Will Hannibal the Cannibal eat Hollywood?
BY NIKKI FINKE
(06/04/99)
“Hannibal” synopsis
BY NIKKI FINKE
(06/04/99)
While I am gleefully fascinated by the politicking behind the “Hannibal”
film, and enjoyed much of Nikki Finke’s article, in the future I
recommend Salon indicate approaching narrative “spoilers.” To summarize Harris’ entire plot in the
penultimate paragraph was an unnecessary and bone-headed move, and one
that bushwhacked me, at least. Despite my sick interest in this probable
train wreck of a movie, even I am more interested in reading the book
than listening to industry gossip. Or I was, anyway.
– Pat Harrigan
Minneapolis
As much fun as it is to take a peek behind the scenes of a potentially hot Hollywood property, let us not forget that this is also a novel that the author spent a decade working on, and I feel rather certain Harris would prefer readers get a chance to actually read the fruits of his labor. Revealing the story line to a novel in such detail strikes me as incredibly rude and disrespectful of a writer’s efforts, and a particularly odd and nasty thing for a writer — Finke — to do to another writer. This is not “news.” The public doesn’t have a “right to know,” and if they want to, they should be encouraged to read the actual book.
– Craig Spector
Printing the plot of Thomas Harris’ new book was a
wonderful public service, allowing me to save money by not purchasing
it. This is not literature, but a giant “what’s grosser than gross”-fest — behavior that most people give up at 13 years of age. Apparently, the movie moguls and the book
publishers don’t realize that Harris is most likely messing with their
heads and mocking them by writing the book with a “Let’s see how
revolting this story can get and still get me paid millions for it” mentality.
I’m really sick of uselessly violent movies being shoved down the public’s throat for the sake of
sheer, unadulterated greed. Too many producers and studio heads deny
responsibility for mindless, violent or otherwise irresponsible
productions with, “We just give the public what they want.” I trust
there will be a portion of the public that is not going to want “Hannibal” in any form.
– I. Moya
San Francisco
New York stakes
BY JOE CONASON
(06/01/99)
Joe Conason’s article applies good,
level-headed thinking to a very exciting proposition — a current,
popular first lady reshaping her political relevancy into a
citizen-authorized institution. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “potential” bid for the Senate seat in
New York coincides with the termination of her
and her husband’s “thanks for the ride” years in the White House. It
cements Giuliani’s role as the villain proper in a dramatic
landscape ripe for his contest with a perceived white knight. And
Clinton’s bid comes at a time when — for better or
worse — an American public indifferent toward its presidential
prospects for 2000 will concentrate on a struggle defined by
fashionable domestic issues and perennially sexy gender politics.
Conason lapses into fantastical territory, however, when posing a number of questions that haunt or strongly influence Clinton’s candidacy.
“What will Hillary do when the administration proposes policies that are unpopular with the New York electorate?” he asks. She will do what she was elected to do — exercise the
judgment for which we hold our officials responsible. I doubt a
player as canny as Clinton will agonize over any disparity between her
constituents and the White House. Her exposure to top-level politics
throughout the husband’s tenure gives her the kind of experience we
expect but don’t often get from our representatives.
“What will she say if she doesn’t agree with a position taken by her
husband or his chosen successor?” Conason’s question hints that Hillary Clinton is a shrinking
violet next to the majesty of Bill or his successor. I
don’t think it would be too hostile to suggest that Clinton will
demonstrate she has just as much moxie as her male compadres.
“What will protect her from the vagaries of a sudden economic downturn
or an unsuccessful conclusion to the war in Kosovo?” Nothing will
protect her. That’s one of the beauties of her risk.
– H. Andrew Lynch
San Francisco
Black and white and read all over
BY STEVEN PYRRHO
(06/04/99)
Two things are obvious from Steven Pyrrho’s article — that his
Korean-American classmate Regan is an out-and-out racist of the worst
type, and that the author himself is a hopeless weenie.
I was always under the impression that racism was defined as the hatred of a
person or persons based on their race. If I understand Regan’s
self-righteous pontificating correctly, however, it seems to be fashionable now,
at least within the cloistered halls of academe, to define race as a social
construct or a power relationship, with “whiteness” being defined simply
as the state of being on top of the heap. For Regan to hold this view shows how
pathetically she has internalized the real racist paradigm of this society:
that white people are successful and powerful and non-white people are not. I
have to ask: Are poor, powerless Caucasians rendered non-white by their
powerlessness, their skin becoming darker the more disenfranchised they
become? As Asians rise higher up the social and economic ladder, does their hair turn
blond, their eyes blue and their skin pale? The very real racism in this society directed against non-whites will not be eradicated by such a fantasy.
