Barack Obama is declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United States on Saturday, two days before Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday, not in Chicago, the city where he launched his political career, but in Springfield, the Illinois state capital.
The meaning of Springfield will not be lost on anyone who paid attention in history class. Springfield was Abe Lincoln’s hometown, the frontier settlement-turned-capital where Lincoln started a law practice in 1837 and from which he later launched his own national political career. What better place to roll out the campaign of the first African-American with a realistic shot at becoming president than in the city that gave us the “Great Emancipator”? Whatever Obama may say on Saturday, the mere sight of him among the Lincoln monuments in Springfield — the old statehouse where Lincoln gave his famous “house divided” speech, his home on the corner of Eighth and Jackson, the grave in Oak Ridge Cemetery — will deliver a feel-good message of racial harmony, of white goodwill and black perseverance, that Americans can embrace.
Except, as Obama may know, there’s more to the history of Springfield than Abe Lincoln. There’s the part, for instance, where the whites tried to run the blacks out of town.
Though now largely forgotten, the events and aftermath of the Springfield Race Riot, as it came to be known, are as relevant to the hopes of Obama as is the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.
The year was 1908. It was mid-August and America was in the throes of a very different presidential race. Republican William Howard Taft was running out the clock against perennial Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, whom Taft would beat easily in November. The economy had rebounded from a crash in 1907 and was back on a soaring trajectory. The U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet was sailing around the world, the Wright brothers were being hailed as “conquerors of the air,” and Robert Peary had sailed off to discover the North Pole. These were giddy times in America, and booming times in Springfield, which had grown from a country village to a city of 50,000.
The one group untouched by the nation’s prosperity and optimism was African-Americans. Even by the standards of what had come before, and would come later, 1908 was a brutal year for black people in this country. Jim Crow laws had wiped out most of the gains of Reconstruction and a steady campaign of lynching and other forms of physical intimidation kept blacks in near subjugation throughout the South. More recently, and ominously, Northern cities had begun imposing their own brand of Jim Crow. “A few years ago no hotel or restaurant refused Negro guests,” journalist Ray Stannard Baker noted in 1908 after visiting Boston. “Now several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not serve Negroes, even the best of them.”
And then came August, and Springfield exploded.
The incendiary event was a white woman’s accusation of rape against a black man. The charge would later turn out to be the deception of an unfaithful wife; her boyfriend had beaten her up and she’d used the excuse of a black stranger to explain the bruises. For the moment, though, her lie was taken as gospel truth. On Aug. 14, as local newspapers fanned outrage, several thousand whites descended on the county jail. They demanded that the suspect, a laborer named George Richardson, be delivered to them. What the mob intended to do to Richardson did not, in 1908, require much imagination.
Getting no satisfaction at the county jail, the mob turned its wrath elsewhere. Thousands marched into the black sections of town. “Abe Lincoln brought them to Springfield,” someone shouted, “and we will run them out.” Which is exactly what they attempted to do. Over the next several hours, whites attacked blacks wherever they found them and set fire to dozens of black businesses and homes. Whites who feared their own homes would be accidentally torched nailed white sheets to their doors.
As midnight passed, the mob advanced remorselessly into an area of town known as the Badlands. Coming upon an elderly black man named Harrison West, the rioters beat him severely. Finding a paralyzed man named William Smith, they dragged him from his house and threw him into a patch of weeds.
At 2 a.m., the mob arrived at the home of Scott Burton, a 56-year-old black barber. After firing buckshot at the mob, Burton tried to escape through a side door of his house, but he was overtaken and knocked unconscious. In the light of burning buildings, the mob lynched Burton from a nearby tree.
With daybreak on Saturday, Aug. 15, as Springfield smoldered and state militia poured in by train, some of the city’s 3,000 blacks took refuge in the State Arsenal downtown. Many more fled into the surrounding countryside. Finding nearby towns inhospitable, they camped in the forest and cornfields.
The soldiers tamped down the violence, but only temporarily. Saturday night brought more rioting and burning, and ended with the lynching of an 84-year-old African-American named William Donnegan. A retired cobbler, Donnegan had been friends, long ago, with Abraham Lincoln.
When the white journalist William English Walling arrived in Springfield from Chicago on Sunday, he was stunned by the lack of remorse he encountered among the city’s whites. Even those who had not participated in the pogrom seemed to condone it. Certainly few had intervened to stop it. “Springfield,” Walling would write in a widely circulated left-wing journal, “had no shame.”
