I used to believe that electing a president should partly be a popularity contest. Who’s the guy I’d most like to have a drink with?
The problem, of course, is that I’m never going to socialize with the president of the United States. Instead, my criteria should revolve around things that will actually or plausibly affect me, like Social Security reform, the death tax and net neutrality.
Yet the reverse snobbery of those who champion the beer primary was lost on me until I read this op-ed, by the editor of the Nashville Scene, comparing Al Gore to Fred Thompson. Here’s the nut (and here’s a quick question for this ilk: name a northeastern liberal who passes the beer primary?):
Thompson never came off looking like a cardboard cutout—the way Gore did as a presidential candidate—because there was a kernel of truth to the image. Who could imagine a teenage Gore driving a pickup along Massachusetts Avenue on his way to the privileged academic bastion of St. Albans? But young Freddie Thompson probably did kick back in a Chevy, drinking a beer with his buds, after a Lawrence County High School football game. As Tennessee columnist Frank Cagle once put it, Thompson fit that truck in a way that Michael Dukakis never fit the tank.
So I’m not misunderstood, character matters a great deal. But in electing a person whose powers include first-strike capabilities, considerations as to whether he went to prep or public school, whether his shirt is a hand-me-down or embroidered with a brand-name logo, or whether he avoids multisyllabic words because he doesn’t know many, are frivolous.
To put it another way, who would you rather have as a boss: a bombshell of average intelligence or an overweight nerd? One’s incompetence might result in your being laid off, whereas the worst that can happen with the other is that your circle of people to flirt with in the office shrinks by one person.
JERRY: “So this woman you plan on hiring, is she going to be in the spokesmodel category?”
GEORGE: “Sure. I could go the tomato route. But I’ve given this a lot of thought Jerry. All that frustration. I’ll never get any work done. So I’m doing a complete 360 [sic]. I’m going for total efficiency and ability.”)
In the end, charisma and authenticity should be luxuries in politics.
Related: A few days ago, I wondered if the beliefs of a spouse are relevant in voting for a politician. Last month, I examined whether politicians should know the price of a gallon of milk.
Within the past year or so, two terms have became verboten within the conservative lexicon: “judicial activism” and “amnesty.” Both are so facile and, by now, shopworn, they have lost objective meaning and instead serve as means to hurl at one’s opponents.
So, in order to restore semantic sanity to the debates about the role of the judiciary and about immigration reform, let’s try to unravel some definitions.
“Judicial activism” occurs when the judiciary overturns a law that enjoys overwhelming public support. Hence the phrase “legislating from the bench.”
“Amnesty” is not automatically synonymous with earned citizenship. Instead, the operative question is how long an illegal must wait for legalized status.
If, after paying back taxes, fees and satisfying other conditions (like fluency in English, gainful employment and a clean criminal record), such status is conferred immediately, then that seems like amnesty. If such status must be earned over time, as with the 1986 bill that granted permanent residency after 18 months and citizenship after another five years, then I think invoking the scarlet noun minimizes the hardships associated with waiting.
For those who disagree—like Senator DeMint, who recently proclaimed, “I don’t care how you try to spin it, this is amnesty”—I’d ask you to describe a solution, short of deporting all illegals, which is not amnesty?
By all means, I’m no expert on these subjects; this is just my admittedly uninformed opinion. What do you think?
Addendum (6/16/2007): My litmus test for the “amnesty” label are the requirements for legalization. But as Time reporter Nathan Thornburgh observes, the more common test is legalization itself:
Whether you fine illegal aliens or stick them in English classes or make them say a hundred Hail Marys, at the end of the day, illegals would be allowed to stay and become citizens under this bill. That’s amnesty.
In other words, anything allowing those who came here illegally to stay here legally constitutes amnesty. To avoid amnesty, illegals must get in the back of the line for legal entry.
Upon the recent death of religious right pooh-bah Jerry Falwell, Christopher Hitchens observed that having the word “reverend” before your name grants you immunity.* Jonathan Martin drew a similar conclusion about having an “R” after your name, specifically, Ron Paul’s, with respect to the Republican presidential debates.
Now comes news from Erick Erickson that the NRCC is holding a fund-raiser tomorrow for Ken Calvert, with special guest Jerry Lewis. Doug Bandow provides the context:
House Republicans . . . added ethically challenged Ken Calvert to the Appropriations Committee, to temporarily fill a vacancy created by Rep. John Doolittle, another California Republican, who resigned after the FBI raided his home (an increasingly common problem for Republican members these days). And the Republican ranking member remains Jerry Lewis, yet another California Republican . . . [who is] a big spender facing a serious criminal investigation as well.
