Not a Big Truck

Saw this on the Daily Dish today.

“Look, I owe the American people an apology. If I had beaten the old man you’d’ve never heard of the kid and you wouldn’t be in this mess. So it’s all my fault and I feel that very, very strongly,” - Michael Dukakis

The speculative chatter about whom McCain and Obama will pick as their vice presidential running mates has reached a fever pitch in recent days, as McCain has announced the date (August 29) on which he will reveal his selection, and the Obama campaign is running out of time to announce their pick before the Democratic convention begins.  The political sphere is especially focused on guessing who Obama’s pick will be, since he will have to announce his first.  Will it be Biden?  Kaine?  Bayh?  Sebelius?  Reed?  Someone else?

Though engaging in such speculation is fun — I certainly have done my share — it is mostly a waste of time.  Not just because knowing what is going on inside the candidates’ minds is impossible (think of the VP choices just in recent years who have been dark horses, for example, Cheney and Lieberman), but also because the eventual selection of a vice presidential candidate simply isn’t likely to have much of an impact on the election.

For one, the conventional wisdom that a VP pick can deliver certain states or geographic areas in the general election is, these days, questionable at best.  In the past, when the U.S. was more divided along regional lines, this was more true.  John Kennedy’s pick of Lyndon Johnson in 1960 is a classic example of this; LBJ brought most of the South with him to the Democratic ticket.

But regional consciousness has declined significantly since then.  Going from Mississippi to New York in 2008 is a far cry from what it must have been like to go from Mississippi to New York in 1958.  Differences between distant parts of the country simply aren’t as great as they used to be.  The South has urbanized and industrialized.  The Southwest has experienced a population explosion.  Heck, Microsoft has a huge facility in Fargo, North Dakota.  Suburbia with its big box stores and chain restaurants seems about the same whether it is in Nashville or Pittsburgh or Phoenix.  Amazon.com and UPS have brought many of the benefits of urban life — unlimited books, niche food products, you name it — to tiny towns in Wyoming.  Communication and social networking with people in far-flung locales is inexpensive and easy, thanks to the Internet.  Air travel, even with current high fuel prices, is cheaper than it has ever been and Americans travel more and more.

In her August 15 column called “The End of Placeness,” Peggy Noonan suggests that McCain and Obama themselves are representative of this “flattening” trend of recent decades.

OK, quick, close your eyes. Where is Barack Obama from?

He’s from Young. He’s from the town of Smooth in the state of Well Educated. He’s from TV.

John McCain? He’s from Military. He’s from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt state.

Chicago? That’s where Mr. Obama wound up. Modern but Midwestern: a perfect place to begin what might become a national career. Arizona? That’s where Mr. McCain settled, a perfect place from which to launch a more or less conservative career in the 1980s.

Neither man has or gives a strong sense of place in the sense that American politicians almost always have, since Mr. Jefferson of Virginia, and Abe Lincoln of Illinois, and FDR of New York, and JFK of Massachusetts.

“Placeness” just doesn’t exist the way it used to.  The urban-rural divide is far more significant these days than the divisions between New England, Midwest, Deep South, Pacific Northwest, etc.  In light of this trend, picking a VP in order to deliver certain states or geographic regions just doesn’t make sense the way it once did.  Consider recent VP nominees: Cheney from Wyoming, Edwards from North Carolina, Lieberman from Connecticut, Jack Kemp from New York, Al Gore from Tennessee.  None of those men, with the possible exception of Gore, was chosen because he would deliver a state to the party ticket.

Another way in which the choice of a running mate is supposedly important is that it can assuage voters’ concerns about the presidential nominee, on the grounds of either cultural differences or experience.  A nominee relatively inexperienced in, say, foreign affairs might want to choose a running mate with plenty of experience in foreign affairs to “balance” the ticket.  This is a plausible argument in the case of the 2000 election, when George W. Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney seemed to reassure a lot of people that Bush, though he might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, was going to surround himself with competent people as president and would have a managerial type of presidency.

In most other cases I don’t think the idea of trying to balance the ticket works.  Gore won himself a few old Jewish voters in Florida by picking Lieberman, but picking Lieberman did not help Gore make himself seem less wooden, which more than anything else (except perhaps for his decision to run apart from Bill Clinton rather than on the Clinton record) cost him the election.  (Well, if you say that he actually lost, which he didn’t, but that’s another story.)  Jack Kemp’s knowledge of economic issues didn’t help Dole pull off an upset against Clinton in 1996 in the midst of a strong economy.  John Kerry in 2004 didn’t win himself very many votes from cultural conservatives by picking the affable, sweet-talking country boy John Edwards as his running mate.