Nor apparently did the rest of America. “If these outrages had happened thirty years ago, when memories of Lincoln, Garrison and Wendell Phillips were still fresh,” Walling asked his readers to imagine, “what would not have happened in the North?”
What happened in the North in 1908 was tepid outrage, followed by tenuous explanations, followed quickly by nothing at all. By the time America celebrated the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth on Feb. 12, 1909, the riot had been effectively brushed under the rug. In Springfield, the Great Emancipator’s centennial was celebrated with a feast in the State Arsenal, the same building into which blacks had fled back in August. This time, no blacks were invited.
But there was a silver lining in the dark cloud over Springfield, one that has not been forgotten. Galvanized by the riot, a group of 60 prominent men and women, white and black alike, including Walling, Jane Addams, Ida Wells-Barnett, John Dewey and W.E.B. DuBois, cosigned an open letter, released that same Feb. 12, to protest injustices and violence against African-Americans. The letter became the founding document of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The NAACP, as we now know, went on to become a beacon of hope to African-Americans in the 20th century, even when there was not much reason to hope. It’s in large part thanks to the NAACP that the Civil Rights Act was passed 56 years after the Springfield riot– and that an African-American named Barack Obama has a chance to become the next president of the United States.
As I write I don’t know whether Obama will mention the 1908 riot in his announcement speech. Given that his bid for 2008 rests partly on his appeal as a man who can cross America’s racial divide, I wouldn’t be shocked if he skipped it. Does he really want to dredge up a century-old race riot in the kickoff speech of his campaign?
But here’s hoping he does mention it. Because there is a message in the shameful history of the 1908 riot that is every bit as stirring as memories of Lincoln. The riot reminds us, for one thing, that as far as we still have to go in race relations, we have come a very long way. More broadly, it reminds us that even when things seem to be beyond hope, as they do now in Iraq, for instance, and in New Orleans — and as they did for African-Americans in the early part of the last century — they do sometimes, in some ways, get better.
If Obama can make Americans believe that, he really may be our next president.
Now that we’ve got a rainbow coalition of Democratic candidates, the debate about whether a woman or a black man can win the nation’s highest office has pushed political horse race chatter to a new low. The running has barely begun, yet the media has already exhausted itself talking about the identity-politics equivalent of back musculature and breeding.
From the beginning there have been plenty of observers to name the sex vs. race debate for what it is: a huge distraction from the substance of the campaign. But none has struck so plaintive a chord as Gloria Steinem‘s Op-Ed in Wednesday’s New York Times. Calling it a “dumb and destructive question,” Steinem argues that most Americans are smart enough to know better than choose candidates based on skin color or genital configuration. She invokes Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court hearings and Elizabeth Dole’s presidential run as instances of voters seeing past shared identity and recognizing divergent interests.
Fair enough. But the wholesale rejection of conservatives like Thomas or Dole represents a far simpler choice than the tangle of decisions Democratic voters face regarding Obama or Clinton. As Steinem notes, already polls show that people aren’t voting with their I.D. cards: “Polls show that about 60 percent of African-American Democrats support Hillary Clinton, while only about 20 percent support Barack Obama.” At first it seems that she’s using this statistic to show that the race-gender debate is irrelevant in the eyes of the voters, but sadly it’s quite the opposite. Citing a “disease of doubt,” Steinem points to statistics (81 percent of black voters believe a white man will get the Democratic nomination, while only 58 percent of white voters do — plus more women than men tell pollsters that Clinton can’t win) that suggest the race-gender debate may influence voters in the worst possible way — steering them clear of their true choices in favor of those they believe can win.
In the end, Steinem implores Democrats to jettison the question altogether and take a page from the historical alliances between women and African-Americans: “rediscovering Gunnar Myrdal’s verdict of the 1940s that ‘the parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life, for together they form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which America runs.’” When asked who she’s supporting — Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama — Steinem just says “yes.”
This embrace-now, critique-later approach to the campaign is an interesting one, since not so long ago Jane Fonda — who founded the Women’s Media Center and GreenStone Media with Steinem — offered a less politic appraisal of Clinton’s potential presidency: “Well,” Fonda said, “her position on the war disappoints me a lot, and that’s a biggie.” Fonda went on to point out that in many cases she would have preferred a “man of conscience, a feminist man” to some of the female presidents and prime ministers the world has seen. Last month leading women’s rights advocate Kate Michelman announced she was working for former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, citing similar reasoning.
