Behaving badly - Add Clintons' campaign tactics to a dubious list

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

January 28, 2008

There is nothing wrong with running a good but tough presidential campaign. But there is something wrong with running an unfair and unseemly campaign. As they say, politics ain't beanbag. But it doesn't have to turn into a food fight.

Americans have the right to expect that those who run for president will abide by certain standards. The office carries enormous dignity, and so the pursuit of it should also be dignified. Those who forget that fact risk going down in history books alongside Lyndon Johnson's “Daisy Girl” commercial or the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped elect George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Now you can add one more example to that dubious list: The double-teaming of Sen. Barack Obama by Sen. Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. There is something awfully distasteful about a former president morphing into a political attack dog. Even more so when the individual in question embraces his new role in ways that are cynical, hypocritical and underhanded.

Cynical because the Clintons have managed to play the race card against Obama and then make it seem as if he was the one dealing. Hypocritical because it boggles the mind that Bill Clinton – aka “America's first black president” and someone who actively cultivated support from black voters – could complain that black voters in South Carolina would support someone because of his race. And underhanded because so much of what both Clintons are saying about Obama are distortions or outright lies.

Much of the media saw through this and, in recent days, there has been a lot of criticism of the Clintons for their “anything goes” approach to this race. This isn't news to those of us who have long been skeptical of this couple and their tactics. But it may have come as a shock to African-Americans and other elements of the Clinton coalition who now support Obama.

It's one reason why people are beginning to wonder if Bill Clinton isn't, by word and deed, doing substantial harm to his wife's candidacy and damaging his own legacy. It might even be a good idea for the ex-president to assume a lower profile in this campaign.

One has to wonder if it isn't already too late and if the Clintons haven't already crossed some line and lost the support of the same people they will need in November, should Hillary Clinton become the Democratic nominee. In fact, Obama has begun telling audiences that, while he is confident he can bring the Democratic Party together if he is the nominee, he is not sure Hillary Clinton can do the same if she wins the nomination.

We'll leave that to the Democrats to sort out. But one thing that the Clintons already have had working in their favor is the notoriously short memory of the American people. Folks age. Time passes. People forget. Even the juiciest soap operas fade from memory.

But thanks to recent events, and the way the Clintons have behaved, it's all coming back.

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me@rescam.org

A dangerous game with Latino votes

ROBERT D. NOVAK
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

January 28, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Sen. Hillary Clinton is relying on the big Latino vote as her firewall to prevent losing the California Democratic primary Feb. 5, the most important of 22 states contested on Mega Tuesday. But that reliance, say both pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton Democrats, is fraught with peril for the Democratic Party's coalition by threatening to alienate its essential African-American component.

Clinton's double-digit lead in California polls over Sen. Barack Obama is misleading. Subtract a Latino voting bloc whose dependability to show up Election Day always has been shaky, and Clinton is no better than even in the state, with Obama gaining. To encourage this brown firewall, the Clinton campaign may be drifting into encouragement of brown vs. black racial conflict by condoning Latino racial hostility to the first African-American with a chance to become president.

Implications transcend California. The pugnacious campaign strategy of Bill and Hillary Clinton in forcefully identifying Obama as a black candidate spreads concern that they could be risking continued massive, unconditional support for Democrats by African-Americans. The long-range situation is so disturbing that some Clinton supporters talk about an outcome they rejected not long ago: a Clinton-Obama ticket.

Experienced California Democratic politicians doubt the validity of Clinton's double-digit polling lead in the state. At the heart of Obama's support are upper-income Democrats (in exceptional supply here) and young voters whose intentions are difficult to predict. Will the state's huge, currently passive college campuses erupt in an outpouring of Obama voters?

Another problem for pollsters is a California peculiarity. A registered independent who shows up at a polling place Feb. 5 and asks for a Republican ballot will be told, sorry, but the Republican primary is for registered Republicans only. But the voter then may take a ballot of the more permissive Democratic Party. How many will do this and then vote for Obama? The polls cannot predict.

Clinton's 39 percent against Obama's 27 percent in California's Field Poll released last week provides much less certainty than a 12-percentage margin normally would. With Clinton falling and Obama rising, it compares with her 40-point lead six months ago.

The demographics are most important. Clinton has dramatically lost support among blacks, trailing Obama 58 percent to 24 percent. It is a virtual dead heat among white non-Hispanics, 32 percent to 30 percent. Therefore, the 12-point overall lead derives from a 59 percent to 19 percent Clinton edge among Latinos.

In California, the Latino vote is notoriously undependable in actually voting, especially when compared with African-Americans. How the Clinton campaign deals with Hispanic voters is a sensitive matter, but sensitivity never has been a hallmark of the Clinton style.

Insensitivity was reflected in a recent issue of The New Yorker, when Clinton's veteran Latino political operative Sergio Bendixen was quoted as saying, “The Hispanic voter – and I want to say this very carefully – has not shown a lot of willingness to support black candidates.”

That brief quote from an obscure politician has generated shock and awe in Democratic circles. It comes close to validating the concern that the Clinton campaign is not only relying on a brown firewall built on an anti-black base, but is reinforcing it. A prominent Democrat who has not picked a candidate this year told me, “In any campaign I have been involved in, Bendixen would have been gone.”

But not in Hillary Clinton's. During the Jan. 15 debate prior to the Nevada caucuses, where the Latino vote was important, NBC's Tim Russert read the Bendixen quote and asked Clinton, “Does that represent the view of your campaign?” Her response was chilling: “No, he was making a historical statement.”

