s people pounced, accusing Hillary of discounting King’s centrality to Civil Rights. Obama himself has denied his campaign fed the attacks against what he made sure to call “unfortunate” and “ill-advised” remarks. Edwards also joined the pile-on, telling more than 200 people at a predominantly black Baptist church: ”I must say I was troubled recently to see a suggestion that real change that came not through the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King but through a Washington politician…. Those who believe that real change starts with Washington politicians have been in Washington too long and are living a fairy tale.”

Predictably, as her surrogates attack Edwards and Obama for demagoguery, Senator Clinton is back-pedaling furiously. Alas, by the time Clinton finishes her damage control effort, she will probably join Obama and Edwards in distorting the truth.

In fact, Hillary Clinton gave a pithy, accurate summary of an incredibly complicated period of time. She started with Dr. King as the visionary. She acknowledged Dwight Eisenhower’s disinterest and John Kennedy’s limited impact in implementing that vision. And she credited Lyndon Johnson with his great skill in translating Civil Rights leaders’ grand aspirations into lasting – and significant – Civil Rights legislation.

Moreover, it was perfectly appropriate for a presidential candidate to draw the lesson “it took a president to get it done.” One of the president’s central tasks, especially when spurred by passionate reformers like King, is to convert the high wattage energy of the moral crusader into a more standard and less combustible current for widespread domestic consumption. Edwards’ assumption that this process puts the dreaded “Washington politician” at the start of the process rather than the end of the process, is a willful distortion. Obama’s claim that this description somehow “diminished King’s role” is an ignorant misrepresentation.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the twentieth century’s most influential Americans. Putting his accomplishments in context, suggesting he could not have done it alone, does not diminish him in any way. In fact, by placing him in the proper context, by treating his achievements accurately and proportionately, we give him the respect he – and the millions who fought for justice with him – deserve.

P.S. Whatever high mark she earned with her MLK-LBJ summary, Hillary earns a “C” in history for her remark on Sunday when speaking to black parishioners at a Presbyterian church in Columbia, S.C. She said: “Many of you in this sanctuary were born before African-Americans could vote.” Unless she was speaking to the oldest congregation in history, of people born in 1849 or earlier, she needed more subtlety in that formulation. The fifteenth amendment, ratified in 1870, gave African-Americans the vote — although it took the Voting Rights Act (thanks to LBJ again) and the Civil Rights movement (thanks to MLK and others) for this right to be enjoyed fully with minimal harassment.

Related Links

# HNN Hot Topics: Election 2008: Primaries

Posted on Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 8:49 PM | Comments (15) | Top
ShareThis

Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Artifacts: When does it help to cry in New Hampshire?

As Hillary Clinton’s tearful moment becomes historical and political legend, it is worth remembering the famous or infamous moment in the 1972 campaign, when Edmund Muskie cried – -or wiped ice and snow from his eyes — as he defended his wife’s honor. His campaign crashed after that and this supposed moment of weakness was blamed. Of course, in the intervening 36 years, it’s become far more acceptable for men to cry in our culture. Still, Hillary’s tear-stained rise and Muskie’s tear-stained fall raise fascinating questions about gender expectations, leadership models, and how much vulnerability we want to see in leaders, if they are male — or female.

Posted on Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 4:51 PM | Comments (1) | Top
ShareThis
Making Elections Real Events not Pseudo Events

Perhaps the best thing that happened in the marginal, unrepresentative Iowa caucuses was that Senator Barack Obama defied all that media speculation about Senator Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability.” Perhaps the best thing that happened in the marginal, unrepresentative New Hampshire primary was that Senator Hillary Clinton disproved all that media speculation about Senator Barack Obama’s momentum. The results for Republicans were similarly surprising, with former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee supposedly coming from “nowhere” to win in Iowa, and Senator John McCain “coming back” to win after pundits pronounced his candidacy dead. The 350,000 citizens who caucused in Iowa and the half a million or so New Hampshirites who voted in their state’s Democratic and Republican primaries reminded the pundits that even in modern America’s “mediaocracy,” the power remains with the people.

The late historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” to describe the modern media’s bizarre Alice-in-Wonderland distortions of reality. Pseudo-events are moments staged for the cameras and to shape the ensuing coverage, reducing the actual participants to props. The media gabfest about the campaign, which injects idle speculation about who’s hot and who’s not between the candidates and the citizens, is a massive sustained exercise in turning America’s most sacred democratic event into a tawdry pseudo-event.

Of course, rather than apologizing for their inaccurate predictions, reporters reward candidates for exceeding the false journalistic expectations. Thus Senators McCain and Clinton became “comeback” kids on Tuesday, having bounced back from reporters’ premature eulogizing – and pollsters’ seemingly authoritative predicting.
Thanks to the citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic race is shaping up as a clash of the titans, led by but still not yet limited to Senators Obama and Clinton. Even though she lost in Iowa, Hillary Clinton remains the beneficiary of one of the greatest modern political machines. Clintonites not only know how to win – they know how to lose, nimbly turning setbacks into opportunities for comebacks. And even though he lost in New Hampshire, Barack Obama remains a dazzling political talent, a silver-tongued, honey-smooth, hope-generating political thoroughbred. Both his Iowa victory speech and his New Hampshire concession were rhetorical gems, while Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire victory speech had a lumpy, clunky quality that suggests that she has not yet learned from her husband or her chief rival how to sweet-talk the American people.