Whatever one thinks about Clinton herself, how can one not wince at the idea of the country’s most prominent feminists turning on the country’s first viable female presidential candidate only to find themselves eating their words if she wins the primary? Steinem’s “just say yes” answer offers those feminists who don’t want to slam Clinton, but aren’t necessarily for her, the best of all possible strategies. The only problem, of course, is that politics isn’t a group sport. Once the running begins, and the track gets dirty, it will be harder and harder to stand on the sidelines cheering the team.
We don’t yet know whether the next president will be a man, a woman, white or black, but we know this much: On Inauguration Day, he or she will be gravely indebted to many very wealthy people. Sen. Hillary Clinton has already decided to fund her presidential campaign entirely through private donations, and her rivals are likely to follow that approach. The serious candidates are looking to raise $100 million this year alone, and the two who win the primaries will take in substantially more. That’s an average of at least $2 million a week, or $286,000 every day, including weekends, until the election — greater than the median price of a new American home.
The news is dispiriting to anyone who cares about clean politics, but it’s not surprising. Today’s campaign finance regulations are as effective as abstinence vows on prom night, and the leading proposals to fix the system do little more than impose some decorum on the bacchanalia. This week Sen. Russell Feingold, just about the last politician in the nation who can still muster any fervor on the issue, offered a plan that would modestly tweak the current system, increasing some public funding here and eliminating some limits there. The plan’s prospects look uncertain. His former co-conspirator in reform, John McCain, says he’s not even familiar with Feingold’s idea, perhaps because as a presidential candidate he now spends much of his time asking rich people for money. But even if Feingold’s plan did become law, it would do nothing about the fundamental problem. Running for office takes an enormous amount of money, and even though “You” may be Person of the Year, drunk on the power of “your” blogs and “your” YouTube, politicians will always be able to get more money from “Them,” the fat cats.
But reforming the system doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. In fact, there’s already a plan out there that would work. The proposal, which was outlined a couple of years ago by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, two professors at Yale Law School, is nonpartisan, constitutional and completely contrary to nearly every orthodoxy in the campaign finance reform movement. Think of it as the best campaign finance reform proposal you’ve never heard of.
The first part of the Ackerman-Ayres plan calls on the government to give every voter $50 to donate to candidates running for federal office. The second part will sound almost as crazy, until it sounds brilliant: Make all campaign donations secret, so that nobody — especially political candidates — knows where any citizen’s money is going. Anonymous giving means no quid pro quo.
To understand what’s so truly inspired about this proposal, you first have to understand what’s wrong with today’s laws. The current regulations were put in place to counter the abuses uncovered during the Watergate investigation, things like the Committee to Re-elect the President’s maintenance of secret slush funds for dirty tricks. They mainly limit how much money individuals can donate to candidates and how much candidates can spend to win office. In return for abiding by spending limits, politicians get public matching funds — that is, money from the government — to mount their campaigns.
This may seem like a sensible approach, but Ackerman and Ayres suggest that it is fundamentally flawed. Capping how much money people can give to candidates only invites ways to get around those limits. Getting around the limits has become a huge Washington business, employing battalions of lawyers and lobbyists. Limits simply don’t limit much — every election sees more private donations to candidates, and more money spent on campaigns.
Conservatives often argue that there’s nothing wrong with candidates collecting all this money so long as they fully disclose it. Newt Gingrich, for example, wants politicians to have to post to the Web receipt of all donations within 24 hours of cashing the check. But we are already drowning in disclosure — go to OpenSecrets.org to feast on a smorgasbord of candidates’ funding sources — and it has hardly changed a thing. Public knowledge of politicians’ funders perhaps deters the worst kind of influence peddling, outright bribery. But disclosure does nothing to stem more pervasive forms of favor trading. There is no better illustration of this than the current president, who won his office thanks to wheelbarrows of cash from business interests, notably the oil and gas industry, a sector few Americans hold in high regard. Public awareness of who backed George W. Bush has not mitigated his willingness to act in accordance with those backers’ interests. As Slate’s Timothy Noah recently observed, sometimes sunlight just isn’t so great a disinfectant.
When you mention these difficulties to reformers, they often respond by suggesting the most radical change of all: complete public financing of elections. Under this plan, the government would pick up the entire tab for candidates’ electioneering efforts. While that has obvious benefits — public money frees up candidates to focus on policies rather than fundraising, and it leaves them beholden to no one — there is one huge drawback. The public is opposed. The current system of public matching funds is paid for by taxpayers who check off a box on their tax forms directing $3 to candidates. In the 1970s, more than a third of taxpayers checked off the box. Now, only 1 in 10 do, and the number is dropping. If the people aren’t willing to direct $3 to candidates, how can we expect them to go for anything more?