Asked whether Latinos will refuse to vote for him, Obama got a laugh when he replied: “Not in Illinois. They all voted for me.”

But this is no laughing matter for Democrats. The Clintons are making a risky gamble that black voters will not be offended by Hillary Clinton attacking Obama for legally representing a Chicago slumlord or for clearly identifying him as the black candidate for president. They are betting that African-Americans will forget the slurs of January and loyally troop to polls in November.

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me@rescam.org

Clintons ignore nation's changes

EUGENE ROBINSON
THE WASHINGTON POST

January 29, 2008

Playing the race card against Barack Obama didn't work out quite the way Bill Clinton had hoped. Neither did a reported last-minute personal appeal to keep Ted Kennedy, venerable guardian of the Camelot flame, from joining the Obama crusade. The question now is whether the Clintons understand how the country they seek to lead – and, regrettably, I do mean “they” – has changed.

I wonder how all the Clintonistas who protested that Bill and Hillary would never, ever dream of stooping to racial politics must be feeling now, after Bill was videotaped in the act. On Saturday, as Democrats in South Carolina went to the polls, a reporter asked Bill about Obama's boast that it took two Clintons to try to beat him. Bill replied: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”

Now, the question had nothing to do with Jesse Jackson. So why do you suppose such an expert on American politics as Bill Clinton, with no prompting, would bring up contests that took place decades ago – back when South Carolina picked its convention delegates in caucuses, not primaries? John Edwards' victory four years ago, in a primary, would have been much more relevant; he ran a good campaign, too.

The only possible reason for invoking Jackson's name was to telegraph the following message: Barack Obama is black, so if a lot of black people decide to vote for him – doubtless out of racial solidarity – it doesn't really mean squat.

And the reasons to send that message would be to devalue an Obama victory in South Carolina; to inoculate the Clinton campaign against potential losses in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee – Southern states with large African-American populations – next Tuesday; and, most important, to pigeonhole Obama as “a black candidate” as opposed to “a candidate who, among other characteristics, is black.”

That would help Hillary Clinton in other states, because the more prominent race becomes in this campaign, the more likely it is that she will win the nomination. They don't call us a “minority” for nothing.

But a funny thing happened in South Carolina. Clinton didn't lose by 10 or 12 points, as most polls had predicted; it was a 28-point blowout, with Obama more than doubling her vote. Yes, he took 78 percent of the black vote, according to the exit polling, and she beat him among white voters, 36 percent to 24 percent. But if you look more closely, Clinton and Obama were practically tied among white men, 28 percent to 27 percent. Clinton's advantage among whites came from women.

If Obama wanted to take a page from the “identity politics” playbook of the 1990s, he could try to hang the “female candidate” label around Clinton's neck.

He won't, though, because the Obama campaign is well aware that identity politics is a fatal trap. In his victory speech Saturday night, Obama went back to his focus on tearing down barriers rather than reinforcing them. On his way to the rhetorical mountaintop, however, he paused to note that the “status quo is fighting back with everything it's got; with the same old tactics that divide and distract us from solving the problems people face.”

Oh, and he threw in a line about people who would “say anything and do anything to win an election.” No, he didn't mention the Clintons by name.

It pains me to refer to the Clintons in the plural, since Hillary's campaign is indeed a historic milestone. But after South Carolina, it's hard to claim that this candidacy is entirely about her. At the very least, it's about them – and if you listen to Bill's speeches, you get the distinct impression that he thinks it's all about him. Does anyone believe his sense of entitlement will somehow dissipate if the Clintons move back into the White House?

The Clintons are a remarkably successful political partnership, and Hillary Clinton still has to be considered the favorite to win the nomination. Yet they can't have anticipated that Kennedy would defect, or that other Democratic Party grandees would complain so loudly about their tactics – or that Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who called Bill the “first black president,” would endorse Obama.

The Clintons are running the kind of campaign they know how to run. But there are signs that the country has changed – that it's less concerned about identity than character, more interested in commonality than difference, hungrier for inspiration than triangulation.

If, as Obama said Saturday night, “this election is about the past versus the future,” the Clintons are in for more rude surprises.

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me@rescam.org

Endorsements may actually count this year

San Diego Union-Tribune editorial

January 30, 2008

So, whom have you endorsed for president? No one yet? You're kidding. You had better get on that. Everyone else is doing it.

It's the battle of the endorsements. Newspapers typically endorse one candidate over another, but that practice is usually reserved for the general election. This year, perhaps the presidential races are so contested because there is no incumbent running or even a vice president considered to be the heir apparent to the sitting president.

As usual, Hollywood action stars are having a say. Sylvester Stallone is backing John McCain, while Chuck Norris supports Mike Huckabee.

Meanwhile, members of Congress in both parties are divvying up support between the front-runners: Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney, and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. McCain is getting the better of Romney on that score, which is odd given that McCain has a reputation in Congress for not playing well with others. Clinton and Obama have a fair number of lawmakers in their corners, including a number who serve with them in the Senate. That is bound to make things interesting once the campaign is over.

Yet nothing put the issue of political endorsements front-and-center like the announcement this week that Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, the liberal lion, was throwing his support behind Obama. Kennedy has said he has grown increasingly concerned over the Clinton campaign's tactics and specifically the tendency to introduce race into the debate. In fact, Kennedy said he called Bill Clinton to complain and, after what must have been a heated exchange, emerged from the call angrier than he was before he started to dial. So, Kennedy endorsed Obama and even drew comparisons between the Illinois senator and President John F. Kennedy.

If this were any other election, in any other political year, we might dismiss the importance of endorsements. We might even argue that these overtures are outdated and of questionable value.