For all the obvious political talent displayed on the Democratic side, the foreign policy experience of Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards is perilously thin. As First Lady, Hillary Clinton went on foreign trips but she rarely made policy. Claiming she has considerable foreign experience is like a bleacher bum presuming he can master center field – watching, even from up close, is not the same thing as playing. Barack Obama’s foreign policy experience – having spent part of his childhood in Indonesia – is even less impressive, akin to presuming that just because you love ice cream you know the recipe for making it taste so good.

It is disturbing how irrelevant a healthy recognition of the Islamist threat appears to be for Democrats. John Edwards, for one, went so far as to dismiss the “war on terror” as merely a slogan. Only a few short years ago, that kind of thinking would have been derided as so “September 10,” meaning buried in yesterday’s delusions. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, for all the Republican candidates’ flaws, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have at least pitched their campaigns on national security credentials and concerns.

Inevitably, the next few weeks will bring on even more idle speculation, journalistic oversimplification, and candidate confrontations. But amid all the cheesy spectacle of the American nominating campaign, the people’s input makes the whole carnival profound. Thanks to the ornery, swim-against-the-tide, expectation-defying citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire, these campaigns have become very real. With luck, the process will not only be empowering democratically but will result in a quality leader capable of meeting America’s challenges. There are no guarantees, but as Obama has shown, hopes themselves can be not just inspiring, but transforming.

Posted on Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 2:01 AM | Comments (5) | Top
ShareThis
Friday, January 4, 2008
Iowa: the snap of a starter’s pistol not the roar of a rocket launcher

[Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN. ]

The people have spoken: “Obama and Huckabee Triumph,” the headlines are blaring. Well, to be accurate, a small unrepresentative sample of the people spoke. The Iowa caucus is more like the snap of a starter’s pistol than the roar of a rocket launcher. Nevertheless, Democratic Senator Barack Obama and former Republican governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, will enjoy a boost in momentum and fund-raising, especially because reporters choose to magnify minor Iowa victories into major national statements.

Even if they win no other contests, the emergence of Obama and Huckabee shows how wide-open both party fields are. Not since 1920 have Americans experienced a campaign with neither the president nor vice-president running in any way or any time (Harry Truman initially hoped to run in 1952, Dawes was a presidential hopeful in 1928). None of the candidates worked for George W. Bush, further proving the Administration’s unpopularity — and the difficulty these days of launching a campaign for executive leadership from the executive branch (except the White House). Moreover, before his stirring debut at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, few Americans had heard of Barack Obama. Even though Mike Huckabee governed Arkansas from 1996 to 2007, he was nationally unknown until months ago, when his wisecracks started attracting attention in the televised candidate forums.

Obama’s rise, even if it proves fleeting, shows America making progress toward burying racism. Americans seem more worried that Obama is too green – inexperienced – than too black. Obama’s emergence is also the story of celebrity politics, especially because the talk show goddess Oprah Winfrey embraced Obama so enthusiastically. Obama wants to represent a national yearning for healing, appealing as a constructive centrist promising to end the Clinton-Bush baby-boom generational squabbling.

Huckabee’s rise is tied to another modern American political story, the rise of the religious right. Huckabee played to Iowa’s evangelicals, calling himself a “proven Christian leader” in some television ads. This crass appeal violated some of the delicate unspoken rules in the admittedly gray area where religion and politics overlap. Huckabee’s implicit, even more disturbing, appeal contrasts him as a true Christian, and thus a true American, with his runner-up in Iowa, Mitt Romney, a Mormon, whose candidacy has stirred some bigoted anti-Mormonism.

On the losing side, Romney and Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton may have suffered the biggest blows among the serious contenders. But both hope to rebound in New Hampshire next Tuesday. Both also now have a chance to show how they bounce back from setbacks with grit and grace. Reporters love comeback stories, as much as they love Cinderella stories, and reporters often knock down candidates to set up those comebacks

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, among others, have gone from relative obscurity to the presidency in a flash. But victory in Iowa does not guarantee the nomination. In 1980 George H.W. Bush beat Ronald Reagan in the caucuses but still lost the nomination. Iowa triumphs can launch a candidacy to the party nomination but do not guarantee general election victory, as John Kerrey learned in 2004.

So, yes, some of the people have spoken. But there is a lot more jawboning and stumping, speculating and voting, that must occur before the Democrats and Republicans nominate their respective nominees and the American people pick their next leader – 11 months from now in November 2008. All we can predict is more – more speculating, more campaigning, and, thankfully, more voting from other parts of the country.

Posted on Friday, January 4, 2008 at 1:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Fred Thompson’s Disinterest May Reflect Sanity not Laziness

When an Iowa voter recently asked him about the intensity of his motivation for running, former Republican Fred Thompson admitted “I’m not particularly interested in running for president.” This statement confirmed the media spin on Thompson as too lazy and too disengaged. But Thompson’s admission may be the sanest statement a candidate has made on the campaign trail in years.

Years ago the venerable Washington Post columnist David Broder coined “Broder’s Law,” suggesting that all those willing to endure the indignities of the campaign thereby revealed they were “too loony to be trusted with the office.” Alas, too many of Broder’s journalistic colleagues take the opposite tack, assuming that running for president like crazy is a minimum requirement for being president. As a result, in the last few presidential cycles, marginal candidates like Ron Paul and Al Sharpton have enjoyed serious media exposure – exploiting reporters’ love of an offbeat story and the absurd party policies giving long-shot candidates equal billing in the joint candidate press conferences frequently mislabeled “debates.”