The strangest thing is her bizarre belief that, since only whites can be
racist, the Japanese oppression of the Koreans could not have been a racist
oppression. I assume that she holds this view out of a feeling of
pan-Asian solidarity. Well, I have news for her: The concept of homogeneous
“Asianness” in this country is purely an American construct, a function of two
complementary phenomena: the laziness and ignorance of whites who see all
Asians as interchangeable members of an undifferentiated mass and discriminate
against them accordingly; and the loss of culture-specific traits on the part of
members of distinct Asian communities in this country as they, like all immigrants,
gradually assimilate and become Americans.
There is no pan-Asian solidarity among Asians in Asia. I suggest that Regan go
to Japan and talk to those Koreans who have been living in Japan for
generations but who are still not given citizenship, who still must submit to being
fingerprinted and who must still carry around an internal passport upon
pain of being arrested.
I also suggest that Pyrrho grow a backbone and stop sucking up. Trying to
establish your racial bona fides by parading your non-white siblings around
veers dangerously close to “some of my best friends are …” Still, at
least he knows that he chickened out when the chips were down. I commend him for his
honesty if not his bravery.
– Earl Hartman
It struck me, as I read Pyrrho’s recounting of the PC-infected Regan’s
comments, that I had heard her exact argument before. It was offered by a
young neo-Nazi wearing full SS regalia, who was explaining in a television
interview why the Jews are and should be persecuted. “They’ve been hated for
2,000 years,” he said. “There must be something going on there to account for
that.”
The fact that this kind of ignorant double-think supersedes proper critical
thinking in our “higher” educational programs infuriates me. The purveyors of
this sloppy, overly subjective horseshit ought to be deeply ashamed of
themselves, as they have forsaken any notion of academic rigor in favor of
producing faddish, palatable pap. I would like to see Pyrrho’s classmate
produce an even moderately coherent, 2,500-word essay on Aristotle’s thoughts
about women and slavery, or on Plato’s notions of erotic love. She
couldn’t do it, because the system has taught her that it is perfectly acceptable to
retroject modern ideas into the past. This is why papers on such nonsensical
topics as “Aristotle’s Views on Animal Rights” continue to pass academic
muster. The idea of making a difficult and brave attempt to extract meaning from a
text within its own cultural context — as far as that can be determined — has been
abandoned, and replaced by the shabby, third-rate blathering that is postmodern “scholarship.”
It is precisely this kind of ill-considered acceptance of an ideological
authority, as demonstrated by Regan, that leads to the mushy-headed nonsense
spouted by neo-Nazis, Klansmen and bunker-dwellers in Montana. I was
disappointed to see that Pyrrho succumbed in the end to the emotional
blackmail of his soft-brained classmate. As any philosopher worth the
descriptor knows, courage is required to maintain an appropriate intellectual
posture in the face of ignorance, emotionalism, and sloppy thinking.
– Ian Wood
What did Democrats sacrifice to win gun control?
BY JAKE TAPPER
(06/04/99)
Jake Tapper is right: The juvenile justice bill stinks. It is a
collection of law-enforcement wish-list items and shameless political
pandering. In this, it resembles other recent crime and terrorism
bills. But Tapper is a bit disingenuous here. It was his former employer,
Handgun Control Inc., that took advantage of the Columbine massacre to
drum up public hysteria in the hopes that doing so would allow the
passage of gun control legislation. The problem is that it’s easier to
whip up public hysteria than to control the result.
– Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Professor of Law
University of Tennessee
Isn’t there something deliciously ironic about the ACLU, of
all American institutions, complaining that the Democratic Party has
sold its soul to the gun control movement? After all, that’s a transaction
the ACLU completed years before the Democratic Party even contemplated it!
As witness their absurdist defense of “states’ rights” in the case of the
Second Amendment, despite the overwhelming consensus of constitutional scholars that the
amendment unquestionably was intended to guarantee an individual right to own firearms.
The ACLU’s anti-gun stance has condemned it to a membership only a tenth the size of the
NRA’s. Who knows how much safer our rights would be if it were the ACLU with
2.5 million members, and not the NRA? It’s something that can’t happen so
long as the ACLU refuses to defend the entire Bill of Rights.
– Brett Paul Bellmore
It’s hard to work up much outrage about the Secret Service prostitution scandal, in which 11 members of the president’s elite protective service and various military personnel were found to have picked up escorts in Colombia, where they were doing advance work for the president’s visit. I guess it is probably not a good idea for the people in charge of protecting the president to leave themselves vulnerable to sexual blackmail, but on the other hand we do not live in a John Le Carré novel or “24″ episode, and I don’t think the threat of a honey-trap assassination conspiracy plot is very credible. If members of the Secret Service want to get drunk and hire escorts after work, that is their business. (As Melissa Gira Grant says, the only actual scandal here — and the reason this became an international incident — is that all these guys tried to bilk one of the women out of the money she was owed.)
