Bring It On! Election 2008

Those hoping for a kinder gentler presidential election complete with a heaping helping of compassionate conservatism might want to prepare themselves for a plate of partisan politics that will be far less palatable. I find myself suspecting that the GOP may be laying the groundwork for a bait and switch strategy aimed at satisfying voters newfound penchant for a civil campaign.

With the emergence of John McCain as the seemingly inevitable Republican nominee, voters may be under the impression that we’re moving beyond choreographed character assassinations and stealth swiftboating strategies. My hunch is that the GOP’s alternate approach includes John McCain appearing to take the high road while the usual suspects redouble their efforts to eviscerate the enemy.

I’ll try to explain. This week, we may have witnessed a preview of the plan. My concern is that the orchestration was evidenced in Bill Cunningham’s introduction of Senator McCain (and his effort to define Barack Obama)…which was followed by Senator McCain rapidly renouncing Cunningham’s remarks…even though the campaign had arranged the appearance of the raucous radio personality.

What happened before and after McCain’s criticism seems implausible to me. How could the McCain campaign have been so oblivious to what Cunningham was going to say? Why did Cunningham almost instantly withdraw his support for the Senator…stating instead that he would now join Ann Coulter in supporting Hillary Clinton? One, I can’t imagine the McCain campaign didn’t discuss the introduction with Cunningham. Second, I doubt anyone who is so well connected to a campaign such that they are chosen to introduce the candidate makes such an instantaneous about face. Hence, it’s important to analyze his actions; searching for the underlying objective.

Note that in shifting his support to Clinton, Cunningham has left himself room to change his mind should Obama be the Democratic candidate (the same candidate he sought to define as a soft on terror Muslim sympathizer). If we project ahead, let’s suppose Obama is the Democratic nominee; leaving the Coulter’s and Cunningham’s of the GOP without a candidate. We could assume they won’t vote…or we could assume something far more strategically savvy. Using Cunningham’s own word, I look for these current outliers to suddenly announce their own “kumbaya” moment…the one that states, “I actually supported Hillary Clinton…and that’s a difficult calculation to make…but when I imagine an Obama presidency as the alternative to John McCain, I have to support John McCain”.

So what does this achieve? Well, it sends GOP voters two important messages. First, it says that some establishment conservatives were actually willing to support one of the most reviled Democrats (Clinton)…a candidate the base could never support. Second, once Obama became the candidate, those same establishment conservatives decided to come back and support John McCain…because Barack Obama must be worse than Hillary Clinton. So what is the conclusion GOP voters will be asked to draw? If the choice in November is between John McCain and a candidate that is worse than Hillary Clinton, they have to get out and support John McCain.

By utilizing this approach, it allows people like Cunningham and Coulter to continue to rail against Obama as they supposedly support Clinton…all the while further defining Obama as worse than Hillary…doing the work for the McCain campaign while he keeps his hands clean and moves to higher ground. At the same time, the media darling McCain can stay below the radar and avoid being directly associated with the scorched earth strategy.

The bottom line is that the GOP desperately needs to define Obama…negatively. Having the GOP candidate do this dirty work isn’t ideal in 2008 given that a majority of voters don’t seem inclined to accept more of the partisanship fostered by the likes of Karl Rove. If this can be achieved by unattached surrogates who also have the ear of those Republican’s less apt to be enthused with a McCain candidacy, all the better.

If they succeed, then the entire GOP can sit down at the table…together with the independent and moderate voters they must have to win in November…ready to indulge in the equivalent of a twice baked batch of kinder, gentler, compassionate and conservative, comfort food…a delectable dish of “Krafty Mac & Sleeze”.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

Honestly, I couldn’t care less if John McCain is a womanizer. If so, that puts him on par with most of his colleagues and many of his fellow citizens. Frankly, if he is, it’s not a predictor of competence and it shouldn’t automatically disqualify a candidate from consideration. Nonetheless, it may make sense to seek an understanding of the behaviors that might accompany an individual’s propensity to engage in such escapades.

I’ve known men that are virtually unable to function without the prospect of a budding relationship…whether married or not. Men of this ilk are prisoners of their prurient pursuits. They are apt to make compromising decisions that jeopardize their existing relationships as well as their own well-being. Money is often no object and they will frequently take unwise and unwarranted risks. Hence, when these individuals are in the throes of their latest interlude, their judgment is not only suspect; it may well be incorrigible.