Perhaps these reporters are suffering from the same sleep-deprivation and fast-food highs they impose on the candidates. It is a funny thing. On one hand, the relentless media exposure and scrutiny do prepare a candidate for life as president. On the other hand, the campaign trail’s 24/7 chaotic, dyspeptic, but intensely democratic Holiday Inn-hop – especially in the demanding, one-on-one states like Iowa and New Hampshire – represents a dramatic contrast to the coddled monarchical splendor of White House life. The modern American president lives in a palatial cocoon cut off from the realities of everyday life. The campaign trail has its own illusory reality – but cushy, it ain’t.

On a deeper level, reporters frequently confuse ambition with ability. A longstanding, deep-burning desire for office should not be a qualification for the presidency. In George Washington’s day, excessive ambition was one of the qualities Americans most feared in a politician. While we need not return to the eighteenth century’s elaborate posturing, a little perspective on life and on politics can go a long way in grounding a leader. This lack of perspective is one of the distinguishing characteristics of both Hillary and Bill Clinton – and feeds many Americans’ deep suspicions of them. In 2000, one source of George W. Bush’s appeal was his relaxed approach to the presidential quest; Al Gore appeared far too keen, far too invested and thus far too desperate. (Of course, observers of the Bush presidency can make the case that a little more zeal and perseverance would make for a more effective administrator).

Fred Thompson needs to fine-tune his message, so that his insouciance does not appear to be lazy, sloppy, or contemptuous. His role model, Ronald Reagan, aptly conveyed that sense to the American people, showing just enough perspective to carve out time for napping, without appearing dismissive of the president’s serious responsibilities. Of course, Reagan’s casual detachment drove reporters to distraction.

Then again, maybe it was jealousy. When Reagan napped, reporters stewed, waiting for a story to file before deadline. When Reagan vacationed, reporters followed, having to hustle twice as hard for a story half as interesting. Thompson’s great offense may be suggesting he will be less worried about feeding the insatiable media maw and more concerned with doing his job while preserving some measures of privacy and sanity.

Posted on Tuesday, January 1, 2008 at 4:34 AM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis

Thursday, December 27, 2007
Do Tragic Assassinations Ever Yield Unexpectedly Positive Results?

Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN.

The murder of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is an evil act that, on its face, delivers a crushing blow to the forces for democratization and enlightenment in Pakistan – and the world over. Nevertheless, her assassination raises an awful, amoral, terribly unsentimental historical question: do assassinations like this – as shocking and horrific as they are – ever produce unintended positive consequences? This question is not to justify any such crimes. But it is instructive to think about the expected and the unexpected, the predictable and the unpredictable, positive gains that sometimes result from terrible losses.

Assassinations freeze moments – and leaders – in historical time, then frequently place the martyred leader on the national, and even international pantheon of immortals.
Often, naturally, justifiably, we mourn the lost potential, we contemplate all the good the lost leader could have accomplished. We imagine Abraham Lincoln engineering a just post-Civil War Reconstruction that rehabilitated Southerners and welcomed blacks as citizens – in contrast to the hamhanded Andrew Johnson’s failures. We envisage John Kennedy managing the civil rights movement, avoiding the Vietnam War mess, and preventing any serious Sixties youth rebellion, which his successor Lyndon Johnson could not do. And we dream of the kind of warm peace Anwar Sadat would have brought to the Middle East, indulging in the fantasy that he could have moderated other leaders, including the incorrigible Yasir Arafat.

The truth is, as flesh-and-blood politicos become legendary icons they often become more powerful symbols dead than they would have been had they remained alive. John Kennedy was on track to be a rather mediocre president when Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet cut him down. And while Martin Luther King, Jr., had already proved his greatness before being murdered at the tender age of thirty-nine, he died just as the civil rights movement was hitting a particular rocky patch. King’s death in 1968 froze him as the sainted slayer of Southern segregation but insulated him from the ensuing decades’ fights over busing, affirmative action, African-American crime, and how to balance personal prerogative and the need to integrate.

Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November, 1995, made him an enduring icon of Israel’s hopes for peace – and Israel’s peace camp. He is remembered as a warm fuzzy peacemaker, rather than the gruff, Scotch-drinking warrior he was for much of his life. Who knows if he would have been able to stave off the ensuing Palestinian violence. Who knows how his reactions to that violence might have tainted his now pristine image. In fact, in elevating Rabin to a godlike status as Israel’s martyred mediator, Rabin’s murderer unwittingly gave his opponents a powerful spur for more concessions and more conciliation.

Looking at the heartbreaking images beaming out of Pakistan today, this assassination’s negative consequences are clear. Benzair Bhutto’s death all but guarantees more unrest, euphoria among her violent, Islamist opponents, and a blow to Pakistan’s already fragile democracy. Bhutto’s assassination shows how deeply the culture of violence permeates and distorts so many polities in the Islamic world. Who knows? Perhaps this act of violence will be the wake-up call Pakistanis – and Muslims throughout the world – need to demand a reformation of Islam and expel from their midst the Jihadists and that murderous medieval spirit of Jihadism which is proving so dangerous.

Posted on Thursday, December 27, 2007 at 3:14 PM | Comments (3) | Top
ShareThis
Monday, December 24, 2007
“All I Want For Christmas” – The Candidates’ Wish List

Here’s what this year’s crop of presidential candidates are hoping Santa will bring — feel free to make your own suggestions:

RUDY GIULIANI: a big bust of a terror ring the day before every primary, to resurrect the fears of 9/11 (without any real trauma) – and a marital record like Harry Truman’s (who was devotedly married to Bess, his Sunday-School sweetheart for 53 years).
MITT ROMNEY: the right incantation for exorcising Evangelical Protestants’ anti-Mormon bigotry – and John Kennedy’s skill in handling religious prejudice.
MIKE HUCKABEE: the same good luck charm propelling obscure governors into the White House that Bill Clinton found in the Arkansas governor’s mansion – and that Jimmy Carter found in the Georgia governor’s mansion.
JOHN MCCAIN: the mantle of righteous iconoclasm he wore so effectively back in 2000 – and George Washington’s manual for using military service to win the presidency.
FRED THOMPSON: those adoring summertime headlines, before he actually started running – and a political career that truly is like Ronald Reagan’s.
RON PAUL: a year-long celebration of the Boston Tea Party’s anniversary (he used the anniversary to set the record for internet fundraising) – and James Baker (Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff), who helped moderate the image of a man deemed to be an extremist.