Add this circle-the-wagons, strength-in-numbers, the devil-you-know-is-better-than-the-devil-you-don’t agenda to the NRSC’s vigorous attempt, in last year’s Rhode Island primary, to ward off a challenge to Lincoln Chafee (lifetime ACU rating: 35), and the message is clear: party trumps principle—even when the party is in the gutter.
It’s said that cops form a “blue line” around their colleagues when one stands accused of misconduct. This mentality, while appropriate in some circumstances, now infects the GOP leadership. Call it the Republican red line; or, as Quin Hillyer puts it (via e-mail), “Calvert leads to culvert”:
By elevating Ken Calvert to the Appropriations Committee, the House leadership has driven its ethics, its message, and its entire caucus into a culvert.
Accordingly, let’s replace Reagan’s 11th Commandment—”Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican”—with a 12th one: Principle before party.
*Maybe this is why former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, who resigned in disgrace after a gay sex scandal, is now on his way to becoming a priest.
Who would have thought former Attorney General John Ashcroft—the guy who ordered $8,000 drapes to cover the bare-breasted “Spirit of Justice” sculpture in a hall of the Justice Department—was a civil libertarian? Compared to his former colleagues, he looks like a card-carrying member of the ACLU. The Postreports:
In addition to rejecting to the most expansive version of the warrantless eavesdropping program, the [former] officials said, Ashcroft also opposed holding detainees indefinitely at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without some form of due process. He fought to guarantee some rights for those to be tried by newly created military commissions. And he insisted that Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers, be prosecuted in a civilian court. . . .
None of this meant that Ashcroft was a closet liberal. He championed a broad expansion of government power to investigate possible terrorist cells through the USA Patriot Act, authorized the detention of hundreds without charges in the days after Sept. 11, pushed immigration agents to fully use their power to deport foreigners, secured new authority to peer into private records even in libraries, and oversaw legal interpretations that opened the door to harsh interrogation techniques that critics called torture. . . .
Ashcroft declined to comment last week. But Mark Corallo, his former spokesman, said that when it came to resisting what he considered excesses, “he really did throw some sharp elbows.”
Two footnotes:
First, why don’t articlesabout the midnight visit Andy Card and Al Gonzales paid to Ashcroft, while Ashcroft lay in a hospital bed recuperating from gallbladder surgery, reference the original source of this scoop: not Jim Comey’s testimony earlier this week before a senate committee, but a New York Timesarticle published in January 2006?
Second, why does the Post cite Wonkette as a serious news source, on par with Chuck Schumer, Andrew Sullivan and PFAW president Ralph Neas?
Although I prefer the old Mitt Romney to his newfound presidential persona, it’s hard not to like the guy. He’s cheerful, charming, convincing, telegenic—in short, a lot like Ronald Reagan (sans the cowboy hats and boots).
But at least in secular terms, Romney faces a hurdle—of his own making, to be sure—which has grown so high that people automatically assume the worst. Consider the latest. According to a recent cover story in Time:
The closest he has ever come to a personal religious crisis, he recalls, was when he was in college and considering whether to go off on a mission, as his grandfather, father and brother had done. Mitt was deeply in love with Ann, his high school sweetheart and future wife, and couldn’t bear to spend more than two years away from her. He says he also felt guilty about the draft deferment he would get for it, when other young men his age were heading for Vietnam.
But in 1994, Romney was seemingly singing a different tune. Ryan Sager unearths a quote he gave to the Boston Herald:
Romney . . . acknowledged he did not have any desire to serve in the military during his college and missionary days, especially after he married and became a father. ‘I was not planning on signing up for the military,’ he said. ‘It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft. If drafted, I would have been happy to serve, and if I didn’t get drafted I was happy to be with my wife and new child.
Soren Dayton sees this as “further proof that Romney isn’t “[serious],” but, like Ryan, I see no contradiction here. One can feel guilty about getting a deferment while simultaneously being thankful for it. Guilt is a complex emotion, and to Romney’s credit, he acknowledges the nuance.
In general, I distrust polls. But I really distrust those those don’t even pretend to scientific accuracy, as by distinguishing between likely vs. registered voters, screening for people who cannot legally vote, disclosing the margin of error, using neutral language, and so on. The only thing the latter are good for, as Jesse Walker ably explains, is to measure how devoted a following someone has.
This is why, when in 2002 the Modern Library announced its list of the 100 greatest novels and invited online readers to submit their picks, two groups rose up: the Randians and the Scientologists. Where the official top three consisted of Ulysses, The Great Gatsby and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, the people’s house picked Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and Battlefield Earth.