It’s here that we come to what’s great about the Ackerman-Ayres plan: It offers the public a reason to support public financing. Today, people have no say in how their $3 is spent. Under the new plan, anyone who registered to vote would receive $10 to donate to House candidates, $15 to Senate candidates and $25 to presidential candidates. They could make their pledges essentially any way they chose. They could fund long shots or front-runners, spend their wads in the primary or the general election, in their home state or across the nation. They could split their allotments among dozens of contenders or just choose one Senate candidate, one House candidate and one presidential candidate. They could not cheat and spend the money on dinner. The $50 would be issued as a kind of electronic voucher that would expire on Election Day, and Ackerman and Ayres suggest that people could register their donations using the Web, ATM machines or even their electronic food stamp cards.
About 120 million people voted for president in 2004. At $50 each, that would be $6 billion in public financing available for candidates, more than enough to fund big campaigns. As a comparison, all federal candidates — for the House, the Senate and the presidency — spent a combined $4 billion in 2004, most of it raised from private donors. Such sums would profoundly alter the political process. Today, Ackerman and Ayres point out, many Americans participate in politics only at the end of a long campaign, if they do at all. Fifty dollars isn’t a fortune, but it’s more than most voters give. By pooling the money, candidates would be forced to recognize issues of real importance and campaign in places they might otherwise deem pointless to visit. In search of donations, Republicans might even come to San Francisco.
The plan wouldn’t prevent you from giving a politician more than your government-issued $50. You could still make additional private contributions. Indeed, the professors call for raising significantly the current contribution limit of $2,300 per donor per candidate. The new caps would be $5,000 for House candidates, $32,000 for Senate candidates and $100,000 for presidential contenders (with a cumulative cap of $100,000 to all candidates). But that’s where Ayres and Ackerman’s second innovation, the “secret donation booth,” comes into play.
Imagine that you are a politically connected Hollywood producer, and Hillary Clinton calls you up and asks you for $50,000. What do you do? In truth, you’d rather give to Barack Obama, whom you consider more electable, but you don’t want Clinton to know that. After all, what if she wins? Then you’ll never see the inside of the Lincoln Bedroom. So you tell Clinton that you’re definitely on her side. Fortunately, under the Ackerman-Ayres plan, you’ll make your check out to the Federal Election Commission, not Clinton. The FEC will wait five days before adding your money to Clinton’s account. In those five days, you could contact the FEC and redirect the money to Obama if you chose. And regardless of which candidate ultimately gets the money, its origin will be masked. The FEC will distribute the cash to the candidate’s account anonymously, in pieces, over several days, using a secret algorithm to vary the pattern by which it deposits the money. So even though you promised the New York senator your support, she’ll have no way of knowing whether you really went through with it. You could send your money to Obama and Clinton would have no way of knowing whose side you were actually on.
The professors compare their anonymous donation mechanism to an electoral innovation that we now think of as sacrosanct — the secret voting booth. Early American elections were conducted in the open, a situation that led to a rash of vote buying. But in the late 19th century, as states switched over to secret ballots, the practice of bribing people to vote a certain way dropped dramatically. Today only a foolish candidate would pay you to vote for him. You could take his money and swear on your mother’s grave that you’ll vote accordingly, but once in the privacy of the voting booth, you can do whatever you please.
The secret donation booth could have the same effect on today’s main political transaction, wherein candidates, with a wink and a nudge, offer donors electoral favors. Certainly many wealthy people would still want to give candidates a lot of money, and certainly candidates would still promise great possibilities to their donors. But, theoretically, suspicion would sour the money parade, significantly reducing overall donations. Today’s routine $2,000-per-plate benefits would become impossibly tense affairs. If they didn’t like the veal, CEOs might go home and secretly cancel their checks, and the candidates would never know. Meanwhile, any politician would be foolish to risk losing public favor — which, remember, would be worth billions — by kowtowing to a big donor’s unpopular ideas, because the politician could never truly know that the donor ever gave a dime.