But this is no ordinary election and no ordinary year. With so much in doubt, and with voters presented with so many choices, endorsements might actually mean quite a bit this time around. If nothing else, they allow elected officials to send a message – not just to voters but to rival candidates and entire political parties.

So what message was Ted Kennedy trying to send by endorsing Barack Obama? It could be this: Racial politics have no place in this election and anyone who stands by those sorts of tactics deserves to stand alone.

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me@rescam.org

A campaign about race

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

January 30, 2008

Having polarized blacks and whites, the Democratic primary campaign was already becoming sleazy. And now that Latinos have been added to the mix, it's become surreal.

We're being told that Latinos won't vote for Barack Obama because he's black. The implication is that Latinos are racist.

Sergio Bendixen, a Latino who conducts polls for Hillary Clinton, suggested during an interview with Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker that “the Hispanic voter – and I want to say this very carefully – has not shown a lot of willingness to support black candidates.”

John B. Judis, writing in The New Republic, insisted that Latino voters could be a firewall for Hillary Clinton in part because of “a legacy of an older Latin American prejudice against blacks that has been transplanted to this country.”

And, in The New York Times, Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer cited “a history of often uneasy and competitive relations between blacks and Hispanics, particularly as they have jockeyed for influence in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.”

Nagourney and Steinhauer neglected to mention that each of those cities have, in the past, elected black mayors who captured the majority of the Latino vote.

It's true that in most polls, Hillary Clinton has a 2-1 advantage with Latino voters over Barack Obama.

But do the Eastern media really expect us to buy the idea that the 44 million people who make up America's largest minority have a beef with African-Americans? Does that include the Latinos who backed Obama in his campaigns in Illinois, and those who now support his presidential campaign? If anything, Latinos – especially those whose families have been in this country for generations – tend to have a keen understanding of racism, which makes them more likely to identify with the plight of African-Americans.

Next thing you know, pundits are going to tell us that Latinos are too macho to elect a woman president.

There are plenty of reasons why Latinos might support Hillary Clinton. Her husband won two national elections in which he earned more than 60 percent of the Latino vote. She has racked up scores of endorsements from prominent Latino officials, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.

Not that there isn't racism in this election. That's the surreal part. There certainly is. But none of it involves Latinos. Rather, it's the kind that has been the most prevalent in U.S. history – whites versus blacks.

Things got really nasty in South Carolina, where former President Bill Clinton dealt a whole deck of race cards before – and even after – the vote. And yet Obama cruised to victory with more than 80 percent of black support and nearly a quarter of the white vote.

This despite the ex-president's despicable efforts to scare off Obama's white supporters by trying to define the Illinois senator solely by race. Last week, a top adviser to the Clinton campaign acknowledged to a reporter from The Associated Press that the campaign's objective is to define Obama as “the black candidate.”

And so, Bill Clinton tried to portray Obama as someone who draws his support almost exclusively from African-Americans and speculated that South Carolinians would vote along racial lines. After the votes were cast, he took one last shot by comparing Obama's victory to those enjoyed in South Carolina by Jesse Jackson during his 1984 and 1988 presidential bids.

Hurricane Bill couldn't have done more damage to his wife's campaign if he had tried. Wait. Maybe he did. Maybe the plan was to write off South Carolina, knowing that black voters would turn out overwhelmingly for Obama. Then Hillary comes off as a victim of identity politics, and white and Latino voters become more sympathetic to her in future primaries.

An African-American friend suggested to me recently that the Clinton campaign might be willing to swap black voters for Latinos. The Clintons could be counting on Latino voters to make up the votes they're losing from African-Americans. It's possible.

In 1968, Richard Nixon embraced a Southern strategy that used the race issue to carve up the electorate and scare up support from white voters. Republicans turned to the strategy time and again until the South was largely in their hands.

Well, with Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and California all holding primaries or caucuses next week, this could be the Clintons' Southwestern strategy – an elaborate racial bank shot that is just as divisive and unsavory as its predecessor.

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me@rescam.org

Voters reject Edwards, Giuliani messages

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

January 31, 2008

There was once a crowded field of presidential candidates from both parties. Well, don't look now but the crowd is thinning – and fast.

It's a safe bet that when Democrat John Edwards and Republican Rudy Giuliani launched their campaigns for president, they were filled with confidence and never imagined that they would come to an end on the same day. But that's what happened yesterday, when both men withdrew from the race after suffering humiliating defeats in “must win” states.

Edwards' third-place showing in South Carolina had to be personally painful, given that he was born in the state. His tone was angry, his message defeatist, and his rhetoric divisive. Gone was the sunny optimism of “the son of the mill worker” who was born to humble circumstances, worked hard and became rich and successful in this greatest of countries. In came the populist rhetoric of “the son of the mill worker” who saw his father struggle and who later vowed to fight the rich and successful as part of a warped strategy to make the country greater.

The truth is, Edwards never really had much of a message, as much as he had a cause. He obviously cared deeply about poor people, and he felt strongly that they needed to have a champion in Washington. He's not wrong about that. But where he went wrong was in offering people a convenient villain for what ails them – evil corporations that make profits while Americans struggle to make ends meet. In the style of CNN's Lou Dobbs, Edwards issued a simple diagnosis of what's wrong with America and then offered himself as the cure. Thankfully, Democrats saw through that brand of demagoguery and took their votes elsewhere.