HILLARY CLINTON: her husband’s magic potion for bewitching America’s voters – and Richard Nixon’s 1968 strategy for winning despite being so disliked.
JOHN EDWARDS: his wife’s good health. Nothing else really matters.
BARACK OBAMA: Joe Biden’s, Chris Dodd’s, or Bill Richardson’s resume – and a posthumous endorsement from Theodore Roosevelt, America’s youngest president ever.
JOE BIDEN, CHRIS DODD, and BILL RICHARDSON: a just world in which decades of governmental experience and real gravitas would make you more than just an asterisk in the presidential popularity polls.
DENNIS KUCINICH: extra-gravity shoes to keep earth-bound (even James Baker couldn’t help).
AL GORE: Mike Huckabee’s diet secrets and the good ole days when conventions deadlocked and dark horses, favorite sons, and party bosses’ choices could emerge as last minute nominees.

Posted on Monday, December 24, 2007 at 4:51 AM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis
Friday, December 21, 2007
Hillary Clinton Better Bank on Governing Ability or Electability not Likability

Apparently, Hillary Clinton is trying to prove her “likability” to Iowans or as she put it on Tuesday, “to kind of round out who I am as a person.” This latest strategic shift in the surprisingly herky-jerky Clinton campaign is further proof of an increasingly jittery “juggernaut” as the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses approach. Moreover, this strategy is doomed to fail. If Hillary Clinton is nominated, Democratic voters will be banking on her electability or governing ability not her likability.

In political terms, in the public sphere, “likability” is not the same as niceness or goodness. My guess is that if we could look into the future, scan the heavens, and get a gander at the situation at the Pearly Gates when both Clintons meet their maker, Hillary Clinton would outscore Bill Clinton as a nicer and better person. Over the decades, Hillary Clinton has cultivated a coterie of devoted friends and aides who testify to her niceness; her lifelong devotion to Methodism and perennial search for the virtuous path testifies to her goodness – or at least her ability to outscore Bill Clinton in this realm.

Bill Clinton, by contrast, like so many successful politicians, is extraordinarily selfish, self-involved, temperamental, ruthless, and amoral. He is not particularly nice or good, but he plays a pleasant person convincingly on TV. Bill, however, unlike his wife, is blessed with a magical charisma that – as Dan Rather might have said in one of his mangled frontier metaphors — could charm the skin right off of a rattlesnake. Clinton is like another great politician of his era, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was known for his affability but he was remarkably aloof. Even Reagan’s devoted wife Nancy said that emotionally he was like a “brick wall” (although Reagan lacked Clinton’s temper, sloppiness, and self-indulgence).

Hillary Clinton has never been that effective in mass producing charm or feel-good moments. In high school, she was known as “Sister Frigidaire.” At Yale Law School, observers trusted Hillary to have done the homework and be the closer at her moot court trial, while her partner and boyfriend Bill was the schmoozer. She was “tough as nails”; he was “Mr. Softee.” Similarly, in the Arkansas governor’s mansion and in the White House, she impressed people with her IQ, he seduced people with his EQ, his emotional intelligence.

During Hillary Clinton’s first few years on the national stage, she proved particularly inept when it came to practicing the black arts of mass seduction. It was not just that her husband’s extraordinary abilities in this realm dwarfed hers. In 1992 and 1993, Hillary Clinton was frequently brittle, heavy-handed, doing far more to perpetuate the stereotype of the humorless feminist than mimicking her husband, the glad-handing good ole’ boy Southern politician. It is remarkable how intensely so many people hate her – even loyal Democrats, even though so much time has passed. It is possible that no politician has alienated so many so thoroughly since Richard Nixon’s heyday.

To her credit, Hillary Clinton has learned – and matured. Having just turned sixty, she is far more settled, sobered and softer than she was as an edgy, anxious forty-five-year-old. Moreover, fifteen years in the maelstrom of national politics and amid the glare of the celebrity culture have taught her how to project that ease onto the national stage. Her tremendous fame helps, generating excitement and brouhaha befitting royalty wherever she goes. Happy to be running her own political career rather than serving her husband’s, she has been more self-assured, resolved, and charming as New York’s Senator than she ever was as First Lady. She appears less remote, impassive, unnaturally-perfect and ruthless. She laughs more frequently and more freely – but still risks falling into the forced cackle that Jon Stewart has mocked (back when the writers weren’t striking and we could enjoy politics a whole lot more by seeing it through his eyes – and through Stephen Colbert’s).

Still, for all her progress, Hillary is surrounded and upstaged by three particular maestros of mass magnetism. Bill Clinton has proven that even at a funeral for Coretta Scott King, he can play the bubbly Bubba while she remains the forbidding schoolmarm. Her rival Barack Obama is also compulsively cuddly, appearing to be every Democrat’s cute younger brother while she seems to be the stiff older sister. And the ever-sunny John Edwards is the smiley-est, seemingly happiest politician since Jimmy Carter’s ultimately deceptive 1976 smile-fest. (Sad but true: gender issues clearly play a role here in shaping public perceptions of both men and women about both men and women on the public stage).