As I read the accounts of Senator McCain’s involvement with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, I immediately recalled watching an episode of Headliners and Legends chronicling his life. The pursuit of women was a persistent theme of the biography…a pattern not only confirmed by friends of McCain; but also by McCain himself.

In one particular segment of the program, McCain basically states that he and his fellow servicemen were preoccupied with seeking female companionship. While understandable given the circumstances, the manner in which the Senator recounted the story immediately reminded me of my discomfort with his habit of winking at people on the campaign trail. Instinctually, both instances strike me as part and parcel of a persona I might be inclined to suspect is focused on the pursuit of the opposite sex…a behavior set I would equate with a tendency towards objectification.

As the biography progresses, the narrator notes that McCain’s first wife Carol waited patiently for his release from his captors only to see their marriage fall apart as a result of the Senator’s many extramarital dalliances. When asked about that period of time, McCain’s former wife, a victim of a disabling car accident, apparently told others that once her husband turned forty, he decided he wanted to be twenty five again. Hence, he divorced his first wife and soon married his much younger (and wealthy) current wife Cindy.

In the biography, McCain speaks about his affairs and while he accepts blame and acknowledges his actions were inappropriate, he also posits that he was motivated by “selfishness and immaturity”. In my way of thinking, I could entertain giving him the benefit of the doubt had he suggested that his actions may have been a reaction to his years of confinement and the denial it certainly included. To his credit, he refuses to offer that rationale, though it’s possible he did so because it wouldn’t square with his history of womanizing prior to his stint in Vietnam.

Returning to the New York Times report, I was particularly struck by the following excerpt:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

What troubles me about this revelation is the sense, by his advisors, that the Senator was capable of sabotaging his own campaign. Presumably, the advisors had a good sense of their candidates idiosyncrasies…a fact that seems to have led them to conclude the Senator lacked the proper judgment with regard to romantic involvements. Whether this caution resulted from prior experiences wasn’t revealed…but it isn’t much of a stretch to draw that conclusion given the Senator’s self-confessed track record.

So where does that leave us? Well, as is so often the case with such stories, we’re forced to rely upon the speculations of others. Clearly, the Senator’s history has contained instances of a similar nature and he freely admits as much. Whether he does so to help him arrive at the current straight talking maverick war hero image may never be known…though he wouldn’t be the first public figure to craft a message that masks the actual man. Lastly, he can ill-afford to acknowledge an infidelity or an influence peddling impropriety at this critical juncture in his political life. Such is the nature of the political beast.

Rather than focus on this current assertion, I decided to have a little fun developing my own theory of McCain-ometrics. First, some background facts are needed. In 1965, at the age of 29, McCain married his first wife. In 1979, 14 years later, at the age of 43, McCain began courting his future second wife. In 1980 he left his first wife, who was 2 years his junior, for his new 27 year old wife…17 years younger. Nearly 20 years later, in 1999, at the age of 62, McCain is reported to have become “involved” with a 31 year old woman who was also roughly 31 years younger than he.

So here’s the formula and a riddle. John McCain spends 14 years with his first wife (Carol)…and then finds a new love interest (Cindy in 1979 - 1980)…and then, down the road, in approximately half again more years…minus one…(14 + 7 - 1 = +20 = 1999), he finds Vicki. Simultaneously, he doubles the net age difference between himself and each subsequent (love) interest…going from a baseline of a woman 2 years younger (Carol) to one 17 years younger (Cindy) for a net of 15 additional years younger…which means we must double the 15 year age gap to predict that the subsequent (love) interest would be approximately 30 years younger (Vicki 31, John 62 in 1999). Let’s also assume that John McCain doubles the years he stays married to each wife…plus one…thus 14 years with Carol x 2 + 1 = 29 years with Cindy. As such, he should be due for both a new (love) interest and wife in 2009 (14 + 7 - 1 = +20 plus half again more (minus one) = 20 + 10 - 1 = +29 years…or 2009).

OK, so if one applies this formula, how old would you approximate his new (love) interest and bride to be when he marries her and how many years would you anticipate he’d remain married (assuming he lives that long, of course) to this third wife?

You see, when it comes to the “evil” New York Times, I just hate to think that Republicans would conclude that its tawdry invective can’t be substantiated through a mathematical metric. I know I feel better having put pencil to paper.

