What we are looking for?
A candidate who would not talk about reducing deficits, but promise instead surpluses to such a degree to buy down the national debt and so leave us less vulnerable to the Middle East, Chinese, Japanese, or European possession of trillions abroad; who would give someone some credit for taking out the two worse regimes in the Middle East and avoiding a reoccurrence of 9/11; who would state a simple principle that for every new spending initiative offered, a cut elsewhere or new tax increase would be promised to ensure no additional draw on the treasury; who would close the border to illegal immigration now, and explain that we can then bicker over other issues while the pool of illegal residents insidiously shrinks due to voluntary repatriation, intermarriage, deportations of criminals, and earned citizenship; who could craft some sort of bargain to drill oil offshore and in Alaska, build more refineries and nuclear power plants, and still toughen conservation standards and invest in alternate energy–and tell us exactly why and how and when we will be less dependent on foreign oil; and who could explain to us and the world abroad exactly how the US presence overseas leads to global peace and security, and do that both in daily impromptu and formal fashion.
Impressions about the Candidates
Given my column with Tribune Media Services, I can’t endorse a political candidate. But here are some impressions. First, the Democrats.
Clinton. She has run a Giuliani-like campaign, hoping that her vast lead in the national polls would make the early primaries irrelevant. That standoffish tact in her case was based on her name recognition, and deft and serial repositioning on the issues, like Bill’s triangulation in the 1992, 1994, and 1996 elections.
Her current problem is that while a majority may be satisfied with the Clinton years in retrospect, they have no desire to repeat them. Second, the more voters come to know Hillary—hence the original idea of keeping her aloof, as some sort of image rather than a flesh and blood candidate—the more she appears less than genuine.
Consensus? I don’t think she can ever get 50% of the vote, and, if she gets the nomination, her election chances will hinge on some sort of third candidate draw away. Watch Bill Clinton; his sudden prominent role will invite renewed press scrutiny that has been dormant the last six years. And while always undisciplined, he is even more so when someone else pays the consequences for his indiscretions.
Edwards. Again, I am confused by him. He was a moderate, new southern Senator, and now has almost overnight morphed into a hard left demagogic populist. But in the midst of this metamorphosis, he has not lost his conspicuous appetites for the noveau riche lifestyle, which can only cause embarrassment by the abyss between his word and deed. The agenda is more of the same like Obama’s: the ossified liberal approach of raising taxes for more entitlements, predicated on the idea that Americans are in need of more government support; more outsourcing of security concerns to international bodies, and appointment of more liberal judges to expand government influence when legislative remedies are too lethargic or not found.
Obama. The most talented impromptu speaker of the entire field, and maybe the brightest. He also seems conflicted, at least from his memoirs: By his own admission his white mother’s family’s influence was the far greater in formulating his education and discipline, yet he seems more inspired by the nebulous image of his black father.
So far he has shown a brilliant triangulation that would make Dick Morris proud—giving glimpses of “authenticity” that will ensure the African-American vote, but enough Ivy-League assurance that he is, to paraphrase Joe Biden, a safe bet for whites and Asians. His views? They are little different from Edwards’—government is the first solution to each crisis, anti-Americanism abroad is always due to what we do at the moment, rather than what we represent in the abstract; social pathology is a result of some sort of –ism or societal failure rather than the lapse of the individual; life is always getting worse for the poor and middle class, when in fact it has gotten far better in recent years; economic growth is mostly zero sum—the rich benefiting not from expanding national wealth and production but by taking riches from someone else. I would expect either Obama or Hillary to lift the current income caps on Social Security deductions, something that would cost the upper-middle classes thousands of dollars per year, as well as reinstate estate taxes that again won’t bother the poor and rich, but will double-tax the middle class. I could go on, but we all know the script: the best and brightest need our money to save people in ways we dumber others are clueless about.