With Democrats like that around, Hillary better do what she has done throughout her career – wow people with her brains, her work ethic, her skills. Meanwhile, she should hope that if she is the Democratic nominee, the Republicans go more with a Bob Dole or Richard Nixon type than with a Ronald Reagan replacement. In fact, Hillary Clinton has much to learn from Richard Nixon, a politician she and her peers so detested. Nixon understood that, at the end of the day, Americans know it is far more important to respect the president than to like him – or her. Hillary Clinton and her people better hope that this remains true, even amid today’s celebrity-sotted culture.

Posted on Friday, December 21, 2007 at 5:01 AM | Comments (3) | Top
ShareThis

Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Each Party has Its Own Baggage to Shed

On Monday, I said I awaited an article explaining why when Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton profess their Christian faith, they are expressing their freedom of religion, and when Republicans profess their Christian faith, they are threatening our freedom to be as religious or secular as we wish. Partisans on the right would answer by charging “liberal bias,” saying it is the same thing why when Republicans earn big money they are being greedy and that when Democrats earn big money they are doing it to put their kids through college. Partisans on the left would answer that it is true – today the historic wall separating church and state is threatened by Evangelicals on the right not liberal Protestants on the left.

This question gets to a deeper phenomenon, highlighting one of the essential dynamics in a campaign. Theodore White, the great presidential reporter, described campaigns as opportunities for Americans to weigh the past and assess the present in shaping the future. Romantics like to think of campaigns as opportunities for the best man – or woman – to win. But all too frequently, rather than choosing a candidate they like and trust, voters end up settling on who they perceive to be the lesser of two evils.

Similarly, while parties like to think that they are presenting their best and most noble faces to the electorate, frequently campaigns are about containing a party’s least attractive and extreme elements. Since 1972, Democratic candidates, especially the successful nominees, have been running away from the spectre of George McGovern’s losing “acid, amnesty and abortion” campaign. Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and even Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry worked hard to distance themselves from the charge that they rejected traditional mainstream American values. At the same time, since 1964, Republican candidates have been haunted by the ghosts of Barry Goldwater’s failing “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” campaign. In other words, to win, Democrats have to prove they are neither libertines nor wimps; Republicans have to prove they are neither totalitarians nor racists.

Two of the most successful modern politicians, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, were particularly attuned to their respective party’s baggage. Bill Clinton’s “values talk” and “Sister Souljah” moment denouncing a Rap singer as a racist, were attempts to prove that he was a New Democrat, rooted in old traditions and strong enough to stand up to the party’s special interest groups – and by analogy America’s enemies. Ronald Reagan’s Goldwaterism with a smile bled the toxins from the conservatives’ image as cranky control freaks. Reagan understood that he needed to reach out to African-Americans and other liberal constituencies that would never support him, not so much to win their votes, as to reassure moderates of his own centrism and reasonableness.

Especially after all the Culture Wars of the last few years, Republicans have to disprove Kevin Phillips’ overheated but best-selling charge that George W. Bush has brought about an “American Theocracy.” As Republicans reach out to the religious right, they need to reassure the less religious – or less militantly religious – center. When Democrats like Obama and Clinton profess their faith, however, few worry that they will create an American Theocracy, but many are reassured that a Democratic victory will not vanquish what’s left of the traditional American consensus. So, yes, Theodore White was partially right. On Election Day, Americans do weigh their hopes and dreams; but they also seek to manage their fears and nightmares, from the left and the right.

Posted on Wednesday, December 19, 2007 at 7:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis
Monday, December 17, 2007
Reporting about Rumors is Tricky but Legit

The New York Times today reports on a journalistic brouhaha regarding a front-page Washington Post article from November 29, 2007, entitled: “Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.” Claiming that the Post piece spread and legitimated the false rumors, the Columbia Journalism Review called the Post article “the single worst campaign ‘08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle.” But the criticism of the original article strikes me as unreasonable – and the Times article itself shows that the Washington Post article was fair and within acceptable boundaries.

The major objections to the article pivoted on the classic problem that simply refuting rumors perpetuates them, immortalized in the old Borscht Belt routine that “no, your honor, I did not beat my wife.” As I read the article, the meaning of the word “rumors” – placed in the headline and repeated in the text — makes it clear that this article is about false allegations the campaign is having difficulty shaking. Moreover, Senator Barack Obama’s membership in the “United Church of Christ in Chicago,” is mentioned in the second paragraph, and the reporter then writes (in an unacceptably long sentence, that DID need editing): “Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a “Muslim plant” in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.”

The argument about the article intensified – and attracted the New York Times’ attention – when a 53-year-old Boston University journalism professor, Chris Daly, attacked the Washington Post’s editors for assigning an important “Page 1 presidential campaign piece” to a 27-year-old, Perry Bacon, Jr. The Times article appeared in the business section under the headline: “At Web Site for Journalists, Criticism of a Campaign Article Becomes a Melee.” The bulk of the article focused on the media big wigs who slugged it out over Daly’s personal attack on Bacon’s age.

In other words, the New York Times reported on the fallout of the article, rather than assessing the article itself or the rumors themselves. In fact, while the Times-on-line provided links to pages with the Washington Post Company’s stock information, and Senator Obama’s biographical sketch, it failed to provide links to the original Washington Post article or any of the blog posts criticizing the article. This abundance of irrelevant information gives a modern illusion of interactivity with very little enlightenment resulting.