And let’s take the current election, where the popular idea is that Obama needs someone with foreign policy credentials and McCain needs a wizard on the economy.  I wouldn’t say that that would be a bad thing in either case, but I also can’t imagine someone who says, “Gee, I don’t trust Barack Obama with foreign affairs and national security” taking a look at his vice presidential choice — perhaps someone like Biden or Reed — and then deciding, well, okay, I trust him now.

In reality, it’s even pretty hard to screw up the ticket by making a bad vice presidential choice.  Assuming the VP pick doesn’t have any skeletons in the closet — a la Thomas Eagleton in ‘72 having received electroshock therapy — nobody really cares so much about who the VP is that they will cast their votes on that basis.  I mean, Dan Quayle in ‘88?  Dan Quayle???  And George H.W. Bush still won that election.

So, enough already with the VP chatter!  It just isn’t that important.

In a future post I will write about what I think is the most important factor in determining the outcome of the election in November.

I’ve had this post percolating in my head for quite some time, so I’m excited that this blog gives me the opportunity to pour it out. I watched HBO’s new movie Recount several weeks back and thought that it was pretty good. I was surprised at how certain characters portrayed in the film came out badly, especially Warren Christopher. (He comes off particularly poorly for not wanting to fight for a recount from day one.) I guess I should clarify at this point that this post is not about me griping over the outcome in Bush v. Gore or the fact that Gore lost the election - I’ve “gotten over it,” so to speak. What I was most interested in was the odd situation of viewing Recount as an isolated history while still knowing the subsequent events that happen after that history ends. Embedded within this “but that’s not how the story ends!” mindset is an implicit argument on the part of the director (and even more so on the part of HBO).

I’m not spoiling it for you by telling you that Recount ends with Gore’s concession speech and Bush’s victory speech. The film does an excellent job of pairing the two speeches side by side. The two speeches sound nearly identical, as they share the same thesis: the 2000 election was not a crisis, but a triumph. Violence did not erupt. The government did not collapse. The dispute which did exist, though extremely tense at times, was resolved through civil processes. Both candidates were particularly effusive over the notion that the 2000 election demonstrated the strength of our electoral system: we had just survived an election that might have done in the democratic process of other countries. In the spirit of this triumph, the candidates pledge to come together in government for the good of the country.

I couldn’t help but connect this with my favorite play, Shakespeare’s Henry V, which finishes on a similar note. In that play, the ending is likewise triumphant: Henry has managed to complete the goal of the English kings who preceded him by uniting the crowns of England and France in a single person, while in the process demonstrating that he is a great and wise warrior-king. It’s at this point, though, that the chorus enters to tell us that Henry dies extremely young, whereupon the regents who rule in his son’s stead undo all that he achieved for England. To my reading, Henry V’s kingship represented a period of great (and unrealized) potential.

Which brings me back to Recount. In a similar fashion, a peaceful solution to the 2000 election represented a moment of similar great potential (and a great success for the rule of law). This moment of triumph is marred for the viewer, however, because the viewer knows what happens after the story ends. Triumph turns to tragedy: Bush becomes President, and things go downhill from there. So far as Recount is concerned, the argument is entirely implicit and relies on the viewer to make the connection between the film and what comes next, historically. HBO, however, made the argument more explicit. Immediately following Recount, at least for the showing I watched, HBO broadcast James Gandolfini’s documentary Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, which consisted of conversations between Gandolfini and injured Iraq war veterans. (I should mention that this documentary was fantastic as well.)

(One wonders what Gandolfini and the veterans he interviews would have to say about this.)

Here, HBO is making a connection between the end of Recount and what comes next for the viewer. It strikes me that they’re saying “Yes, we survived this Constitutional crisis, but to what end?”

This is tough stuff.

For all the talk of the groundbreaking nature, particularly on the Democratic side, of this year’s presidential election, the parallels between the two major candidates and our two most recent presidents are striking.

