Ronald Lewis, a retired streetcar-track repairman with a homemade culture museum in the backyard of his restored Lower Ninth Ward house, doesn’t think much about anniversaries. “But if it helps people understand my life and the lives of other people here in New Orleans,” he said on Sunday, “if it makes them think about why we’re here and we won’t leave, let ‘em have an anniversary.”
There are fewer media folk in New Orleans gearing up for Wednesday’s second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina than were here for last year’s commemoration. Maybe that’s a good thing — the first time around most locals seemed genuinely annoyed by the drop-in presence of so many cameras and commentators, many of whom knew little of the city and craved simply a good setup shot and a ticket out of town. (“Get me some blight,” they might as well have said at last year’s media center, and very nearly did, “and a black man with a trumpet.”) I remember one Ninth Ward family who stood by and watched as an anchorwoman held her microphone in front of their devastated home: “The producer said he doesn’t want us in the picture,” the father told me, holding his baby in his arms. This year, those disaster images now seemingly played out, maybe the coverage will get further beneath the surface, down to nuances of the issues that linger: housing, education, crime, federal and state aid, and culture.
But those who live in New Orleans — by even optimistic estimates, around 60 percent of pre-Katrina population level, or nearly 300,000 — hardly need to mark calendars. Every day is an anniversary, a stark reminder of nature’s wrath and more so of the very unnatural disasters of levee failures, insurance shortfalls, and a tide of bureaucratic red tape that rivals even the water for its ability to stall lives. Two years after the storm, only about one-third of those residents approved for their “Road Home” awards from the Louisiana Recovery Authority have received payments.
The number of press people may be down, but the politicians have been out in force this year. And there has already been much talk, a good deal of it in conferences with impressive, even hopeful, titles. At a Hope and Recovery Summit hosted by Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu Monday, presidential candidates took turns at public interviews with news commentator Soledad O’Brien. Democratic Sens. John Edwards and Hillary Clinton both pointed fingers of blame at the Bush administration for slow and inadequate response; each supported the idea of investing some $40 billion to $50 billion to rebuild the levees to Category 5 standards.
Edwards described the federal response to Katrina, then and now, as “a national embarrassment” and spoke of the need for “a high-level person reporting to the president every morning about what was done in New Orleans the previous day.” Clinton, addressing the Kafkaesque scenarios resulting from recovery bureaucracy, said simply, “You can’t make this stuff up. It’s beyond satire.” She presented a 10-point recovery plan that, again, began with one Cabinet-level figure in charge. Both candidates praised the efforts of private citizens as the real backbone of recovery.
Republican Rep. Lindsay Hunter took that citizen-action theme one rather disturbing step further. “Government is inept,” he said. “Bureaucracies are inept. I see a great future for New Orleans based not on what government does for people but what free people do for themselves.” At one point, O’Brien asked, straight-faced, “We appreciate that you appreciate that firemen and old ladies in church groups have come down here to help, but you don’t think they can rebuild the levees, do you?” Moments later, discussing the problems with police protection, Hunter said frankly, “To the people of New Orleans, I have to say that’s a local issue. I can’t help you with that.”
A day earlier, Sen. Barack Obama spoke at an early morning Sunday service at First Emanuel Baptist Church in Central City. Picking up on the fire and urgency of the Rev. Charles Joseph Southall III and his stirring choir and six-piece band, Obama matched their cadences, invoking the Sermon on the Mount, with its admonition to Christians to build on a rock of faith in order to withstand life’s storms. “I know I’m not the only person that’s going to be in town this week,” he said in allusion to his fellow candidates, and spoke of an “empathy deficit,” the need to “rebuild a trust that’s been broken,” and most notably and specifically, about a plan to create a funding pool from private insurers to be drawn on for catastrophic losses.
The most interesting discussions of the past week were those at Saturday morning’s executive session of the World Cultural Economic Forum, hosted by Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu at the French Quarter’s Le Petit Theater, the oldest community theater in the country. “I don’t know that we did not take for granted the cultural riches we have here,” Landrieu said, “until after the international community gasped when they thought about what might be lost.” In fact, a focus on culture in New Orleans — on what might be lost as well as on how culture holds important keys to many aspects of recovery, be they economic, civic or spiritual — may prove to be the essential ingredient for productive conversations about New Orleans right now.
Erosion of our coastal wetlands may have paved the way for the natural disaster that hammered this city. But the least-mentioned aspect of the resulting devastation — the erosion of what ethnographer Michael P. Smith once called “America’s cultural wetlands” — should be of primary concern. The resilient African-American cultural traditions of New Orleans, famously seminal to everything from jazz to rock to funk to Southern rap, also contain seeds of protest and solidarity that guard against storm surges of a man-made variety. Erasure of these wetlands exposes many to the types of ill winds that shatter souls.
Landrieu’s forum gathered wisdom from many local and national experts on cultural programming, funding and studies, and it attracted officials from some 20 foreign nations. At one point, Denis G. Antoine, ambassador to the U.S. from Grenada, said, “If we’re taking about rebuilding New Orleans, we have to ask: Which New Orleans are we talking about? We have to talk about social values and an ancestral past. There is an anthropological aspect to the nurturing of a new New Orleans and this will help direct what is appropriate and what is not.”
One more modest example of cultural education and economy could be found Saturday afternoon at the peach-colored house of Cherice Harrison-Nelson, one in the row of new homes within the Ninth Ward Musicians’ Village complex. Harrison-Nelson is the daughter of Donald Harrison Sr., a celebrated Mardi Gras Indian chief; this was a weekly session of the Guardians Institute, conceived and run by Herreast Harrison, Donald’s widow, and temporarily held at Cherice’s home until Herreast’s is rebuilt. Herreast envisions her institute as “a safe haven for children, and a place where cultural traditions are supported and authentically transmitted.” Cherice, who has worked as a teacher and a school administrator, explained, “Something deep within your soul calls you to do this. It just calls you and you’ve got to do it for your mental and physical survival, and for the welfare of those around you.”