But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.
Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.
For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.
NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)
The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.
In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.
The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.
This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.
But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.
Being that it’s still March 2012 and we have no way of knowing who will actually be president by the end of January 2013 (besides “not Ron Paul,” obviously), it would seem to be a bit premature to speculate as to how the 2016 presidential race will shake out. And yet political reporters, finally bored perhaps with the inevitable Republican nomination of Mitt Romney, are already spewing forth predictions. Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post has even created a “Sweet 2016″ bracket.
The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race,” or someone fairly serious and “savvy,” like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.
There will be events no one could’ve predicted — like “obvious” future Republican presidential contender George Allen using an obscure racial slur on camera, or John Edwards being generally John Edwards — that destroy promising careers in an instant.
And there is also the plain fact that the sort of politicians that Washington-based reporters and pundits and political operatives like, and the sort of politicians they think “voters” would like, are often people who have no appeal for anyone outside of their districts or the Beltway. (Like Evan Bayh. Jon Huntsman. And Mitch Daniels, probably.)
Some people turn out to be awful at campaigning: Like Wesley Clark, the general who was going to sweep a troop-worshiping country off its feet and away from George W. Bush, until it turned out that he did not blink like a human. Or Rick Perry, who, it turned out, seems too dumb to dress himself when asked simple questions on television.
There are times when this sort of long-range forecasting is easy until you overthink it: John McCain was the logical 2008 front-runner the moment he addressed the 2004 Republican convention, until you started daydreaming about Fred Thompson’s seductive drawl. Al Gore was pretty obviously going to be the Democratic nominee in 2000, and boredom with his inevitability might’ve had a hand in how the political press helped destroy him that year.
A hell of a lot will obviously depend on whether or not Barack Obama wins reelection. If he loses, Democrats might suddenly find white candidates from the West or the South more attractive. If he wins, we might have to take Joe Biden semi-seriously for a few unlikely news cycles. If Obama ends a second term as popular as Clinton, someone associated with his administration is certainly more likely to be nominated than if Obama’s 2015 numbers look more like Bush’s in 2007.
So let’s get to the predictions, shall we? According to Cillizza, the “number one seed” for 2016 is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (Mark Warner is still on the shortlist, by the way. His time will come!)
Cuomo is the reasonably popular governor of a very populous state. He’s thus far managed to balance liberal base-pleasing deeds (gay marriage!) with “moderate” newspaper editorial-board pleasing things (going after the pensions of public employees!). But we’re still talking about a Northeast liberal (or “liberal”) — from New York! — who’s living with but not currently married to a celebrity television cook who makes awful-looking garbage food out of prepackaged garbage food. The Democratic Party might not want to chance another blatantly culturally urban candidate. (I mean urban in the literal sense, and not as weird racial code.) Plus he’s in the honeymoon portion of his governorship, and that job has utterly destroyed its last two holders.
Plus, Cuomo looks like he’s on pace to use up much of the goodwill he built up with liberals after signing gay marriage into law. (So far there’s been his apparent lack of interest in transit, signing awful gerrymandered legislative and congressional district lines, and his property tax cap.)
Joe Biden has run for president twice and never come remotely close to winning a single primary. He’ll be 74 in 2016. As Steve Kornacki already pointed out, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to nominate 70-somethings. He’s also a gaffe-prone goofball whose appeal is that he’s a ridiculous character. I would not put a lot of InTrade money on Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination in 2016.
Hillary Clinton is a bit younger than Biden, and a lot more serious than Biden. But does she still want to be president? Who knows. (Anyone who says they know is lying.) And if she runs in 2016, does she hire the same asinine campaign team that lost her the nomination in 2008?
After those three, we’re already essentially in “who?” territory with the Democrats. Not to say that someone no one has heard of now won’t be the nominee — with Democrats, you may be more likely to get a relative unknown than with Republicans — but we can’t know which governors or senators will turn out to be Barack Obama (or even John Edwards) and which ones will turn out to be… well, Mark Warner.
And theoretically there would be more women vying for the nomination than just Hillary Clinton. Cillizza posits New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand — a long shot, in my estimation — and senatorial hopeful Elizabeth Warren, who, if she loses her election, would surely be out of the running, and if she wins, would be … a liberal senator from Massachusetts. So, I dunno, Amy Klobuchar? Sadly, four of the current six female governors are Republicans. The two Democrats are North Carolina’s Bev Purdue, who is currently polling poorly enough that she’s announced that she won’t seek reelection, and Washington’s Christine Gregoire, who seems cool, so let’s just put her on the fantasy shortlist. (Oh, I guess the Times already did.)