Meanwhile, most Republicans passed on the Giuliani candidacy. Giuliani went from front-runner to bringing up the rear. He had a message, but it mostly was about using his leadership skills to keep America secure and preventing another terrorist attack. He turned himself inside out on the immigration issue, going from moderate to hard-liner in record time. Who can forget his naive sound-bite pledge to end illegal immigration in three years? A pro-choice Republican, he deserves credit for challenging his party's orthodoxy on abortion. That was supposed to take him out of the running, and fortunately it didn't.

But, ultimately, Giuliani took himself out of the running by relying on an ill-conceived strategy that put all of its eggs in the Florida basket. In the modern age, candidates have to ask for every single vote. The people of Iowa, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Michigan and South Carolina deserved to hear the Giuliani message. Giuliani overlooked them and attempted to use Florida to launch his campaign. By the time the Florida primary rolled around, his opponents had worked themselves into a full gallop. And the rest is history, and so is the Giuliani campaign.

A presidential election is no place for niche marketing, where a candidate targets one slice of the electorate at the expense of the rest. Those who attempt to divide and conquer sometimes wind up down for the count.

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me@rescam.org

Parties narrowing November choices

DAVID S. BRODER
THE WASHINGTON POST

January 31, 2008

Obama is not inevitable, but the longer the race continues, the greater that hunger.

Heading into Tuesday's unprecedented day of voting in nearly two dozen states, a degree of order is finally emerging in the dramatic races for the presidential nominations of both parties.

Public opinion and leadership support are finding their way to the same destinations, pointing to a clear favorite and a single viable alternative in each race.

John McCain has the easiest path remaining to the Republican nomination, with Mitt Romney needing some kind of dramatic breakthrough Tuesday to keep his hopes of an upset alive.

On the Democratic side, the battle is more even, but the advantage has shifted back to Barack Obama – thanks to a growing but largely unremarked tendency among Democratic leaders to reject Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president.

The New York senator could still emerge from the “Tsunami Tuesday” voting with the overall lead in delegates, but she is unlikely to be able to come close to clinching the nomination. And the longer the race goes on, the better the chances that Obama will ultimately prevail, as more elected Democratic officials and candidates come to view him as the better bet to defeat McCain in November.

As the race has moved from contests in small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire to the national dimension of Tuesday's voting, the role of the endorsements and leadership testimonials has increased. The candidates simply lack the time and resources to make personal appeals to very many voters.

Had McCain not invested that personal time in New Hampshire, with more than 100 town meetings where he argued for the correctness of his views on the Iraq war, he could not have reversed the summertime disaster that overtook his campaign, when he ran out of money and lost most of his senior staff.

But after turning back Romney in New Hampshire, the Arizona senator picked up significant establishment backing in South Carolina and Florida – the hard-core Republican states where he had to show his credentials. He campaigned in South Carolina flanked by Tom Coburn and Jack Kemp, icons of social and fiscal conservatism, and won Florida thanks to last-minute endorsements from Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. Mel Martinez.

Now, with defeated Rudy Giuliani adding his voice to the chorus of endorsements, and with Mike Huckabee remaining in the race to challenge Romney from the religious right, McCain appears poised to lock up the nomination.

Unelected conservative ideologues – Rush Limbaugh and George Will – can mutter in frustration, but Republican politicians recognize what was written here as long ago as last Dec. 2: “If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009 . . . it would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president – and president-in-waiting.”

The Democratic race remains harder to handicap, in part because Clinton already has demonstrated her resilience by fighting uphill battles to prevail in New Hampshire and Nevada and because she retains formidable alliances and organizational strengths.

But the last two weeks have seen a remarkable shift of establishment opinion against her and against the prospect of placing the party's 2008 chances in the hands of her husband, Bill Clinton.

The prominence of his role in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the mean-spiritedness of his attacks on Obama, stunned many Democrats. Clinton's behavior underlined the warning raised in this column before Iowa, by a prominent veteran of the Clinton administration, that the prospect of two presidents both named Clinton sharing a single White House would be a huge problem for the Democrats in November if she is the nominee.

The negatives on the Clintons have brought much support to Obama, most notably that of Ted Kennedy, the most prestigious figure in the Democratic establishment in Washington. But it is also Obama's own appeal that is being talked about across the country from Massachusetts to Arizona by the younger generation of governors, senators and representatives who share with him an eagerness to “turn the page” on the battles of the past.

Obama is not inevitable, but the longer the race continues, the greater that hunger. And the growing recognition of McCain's appeal to independents also works in Obama's favor.

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Is McCain conservative enough?

ROBERT NOVAK
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

January 31, 2008

As John McCain neared his momentous primary election victory in Florida after a ferocious campaign questioning his conservative credentials, right-wingers buzzed over word that he had privately suggested that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was too conservative. In response, Sen. McCain recalled saying no such thing and added Alito was a “magnificent” choice. In fact, multiple sources confirm his negative comments about Alito nine months ago.

McCain, as the “straight talk” candidate, says things off the cuff that he sometimes cannot remember exactly. Elements of the Republican Party's right wing, uncomfortable with McCain as their prospective presidential nominee, surfaced the Alito comments long after the fact for two contrasting motives. One was a desperate effort to keep McCain from winning in Florida. The other was to get the party's potential nominee on record about key issues before he is nominated.

The latter has no pretensions of changing McCain's firmly held non-conservative positions on such issues as campaign finance reform and global warming. Rather, they want two assurances: first, that McCain would veto any tax increase passed by a Democratic Congress; second, that he would not emulate Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush in naming liberal justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter.