Let’s look briefly at Bill Clinton.  Coming from a humble upbringing, he is a brilliant intellect who achieved great academic success (Georgetown, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Yale Law).  His extraordinary ambition spurred him to take a lifelong calculated path towards the presidency, starting perhaps when he met JFK as a high schooler at Boys Nation.  His gift for public speaking and getting people to feel a connection to him is legendary.

And Clinton showed himself to be willing to compromise almost anything for the furtherance of his political career, especially when the White House was at stake.  Think of his return to Arkansas in the ‘92 campaign to oversee the execution of the mentally disabled convicted murderer Ricky Ray Rector.  Then there’s his famous strategy of “triangulation” especially after the Democrats’ debacle in the ‘94 midterm elections.  Clinton gutted the welfare system and declared that “the era of big government is over” on the way to solidifying the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Barack Obama?  Also a modest upbringing, raised by a single mom and grandparents.  Also a stellar academic career (Columbia, Harvard Law, president of the Harvard Law Review, teaching post at Chicago).  Like Clinton, a public speaker of almost unrivaled caliber — though he probably lacks Clinton’s capacity for projecting empathy.  And by most accounts, Obama also has pursued a carefully orchestrated path towards the presidency.  Even aside from his notorious elementary school essay about wanting to be president, which HRC attempted to make an issue in her campaign, he has clearly had his eye on the upper echelons of American politics for ages.  Fifteen years ago, he told his brother-in-law Craig Robinson that he was interested in running for U.S. Senate and maybe for president.  A recent article in the NYT pointed out the extent to which Obama was careful to hide his true political feelings while teaching at Chicago Law and how he did not leave any kind of potentially incriminating paper trail — he has no academic articles to his name.

Most importantly, I think it is likely that Obama will turn out to be just as politically ruthless and willing to sacrifice anything for political success as Clinton was.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy and will vote for him, but I think he has shown hints of this tendency already.  Look at the ridiculous tacking to the right he did as soon as he had the nomination sewn up.  I mean, supporting the death penalty for rapists of children?  That’s a terrible crime for sure, but what is this, the 19th century?  So much for Obama being a true liberal lion.  Let’s be honest, we really don’t know what the guy’s principles are.  He takes a lot of credit for opposing the Iraq war from the start, but it is also true that back in 2002 he was in a congressional primary race against Bobby Rush in a very liberal district.  Sure, he is a smart guy and articulated his position in a wise and sophisticated way in his speech back then — but he had nothing to lose and much to gain by taking that position in the first place.  Obama’s national career has been made, above all else, by one man: George W. Bush.  Obama has sold himself very effectively as breaking from the Bush era in almost every respect.

Now for part two: a comparison of George W. Bush and John McCain.

Let’s make this one a faster run-through.  GWB: scion of privilege with weak academic credentials who got into a top-notch school (Yale) only because of family connections.  Same story for McCain, who was able to attend the Naval Academy because his father and grandfather were admirals.  McCain, like Bush, was a jock and prankster type and he graduated almost at the bottom of his class at Annapolis.  Neither man is talented as a public speaker.  For both men, one of their biggest selling points is their congeniality: to many Americans they seem like the kind of guys you’d like to have a beer with.  I’d also argue that both men tend to get a pass on their mistakes and weak points because of their supposed likability, but perhaps that is only my liberal sensibility showing through.

Another key point of similarity can be seen in the kind of campaign McCain is running this year compared to the Bush 2000 campaign.  McCain is running in large part on his national reputation, deserved or not, of being a maverick and a moderate on many issues.  Bush in 2000 — but not 2004 — did the same thing.  He ran on his credentials as a moderate governor of Texas who consistently reached across the aisle to work with Democrats in the legislature.  What happened when Bush got to the White House was, of course, that that “compassionate conservative” approach to governing was tossed out the window.  Republicans since then have adopted a fifty-percent-plus-one approach to campaigning and governing — an approach aided in large part by fears stoked in the wake of 9/11.  I expect McCain to have a similar approach to governing if he gets to the White House.  He has tacked to the right since losing to GWB in the GOP primary in 2000; he has voted for Bush’s agenda 95% of the time and he knows he needs the GOP base to get into office and get things done.

This has been a downer of a post for me to write, because I would like to have reached different conclusions.  I think our country right now needs someone different not only from Bush, about whom you can make a convincing argument that he is the worst president ever, but from Clinton, who my liberal dad likes to say is the best conservative president we ever had.  I am afraid that whether the next president is McCain or Obama, we may not ultimately get as much change as we need.