Of course, there’s always some cheating (as in using a single computer to vote multiple times). But as Jesse observes of Ron Paul, who’s been racking up victory after victory in various online polls, “The congressman does well even when the multi-voters are ferreted out.”
The reason for such success, as with the Modern Library survey, is the Internet, which from its inception has been a boon for the marginalized (pornographers being the obvious example). Such people are usually geographically separate, but in a classic display of supply meeting demand, the Web allows them to pool their resources.
The final point is the icing on the cake. As Jesse puts it, those, like Little Green Footballs and Pajamas Media, who have banned Paul from their polls, would do well to “ponder the point of offering a system so easily gamed.” Or, in the case of Fox News host Carl Cameron, who questioned his employer’s text-messaging poll, in which Paul placed a solid second, they might “admit that if the votes for Paul didn’t mean much, the same was true of the remainder of the results.”
Here’s the now-infamous exchange (parts of which I’m omitting, signified by ellipses, to get to its essence) among Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), Rudy Giuliani and moderator Wendell Goler, during the most recent debate for the Republican presidential candidates:
Paul: They attack us because we’ve been over there. [For instance,] we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East. . . .
Goler: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?
Paul: I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it. . . .
Giuliani: I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us he didn’t really mean that.
Paul: I believe very sincerely that the C.I.A. is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. . . . If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.
For these arguments, manyarenowclamoring for Ron Paul’s exclusion from future debates. This is not only unhealthy, but also sets a dangerous precedent. (What’s next: baring a Republican who supports gay marriage?)
Dissent—in a debate of all places—invigorates discussion. And since Paul is the only one, out of 10 candidates, to oppose the war, his views merit inclusion.
Of course, not all dissent is worthy. Dissent for dissent’s sake is a waste of time, which is precious with only 90 minutes and 10 people. But dissent that’s grounded in conservative principles (”war is the health of the state“), or even some evidence, deserves a hearing.
Indeed, the idea that the U.S. invited 9/11 is not as radical as one might think. This idea, at least the nuanced, scholarly school of it, does not blame the United States for the attacks, but recognizes that it’s both who we are (”They hate us for our freedom“) and what we do (”We’ve been in the Middle East”) that fans the terrorist flames.
Even if Paul sounds like him, Michael Moore he is not.
But if he’s not a kook, then who is he? Well, some of his ideas are kooky, but the bigger problem is that he’s a poor communicator, who suffers from a rhetorical Napoleon complex. In short, he’s his own worst enemy.
Even a fool realizes that a format where you’re given one minute per question is probably the worst place to articulate perhaps the most controversial thing you could say to an American audience (you have blood on your hands for the deadliest attack on American soil in the nation’s history), especially one of Southern conservatives to whom the war on terror trumps everything. To wit, Paul’s above remarks were unnecessary (yes, he was baited, but he took the bait) and inappropriate (they require far too much time to explain, let alone convince someone of).
Since it’s fair to assume that a 10-term member of Congress is familiar with the cardinal rule of marketing—know your audience—the only explanation I can think of for these follies is that Paul likes controversy. And, to give him his due, as a going-nowhere candidate, he may be right to exploit the P.T. Barnum rule of publicity: all press is good press. If nothing else, his confrontation with Giuliani (it’s playing on YouTube as Ron vs. Rudy) has heightened his profile.
But Paul is seemingly oblivious to the alternative: instead of trying to ride his antiwar bona fides, he should emphasize his domestic agenda.
For example, when asked by both Giuliani and Goler to disabuse those who thought he had just likened Americans to cold-blooded mass murderers, instead of returning to theories of blowback, he might have simply said “No, I am not,” and pivoted back to why the Iraq war is hurting our national security.
What Ron Paul offers are deeply consistent, principled views on what the Constitution authorizes and does not authorize. Among Republicans hungry for a candidate who not only believes but also acts on fiscally conservative principles, this is his unique selling point.
Yet in listening to him, you’d never know this. You’d never know that he has never voted to raise taxes. Or that he has never voted for an unbalanced budget. Or that he has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership. Or that he has never voted to raise congressional pay. Why? Because Ron Paul is lousy at self-promotion—when, ironically, he has the most to promote.
So, instead of attacking Giuliani and asking him to apologize, both of which only fuel the perception that he is out of touch, Paul must focus more on himself. He’s already nailed showmanship. Now he needs to master salesmanship.
Addendum (6/1/2007): Finally, Paul declares, “It’s preposterous to say that I’m blaming America. That’s a complete distortion, like blaming a person for being murdered. No, I’m looking at the motives and reasons that elicit such hatred and willingness to kill.”