That is the background of conservative John Fund's Wall Street Journal online column the day before Florida voted. He wrote that McCain “has told conservatives he would be happy to appoint the likes of Chief Justice Roberts to the Supreme Court. But he indicated he might draw the line on a Samuel Alito because 'he wore his conservatism on his sleeve.' ” In a conference call with bloggers that day, McCain said, “I don't recall a conversation where I would have said that.” He was “astonished” by the Alito quote, he said, and repeatedly tells town meetings, “We're going to have justices like Roberts and Alito.”

I found what McCain could not remember was a private, informal chat with conservative Republican lawyers shortly after he announced his candidacy in April 2007. I talked to two lawyers present whom I have known for years and who have never misled me. One is neutral for president, and the other recently endorsed Mitt Romney. Each said they were not Fund's source, and neither knew I was talking to the other. They gave me nearly identical accounts, as follows:

“Wouldn't it be great if you get a chance to name somebody like Roberts and Alito?” one lawyer commented. McCain replied, “Well, certainly Roberts.” Jaws were described as dropping. My sources cannot remember exactly what McCain said next, but their recollection is that he described Alito as too conservative.

Meanwhile, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is worried about a prominent journalist informing him that McCain a few years ago said to him, off the record, that as president he would have to raise taxes. McCain more recently has told me, on the record, he never would support a tax increase and, consequently, favors making permanent the Bush tax cuts.

Norquist and McCain have a stormy personal relationship. As Senate Indian Affairs Committee chairman, McCain in 2005 subpoenaed records of Norquist's dealings with imprisoned Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Denying wrongdoing, Norquist said McCain held a grudge against him for campaigning against the senator's 2000 presidential bid. Norquist told me he has no personal animus and only wants assurance that McCain opposes higher taxes.

According to exit polls, voters calling themselves “very conservative” supported Romney in Florida by 2-to-1, and McCain still won in a state described as a microcosm of America. McCain survived a scathing assault on conservative talk radio led by Rush Limbaugh. Romney's appeal to the right on immigration backfired, triggering Sen. Mel Martinez's endorsement of McCain and a 5-to-1 vote for him by the Cuban community.

McCain as the Republican nominee would need those “very conservative” voters. He will encounter some of them at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington Feb. 7-9. His campaign yesterday asked for McCain to speak there after rejecting an invitation to last year's meeting. At CPAC, he might well consider providing “straight talk” about Samuel Alito and promising to veto any tax increase by a Democratic Congress.

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me@rescam.org

Military budget increase

. . . Clinton stays alive
Obama fails to quash her front-runner status

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

February 6, 2008

In the Democratic presidential sweepstakes, Hillary Clinton fended off Barack Obama's mid-winter surge in the polls, winning California, New York and some other key states. But Obama's showing was impressive enough – taking Illinois, Georgia, Connecticut and Minnesota – to keep him firmly in the race, thus leaving the outcome of the nominating battle still uncertain.

Only a few weeks ago, Clinton appeared to be succeeding in her bid to make her victory appear inevitable. Clinton's strategists had hoped, in fact, to make yesterday's Super Tuesday balloting the decisive turn that would ensure her nomination.

But Obama's late-blooming appeal among both Democrats and independent voters spoiled Clinton's hopes. All the same, Obama failed to quash Clinton's front-runner status Tuesday. The result is that the contest for the Democratic nomination will continue, perhaps for weeks to come, even as the Republican Party appears increasingly ready to anoint John McCain as its nominee.

The delegate count between Clinton and Obama is relatively even, thanks in part to the proportional awarding of delegates in Democratic primaries and caucuses. Clinton's advantage in delegates at this juncture is due largely to her backing from so-called “super-delegates,” party officials around the country who are not determined by proportional representation.

As the Democratic contest stretches into a potentially protracted fight, Obama's best hope is that his pledge to unite Americans behind a new political culture in Washington will in time woo more primary voters than Clinton's pledge to put her experience to work on her very first day in the Oval Office. In either case, the Democratic Party is poised to make history by choosing either the first woman or the first African-American as its standard-bearer.

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me@rescam.org

McCain on a roll . . .
GOP diehards' anyone-but-John push a flop

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

February 6, 2008

John McCain's victory in California and his decisive wins in delegate-rich New York, Illinois and New Jersey cement his front-runner status. Meanwhile, the resurgence of Mike Huckabee in Southern states has undercut Mitt Romney's strategy of offering himself as true-blue conservatives' only alternative to the unorthodox McCain.

Eight months ago, this scenario would have seemed impossible. McCain's push for comprehensive immigration reform troubled many Republicans. His ardent defense of the Iraq war hurt him badly with independent voters, damaging claims about his electability. But immigration and Iraq have faded as issues, and McCain emerged from Super Tuesday with a large lead in delegates.

The bottom line: Despite weeks of bitter attacks from such conservative establishment stalwarts as Rush Limbaugh, George F. Will, James Dobson and many more, war-hero McCain's image as a feisty, straight-talking patriot remains powerful and compelling.

There have been so many surprises in this campaign that perhaps more are in store. But McCain backers have to like their chances, especially with Huckabee saving all his fire for Romney.

Should McCain wrap up the nomination soon, however, the Republican Party drama will still be far from over. Not only some establishment conservatives loathe McCain for his stands on global warming, campaign finance reform, taxes and immigration. Many die-hard conservative voters and party activists consider him a traitor.

Perhaps the prospect of another president named Clinton would bring these recalcitrant Republicans around. But in this unique election year, nothing is assured.

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Bailing out homeowners and lenders

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

February 6, 2008

I've written before about how many Americans feel entitled to a comfortable ride through life and then rush to dole out the blame when things get bumpy.