You might argue that donors would find other ways to suggest to candidates that they’re team players. Perhaps the nation’s energy executives could visit Dick Cheney — privately, of course — and assure him that they’re giving gobs of money. Because of constitutional restrictions, the proposed secret donation booth would not apply to organizations independent of candidates’ control, groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or MoveOn.org, nor do Ackerman and Ayres propose instituting a cap on such donations. Donors could always direct funds there as a way to show support. To prove to Cheney that they love the GOP, for instance, hundreds of Big Oil executives might get together and publicly give $10 million to Americans for Good Things, a group that runs ads alleging that Democrats were secretly educated at madrassahs. The oilmen would get to help Republicans and take credit for it.
Ackerman and Ayres have two responses to these worries. The first is that talk is cheap. The private assurances of donors might be comforting to a candidate, but Cheney could never really trust that the CEOs were telling him the truth — at least not as much as he trusts them now. And what if donors directed their funds to Swift Boat-style efforts? The professors say the key is to set tough rules to ensure that such groups really are independent of a candidate’s control. And if that were the case, Cheney might not appreciate Big Oil’s big donation to Americans for Good Things. He might feel slighted that it didn’t deposit the money instead in the Bush campaign’s coffers, where the money would have been much more useful to the campaign. Ackerman and Ayres add one more clever idea. If donations to independent groups rise by a substantial amount, then the FEC, under their plan, would correspondingly increase public money given in vouchers. In other words, by design, public money would always vastly outweigh private money, and ordinary people would always have more combined power than the wealthy.
By now this whole thing may sound quite technical, though it’s actually far less complex than today’s regime. In “Voting With Dollars,” their little-noticed 2004 book, Ackerman and Ayres outline their plan in great detail. They even include model legislation; Obama, Clinton or anyone else in Congress could introduce it tomorrow.
That’s not going to happen. And that’s because there is one group that won’t find this plan attractive: those already in power. Because the plan would make politics extremely unpredictable, incumbents are bound to see it as dangerous. The right and some populists will reject using $6 billion or more in taxpayer money to finance campaigns — they’d call it welfare to politicians (though for less than the price of a month of war in Iraq, it’s pretty cheap welfare). Others would rankle at the idea of keeping donations secret. Full disclosure has become so entrenched a part of our political lives that to abandon it might look insane. Another complaint might be that by adding more money to the system in the form of vouchers, candidates would simply launch bigger, noisier campaigns, though Ayres and Ackerman argue that the secret donation booth would cause a net decrease in private political money.
Still, what could be worse than today’s laws? Many who are now vying for the White House have cast themselves as reformers. In announcing his bid, Obama lamented that politics has become “so gummed up by money and influence … that we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions.” Clinton’s aides have suggested that she’d be in favor of overhauling today’s presidential financing laws. The Ackerman-Ayres proposal is one plan that deserves serious consideration.
Short of publicly appealing to St. Jude, Sen. Joe Biden could not have more dramatically signaled his distress. Asked by Jon Stewart Wednesday night on “The Daily Show” about his ill-advised putdowns of his presidential rivals — especially a racially patronizing comment about Barack Obama — Biden, a Catholic, responded by crossing himself. Stewart’s deadpan response: “By the way, he doesn’t have jurisdiction here, so that’s not going to help.”
Thursday afternoon, continuing his self-abnegation tour, Biden appeared on Al Sharpton’s radio show to express his “regret” over the way his comments were perceived, and to reiterate his “love” for the preacher turned perennial protest candidate.
For those who may have been off participating in a sensory deprivation experiment, the Obama remark — which launched a thousand lips — was embedded in an interview with the New York Observer, published Wednesday, the day that Biden released a webcast formally declaring his candidacy for the White House. Here is what Biden said about Obama (though the punctuation is subject to debate, as can be heard on the audio): “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
What may be the real storybook here is how quickly a presidential candidate can become a national laughingstock with 25 ill-chosen words. (Of course, former Sen. George Allen, once a strong prospective 2008 presidential contender, achieved the same result with just one word: “macaca.” But then, Allen is terse with his slurs, while Biden is notoriously verbose.)
A symbol of Biden’s predicament was that the Delaware senator could not decide which verbal sin warranted the biggest apology. He abjectly apologized to Jesse Jackson and Sharpton — both prior presidential candidates — for implying that they were not as “articulate and bright and clean” as Obama. Biden also gave contradictory explanations of what he meant by “clean,” saying in a press conference that it was a shorthand for “clean as a whistle,” and then insisting to Stewart and Sharpton that he was praising Obama’s “fresh” ideas.
While a sports announcer these days would probably be admonished for calling a black athlete “articulate” (as if this were an unusual quality for African-Americans), Biden’s punishment is likely to be cruelly meted out in the polls (where he is already a negligible factor) and in fundraising (where he faces a daunting prospect in corralling the $30 million that is a bare-bones price of entry into the 2008 race).