Biden, Dodd, Richardson et al. They remind us that neither aggregate experience counts in presidential races—nor qualification beyond a minimum standard. That said, their collective sanctimonious attitude is reminiscent of Kerry’s sigh that he couldn’t believe he was losing to “this guy”. Despite long political careers, they all three exude a sense of smugness, and don’t quite seem to equate their present failure with the voters’ perceptions that they are functionaries of a sort, lacking both Obama’s and Edwards’ charisma, and Billary’s name recognition. Then in the case of Dodd and Biden, there is something about the US Senate as a prerequisite for Presidential candidacy: it offers no executive experience, but ensures plenty of opportunity for loud speech-making without consequence.
Consensus—the most interesting candidate is Obama. And if I could be assured he wouldn’t win the general election, I would hope that he is the nominee. His summer and autumn presence would ensure a lively, articulate debate, a newcomer who is not one of our tired past.
Republicans…
I confess at the outset I don’t know enough about Huckabee to comment, either his past career or his present bromides—other than his foreign policy statements. They are terrible–erratic, self-contradictory, poorly articulated, and inexact about how he would differ from the present policy abroad other than his generic Bush is “arrogant” motif.
Romney suffers from the paradox that the more he seems polished and in control of the facts, the more he is charged as somewhat robotic. His ability to serve as a Republican governor should attest to his political skills, but just as often it is cited as a liability as a conservative who sacrificed principles for expediency in a liberal state. It is hard to ascertain to what degree his religion governs such impressions. In the meantime, of all candidates in both parties, he appears the most presidential and at the same time the most vulnerable to criticisms of smoothness.
Giuliani, like Hillary, assumed after the early polls a coronation rather than a barroom fight. He is the quickest on his feet, toughest on questions of Islamic fascism, and probably the most savvy on political matters. I have no idea the extent to which his personal life, his New York ties, or his lack of state-wide or national election experience matter, only that they have all been used to erode his lead.
McCain. I think I share the same odd impression as millions of other moderates and conservatives whose logical reservations are more than outweighed by McCain’s emotional appeal. They all worry about McCain’s past positions on immigration, taxes, campaign finance reform, and harsh invective against Rumsfeld. But all that seems to matter little in the last analysis given his present steadfastness on the war and his own saga of courage. When I watch him speaking, he seems old and tired, sometimes on the verge of an outburst—but somehow deserving of our collective support. I would sleep easily with a President McCain, the oldest and most deserving in some sense of all the candidates..
Thompson. I never quite understood why the press charged someone 65/6, with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in remission, as “lazy.” He is not. The wonder is not that he is not as vigorous as Romney but that he is out on such a breakneck campaign at all. He seems the ideal Vice President candidate. That he could not meet the impossible pre-candidacy hype does not mean he won’t bounce back and run a strong second or third in the primaries.
Things that don’t compute
I never understood why the Left did not blame the radical Palestinian movement—at the time Marxist inspired and Soviet-funded—for the zeal behind Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Bobby Kennedy, or the hard-core Soviet/Comitern communist movement that enticed a Lee Harvey Oswald who shot Jack Kennedy.
Never either understood how an Al Gore could live in such exceptional splendor amid conspicuous consumption and rail like an Old Testament prophet about the Western consumer lifestyle and its culpability for global warming. Nor was it easy to understand how a self-acclaimed man of the people like John Edwards would chose to dwell in a 30,000 square foot home, with a 2,000 sq. ft “John’s Room” inner sanctuary—rather than say a 5,000 square foot more modest abode?
I never understood the radical environmental movement that so castigated the US, when most of the global bumper-sticker eco-crimes—the Soviet sloppy and polluting exploitation of Siberia for gas and oil, the Japanese harvest of sperm whales over the last quarter century, or the Chinese contamination of the soils through systematic leaching of industrial chemicals—were elsewhere.
