What passes for an urban policy debate in New York can look surreal after a trip north of Central Park.
At the Ready, Willing and Able shelter on 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, a former homeless crack addict I’ll call Tom walked me through immaculate, pleasantly furnished dormitories where books and telephones were kept by the beds.
He took me to the computer room where men were quietly studying for the G.E.D. He showed me the room where members of the program have their urine tested twice a week. There was no violence, no drugs and none of the filth and chaos that everyone remembers from the thousand-bed armory shelters in the 1980s.
Those were the days when the Coalition for the Homeless monitored conditions in the mega-shelters, steadfastly ensuring that there was three feet between each bed and at least one shower for every 15 people — even if no one felt safe enough to use it. Lately the advocacy group has joined with talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell and other Celebrity Friends of Hillary Rodham Clinton to excoriate Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his policies on the homeless.
The barrage of criticism has eclipsed revolutionary improvements in the way New York deals with the homeless. Whatever you may think of the mayor’s dubious record on police brutality, media and free speech, it is Rudy Giuliani who has brought that revolution about by implementing the suggestions of a 1990 report authored for then-Mayor David Dinkins by Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who was working for the alternative housing nonprofit H.E.L.P.
Sure, people are aware that there are fewer vagrants, panhandlers and muttering schizophrenics in Gotham these days. And though most have no clue how or why that came to be, they’re generally so pleased by the change that Clinton and Co. have probably picked a losing political strategy. It’s telling that only 1,000 people turned up at a demonstration against Giuliani’s homeless policy in Union Square in early December.
And even with the mayor’s strange genius for attracting negative publicity, the more New Yorkers learn about his genuinely humane and effective homeless policy, the more damaging it will be for Clinton if she makes it an issue in her New York Senate campaign.
With the help of the nonprofit organizations that now run 90 percent of New York’s shelters, many homeless are getting their lives together and joining the mainstream. And when New Yorkers discover that the homeless haven’t been chased out of town by the New York Police Department or packed into penitentiaries (though far too many mentally ill people do end up at Rikers Island, rather than in the asylums and halfway houses where they belong) but are instead rejoining the community of those who live according to the social compact, it will only help Giuliani’s political prospects.
Yet it’s the very programs that have most helped the homeless — drug testing, work requirements and other programs that help acculturate them into the mainstream — that make the Coalition for the Homeless and its allies wax hysterical. If you believe their most recent sallies, you’d think that requiring work from able-bodied, mentally healthy people in the city’s shelters was the ultimate unspeakable act of a monstrously uncaring city government.
You also might be bamboozled into thinking the city’s homeless policy is the product of financial stinginess. Yet New York now spends $800 million a year on the homeless — with $438 million budgeted for the Department of Homeless Services and another $360 million that gets filtered through other agencies. And under Giuliani, even as the number of people on the streets has shrunk, the city’s budget for helping the homeless has grown beyond what was spent under the supposedly more compassionate Mayor David Dinkins.
The most recent salvo in the battle between the mayor and the alliance of Clinton supporters and advocacy groups came from federal Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who since endorsing Clinton has apparently disavowed his own report, which was the foundation for Giuliani’s policies.
In late December, Cuomo took control of the $60 million the federal government provides New York for its homeless programs. The housing secretary said his decision to resume control was a response to a recent federal court ruling that the city “improperly” blocked funds to the activist group Housing Works. But despite the mayor’s often deserved reputation for punishing groups that criticize him, Housing Works actually lost its funds because it may have misappropriated a half-million dollars in 1998 grant money. (The organization denies any theft but cannot account for the missing $500,000.)
When the Doe Fund introduced its Ready, Willing and Able program in Harlem in 1996, the organization was picketed by the Coalition for the Homeless. Activists slammed the Doe Fund as “racist” and compared its program to “slavery.” (It was, of course, the Coalition that had supervised the shelter in the halcyon days before the Doe Fund took it over, when crack was openly dealt in the parking lot and hallways.)
The homeless themselves tend to take a less theoretical approach to their situation. When I asked trainee Frank Simmonds, who lived on the streets for two years and used to hustle tourists at Kennedy airport for crack money, if he thinks the program is like slavery, he told me that the question is insulting, in fact crazy. “Work gives you your dignity back,” he said.
It’s one of the two phrases you hear from everyone at RWA, especially from the majority of staff members who themselves are graduates of the program. The other is, “I was tired,” meaning tired of life on the street.
When I arrived at the shelter, work crews wearing the program’s blue-and-white uniforms were heading out into vans, having had their breakfast and attended the morning’s Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
Since the program was first established in Brooklyn in 1990, Ready, Willing and Able workers have cleaned hundreds of blocks in Manhattan, and much of the program’s noncity funding comes from businesses and individuals who heard about the program from the men sweeping the sidewalks on their streets.