Biden, reflecting the occupational hazard of having spent more than half his life in the wind chamber of the Senate, is a classic motormouth who routinely speaks before he thinks. Yet, while Biden’s remarks about Obama suggest a tin ear on racial matters, his liberal legislative record — as Sharpton testified — points in a completely opposite direction.
What, then, is the proper way in presidential politics to weigh off-the-cuff words against deeds? This is a serious question in an election cycle in which YouTube may emerge as a dominant communications tool — both by allowing candidates to speak to the voters free of the constraints of 30-second TV spots and by spreading at warp speed embarrassing candid-camera campaign moments.
Two long-ago campaign gaffes, involving Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, illustrate both the risks and the rewards of constructing an elaborate character analysis based on a few words that may — or may not — reflect the candidate’s deepest beliefs.
Having soared to the front of the Democratic presidential pack in storybook fashion, Carter, then a one-term former Georgia governor, stumbled badly when he said that he had no objection to neighborhoods preserving their “ethnic purity.” Against the backdrop of the civil-rights struggle and the battle over mandatory school busing, Carter’s maladroit use of the two-word phrase “ethnic purity” convinced many Northern liberals that on racial matters he was, at heart, still an old-fashioned Southerner.
What followed was a frenzied debate over whether the front-runner for the Democratic nomination was, to put it bluntly, a racist. Carter was saved by testimonials from Atlanta-based black leaders like Andrew Young. In hindsight — given both Carter’s record as president and his post-White House career — the furor was irrelevant, demeaning and absurd. But it underscores the ease with which a presidential candidate can be demonized by his word choice.
(Department of full disclosure: I worked as a spear carrier on the 1976 Carter campaign and later became a White House speechwriter for him. But the “ethnic purity” flap occurred before I signed on with his campaign.)
Four years later, running for president against Carter, Reagan blurted out his informed scientific judgment that trees cause more pollution than automobile exhaust. Even back in the days before polar bears were thought to be imperiled, Reagan’s comments touched off a firestorm hot enough to melt the ice caps. They also fit neatly into a larger pattern of breathtaking environmental ignorance by the former California governor, since Reagan had also claimed during the campaign that oil slicks in the Pacific Ocean helped fight infectious diseases and that the haze over the Smoky Mountains had curative powers for tuberculosis patients.
Reagan’s handlers developed an inspired solution to the problem of an engaging presidential candidate whose head was filled with more misinformation than Dick Cheney’s office. They perfected a technique pioneered by Richard Nixon: keeping the candidate as far away from spontaneous conversations with the press or voters as possible. Everything in Reagan’s campaigns and much of his presidency was choreographed down to the smallest detail on 3-by-5 cards.
Looking back, Earth Day voters who recoiled at Reagan’s words got it right — this was indeed a would-be president with the environmental sensitivity of an actor turned pitchman for General Electric. In this case, the blurted words reflected a larger truth about Reagan’s beliefs.
It is worth pondering what are the lessons that the 2008 presidential candidates and their advisors are likely to draw from Biden’s latest display of hoof-in-mouth disease. Their natural instinct is to conclude that this is what Biden gets for veering away from bland talking points and revealing how he actually feels about his front-running rivals. If anything, for better or for worse, it may reinforce the notion that the message discipline of Hillary Clinton and other robo-candidates is the way to successfully run for president in the 21st century.
Biden’s criticisms in the Observer article of both Clinton (everyone knows her but “she can’t break out of 30 percent”) and John Edwards (“I don’t think John Edwards knows what the heck he is talking about” on Iraq) represent a hard-edged interpretation of their weaknesses as candidates. Impolitic as his words about Clinton and Edwards may sound, they are the comparative arguments that second-tier candidates like Biden probably must make if they have any chance of breaking out of the pack. But there was no strategic logic behind Biden’s comments about Obama, especially if you accept Biden’s claims that he was trying to praise the Illinois senator.
After George W. Bush, few Democrats want a president with a propensity for verbal miscues. But Biden, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also one of the most seasoned experts in the Democratic Party on global strategy and probably would have been John Kerry’s secretary of state. In an ideal world, Biden’s candidacy would be tested by the validity of his views on the Iraq war and domestic policy. But this is the unforgiving sphere of presidential politics — and Biden may have crossed himself off the 2008 list with the kind of comments that caused him to cross himself on Comedy Central.