Now this entitlement culture is on display again with the mortgage crisis. Some elected officials, particularly those on the presidential campaign trail, are promising to bail out lenders and borrowers, freeze interest rates and stop home foreclosures.

Consider the recent installment of CBS' “60 Minutes,” which offered a critical look at the wave of foreclosures sweeping across much of the country. What bothered me were profiles of young couples who, once they could no longer afford the mortgage payments and discovered they couldn't refinance because they owed more than the house was worth, simply abandoned their homes, skipping out on their agreement with the loan company.

Never mind that they signed a contract. Never mind that no one ever promised them that their home would continue to go up in value or they'd be off the hook if that was no longer true. Never mind that someone – namely, their parents – should have taught them that when you borrow money, you pay it back.

Not that we don't have an interest in keeping people in their homes. We do. If many Americans are “house poor” because they're struggling to keep up with payments that have grown by as much as 50 percent in recent years and they're locked into subprime loans, then that means they'll have less money to spend on groceries, clothing or auto repairs. That means less money going into the pockets of merchants and others. And if people lose their homes, they'll wreck their credit, and that's bad for them but also bad for the rest of us. It'll make it harder for them to buy, for instance, a car on credit in a few years, which isn't good news for people who sell cars or those who sell things to people who sell cars.

It's one of those societal problems with no easy and pain-free solutions being pushed along by an angry public that wants easy and pain-free solutions.

The Democratic presidential candidates are eager to please. One offers a bandage: Hillary Clinton wants to impose a moratorium on foreclosures for 90 days and freeze mortgage interest rates for five years. The other offers a bailout: Barack Obama proposes a $10 billion home foreclosure prevention fund “to bridge lender and borrower” so that people can stay in their homes.

When asked about the issue during last week's CNN Republican presidential debate near Simi Valley, John McCain took a somewhat saner approach. He said lenders must “return to the principle that you don't lend money (to people) who can't pay it back.” McCain said there are “some greedy people on Wall Street who perhaps need to be punished” and urged that there be more transparency. He also said that, ideally, a mortgage “should be one page . . . (with) big letters at the bottom that says, 'I understand this document.' ” Lastly, McCain implied that any bailout should be limited to “people who were eligible for better terms but were somehow convinced to accept the mortgages which were more onerous on them.”

McCain is on the right track – especially about this part: The only people who deserve assistance are those who should have qualified for a better deal than they got. And, even then, the most government should do is freeze or readjust mortgage rates. It shouldn't pay out a dime. Those who had bad credit and had to turn to the subprime market to purchase a home should never have been buying in the first place. And if you bail them out, what are the chances that they'll wind up in a similar scrape down the road?

Thanks to unscrupulous lending practices where a lot of people made a lot of money by preying on others, and where many of those predators most certainly belong in jail, we now have a situation where many homeowners can't afford to stay in their homes. But make no mistake. We can't afford a wholesale bailout – not just because of the cost to government, but because of the cost to our society and the principles that hold it together.

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And let's not forget the failed bailout of the airline industry at taxpayers expense.

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Attack ad writer

McCain's moral posturing antagonized many

San Diego Union-Tribune editorial

February 8, 2008

For decades, the norm for successful presidential candidates has been to secure their party's nominations by offering red meat to base voters, then shifting to the center for the general election. But in this most unusual campaign year, we're witnessing the reverse: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., just wrapped up his party's nomination – and his very next step was to begin to woo the skeptical GOP rank and file.

That's why yesterday – after Mitt Romney's withdrawal effectively clinched McCain's nomination – McCain went calling on the National Conservative Political Action Committee, stressing his fealty to conservative orthodoxy on taxes, abortion and the threat posed by radical Islam.

And it's why we saw conservative stalwart Bill Bennett weighing in with an op-ed commentary delineating all the crucial issues – including Iraq, school choice, nationalized health care and spending reform – on which McCain was a true-blue servant of the right.

Alas, one speech or 50, one op-ed or 1,000, it's not going to be easy for McCain to win over his Republican critics. Even more than his unorthodox policy views, his combative personality is why.

Despite his strong pro-life views, evangelicals may not forgive his alternately nasty and patronizing attacks on evangelical leaders in the 2000 campaign.

Despite his strong support for the war on Iraq, many hawks are put off by what they see as his sanctimony in railing against U.S. interrogation tactics and the GuantÁnamo detention facility.

Or consider comprehensive immigration reform. McCain and President George W. Bush were both crucial to the push for sweeping legislation that came up short last year. But GOP critics of the measure are far more likely to revile McCain than Bush, because of McCain's caustic attacks on opponents as nativist ignoramuses.

Or recall the 2002 McCain-Feingold law limiting political speech in the name of “keeping money out of politics.” Some critics argued with great passion and considerable legal weight that the bill abridged the First Amendment. Others said it was silly to believe money could be kept out of politics. McCain suggested opponents of his noble crusade were beneficiaries of a corrupt status quo.

It's easy to see why those subject to such moralistic posturing might be slow to warm to McCain as Republican standard-bearer.

But there is also an upside to this crusader's zeal: It can help get things done in a political culture dominated by inertia. And while McCain's choice of causes may be far from ideal for conservative purists, it is irrational for some GOP pundits to argue he might as well be the third pea in a pod with Democratic Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

We don't hear Obama or Clinton denouncing the prescription-drug benefit as a huge boondoggle. Or vowing to kill every last earmark. Or pledging to prosecute the Iraq war as long as it takes. Or ridiculing those who think diplomacy is more important than strength.

John McCain is many things – some positive, some less so. But the “liberal” label is ludicrous.