The Doe Fund pays trainees a salary that starts at $5.50 an hour. Out of that salary they must pay $50 a week in rent and another $15 for meals; $30 is withheld for savings that are returned when a trainee graduates from the program. Many trainees are able to save additional money during their year to 18 months in the program, and if they manage to put aside $1,000 or more by graduation, Doe offers matching funds — provided over a period of several months, with mandatory drug testing prior to disbursements.
The shelter stresses getting trainees ready to join the work force, by teaching basic life skills such as punctuality, workplace behavior and writing a risumi. Combined with drug testing and counseling that continues for five years from the time trainees enter RWA, the program has been a success. Some 62 percent of those who entered RWA
between 1994 and 1996 graduated from the program and still held jobs three years later, according to a study commissioned by the Doe Fund.
It’s a particularly remarkable achievement when you consider that RWA’s clientele is considered the most intractable segment of the homeless population: single men with histories of addiction and incarceration. The program is always full. And though there’s a waiting list to enter RWA, an “alumnus” who’s fallen back into the old habits can always get a bed.
Since many of the people who run the shelter once participated in the program themselves, there’s no soup-kitchen unease, no resentment against white upper-middle-class volunteers handing out alms to less fortunate black folks. The people who work there have been on the streets and in the jails, and their belief in the program is the most impressive thing about the place.
According to them, the reason RWA works is that it allows people to regain the kind of dignity and self-respect that is impossible to find on the street — or through the kind of no-strings-attached charity favored by the Coalition for the Homeless and the rest of those who have dissed the Giuliani administration for its homeless policy.
But the story that had Rosie O’Donnell (and other celebrities who just happened to be pals of Hillary Clinton) really savaging the mayor was the accusation that City Hall’s newest homeless policy will cause children to be torn from the arms of loving parents and down-on-their-luck poor folks to freeze to death in the snow.
Giuliani’s idea is merely to bring those who refuse work and day care for their kids over a long period of time to the attention of child protective services. His theory is that an able-bodied parent who refuses to work, despite the provision of a job and day care, could well be a less than adequate parent and should probably be checked out. A similar homeless policy has been in place in Suffolk and other New York counties for two years and not a single child has been taken away from its parents.
Here’s the dirty little secret of homeless advocacy groups: Although they’ve pushed the public to accept their definition of “homelessness” as being the lack of a home, the vast majority of people dwelling in the streets of America’s big cities have multiple problems, not merely the lack of shelter. We use the term “homeless” to describe very different kinds of people: old-style drunks and bums, schizophrenics pushing shopping carts, panhandling crack addicts, the relatively small number of eccentrics who like the free life of the open road and people who’ve lost jobs and for one reason or another can’t find anywhere to stay except a free shelter.
For years the Coalition for the Homeless and its fellow travelers have tried to depict the average “homeless” New Yorker as an ordinary, respectable, working woman who has lost her apartment after being downsized. But it turns out that the majority of “street people” are actually mentally ill, drug abusers or both, rather than hapless victims of economic dislocation. Even the Coalition now admits that 40 percent of the homeless population is mentally ill — an estimate that is almost certainly conservative.
Finding new ways to help the homeless who suffer with mental illness or drug addictions, and then acculturating them to function in mainstream society, would therefore seem to make more sense than just warehousing them.
Yet warehousing the homeless is exactly the policy favored by the advocates who have attacked the Giuliani administration and have long claimed that the problem is merely one of “shelter” — as if it’s merely the high cost of housing in New York that forces people to sleep under highways and in tunnels. But when destitute Guatemalan immigrants who barely speak Spanish, let alone English, can find and pay for shelter — however less than ideal it might be — that argument crumbles. It’s clear that the problems of the homeless are behavioral, cultural, even spiritual — not just a matter of lacking shelter.
As a powerful recent article by Heather MacDonald in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal pointed out, when the homeless outreach program of Times Square Business Improvement District (BID) tried to coax its 200 or so local homeless folk into temporary housing and generously subsidized permanent housing, most of them refused. Only 37 even agreed to visit the BID’s “respite center.”
Yet when the Giuliani administration orders the NYPD to enforce laws against sleeping on the streets and to draw the homeless into shelters or hospitals, it’s attacked for depriving these unfortunates of their rights. But no genuinely compassionate society allows mentally ill people to starve or freeze.
As George McDonald, founder of the Doe Fund, points out, his program is designed to mirror the everyday routines of working, getting paid and paying rent. His critics rant about “dead-end jobs,” as if cleaning the sidewalks or serving food is more demeaning than accepting handouts from charities, begging from passersby, or lying in your own filth on city streets.
It’s understandable why the educated upper middle class who work in the nonprofit sector might have no sense of the dignity of such simple labor. But it isn’t fair to allow elitist contempt to govern the way we treat our vulnerable homeless population. As the former Marxist historian Gareth Stedman Jones once wrote — and I’m quoting from memory — in “Outcast London,” “Bourgeois philanthropy like bourgeois social-science invents its victims so as to sustain its practice.”
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) 