The same disconnect applies to religion. I’m no fan of Huckabee, but it seems to me he evokes God and Christianity no more than did Jimmy Carter, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, or the Rev. Al Sharpton, who at one time or another, all ran for President. And why are we in near paralysis over a presidential candidate who is Mormon but worried little about the Mormonism of the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, by now infamous for his shoot-from-the-hip slurs and hysterics?
Of course, there are liberal explanations for all of the above: these leftists were driven over the brink to assassinate the Kennedys in a climate of fear, extremism, and violence brought on by the American right-wing gun culture.
A Gore or Edwards or Kerry are to be commended because, unlike others of their class and status, they at least are “doing something about it” by using and galvanizing their resources to work for the poor, if even in the abstract. And liberal Christianity poses no threat, in its tolerance and advocacy of social change, to government in a way right-wing nationalist evangelicals do. Or so they say.
One thing we all agree on—this will be the dirtiest and roughest campaign in a generation, something that will easily trump 2004.
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26 Comments
Dave Begley -Omaha:Can you picture any of the Dems as Commander in Chief?
Me neither.
That’s why I will be launching the Mike Gravel protest vote campaign on the editorial page of the Omaha World-Herald this week.
It may not appear in http://www.omaha.com as some editorial content is exclusive to the hard copy.
I’m fully expecting the DM Register to blast me. (”Not to be taken seriously.” “Self-proclaimed Nebraska neocon.” “Our campaigns are not a joke.” “Nebraska arrogance.” “The author left Drake for Creighton University, ’nuff said.’” Guilty as charged!)
If my idea gets into the media echo chamber via the OWH, then watch out!
The OWH has a fair circulation in Iowa and is balance for the far left DM Register.
Dec 26, 2007 - 12:40 pm njcommuter:Dr. Hanson,
You write “Clinton …. That standoffish tact ….” Should the word be tack?
For what it’s worth, Obama’s Christmas commercial was clearly the best, and I would put Giuliani’s second, with McCain’s a close third and Huckabee’s not far behind. Clinton’s should remind people of Evita, which may or may not be a good thing depending upon whether you want it to help her or hurt her.
Dec 26, 2007 - 5:24 pm Mike Manges:Finally, someone who suggests a link to “radical” Islam and Bobby’s assination. Would it be a streatch to include the Archduke’s as well?
Dec 26, 2007 - 8:17 pm jdg:I’ll vote for any Republican over any of Democrat.
Dec 27, 2007 - 4:47 am Zhombre:Another lucid post from Dr. Hanson. Thank you, sir. And regarding Senator Clinton’s Evita-like Christmas avatar: a primary tenet of political messages is that your advertisement should not look like it was made by your opponents as a parody.
Dec 27, 2007 - 5:18 am linda skountzos:As an ex Dem (still registered but in that sense only) I have to say Biden is the biggest disappointment.He was one of those dems who was saying the problem in Iraq was too few troops initially, but now proclaims the surge useless. I don’t know how he can live with himself. I thought he was a better man. He used to seem to at least have some understanding of foreign policy. McCain’s the best of the group, but I can only vote dem in the NY primary –so Ill be staying home.
Dec 27, 2007 - 10:57 am Jimmy J.:I have one thing in mind when I look at a presidential candidate in time of war. That the President is the Commander-in-Chief of our military. The candidate must be particularly well suited for that role. All else is secondary.
I have known men who worked for and with Eisenhower and Reagan. Though both men were deemed jovial and good natured, those who knew them well knew that underneath that jovial exterior were men of steely resolve. The kind of resolve that is required when facing the hard decisions of life and death; war and peace.
In my opinion both Giuliani and McCain have that steely inner courage. All the other candidates much less so.
As to the question of Giuliani’s personal life. Yes,it has been messy, but so have some of our other Presidents. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton to name three obvious ones. Yet many would aver that they had successful presidencies. I’m a bit like Lincoln on that score. He was warned of Grant’s less than stellar personal life, but he saw that Grant had the inner courage and backbone to fight if necessary. That is what I see in Giuliani.