But you see where we are, at this point: Randomly tossing out names. It’s like predicting the 2016 NFL Draft. Some of these kids are still in high school!
As for Republicans: If Mitt Romney wins the election, there’s the candidate, fun speculation time done. (Unless Newt and Ron Paul mount a primary challenge?!?) If he loses, the party likely learns the lesson it always learns and lurches to the right for a while, and your front-runner in that case (assuming he doesn’t blow up the party at the convention, I guess?) is Rick Santorum. I made this point already and Dave Weigel concurred. He’s a “true conservative” and he looks like he’ll “come in second” this year, which are both substantial advantages in the Republican race.
Maybe it’s Marco Rubio if Romney makes him the running mate, but the GOP does not often nominate losing running mates, because why would you?
Is Paul Ryan, who frantically introduces numbers-laden fake-serious budgets every year, the future of the party? I happen to think he’s basically a bland weenie who only excites people predisposed to thrill to rich-on-poor economic warefare, but a not insubstantial portion of the Republican Party “elite” seems to like that sort of thing. Mitch Daniels is somehow even less electrifying, but as a governor he has a better shot than Rep. Ryan. And Santorum still seems to have a massive advantage over them all.
(Oh, what about Chris Christie? Yes, well, he’d certainly be fun but he is pretty moderate for the national Republican Party, even if he masks it by being an obnoxious, belligerent bully. And he is woefully unprepared to protect us from CREEPING SHARIAH.)
One guy changes this calculus, obviously: Jeb Bush, because the Bush name exerts some sort of weird hypnotic power over the Republican Party, and they are often forced to do their bidding, even when, afterward, they all regret it. I like to imagine that the nation as a whole has decided that it’s done with Bushes forever, but that is pretty naive. I mean, Nixon got elected twice. Jeb Bush has not actually held office in a while — by 2016 he’ll have been a regular private citizen for nearly a decade — and it’s possible the family has decided to wait for George P. Bush to come of age before reasserting their claim over the White House (oh man, guys, he just turned 35).
The sick need to treat politics like it’s fantasy baseball ensures that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to make people not wildly speculate as to what will happen years after an election that is still months away, so I just encourage you to be sensible and responsible about it. (Like, it won’t be Rand Paul.)
Bill Keller, a bad opinion columnist, has written a bad opinion column. It is about how Barack Obama will replace Vice President Joe Biden on the 2012 ticket with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a thing that will not actually happen.
The former New York Times editor has lately been celebrating his return to writing by fearlessly tackling hacky column ideas already exhausted by everyone who was writing bad opinion columns during Keller’s tenure as a person with an actually important job. Having offered his own takes on classics like “The Huffington Post isn’t as good as a real newspaper” and “Twitter is dumb,” Keller today tries the old “running mate switcharoo” scenario.
John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.
Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:
One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.
One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?
But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:
Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.
Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)
The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”
Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:
But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.
Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!
As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.
The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.
And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.
I think it’s best to understand the Wall Street Journal editorial board’s decision to publish any given column by con artist pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell as basically an expression of contempt for people who read the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Caddell and Schoen, two loser “Democratic” “pollsters,” regularly publish very lame link-bait columns about how if Democrats want to succeed electorally, they must immediately cease being Democrats, and become, instead, Republicans. This week’s variation on that theme: Barack Obama should step aside (already heard that one last year around this time) and allow himself to be replaced by Hillary Clinton, for the good of the party and the nation.
Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country.
Because she’s not running for anything.
So Hillary Clinton should be president instead of Barack Obama, because Obama is too partisan and divisive. America needs a bipartisan plan to attack the deficit and also create jobs, and it is Obama’s fault that that is a vague, magical fairy tale. Hillary Clinton will make this fairy tale real, thanks to the fact that, as we all know, Republicans love cheerfully working with the Clintons for the good of the nation. When a Clinton’s in the White House, partisan politics are always put aside!
This is self-evidently dumb on about ten different levels — Clinton won’t run, President Clinton wouldn’t have any more success negotiating with Congressional Republicans than President Obama, Clinton’s popularity is a result of her not being a partisan candidate for office anymore, if there was such a thing as a “bipartisan” plan to reduce the deficit while also stimulating job growth (and protecting entitlements!) we’d presumably have already decided to act on this fantastical plan, everything resembling such a plan is explicitly supported by the White House and rejected by Republicans, Republicans would not endorse said plans if President Obama promised to go away because then they’d simply want to wait for a Republican to take over for him, and Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are not, as they claim to be, Democrats — but the Journal published this regardless, as they always do with fresh tripe from Schoen and Caddell.