Presidential campaigns are about controversies, rumors, perceptions. One crucial test of a campaign is its skill in deflecting the inevitable attacks on character that arise. In 1828, Andrew Jackson was convinced that allegations – which had some legitimacy — that his wife Rachel had married him before divorcing her first husband led to her premature death. Jackson’s supporters countercharged with the false claims that John Quincy Adams pimped for the Czar. More recently, in 1992 Bill Clinton showed great virtuosity in treating fact-based allegations questioning his virtue as merely vicious rumors while George W. Bush spent a lot of time in 2000 artfully dodging questions about whether or not he used drugs before he found God.

I, too, have heard many people darkly whispering about Obama’s quite marginal Muslim past. Having read his autobiography I know that he went to a public school in Indonesia and has been an active member of his Christian church for years. I have corrected the rumor-mongers but have wondered what kind of impact these rumors are having on Obama’s candidacy. The Washington Post piece showed how widespread the phenomenon was, trusting readers to understand the meaning of such basic words as “rumors” and “denials.”

The Washington Post was justified in printing the story. And while the New York Times story was lots of fun to read for its gossip value, as a loyal Times reader who depends on the self-appointed “newspaper of record” to keep me and others informed, I wondered why it took two weeks for me to hear about this controversy, and why the Times has not explored the more serious question about what kind of an impact these false rumors against this good Christian have had. At the same time, I am also waiting for an article explaining why when Democrats profess their Christian faith, they are expressing their freedom of religion, and when Republicans profess their Christian faith, they are threatening our freedom to be as religious or secular as we wish…

Posted on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 7:29 AM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis

Friday, December 14, 2007
Huckabee’s Bigotry

You don’t need a Ph.D. in American history to realize that freedom OF religion does not just mandate a government with freedom FROM established religion but also fosters freedom FOR religions. Roger Williams and his fellow Puritan fanatics certainly understood the dangers of mixing church and state – and wanted to protect their church from any state meddling. These seeds of freedom scattered throughout America’s land mass have resulted in one of America’s glories – the flourishing of all kinds of ideologies as well as the flowering of individuals with diverse worldviews.

Alas, amid the lush fields of freedom-nourished thoughts, poisonous bigotry has also festered. A definitive religious history of the United States and a definitive intellectual history would also require a definitive history of American intolerance, theologically and intellectually. True, European intolerance, let alone Asian, African, and South American intolerance, has often been more virulent, systematic, brutal, and lethal. Still, Americans need to stand guard, making sure that the noxious fumes of bigotry do not pollute our free, diverse atmosphere.

So far, Mike Huckabee is not only failing to be suitably vigilant on this score, he risks poisoning the 2008 campaign by stirring the already too-powerful undercurrents of anti-Mormonism shaping the Republican debate. Huckabee was already playing with fire with his heavy-handed appeal as a “Christian Leader” – a term used to describe him in his television commercials until just days ago. All of a sudden, he’s a “Proven Leader.” But Huckabee crossed the line in his already-infamous New York Times Magazine interview to be published this Sunday. Huckabee asked the reporter Zev Chafets during an interview: ‘‘Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’’

Huckabee’s morning-TV show apology – and private apology to Mitt Romney – are not sufficient. Huckabee has to make it clear that he is not running for America’s pastor in chief – and that he understands the distinction between his roles as preacher and political leader. Moreover, those Mormons who in Utah and environs tend to blur church and state may now understand why distant from the state protects the church, by creating barriers against bigotry and irrelevant religious tests. Defenses of freedom of religion should not only be coming from Romney and his camp. Huckabee’s provincial and small-minded appeals should trigger a wave of disgust and denunciations.

And as we exorcise these demons from our midst, let us also pat ourselves on the collective backs. Less than half a century ago, John Kennedy’s Catholicism played a major role in his candidacy. Today, the fact that Rudy Giuliani, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Bill Richardson are Catholic is not just irrelevant it is barely noticed by most voters and commentators. Let us not forget that if politicians had to be pious to be elected president, none of the great leaders whose faces are carved into Mount Rushmore would have even made it into office.

Posted on Friday, December 14, 2007 at 4:29 AM | Comments (5) | Top

Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The “Margarine” Republicans of 2008

So far, the 2008 election campaign has produced contrasting dynamics on the Republican and Democratic sides. Many of the leading Republicans are “margarine” Republicans. The term comes from Josef Stalin’s contemptuous characterization of Mao as a “margarine Communist,” because to Stalin and others with agrarian sensibilities, “margarine” was fake, butter was real. Much of the debate has centered on “just who is the most authentic Republican?” By contrast, even many Democratic candidates who have barely registered in the polls are bona fide “red-meat” partisans. Few question the loyalty of Senator Chris Dodd or Senator Joe Biden or Governor Bill Richardson. All are party stalwarts despite their failure to gain traction in the race so far.

The Margarine Republicans include: Rudy Giuliani, whose positions on abortion and gay rights are far to the party’s left; Mitt Romney, whose Mormonism, unfortunately, makes him suspect in the eyes of too many evangelicals, and who also took unconventional stands as governor of what is sometimes called “The People’s Republic of Massachusetts”; and John McCain, who built a national reputation on his iconoclasm. Fred Thompson’s pre-September surge and Mike Huckabee’s recent popularity reflect Republicans’ search for a candidate they perceive as more authentic.

This question of party suitability and loyalty is an old one. Before the Civil War, a “doughface” was someone who twisted his words on the slavery issue depending on whether he was facing north or south. In 1896, the New York Democratic Party boss David Hill expressed his discomfort with the nominee William Jennings Bryan by saying “I am a Democrat still, very still.”