I do worry about McCain’s health and energy. The Presidency is a grueling job and we need someone who can deliver. However, if he is the candidate, he will have my complete support over any of the Democrat candidates.
For those who have not done so, I would suggest going to Giuliani’s website and reading his twelve comittments at:
http://www.joinrudy2008.com/index.php?section=3&pageid=90
As President, if he can deliver on only half of them, I believe he would be quite successful.
Dec 27, 2007 - 11:18 am Morgan:I second Jimmy J’s thoughts…
I found Dr. Hanson’s assessments of the candidates very insightful. I only differ with him on his opinion of Mitt Romney; I have never found him to be presidential, but really more of a caricature of presidential.
Dec 27, 2007 - 6:41 pm Charles Maxwell:Dr. Hanson, Your brilliant words are like a Whisler painting . . . executed in minutes with technique and experience that took a lifetime to earn (learn). We readers are the beneficiaries of your lifetime of commitment to an honest written portrait of pol/mil America. Once again, well done!
Dec 28, 2007 - 6:30 am BRussell:It will be interesting to see just how fast our NATO allies pull out of Afghanistan once Pakistan has gone fundamentalist.
Dec 28, 2007 - 7:21 am Gene Still:I’ve just discovered this site and Victor Hanson–both thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve especially enjoyed the rundown on Hanson’s books. I’ll traipse down to the library and check them out! As for the politics, well, I’m only now beginning to tune in to see what’s up. It bothers me that the Feds have taken just about every personal liberty I had left before 9/11 and have sealed my kid’s fate to live on average in circumstances far less comfortable than mine and in a world far more regimented, and that because of our profligate spending today the Chinese and Indians will tell him and his leaders what to do do and where to do it– and none of the candidates, including Obama-on- high, cares one whit about any of that. As for what the candidates do talk about, the Dems all seem to be saying that they’ll get us out of Iraq tomorrow, when we all know they won’t, and I haven’t listened to a Republican since the Jerry Falwell wing took over the party. As a result, I have only two thoughts about the current front-runners: one, the undercurrent seems to be that Giulani in real-life has the ambition of Napoleon and the charm and trustworthiness of a rattlesnake, and, two, Edwards is another rich guy who lives in a castle with all its accoutrements and tells me that to save the world I shouldn’t cut my grass with a lawn mower, even though he votes to push back any meaningful CAFE standards for the car manufacturers another decade or two. I look forward to checking in again to see your writers’ and readers’ takes on the world. Thanks.
Dec 28, 2007 - 7:26 am BMoon:Victor,
Dec 28, 2007 - 8:18 am Carl Cornejo:Hope you are physically well - we will need your magnificently sane and succint voice for the ominous years to come. That opening paragraph should be plastered on every politicians’ forehead, Dem or Rep.
Excellent column analyzing the 2008 race, Dr. Hanson, as lucid as I personally observed during your presentation about war at my university in November 2007. I trust that your thinking will continue to serve as an intellectual beacon for the American public during this roller coaster of a presidential election.
Dec 28, 2007 - 3:14 pm Curly Smith:“I never understood why the Left did not blame the radical Palestinian movement—at the time Marxist inspired and Soviet-funded—for the zeal behind Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Bobby Kennedy, or the hard-core Soviet/Comitern communist movement that enticed a Lee Harvey Oswald who shot Jack Kennedy.”
It’s called “Fear”, specifically the fear that they would be the next victims. The Left proudly bullies those who can’t, or won’t, fight back but they cower in the face of evil, particularly when that evil is very willing to do them harm. It’s easy to rage against Bush because he won’t respond. You can criticize Putin once and then be found dead in the street from “random violence” or you can call him “The Time Person of The Year”. Who’s surprised by the choice the media made?
Dec 28, 2007 - 3:47 pm Bill Bradley:Oswald?!
… Anyway, now that events are confounding, any reboot?