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Accounting for McCain's ascendancy

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
THE WASHINGTON POST

February 8, 2008

On Super Tuesday, John McCain secured the Republican nomination. How did that happen? Simple. In the absence of a compelling conservative, the Republican electorate turned to the apostate sheriff.

In the beginning, there were two. There was America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, determined to “go on offense.” And there was America's maverick, John McCain, scourge of Iraq wobblies.

Both aroused deep suspicions among conservatives. Giuliani's major apostasy is being pro-choice on abortion. McCain's apostasies are too numerous to count. He's held the line on abortion, but on just about everything else he could find – tax cuts, immigration, campaign finance reform, GuantÁnamo – he not only opposed the conservative consensus but insisted on doing so with ostentatious self-righteousness.

The story of this campaign is how many Republicans didn't care, and felt that national security trumps social heresy. The problem for Giuliani and McCain, however, was that they were splitting that constituency. Then came Giuliani's humiliation in Florida. After he withdrew from the race, he threw his support to McCain – and took his followers with him.

Look at the numbers. Before Florida, the national polls had McCain hovering around 30, and Giuliani in the mid-teens. After Florida, McCain's numbers jumped to the mid-40s, swallowing the Giuliani constituency whole.

On Super Tuesday, the Giuliani effect showed up in the big Northeastern states – New York, New Jersey, Connecticut – and California. McCain won the first three with absolute majorities of 51 percent or more. And in California, McCain-Giuliani (plus Schwarzenegger, for good measure) moderate Republicanism captured 42 percent of the vote.

Elsewhere, where Giuliani was not a factor, McCain got no comparable boost. In Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, he could never break through even 37 percent. The vote was divided roughly evenly among McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney (trailing). But these splits were not enough to make up for the winner-take-all big ones, all of which McCain won.

The other half of the story behind McCain's victory is this: There would have been a far smaller Republican constituency for the apostate sheriff had there been a compelling conservative to challenge him. But there never was.

The first messianic sighting was Fred Thompson, who soared in the early polls, then faded because he was too diffident and/or normal to embrace with any enthusiasm the indignities of the modern campaign.

Then, for that brief and shining Iowa moment, there was Huckabee – until conservatives actually looked at his record (on taxes, for example) as governor of Arkansas, and listened to the music of his often unconservative populism.

That left Romney, the final stop in the search for the compelling conservative. I found him to be a fine candidate who would have made a fine president. But until very recently, he was shunned by most conservatives for ideological inauthenticity. Then, as the post-Florida McCain panic grew, conservatives tried to embrace Romney, but the gesture was both too late and as improvised and convenient-looking as Romney's own many conversions. (So late and so improvised that it could not succeed. On Thursday, Romney withdrew from the race.)

Conservatives are on the eternal search for a new Reagan. They refuse to accept the fact that a movement leader who is also a gifted politician is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. But there's an even more profound reason why no Reagan showed up this election cycle and why the apostate sheriff is going to win the nomination. The reason is George W. Bush. He redefined conservatism with a “compassionate” variant that is a distinct departure from classic Reaganism.

Bush muddied the ideological waters of conservatism. It was Bush who teamed with Teddy Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind, a federal venture into education that would have been anathema to (the early) Reagan. It was Bush who signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. It was Bush who strongly supported the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. It was Bush who on his own created a vast new entitlement program, the Medicare drug benefit. And it was Bush who conducted a foreign policy so expansive and, at times, redemptive as to send paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan and traditional conservatives such as George Will into apoplexy and despair (respectively).

Who in the end prepared the ground for the McCain ascendancy? Not Feingold. Not Kennedy. Not even Giuliani. It was George W. Bush. Bush begat McCain.

Bush remains popular in his party. Even conservatives are inclined to forgive him his various heresies because they are trumped by his singular achievement: He's kept us safe. He's the original apostate sheriff.

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me@rescam.org

Earmarks and the Republican Party

GEORGE F. WILL
THE WASHINGTON POST

February 10, 2008

LEE COUNTY, Fla. - Coconut Road near Fort Myers looks like any other concrete ribbon near housing developments, golf courses and shopping malls in this state's booming southwest. But like another fragrant slab of recent pork, the $223 million “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, Coconut Road leads to somewhere darkly fascinating. It runs straight into Washington's earmark culture of waste, corruption and anticonstitutional deviousness.

Today the road ends at a chain-link fence, beyond which flows the river of traffic on Interstate 75. The earmark that would have built an interchange to connect Coconut Road to I-75 was, like the bridge, smudged with the fingerprints of Alaska's Republican Rep. Don Young, who in 2005 was chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. But this story involves more than one political vulgarian's wretched excesses. It also illustrates how Republicans earned their most recent and coming drubbings.

On July 29, 2005, the House and Senate passed legislation granting Lee County's request for $10 million for “widening and improvements for I-75” to facilitate evacuations during hurricanes. But on Feb. 19, 2005, Young had been in Bonita Springs near Fort Myers, collecting $40,000 in campaign funds. The contributors included developer Daniel Aronoff, a prolific supporter of Republicans and owner of about 4,000 acres along Coconut Road. The value of that land would be enhanced if Coconut Road were connected to I-75 by an interchange that would be adjacent to 1,200 of Aronoff's acres.

When the legislation reached the president on Aug. 10, 2005, the language about widening I-75 had been mysteriously deleted and replaced by “Coconut Rd. interchange I-75/Lee County.” So $10 million was to be spent for a project neither the House nor the Senate voted for, that Lee County did not want, and that someone unknown wrote into the legislation. But the Constitution says: “Every bill . . . shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” before it becomes law.