The contrasting stances of the candidates vis a vis their parties reflect the parties’ relative strengths going into the campaign. The Democrats are feeling confident while Republicans are reeling from the 2006 midterm election losses and from George W. Bush’s continuing unpopularity. Even as the candidates insist on their support of Bush and the broader Reagan Revolution agenda, most try to avoid cozying up too close to Bush. Many fear that the Republicans are out of synch with the nation on many social questions.

Predictions at this stage are poppycock. But while Republicans have to worry about the weaknesses all this iconoclasm reveals, it could redound to their benefit. Despite what Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd preached in 2004, elections are won in the center. Given the backlash against George W. Bush’s partisanship, a Margarine Republican may be the best chance Republicans have to continue dining in the White House Mess with the presidential seal carved into the very real and very rich butter balls.

Posted on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 6:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Mitt Romney is Following in Al Smith’s Footsteps, not just JFK’s

Mitt Romney’s speech in Texas about religion and politics resurrected the ghost of John Kennedy, and his historic appearance in Houston during the 1960 campaign. But few have mentioned that Kennedy was following in the footsteps of Governor Alfred E. Smith. Smith was a Catholic who confronted the religious prejudices of his day when vying for the presidency during the 1928 campaign.

In the April 1927 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, a prominent lawyer named Charles Marshall wrote an open letter to Governor Smith, doubting a good Catholic’s ability to serve the American people independently and honorably as president.

Al Smith, who loved to speak in the “dese, dem, dose,” argot of New York’s Bowery, but was an intelligent, and surprisingly refined individual, responded in the May issue. Smith’s response was unequivocal and memorable, saying: “I should be a poor American and a poor Catholic alike if I injected religious discussion into a political campaign.” Addressing Marshall “not as a candidate for any public office but as an American citizen, honored with high elective office, meeting a challenge to his patriotism and his intellectual integrity,” Smith insisted there was no conflict between being a good Catholic and a good American.

John Kennedy was less hobbled by the religion issue than Al Smith was, because for all Smith’s eloquence and alleged refinement, his political persona struck so many Americans as foreign. Governor Smith was too brassy, too Bowery, too much the immigrant New Yorker for many. Proving that Culture Wars in America are not new, the great American journalist William Allen White thundered: “The whole Puritan civilization which has built a sturdy, orderly nation is threatened by Smith.” The evangelist Bill Sunday denounced Smith’s male supporters as “damnable whiskey politicians, bootleggers, crooks, pimps, and businessmen,” and his female supporters as “streetwalkers.”

Like Kennedy, Mitt Romney comes across as all-American rather than as foreign or fanatic. If anything, whereas Al Smith oozed authenticity, Romney like Kennedy before him occasionally appears a bit too artificial, too programmed. Romney’s campaign should rise or fall on half a dozen other factors than his Mormonism. Romney’s courage and eloquence – like Kennedy’s and Smith’s – on this issue was admirable and a welcome contribution to the continuing American debate about religion and state, and the continuing American quest for a campaign and a country free of bigotry.

Posted on Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top
ShareThis
Friday, December 7, 2007
Historians as a Group Should Not Endorse Candidates

Recently, more than 70 historians proclaimed their support for Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy under the banner headline: Historians for Obama. It triggered the predictable response: both A Historian Against Obama, then Academics for Ron Paul. Let’s put aside the question of whether it should be “a historian” or “an historian.” Although I have tremendous respect for many of the historians who signed the endorsement letter, I do not think that historians as a group should endorse candidates. Uniting on the basis of our professional expertise implies that somehow through applying the rigorous skills of our discipline it is obvious who should be the next president.

I am no shrinking violet and have taken many stands on public issues in newspapers. However, I try to keep my political activism out of the classroom – and out of my historical monographs. Taking a strong stand as an historian, with other historians, would breach the already admittedly shaky and permeable wall I’ve built between my scholarship and my activism.

I think there is great merit in trying to keep the mantle of objectivity as both a teacher and a scholar – if not as a citizen. To help stimulate what I think is a necessary and long overdue discussion about this question – on different terms than is usually debated – let’s think about journalists. Let’s start by admitting (without probing deeply “why” for now) most academics’ (unfairly) condescending attitudes toward reporters. If they are the ones who, as the cliché goes, write history’s first draft, we are the ones who supposedly write the more authoritative, objective version.

And yet, academics, especially these days, feel empowered to be political inside and outside the classroom – often with few internal or external constraints – while our most respected journalists follow careful “conflict of interest” guidelines. In 1989, when reporters from the New York Times and Washington Post participated in a pro-choice march, editors at both papers criticized them. More recently, when one of those reporters, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, who covers the Supreme Court, gave a partisan speech at Harvard University it triggered another controversy.
The NPR story covering that speech quoted the first public editor – or in-house journalism critic – of the New York Times, Daniel Okrent, who reportedly was amazed by Greenhouse’s speech, saying: “It’s been a basic tenet of journalism … that the reporter’s ideology [has] to be suppressed and submerged, so the reader has absolute confidence that what he or she is reading is not colored by previous views.” Don’t our students – and readers — deserve what newspaper readers deserve? Isn’t there value in trying to control ourselves, and not turn our professorial podiums into political platforms? At what point does blurring the line between scholarship and advocacy risk becoming educational and professional malpractice?

I pose these as questions because I acknowledge my own inconsistencies here. I remember as an undergraduate how exciting it was to hear Professor Archibald Cox lecture about Supreme Court cases he argued originally as Solicitor General or watching professors work on campaigns, advise presidents, or take public stands. But I also respected professors who kept their opinions to themselves, and kept their partisan politics out of their professional scholarship.