We’ve already seen how Ron Paul’s fans are using Digg to fire up his campaign. Now comes evidence that they’re also savvy YouTubers (as are, thankfully, his campaign staffers). Both clips come from last week’s debate among the Republican presidential candidates.
The first, uploaded by “dcarrico,” who previously had posted only one, apolitical video, has been viewed nearly 60,000 times. Moderator Chris Matthews asked Paul whether he supported a constitutional amendment allowing foreign-born citizens to become president. Paul said “no, because I am a strong supporter of the original intent,” to which Matthews muttered, “Oh God” (fast-forward to 1:10):
The second clip, viewed nearly 3,000 times and uploaded by the politically active “infowars,” scrutinizes another cheap shot. At the end of an answer concerning the war on terror, Paul declared, “I would work very hard to protect the privacy of American citizens, being very, very cautious about warrantless searches. And I would guarantee that I would never abuse habeas corpus.”
In an earlier era (i.e., a year ago), I would have heard about these details through the grapevine, and probably chalked them up as rumors spread by partisans. In the Age of YouTube, I can effortlessly and for free view and confirm such rumors for myself.
Yesterday, on the heels of news that he has personally donated to Planned Parenthood, Rudy visited radio host Laura Ingraham (listen here). Ingraham wasted no time in broaching the elephant in the room: “If you hate it, what exactly is wrong with abortion?”
Rudy’s response: “I think in America, you can personally oppose something, and at the same time recognize that in a pluralistic society other people just as strongly view it differently, and … you can’t put ‘em in jail for it.”
So far, so good. Given the time to elucidate and elaborate, Rudy did so in a way that seemed plausible.
But then Ingraham zinged him with the obvious follow-up: “Why would you donate to something like Planned Parenthood that makes hundreds of millions of dollars off the procedure that you say you hate?”
Rudy’s response: “Because Planned Parenthood makes information available. It’s consistent with my position.”
Huh? If you hate something, which you say you personally discourage, shouldn’t you donate to organizations that also discourage that something?
I should also point out that it’s less than confidence-inspiring when a politician, especially one like Rudy whose views on abortion are perhaps his most controversial, doesn’t know whether the Mexico City Policy, otherwise known as the global gag rule, is or isn’t currently the law. (It is.)
Co-founder David All, who is doing brilliant work with new media and from whom I have learned much, responded as follows:
I had that same conversation with a close friend who I now believe owns tC. What the Republican Party and the conservative movement needs is more people that claim to actually be a “Republican,” or will at least work toward helping to elect Republicans.
Huh? What the Republican Party needs is not people who merely call themselves Republicans but those who actually believe in Republican principles, like limited government and a market economy and fiscal restraint.
I was talking with Robert Bluey at lunch today and he said something wise so I’m going to steal it and use it here: To build the movement, we need to add and multiply, not divide and subtract. . . .
At the end of the day, it’s us versus them. We’re in this boat together.
In other words, disagreement is dangerous because it disrupts unity. (Ironically, this is the exact same view of the liberal establishment bloggers, or netroots that Jonathan Chait profiles in this month’s New Republic. Quoth Daily Kos himself, “I’m not ideological at all. I’m just all about winning.” Translation: “What they cannot forgive is Democrats or liberals who distance themselves from their party or who give ammunition to the enemy.”)
To give this view its due, consider the endless infighting among libertarians compared to the stay-on-the-message orthodoxy of the GOP. Then look at the respective electoral results. There’s a lot to be said for the virtue of strength in numbers, as the Baker-Hamilton commission, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board, and the netroots have all recognized.
But if it’s one thing to respectfully disagree and another to gratuitously censure, David seems to view even disagreement as unhelpful. I couldn’t disagree more. I do not indulge in the “us. vs. them” mentality, and I do not put party before principle.
For that matter, nor does Mike Pence, who is famous for calling himself a conservative before he’s a Republican. Indeed, even if you subscribe to Reagan’s 11th Commandment, I would hope that you agree with Pence—which is why, to bring us back to the original question, I prefer “techConservative” to “techRepublican.” (Incidentally, this is why the American Conservative Union is not the American Republican Union; that’s what the RNC is for).
Instead, I think in terms of what’s right, regardless of who’s saying it. And, as a matter of fact, I think David does, too. Why else would he play such a big part in the Open House Project, a beautifully bipartisan movement to increase congressional transparency among both Democrats and Republicans?
Ultimately, David is right: we need to “add and multiply, not divide and subtract.” But indulging in the latter does not undercut the former. It might technically be a distraction, but it’s a necessary and perfectly healthy one.
For the Internet is not a zero-sum game. If anything, it’s the exact opposite: a world wide playground where we can learn from—and improve upon—those we disagree with rather than seeking simply to “beat” them.
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