Young at first said the local congressman, Connie Mack, asked for the change. Mack denied that. In January 2006, Young, who subsequently changed his tune, warned Lee County that it could not spend the $10 million for the widening project it requested. Young says local residents requested the interchange project instead. But many residents, not including the developers who are Young's benefactors, oppose it for environmental and traffic reasons.

There are two mysteries: Who surreptitiously perverted the will of Congress? And why is Congress not angry and eager to identify the culprit? It seems reasonable to suspect that the answer to the first question is: Young or an agent of his. The answer, or answers, to the second question probably is, or are: Because Young is powerful – and perhaps also because such violations of legislative due process have been committed on behalf of other members.

Fortunately, Senate rules enable an obdurate individual to force the institution to sit up and take notice. One such mechanism is a “hold,” by which a senator can halt a bill. Freshman Sen. Tom Coburn is an Oklahoma Republican who happily has not learned the Senate ethic of playing nicely with others. He has put a hold on the bill that corrects technical problems in the 2005 highway bill. On Dec. 18, he announced that he will block that bill – and its slew of earmarks; that will get members' attention – if the bill “does not require a full and open investigation of the events leading up to the unauthorized revision of congressionally passed legislation.” Coburn demands “a select committee, comprised of members of both the House and Senate,” because “secret, improper and unauthorized changes to congressionally passed legislation call into question the integrity of our entire constitutional and legislative process.”

Seven weeks have passed, and nothing has happened. Young, 74, one of whose former aides pleaded guilty to bribery charges involving the jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, is the subject of an FBI investigation concerning another matter, and faces strong opposition to a 19th term. Recently two more House Republicans – the total is now 28 – announced their retirements, evidence that Republicans do not expect soon to end their minority status that began 17 months after the Coconut Road earmark alteration.

In his State of the Union address, the president vowed to veto any appropriation bill “that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half.” Coburn tartly notes that although Congress hardly needs 5,500 earmarks – half of last year's total – the president's goal would be met if Republicans themselves quit earmarking. That fact goes far to explain the Republicans' current and future minority status.

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me@rescam.org

Democrats yield to unpredictability

DAVID S. BRODER
THE WASHINGTON POST

February 10, 2008

When this remarkable political year began, many Democrats were expecting a smooth passage to a historic nomination and a relatively easy presidential victory. That is hardly the case today.

Sen. Hillary Clinton was clearly the established favorite among a large field of challengers, blessed with far more financial and organizational resources than anyone else and the best brand name in Democratic politics.

She was the center of attention, not only for the Democrats but for the Republican candidates as well – the person they expected to face in the general election. As Republican aspirants were struggling to escape the downdraft of the self-immolation that had overtaken President Bush and the GOP Congress, with no assurance that anyone in the group could reassemble the scattered pieces of the Reagan legacy, all of them were focused on Clinton as the final barrier to keeping the White House.

Because the odds seemed so favorable for a Democratic victory in November, eight or nine candidates – with varying degrees of plausibility – decided it was worth the gamble to try to wrest the nomination from Clinton. The conventional wisdom at the start was that someone would emerge to challenge her after the first round of primaries and that she would probably defeat that unnamed opponent.

To everyone's surprise, the least credentialed of her opponents, young Sen. Barack Obama, turned out to have the personal and political skills that rocketed him past all the others. He beat the field in Iowa, stumbled briefly in New Hampshire and Nevada, recovered in South Carolina and emerged from Super Tuesday almost even with Clinton in delegates and ahead in the race for campaign dollars.

As the next phase of state-by-state contests begins, no one can claim the favorite's role in a Democratic contest that could go all the way to the national convention.

Meantime, on the Republican side, John McCain has resurrected his candidacy with a series of primary victories from New Hampshire through California, amassing enough delegates that his nomination is assured.

With Mitt Romney's withdrawal, and only Mike Huckabee, a friendly sparring partner, and the eccentric Ron Paul still running, Republicans can begin to focus on November. Their challenge is still difficult. The war in Iraq remains a heavy burden, its costs outweighing its dividends. The economy has turned down. And public weariness with the White House fuels a desire for change.

Nonetheless, McCain now has the luxury of time in which to mend his differences with some of his fellow conservatives and to pursue the independents whose support would make him a formidable contender.

Where Clinton was the measuring stick for all others in both parties during the past year, McCain now becomes the standard of comparison. As the Democratic race continues, the key question becomes, “Who matches up best against John McCain?”

That will increasingly be a factor for Democratic voters, who find themselves being fragmented on gender, racial and generational lines even in the absence of any serious policy or philosophical differences between the candidates.

And it will be even more central to the deliberations of the almost 800 “superdelegates” – elected and party officials who may represent the balance of power at the convention.

Both Clinton and Obama are now framing their campaigns as a riposte to John McCain. Clinton argues that, given McCain's authority as a warrior and as a defense expert, her experience and toughness are essential for the Democrats to have a chance.

Obama counters with the claim that it is only by providing the sharpest of contrasts – a generational gap linked to a flat-out denial of the strategic centrality of Iraq – that the Democrats can confront McCain and hope to win.

As I have previously noted, Clinton and McCain come close to matching each other when voters are asked to compare their experience and their ability to bring needed change. But McCain has a huge lead on Obama when voters judge experience, and Obama has a large advantage when it comes to promoting change.

The Democratic contest is more than a battle of personalities. It represents two sharply contrasting strategies for victory in November. The choice is one Democrats never expected to face.

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