P.S. Feel free to offer your answers…or your own equations in the comments. I’ll provide the answer derived from my metric in the comments at the end of the day.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

The man who held that position was of course John Edwards. His message was clear: there are two America’s. With prices rising for almost everything and wages stagnating for years now, the time was ripe for a populist candidate within the Democratic Party and Edwards proudly filled that role.

Barack Obama would logically have a hard time filling that role. If he did attempt to put out a populist message, the MSM would most likely label him “the black candidate”. The Clinton’s already did that in South Carolina..thankfully it back-fired on them. I have been waiting to see if Obama would grab the populist mantel in spite of the pitfalls that stood in his way. As Manning Marable, a Columbia University history professor stated:

“That’s because once Obama parroted Edwards’ attacks on greed and inequality, he would “be stigmatized as a candidate mobilizing race,” David Sirota adds: That is, the media would immediately portray him as another Jesse Jackson — a figure whose progressivism has been (unfairly) depicted as racial politics anathema to white swing voters.

Sirota’s piece addresses the pitfalls that a populist message would create for Obama with the press and with the Clinton campaign:

Remember, this is always how power-challenging African-Americans are marginalized. The establishment cites a black leader’s race- and class-unifying populism as supposed proof of his or her radical, race-centric views. An extreme example of this came from the FBI, which labeled Martin Luther King Jr. “the most dangerous man in America” for talking about poverty. More typical is the attitude exemplified by Joe Klein’s 2006 Time magazine column. He called progressive Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., “an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped” and “one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics.”

Well, I am here to say that Tuesday night in Madison, WI Obama finally hit a populist note. From his speech:

It’s a game where lobbyists write check after check and Exxon turns record profits, while you pay the price at the pump, and our planet is put at risk. That’s what happens when lobbyists set the agenda, and that’s why they won’t drown out your voices anymore when I am President of the United States of America

It’s a game where trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart. That’s what happens when the American worker doesn’t have a voice at the negotiating table, when leaders change their positions on trade with the politics of the moment, and that’s why we need a President who will listen to Main Street – not just Wall Street; a President who will stand with workers not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard.

Obama is now officially the front-runner. He needs to go after Hillary’s base of support; The blue-collar workers, the folks making under 50k a year, retirees, older women, immigrants and even white collar workers. Obama is also now taking aim at John “weathervane’ McCain as well he should:

John McCain is an American hero. We honor his service to our nation. But his priorities don’t address the real problems of the American people, because they are bound to the failed policies of the past.

George Bush won’t be on the ballot this November, but his war and his tax cuts for the wealthy will.

When I am the nominee, I will offer a clear choice. John McCain won’t be able to say that I ever supported this war in Iraq, because I opposed it from the beginning. Senator McCain said the other day that we might be mired for a hundred years in Iraq, which is reason enough to not give him four years in the White House.

He needs to remind people of NAFTA and its consequences, like he did tonight in Madison. He sounded confident and today he is supposed to deliver a major policy address. I will watch and listen to him and what he says and doesn’t say.

Because this time around..I want to vote for someone, not just for the lesser of two mediocre evils. If I don’t hear what I need to hear from Obama, it will just be another Presidential Election where one of my felines gets my vote, as was the case with John Kerry. For me, this Presidential election isn’t about race or gender..its about who is delivering the populist message that we can no longer tolerate ‘two America’s’ which is represented by the growing economic inequality in our nation. Obama got my attention when he returned campaign contributions from lobbyists. I hope he gets my vote by addressing the problems that affect hard-working Americans on a daily basis and ending the war in Iraq as soon as humanly possible.

I don’t want just rhetoric..I want substance. He will need to not only address the issues, he will need to tell me how he plans to fix them and pay for them. He has the style and he is a mesmerizing speaker..but for my vote he will need much more than that.

John McCain seems to be the GOP frontrunner…a position he has rarely held while aspiring to be the Republican presidential nominee. Following his victory in Florida, McCain and his campaign seem to have accepted the esteemed moniker. His apparent inevitability is troubling to many establishment conservatives and a number of evangelicals. As I watched the Senator in the GOP debate from the Ronald Reagan Library, I couldn’t help but notice the emergence of what I would characterize as the leading edge of his desire to release a blend of pent-up bitterness and spiteful and surly bravado.