At her house, women sat sewing beaded patterns of eagle heads onto canvasses, practicing for the creation of Mardi Gras Day costumes. Kevin Cooley Jr., the 5-year-old chief of the Young Guardians of the Flame group, sat with a half-dozen other children and learned the bamboula and other African rhythms that had been played in Congo Square, just off Rampart Street, more than a century ago. There were discussions of tradition, book reports and finally, $25 paychecks for a performance the previous week. “If Katrina did anything good,” Herreast said at one point, “it gave new meaning to all of this. And it changed our expectations: We don’t want the same old thing. We want something better.”
For all the talk and all the music of the past few days in New Orleans, the most emphatic statement about post-Katrina life, and particularly about cultural economy, was silence.
Sunday’s Musicians Solidarity Second Line found members of the Treme Brass Band and some two dozen other musicians, instruments in hand, assembled for a traditional second-line parade. At a typical second-line, a brass band plays, and supporters follow along, dancing and clapping out rhythms. The events, held nearly every weekend from September through June, are powerful expressions of community and culture. Since Katrina, they have taken on deeper meaning as assertions of determination and domain. But on Sunday, not a note was played, not a step danced. And the message was clear: New Orleans’ musicians need better support, lest the music that lends this city its identity one day fall silent.
The only other time I’d experienced a noiseless second-line parade was seven months ago. Hundreds gathered at the gate to Louis Armstrong Park. The silence — unthinkable throughout the hundred-plus-year history of this raucous tradition — was a carefully thought-through statement. It addressed the violence afflicting the city, the desperately slow process of post-Katrina recovery, and the enabling power of jazz culture for disenfranchised (in many cases, still displaced) communities. Two miles into that procession, not far from where M.L. King Boulevard meets South Liberty Street — the statement having been made — the men of the Nine Times Club (in lime-green suits and royal-blue fedoras) and the Prince of Wales Club (in red suits and mustard-colored hats and gloves) started jumping and sliding to the irrepressible sounds of the Hot 8 and Rebirth Brass Bands.
On Sunday a slow, steady rain lent dramatic drips to homemade signs that read: “Living Wages = Living Music,” “Imagine a Silent NOLA,” “Keep Our Story Alive.” But this day, the procession didn’t explode into music. When it reached the French Quarter’s Jackson Square, Musicians Union president “Deacon” John Moore, a guitarist who played on several seminal R&B hits during his career, addressed the small crowd. “It ain’t easy in the Big Easy,” he said. “Our musicians are suffering. We hate to come out here like this but we have no alternative.”
Benny Jones Sr., the drummer and founder of the Treme Brass Band, has been making music in New Orleans for some 50 years. “It’s always been a bit of a struggle,” he said, “but now it’s become a losing proposition.” At issue were the pressures of a hard-hit tourism industry, the increased cost of living in New Orleans, and the need for musicians to demand better pay and some element of nurturing during tough post-Katrina times. Several nonprofit organizations — the Musicians Clinic, the Renew Our Music Fund, and Sweet Home New Orleans — have risen to the latter task in the past two years. But while the need they serve remains daunting, the flow of contributions has begun to ebb. Sweet Home director Jordan Hirsch estimates that of the approximately 4,500 working musicians and others in the New Orleans cultural community, “about a third are back and doing OK, a third have yet to return, and a third are here but in unstable situations.”
“Historically, musicians have been taken for granted here because it’s so common and pervasive,” said Scott Aiges, a director at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation and a former city government official, who walked along the parade route. “It’s such an intrinsic part of our culture that, when we hear a brass band it’s just another day.” Aiges thinks there are public-policy solutions to some of the musicians’ problems, ranging from promotional strategies to zoning ordinances, and especially tax and other incentives to those who employ musicians. “See, New Orleans culture developed out of a hustle and will always be a hustle,” said Ellis Marsalis, the pianist and patriarch to the New Orleans jazz scene, the other night in between sets at the Snug Harbor club. That hustle won’t suffice, it seems, during the slow crawl of recovery: Some public policy may be in order.
I went back to Ronald Lewis’ house the other day, and he showed me his House of Dance and Feathers, the small museum of artifacts he’s collected through his years of involvement with Mardi Gras Indian tribes, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and jazz musicians: There are books and photos, fans and feathers, masks and drums, most of which were assembled anew after Katrina wiped out his original collection.
“They say we’re dumb, illiterate, poor people. They chose to put those labels on us. But this is a blue-collar community. We bought houses, raised families, came back,” Lewis told me. “I’ll draw you in with my culture, but really I want to have a conversation about my community, who we really are.”
Tomorrow marks two years since the city was devastated. There’s still a great deal of work to do to right wrongs, rebuild homes, and ensure a safer future. President Bush is scheduled to speak at some point, though ever since his infamous Jackson Square address, with its yet-to-be-fulfilled promises, his words are largely unwelcome in this city. A Day of Presence march — among the many events, some somber, some angry, some celebratory, that dot the day — will convene at the Ernest Morial Convention Center, the site of last month’s Essence Festival. “We’re going to demand a regional Marshall Plan,” said Edrea Davis of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, “to restore New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.”
But beyond the rhetoric, immense challenges remain for the city’s artists. As Grenada’s Ambassador Antoine said at the cultural economy forum: “New Orleans is a perception. When we talk about safety: How safe do you feel? It’s not just about crime, it’s about how safe do you feel to be you?”
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) 