Dec 28, 2007 - 7:08 pm Janeway:Excellent, as usual, but I continue to be amazed that Romney is still considered too “good to be true” - if anyone would take the time to read and listen to him, he is what is needed with every position stated in the first paragraph but appears nobody really wants to know, it is easier to do “flip flop”, too rich, too handsome, too not cool, too intellectual, too pragmatic, too Mormon,etc. This is the man we need, just not the one we want. I see the surge for a complete incompent Huckabee and a sweet talking Obama as very disturbing. With the exception of Romney, all the front runners, both sides, seem like cheerleader for their respective target audiences. We live in perilous times and we need a controlled serious person in the White House. Will he be loved? No he will not, anymore than our current President Bush. Men who have to deal in reality can never be popular but history will support them. My ticket would be Romney/Thompson but that would be a practical combination, neither giving the public that yearned for highly emotional types like Giullani, McCain, Huckabee, Obama, Edwards, Hillary - people without any self control if crossed. I will say one thing about Mitt and Thompson, they will not fall on the floor and kick and scream if a problem presents. You have to ask yourself, how many of these guys would you share a foxhole or join the wagon train?
Dec 29, 2007 - 5:51 am BRussell:You have to ask yourself, how many of these guys would you share a foxhole or join the wagon train?
Well said Janeway. Our votes should come down exactly to this question. Based on this question I’ll analyze the candidates with this in mind; If you were sharing a foxhole with candidate “X” they would do this while under attack:
1. Hillary. God help anyone caught in a foxhole with her while under attack. At the first sign of trouble she’d ditch you saying,”I’m going to get help” and that would be the last you ever saw of her. Then, if the platoon wasn’t overrun, she’d be the one putting herself in for medals saying how she led the counter-attack.
2. John Edwards. You know in the movies how we always see one guy sleeping and the other guy keeping watch? Well if you were in a foxhole with Edwards, you’d wake up and he’d be long gone. He’s that sort of a skunk.
3. Obama. I don’t think he’d skin out on you. He wouldn’t be much help, but I hope you’re the good shot.
4. Rudy. See #3 above.
5. Mitt. Anyone who proudly boasts that his 5 sons aren’t in Iraq because they’re fighting the war on terror by helping their dad get elected is a joke. He’d be the one cowering at the bottom of the hole crying.
6. Thompson. Yeah, I’d bet my life on the man.
7. Huckabee. Nope, I’d ask the Sarge to put someone else in my foxhole. I don’t trust him.
8. Hunter. I’d bet my life on the man, after all he’s won two bronze stars while in combat.
9. Richardson. He reminds me of the fat private in HBO movie which came out in 1998 about the battle of the Hurtgen Forest. All thumbs.
10. McCain: It depends on how the enemy attack was going. He’d be one of the first to want to skin out IF things weren’t going well.
Dec 29, 2007 - 9:19 am syn:Thompson’s white papers are worth a read if anyone is serious about a solid candidate.
Guiliani was my mayor for 8 years and managed to do a good job cleaning up the place(NYers were desperate at the time so they didn’t get in his way) however, he has too many liberal friends who will stab him in the back by divulging three days before the general election any secret dirt they have on him; his liberals friends are his biggest enemy.
Romney is a member of the billionaire collectivist club headed by the Kennedy compound; country-club republicans tend to forget the ordinary American’s indomitable spirit.
McCain has spent the last seven years beating up Conservatives for not nominating him the first time around.
I’d vote for collectivist Hillary/Obama/Edwards before collectivist Huckabee; one Carter is enough to never make that mistake again.
That all said, what really captured my attention was when Guiliani/McCain/Romney all immediately raised their hands to man-made global warming hysteria while Thompson refused to engage in the media’s childish games.
Thompson is solid, campaigning his own way with commonsense ideals; the others are simply spineless panderers to identity politics or whatever populist fad comes our way.