Schoen — who works for hypothetical future independent presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, though that fact is never, ever disclosed — is a simple hack, precisely as dumb and unprincipled as you’d expect anyone who was once Mark Penn’s right-hand man to be. Caddell angrily left the Democratic party 20 years ago, which is seldom mentioned when he’s trotted out to trash the president on behalf of the right-wing media outlets that pay his rent. But the fact that they’re classic “Fox Democrats” matters much less than the fact that all of their editorials are predictable, wrong, and patently stupid.
As I said, printing their editorials is an implicit admission that you think your audience is credulous and moronic. The people in charge of the Wall Street Journal are savvy enough about politics to know that all of this is bilge and bullshit. They know both that this will never happen and that it’d be a stupid suggestion even if it were within the realm of possibility. They just don’t care. They don’t care that they’re printing garbage, because they figure garbage will get some traffic from those engaged in the same game.
If I were a conservative American I’d be less outraged at the specter of liberal elites hypothetically disrespecting me from their coastal enclaves and much more pissed off that the people on my side are constantly peddling this bullshit.
I’m on record as a great admirer of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, going back to her days as New York senator and certainly through her 2008 presidential campaign. But this week’s set of stories depicting the U.S. Libya intervention as “Hillary’s War” (The Washington Post) and an example of Clinton’s “smart power” doctrine (Time Magazine’s cover) go a little bit too far for me. They feel like someone’s effort to upstage or diminish President Obama. For the record, I don’t think the effort is Clinton’s. It may just reflect the mainstream media’s inability to give Obama his due.
Clearly Clinton’s competence is an asset to the president, and her power and credibility reflects well on his ability to work with a former rival. And the Time piece, in particular, makes clear, while praising Clinton, that ultimately Obama makes most of his decisions with a small team of confidantes, and she is not among them. He’s the commander in chief.
And there’s fine reporting in the two pieces. Certainly Clinton deserves credit for using her role to leverage support and resources from other agencies, getting greater control of foreign aid funding and even Defense Department funds to bolster her agenda at State. Elevating the role of the State Department took particular work after George W. Bush ignored and degraded so many American alliances.
But neither piece apportions any share of blame for the downside of Clinton’s expansive diplomacy – her role in pushing a bigger continued U.S. presence in and around Iraq, for instance, flagged Monday by Glenn Greenwald. The continued Iraq presence will also use more of the sometimes lawless private contractors whose role she opposed during the presidential campaign. It also seems a little early to be declaring Libya a decisive victory for American interests, or the cause of human freedom, as the nature of the government that will emerge there remains unclear.
Still, at a time when Obama struggles to get the kind of credit he deserves on the foreign policy and domestic security front – for killing Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaida leaders, winding down the military role in Iraq and toppling Muammar Gaddhafi without losing a single American life – it strikes me as a little unseemly that when credit is given, so much of it goes to Clinton. For her part, at least publicly, Clinton works to turn the spotlight on her boss, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press 10 days ago that “President Obama has passed with flying colors every leadership challenge.” And while she insisted, not convincingly, “I’m out of politics, as you know, David, I don’t comment on it,” she quickly boosted her boss against his potential 2012 rivals. “I think Americans are going to want to know that they have a steady, experienced, smart hand on the tiller of the ship of state, and there’s no doubt that that’s Barack Obama.”
It feels a little mean-spirited to be raising these questions about Clinton’s coverage on the day she lost her mother, Dorothy Rodham, at 92, but this is the week of the adoring press coverage. Again, I’m a strong Clinton admirer. But there’s something a little odd about the worshipful tone of these pieces. I still see a faint echo of Maureen Dowd’s analysis propping up Clinton and other female administration “hawks” in her continued effort to diminish Obama’s leadership and masculinity. Dowd seems to be on vacation, or else we might see her to use these two profiles as another reason to pit Clinton against her boss.
I spoke with a close Clinton friend last week who insists the Secretary of State has no interest in either the role of vice president in 2012, or a presidential run in 2016, so I don’t think there’s any crusade for either job behind these admiring stories. Maybe her allies are just trying to make sure she gets credit for the great work she did, against all odds, for a man she was once accused of trying to destroy.
President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
(Credit: AP/Shutterstock/Salon) 
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/Jason Reed) 
Hillary Clinton and President Obama (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak) 
Hillary Clinton (Credit: Reuters) 