Let me be clear, I don’t seek to disparage the Senator or his debate performance. I’m sure he and his fellow candidates must be tired. Nonetheless, McCain’s temperament has long been a topic of discussion…and a reason for pause. Last evening, in my opinion, I observed a man who has longed for the authority and the opportunity to speak his mind without the filters politicians so often employ. It left me wondering if I was watching a man who, upon attaining the presidency, might shed his subtle sophistry in favor of an unbridled style of authoritarianism.

Stay with me for a moment. McCain has made a career of portraying himself as a “straight talking” politician who is amenable to reaching across the aisle. When he’s done so, it’s often been to the chagrin of his fellow Republicans. On the surface, that’s an admirable trait and one that seems to have served the Senator well…especially with the mainstream media…the tool he often utilizes to assuage the animosity and skepticism his actions have generated amongst his peers. In my estimation, whether it’s a demonstration of sincerity or a carefully executed strategy is open to debate.

Now consider the 2000 GOP primary and the character assassination and personal assaults John McCain endured at the hands of his adversary, George W. Bush. If one can believe the media reports, the attacks were understandably quite hurtful to the Senator…and they are thought to have played a significant role in derailing his presidential aspirations.

Next, think about a man who spent over five years in captivity…a man forced to hold his tongue and bide his time in the face of adversity. Such treatment can undoubtedly alter one’s relational skills and interaction style…as well as lead one to adopt a strategy that I would equate with treading water. Essentially, it’s a recognition that survival is the fundamental objective…and that may mean saying what is expected or demanded in order to keep one’s head above water…until one has the opportunity to do otherwise. As such, John McCain certainly understands what it means to tarry.

As I’ve watched the run up to the 2008 election, I’ve felt that McCain has made a number of strategic decisions intended to afford him another shot at the prize he seeks…the presidency. His campaigning for the reelection of George Bush struck me as an attempt to receive the party’s presidential baton…in spite of his dislike of his former adversary. His subsequent forays into mending fences with the evangelicals he once assailed were more of the same. As best I can tell, in most instances, these mea culpa moments took place absent the dialogue one would expect to accompany a difficult reconciliation.

At the same time, my sense is his memory is akin to that attributed to an elephant. Hence he never forgets a slight, a fight, an insult, or a defeat. Like with his time as a prisoner of war, McCain has spent the last seven years plotting his escape from the subservience he resents and his ascendancy to the authority he craves. The phenomenon isn’t unique to prisoners of war. The same often exists in spouses who stay in abusive relationships until they can envision and enact their escape and exact their revenge.

His occasional episodes of vitriolic derision directed at his primary opponents may offer a glimpse of what lies beneath the affable surface he labors to demonstrate. The measured and halting nature of his recent speeches…delivered with a structured and rhythmic cadence…suggest an alternative stream of thought is on the verge of surfacing…and ample energy must be diverted to keep it at bay until the opportune moment.

His palpable dislike of Mitt Romney prompts other concerns and considerations. One, McCain is apt to see Romney’s flip-flopping campaign as a usurpation of the McCain “go along to get along” style. Two, the occasionally uncensored animosity aimed at Romney supports the psychological concept of projection…which essentially posits we’re prone to recognize and resent in others that which we have failed to expunge from our own suspect identity.

John McCain may well win the GOP nomination…and that may occur as a function of voter’s calculating he is best suited to defeat the nominee of the Democrats. If my hypothesis is correct, the more proximate McCain finds himself to his quintessential objective, the more difficult it will be to suppress the psychological scars that power his psyche. If this happens, the intervening months between his nomination and the November election may pull back the curtains and expose him as little more than the GOP’s angry, though impotent, wizard.

The following graphic is a tongue-in-cheek summarization of the above observations.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

I have no particular axe to grind with Andrew Sullivan…except for noting the inconsistencies in the many axes he grinds ad nauseam. His latest obsession is Bill and Hillary Clinton (of course focused on Hillary’s presidential aspirations).

Frankly, given his persistent efforts to negatively link Hillary to every “ism” he’s ever pondered, it’s hard too imagine that he hasn’t ground his axe down to a rudimentary toothpick with which to extract the last shard of evidence…from her teeth…for his relentless indictment.

Suffice it to say that in this latest instance, Sullivan has fast become the epitome of “The lady doth protest too much”…and my apologies to good ladies everywhere. Sullivan now argues, by virtue of quoting the following from Faye Wattleton (transcribed by a reader and sent to him) who observed her appearance on Hardball with Chris Mathews (think mainstream media misogynist).