Dec 29, 2007 - 10:43 am blogengeezer:Reply to Linda Skountos; My extremely intelligent, Depression era savvy, well respected ‘industrialist’, (directly supported hundreds of families) Father-Inlaw, a lifetime registered Democrat, encouraged everyone he knew to register Democrat. At the time of the Democratic Primaries, he always said “vote for the Democratic candidate least qualified to be president. The Presidential election is what really counts”. The unpredictability drives the Media totally insane. That is a good thing.
Dec 29, 2007 - 4:37 pm James Dorritie:I don’t know if Dr. Hanson reads these comments, but I’d like to ask a question just the same. I was reading your excellent piece on the Iraq War at NRO, and you mentioned that there were 22 reasons for the war, but the only one ever brought up is the WMDs. I’d like to ask you what those reasons are and if you could direct me to some Congressional document as I’d like to have some hard, citable responses to the buffoons on the left who rage about the war for oil.
Thanks,
Dec 30, 2007 - 4:50 am A.W. Murphy, MSgt,USAF (Ret):James Dorritie
Dr. Hanson,
As an Iowan who is four days away from joining my fellow caucus goers thank you for your thoughts on the candidates. Believe me when I say that January 3rd can’t come quick enough – we’ve been inundated with phone calls and mailings.
Several quick notes:
Ever since Rachel Carlson’s “Silent Spring” the radical environmentalist have used the courts, the media and gullible legislators to promote their anti-capitalist agenda. This nation has fallen behind France and Japan in the development and construction of nuclear power plants and we have crippled our oil industry with outrageous regulatory and legal burdens that do nothing to promote independence from foreign sources.
Your aside about Al Gore and his environmental disingenuousness underscores one of the most critical issues facing voters in 2008 – getting to the truth about global warming. Everyday we see further evidence that the UN IPCC report, anything published by NASA’s Dr. James Hanson and scores of other so called global warming “experts” is so factually wrong or manipulated that Kyoto and other pseudo-remedies are nothing more than social engineering under the guise of environmental stewardship.
Finally, your point about our military presence overseas underscores the failure of our educational establishment to properly teach the virtues of a robust military. American’s enjoy a quality of life second to none and, 9/11 as an abstract and not the norm, greater security and peace than any other peoples on the earth. Any credible candidate for president must understand not only the proper role of the military within our republic but have the courage to use them wisely.
And, yes, I do believe our incursion into Iraq was wise. It is understandable and healthy that people point to the numerous things the Bush administration could have done better – however, any student of war will tell you that every conflict has been a learning experience. No war was ever fought perfectly from the start – this one included.
Dec 30, 2007 - 8:35 am jake_marvin:Dr. Hanson, you sly old fox,
Not permitted to endorse a candidate, indeed.
Having written your well-thought-out first paragraph defining what we need to preserve our legacy and propel us into an optimistic future while maintaining our sovereignty among nations you have endorsed the one man fit for the job and able, albeit with much support from the Right, to win.
Dec 30, 2007 - 8:57 am Jimmy J.:James Dorritie,
Dec 30, 2007 - 3:47 pm Mike:Not to speak for Dr. Hamson, but you might try this link for a discussion of the cassus belli in Iraq.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/735tahyk.asp?pg=1
Gene Still, I highly recomend Carnage and Culture. I usually check out books from the public library as well, but it is worth going over to Amazon for that one.
Dec 30, 2007 - 5:40 pm L Nettles:I just dropped by to note my pleasure on the return of “Angry Letters” to Private Papers.
For Gene Still
“It bothers me that the Feds have taken just about every personal liberty I had left before 9/11″
Perhaps you would like to elaborate on just what you mean by that with some specific examples.
James Dorritie
The October 2002 resolution is here
http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf
Dec 30, 2007 - 5:49 pm Tom Roderick:thank you Dr.Hanson and Janeway,
Dec 31, 2007 - 7:14 pm“you will know them by them fruits…” All VDH books high in nutrition. Mitt is the real deal, also. Examine his “works and days”
…honest study…you will know him by his “fruits”.