I am not critical of individual historians who plunge into the public arena – I struggle with the question of how intellectuals stay relevant and make a broader contribution. But I draw the line on these kinds of group statements in speculative political matters – just as I try to draw a line between my identity as an op-ed writer my students might read in the morning and as their professor whose hopefully far less political and polemical lecture they will attend in the afternoon.

Related Links

# HNN Hot Topics: Historians and the 2008 Election

Posted on Friday, December 7, 2007 at 11:21 AM | Comments (40) | Top
ShareThis

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Stop The New Hampshire/Iowa Monopoly

History teaches that the world we know had to be invented. No matter how natural today’s realities or yesterday’s stories appear to be, specific historical forces produced them. Americans often reveal the charming yet frustrating tendency to forget the contingent, random, nature of so much of our democracy. Many fundamental rituals which we now see as sacred are actually political improvisations – and some of them are quite new.

Party hacks should remember this lesson as they deprive party members in Michigan, Florida and other states of their democratic rights to select the presidential nominees. On Saturday, the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee punished Michigan Democrats for holding their party primaries on January 29 by stripping Michigan of all its 128 delegates and 28 superdelegates. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have imposed similar penalties on Florida for planning a January 14 primary.

These strong-arm, dictatorial tactics are mostly intended to protect the early voting and caucusing prerogatives of New Hampshire and Iowa. For more than two decades, the non-representative voters of these two states have had a disproportional impact on choosing the nominee. It’s become a big business in those states. Their state leaders squeal like pigs at the Iowa fair – and shriek like a rookie skier mistakenly whizzing down a double diamond in New Hampshire’s White Mountains – any time another state hones in on their turf. But the truth is that the voters of major states like Michigan, Florida, and California have long been rendered irrelevant in the nominating process by arbitrary scheduling quirks.

To see just how absurd this whole thing is – the origins of the early Iowa caucus have to do with a broken down mimeograph machine (kids, ask mom and dad – or maybe gramps and gramma what these things are). Back in 1972, when pc neither meant “personal computer” nor “Politically Correct,” a broken-down offset printing press forced Iowa Democrats to hold their precinct caucuses in January. The early date would give them enough time to duplicate and distribute the results during the various rounds of voting the caucus required. This arrangement made their vote the first in the nation.

Four years later, Iowans promoted their early caucuses to candidates and journalists. “I knew each wanted to be where the other was,” the Democratic state chairman, Tom Whitney, would recall, identifying the symbiotic relationship between candidates and the media.

One candidate who took advantage was Jimmy Carter. Carter worked Iowa intensely – and his slate of delegates received more than twice the votes of any other candidate’s. Moreover, Carter did “Better Than Expected.” Even though this procedure was merely the first step of many in choosing 47 of 3,008 delegates for the 1976 Democratic convention, reporters were looking for a winner – and found Jimmy Carter. [For formal sourcing of this story, check out Gil Troy, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate, revised ed., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 234]

A logical system would push off Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, Michigan and the rest of them for a few more months. But if New Hampshire and Iowa have the right to start in January, other, more, larger, and more representative states should be allowed to as well – and citizens in those states should not be penalized for wanting to have some input in this important and complicated choice, especially this year.

Posted on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 4:54 AM | Comments (1) | Top
ShareThis
Monday, December 3, 2007
Why Historians Can Help Campaign Coverage… Even Though This Political Reporter Apologized — He Got His History Wrong

On November 25, the New York Times published an op-ed written by Mark Halperin, a leading political journalist now at Time magazine. Entitled “How ‘What It Takes’ Took Me Off Course,” Halperin blamed Richard Ben Cramer’s 1992 book about the 1988 campaign, What It Takes: The Way to the White House for teaching him – and a whole generation of reporters — to assume that great campaigners make great presidents. Halperin wrote: “The book’s thesis — that prospective presidents are best evaluated by their ability to survive the grueling quadrennial coast-to-coast test of endurance required to win the office — has shaped the universe of political coverage.” Now, Halperin says, he has seen the light: “The ‘campaigner equals leader’ formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.”

Cramer may have influenced Halperin. Still, Halperin reflects an all too typical, Clintonesque narcissism in conflating autobiography with history. The granddaddy of all “horse-race” reporters was Theodore H. White. White’s The Making of the President 1960 offered insider’s coverage of the battle between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. It is the most important book that shaped political coverage over the last half-century – and its influence was reinforced by White’s succeeding volumes covering 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976. By the time Cramer came along, reporters were already addicted to character studies, minor biographical details that could be magnified, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, insignificant gaffes that could be made into scandals, perpetual polls, and, most annoying of all, the tendency to try reporting what happened before it actually occurred.

Theodore White always provided deep historical perspective and incisive social commentary while producing masterpieces of reportage. Were he alive today, what he spawned probably would appall him, even though he would acknowledge the great skill of Cramer, Halperin and many of the reporters who perpetuate today’s many journalistic sins on the campaign trail. White would be particularly dismayed by the short historical memory Halperin and so many of his peers display.

The first voting in caucuses and primaries is a month away. We historians have an important role to play as America votes. The point is not to pretend that historians have a clearer crystal ball than reporters, or voters themselves. Rather, we can help offer context, comparisons, points of reference. This blog will try to help us look forward by looking backward, seeing how they ran in the past as a way of better understanding why they run as they do today – and what we can learn about this fascinating, frustrating, democratic marathon that has been going on for months already – but now is going to start making history.

Posted on Monday, December 3, 2007 at 2:25 PM | Comments (3) | Top
ShareThis