Chris Matthews: Faye, you first, you know Hillary Clinton, you know Bill Clinton. What’s Bill’s role in this thing, is it a good role or a bad role?

Faye Wattleton: Well, I think that Bill Clinton’s role is that of the spouses of all the candidates, he’s participating as a surrogate for his wife who is running. And I think that its entirely consistent with the ascension of other women to the top offices in their country; they come about it as the result of the president being their spouse or being members of prominent families. So I don’t think that we should be so upset and agitated about Mr. Clinton’s participation - we should continue to focus on the issues that the people want to hear about…these other matters are really side issues.

From these remarks, Sullivan intuits that the Clinton’s are comfortable to conflate nepotism and feminism in order to achieve their objectives…thereby corrupting feminism and “everything they touch”. So let me summarize the trajectory of Andrew’s conclusion…one of Andrew’s readers sends him a transcription of Faye Wattleton’s comments on Hardball and he agrees with it such that it proves the Clinton’s have corrupted feminism? Well there you have it…case closed.

Regardless of one’s opinion on the Clinton’s and Hillary’s aspirations, Sullivan’s argument is the equivalent of entering a vacuous room that has been hermetically sealed and is devoid of any light…with a camera that lacks a flash mechanism…in order to take the quintessential picture of darkness. Unless random chance results in his capturing the definitive number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin, I’m similarly at a loss to recognize the Earth shattering nature of Sullivan’s latest Clintonian hypothesis.

To my knowledge, Hillary Clinton is not only the first woman candidate with a chance to win the presidency; she is also the first spouse of a prior president to seek the office. Concluding that her candidacy must be a willful act, by the Clinton’s, to conflate nepotism and feminism…and thus corrupt feminism…in order to win…is simply painting the unprecedented as presciently predictable. The fact that a president’s legacy is rarely static suggests that asserting an understanding of this novel event is undoubtedly unbridled arrogance.

Yes, the Clinton candidacy turns political convention on its head…but concluding this candidacy is more lacking in ideological purity…or more willing to defile the grand order of “isms”…than those that have preceded it could just as easily be interpreted as a misogynistic projection intended to assure the status quo. At the very least, Newton’s notion that for every action (force), there is an equal and opposite reaction (opposing force) seems an appropriate consideration.

Clearly the Clinton’s are ambitious…and likely to a fault. However, they aren’t the first political family to exhibit as much. They’re not even the first political cabal willing to exploit the advantages they perceive to be available. I suspect we have an example of one in the White House at this very moment. Yes, the Clinton candidacy is unique in its structure…but it isn’t unique in its execution. Looking to view the efforts of the Clinton’s as a unique aberration or a full-scale deviation from established politicking is to ignore history.

Attempting to attach pejorative narratives in order to defeat them is nothing new either…and those who seek to paint the Clinton strategy as particularly distasteful are nonetheless politically motivated.

Sullivan’s vast body of words betrays his effort to portray the Clinton’s as unacceptable outliers. His frequent protestations with the narrow mindedness of the Catholic Church and his incessant lamentations on the state of conservatism demonstrate his own willingness to champion efforts to undo years of status quo while still remaining a card carrying conscript.

Are his efforts a corruption of those “isms” or merely the acts of an individual who hopes to alter them? Couldn’t the established arbiters of the Catholic Church and the GOP establishment view Sullivan’s actions to be the equivalent of the Clinton’s? One can easily make the argument that his actions are intended to undermine their long-established order and their theoretical tenets.

Sullivan’s efforts to reshape Catholicism to accept homosexuality can just as easily be viewed as an attempt to corrupt it. The same can be stated with regards to his displeasure with the current iteration of GOP conservatism. He may not believe that social issues should dominate the Republican landscape, but those who imagine themselves to be the party’s purist guardians would no doubt beg to differ. Wouldn’t both groups be justified in assailing Sullivan’s “perversion” of both?

The presumption that feminism can be narrowly defined…or that it has been what it always was and will be what its always been is merely an attempt to erect an argument to further “sully” the Clinton’s.

Sullivan contends he is a feminist. He also argues that he is a conservative and a Catholic. The truth of the matter is that he is these things…but clearly only to the extent that he defines them.

Sullivan is entitled to support the candidate of his choice. However, his ongoing efforts to disguise his justification as an adherence to ideological purity, is simply superficial subterfuge.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater