Across the Great Divide

Experience Counts!

Even if Ike memorably struggled to come up with a real contribution that Nixon had made, the vice president made the experience argument just the same.
— New York Times

This campaign poster hangs in my studio next to a late-60s wanted poster for Eldrige Cleaver. You are free to detect irony on both counts — individually and in aggregate.

When Nixon/Lodge campaigned on the experience slogan, Nixon was only 47 years old, but had parlayed a decent academic record, undistinguished law career and WWII service into a California House seat, election as Senator and role as Eisenhower's Vice President. Eleven years his senior, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. came from a long line of Massachusetts gentry, which by the time  the dynasty reached his father, it had managed to produce a poet — a sure sign of serious family money.

Lodge had lost his senate seat to John F. Kennedy, then went on to serve as UN Ambassador in Eisenhower's cabinet. Patrician, moderate and internationalist, he'd have a tough haul with today's GOP.

Experience did not count for enough in 1960. We'll see how it does in 2008.

John McCain is the experience candidate, now that Hillary Clinton has proven unable to convince voters that her eight years hanging around the White House were of any more value than Nixon's. McCain, too, comes from a line of elites — his father and grandfather were four-star admirals.

But McCain's "experience" is subject to some skepticism.

First, there's the tour as POW. Hard to match, and certainly impossible to criticize. But can we be frank here? Serving five-plus years in a North Vietnamese hellhole has less to do with running the country than installing tail lights on Chevy Malibus has to do with preparing someone to run General Motors. Street cred to the max, but relevant experience?

Then, stringing out his Naval career, a post-service whirlwind courtship of Arizona money and its attendant House seat, leading to succeeding Barry Goldwater as Senator. Early in his Senate career, McCain gained valuable experience as a waterboy for Arizona S&L crook Charles Keating, Jr. McCain's image as a reformer and straight talker got manufactured soon after.

But it's "experience"  that's going to be the siren song for moderates and fearful liberals. McCain will keep us safe. He'll be tough with dictators and terrorists. He has... like, all this, you know, experience.

I know of otherwise smart people who are buying this line, overlooking the kind of judges McCain would appoint, his relationships with lobbyists, his kowtowing to the fundamentalists on science and religion.

Perhaps you've heard that James Buchanan was our most experienced president. Kennedy and Nixon came in tied for 11th. Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt combined had only two more years experience than those boys. Ford, Garfield, Van Buren? Big time experience.

Does experience count? Only if you know what to do with it.

America, the Inevitable Champion.

Tiger Woods' U.S. Open victory over Rocco Mediate in an extended playoff yesterday, gimping around on a post-operative knee, was both an amazing feat and a routine win.

At the highest levels, any sport requires physical gifts, intense preparation and mental and emotional self-mastery, but golf championships, of all contests, strew the way with self-ruin. Mediate  barely made it into the championship after squeaking through a regional qualifier playoff, itself a tremendous come-from-behind performance that shows what someone in the pack of contenders might accomplish on any given weekend.

Woods has done this so many times, despite the difficulty of what he does against so many talented players, the world expects him to dominate. Except for the fact his intense concentration on golf has left no room for worldly interests, he has the fortitude required of a world leader.

Obama-Woods. Now there would be a mind-blower.

In world affairs, America strides like Tiger at Torrey Pines, and to its fans, there is no other possible winner. The other players provide context, perhaps some drama, before the inevitable.

It has been a great streak, and the formidable gifts remain. But at some point, other champions will emerge. Victory will come harder and less frequently, and the gallery's yips and howls will turn to respectful murmurs as they scan the field for the new champion.

Friend Me, Angelo.

I give you good price.

— Universal sales pitch

Mortgage lending before the meltdown was a bazaar, with all sorts of "deals" to be found, whether you were a low-income, first-time home buyer, a stated income entrepreneur in over your head, or a U.S. Senator. And especially if you were a high-income borrower who might bring more business to the institution.

Now a few Senators and former federal officials are in the news for taking allegedly advantage of Countrywide Financial's "FOA" — "Friends of Angelo" Mozilo — VIP loan program.

Before his company's fall from grace, Mozilo looked for influence in Washington however he could get it, through campaign contributions, high-priced lobbyists and easy lending, not just to power brokers but even to financial journalists. Savings offered under the FOA program do not appear to amount to more than a few hundred or thousand dollars.

Of course not.

The "value" of a VIP program, whether it is with a bank, car dealer, union, strip club or political campaign, is to make the member feel special and expand the relationship in a way that favors the program sponsor. It's designed to increase business or profitability — either directly from the recipient or from referrals, reciprocal favors and implied endorsements.

The way things really work, if you're in a "program," have to make a request or stand in a special line, you're just a prospect with the capacity to spend marginally more than the schmucks on the other side of the rope — and the value of your privileges reflects that calculation.

Do you think Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Tom Hanks, Elliott Richardson or Madonna are in VIP programs? That's where the real favors get handed out in America — to players who don't need them and won't ask for them.

If the Mozilo favors involved any quid pro quo, they were unethical. But given the mortgage business climate and the way things work in halls of power, this looks more like business as usual, with one player telling another one, "call my friend, he'll fix you up," the borrower gets a slightly better deal, and everyone feels a little bigger.

These so-called "highly favorable loans" to Sens. Dodd and Conrad not that special, but don't expect the Party of Business to say much about that.

Some familiar with Mozilo's practices say he made no secret of the incentives. "It was something he handed out like party favors. He was fairly forthcoming with it," said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance Publications. "As long as I can remember, he was offering that."

Although a majority of those named in the Portfolio magazine story are Democrats, I'd be making the same point if the proportions were reversed. This story is about how money and power and advantage mingle so casually, not about outright buying of influence. Tangentially, it's about people like Jim Johnson, why Johnson had to resign as Obama's vetter of VPs, and why Obama needs to look more carefully at his "friends."

Nobody argues he's not a different kind of pol. The missing element in this picture, however, is that too much newness can begat naiveté about the way that power politics works and what makes the big players tick. It takes years of experience and listening at keyholes to fathom the underground financial and emotional connections that can control decisions made for supposedly other, more noble motives.

Of course, this kind of thing takes place among friends at all levels of society from the street corner, Kiwanis Club and church basement to the country club, yacht racing circuit and Bohemian Grove. Favor trading, special access and deals almost always come wrapped in mixed motives, not all of them bad or even consciously exercised by the parties.

But as this dealing and friendly influence peddling reach the upper strata of power, it's not just between two people who may be trying to help each other. It has a way of reaching out and touching us all.

"Look for these," a Countrywide manager wrote in a Sept. 27, 2002, e-mail, after receiving applications from Kati Marton, [former UN ambassador Richard] Holbrooke's wife. "These loans are incredibly important to Angelo and as such they are incredibly important to us."

And eventually, important to the rest of us.

Flag Pin Etiquette.

How do you properly display your allegiance when your candidate has a flag pin? I finesse the problem by never wearing a suit, but McCain supporters have a choice to make.

Via Mississippifarian, John Cole found an interpreter of  John McCain's Nautical Lapel Pin, which renders the candidate's initials in signal flags.

Individual flags represent letters, and also by themselves, common or urgent signals. According to this, three-flag signals can indicate relative bearings. McCain's initials are:

J – Juliet – On Fire, Keep Clear
S – Sierra – Engines Going Astern
M – Mike – I Am Stopped

Okay, but what about Obama?

B – Bravo — Dangerous Cargo
H — Hotel — Pilot on Board
O — Oscar — Man Overboard

Here, you can type in text and have the message rendered for you. Perhaps candidates could use signal flag  bumper stickers to convey their positions in code.

Candidates closer to home, like Norm Coleman and Al Franken, will probably not be doing pins.

N — November — No
B — Bravo — Dangerous Cargo
C — Charlie — Yes

A — Alfa — Diver Down Keep Clear
S — Sierra – Engines Going Astern
F —  Foxtrot — Disabled

Most possible initial combinations seem dire, but mine's not so bad:

C — Charlie — Yes
R — Romeo — (No international designation)
Q — Quebec — Request Clearance into Port

Making Up for Lost Opportunity.

Disappointed Hillary backers who say they plan to vote for John McCain in protest at her treatment may decide to go with Bob Barr after they read this story in the Daily Mail.

McCain's pursuit of present wife Cindy and his divorce from his first wife after a crippling car accident have been reported in the U.S., but — after the New York Times muffed its story about inappropriate relations with lobbyists and CBS used suspect documents to report on George Bush's fly boy days — mainstream media will reamin cautious covering in depth any part of McCain's early history that challenges his heroic image.

Former presidential candidate Ross Perot was an early leading advocate for POWs. He financed the medical care for Carol McCain after the accident that occurred while McCain was in captivity. Perot is not a McCain fan, calling him "the classic opportunist — he's always reaching for attention and glory. Other POWs won't even sit at the same table with him."

Perot's beliefs about McCain and POWs are controversial and not likely to achieve traction in the coming campaign. But his view of McCain's character may get more airing. Even Carol McCain, who supports her ex for president, says:

"My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does."

Obama, striving for a different style of politics, is unlikely to allow his campaign to dredge up this stuff. If he says his campaign should be about positions on issues, then that holds for the other guy, too. But in the  post-Bill Clinton political era, it won't stay just in the British tabloids.

It's Not Nice to Hit a Man When He's Shot Down.

I monitored Barack Obama's "acceptance speech" last night via the UpTake's online feed. It stalled a couple times, I was multi-tasking, and I had neither the live excitement of the crowd nor the contrast of Hillary Clinton's broadcast speech for context, so maybe that's why it seemed pretty standard stuff.

I don't typically read Power Line, but I thought Scott Johnson had a pretty interesting take, particularly with his suggested response to Obama's jab:

In just a few short months, the Republican Party will arrive in St. Paul with a very different agenda. They will come here to nominate John McCain, a man who has served this country heroically. I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine.

Senator McCain's "many accomplishments" of course include military service and martial sacrifice beyond the understanding of most of us. If it is possible to give something beyond the last full measure of devotion, McCain gave it on behalf of the United States over five-and-a-half years in North Vietnamese hellholes. I'm not aware of Senator McCain ever declining to acknowledge Obama's "many accomplishments," but he might be well served by expressly acknowledging them in his stump speech:

Senator Obama, I honor your work in the private sector for a year or two after you graduated from college, and I honor your work for three years as a community organizer in Chicago. I understand that as a community organizer you pressured city authorities to remove asbestos from the Altgeld Gardens apartments in 1986 with at least partial success.

When the on-site manager of the apartments didn't take action, you nudged the residents into confronting city housing officials in two angry public meetings downtown. These generated "a victory of sorts," you said later, as workers soon began sealing the asbestos in the buildings, even if the project gradually ran out of steam and money and even if some tenants still have asbestos in their homes, according to current resident Linda Randle, who worked with you in the '86 anti-asbestos campaign.

When you chose to quit organizing the South Side of Chicago after three years, your good deeds did not stop. You rendered valiant service by attending Harvard Law School and winning your first election as the president of the Harvard Law Review.

Your service to the Harvard Law Review did not bring an end to your remarkable benefactions. You returned to Chicago, where you won election to the Ilinois state legislature before the triumph that brought you to the Senate for the past three-and-a-half years. We all know your accomplishments in the Senate.

And last, but far from least, I honor your authorship of Dreams From My Father, a memoir that has spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. You, sir, have served our country with uncommon distinction.

Johnson's retort — he was a POW, what did you ever do for the country? — is the kind of comeback Obama must have an answer for, and it illustrates the challenge of running on experience against an ex-POW instead of a former First Lady. It's not nice to hit a woman who's trading on her spousal position in the White House; it's impossible to hit a man after he's been shot down.

In fact, McCain's sacrifice for his country was very great and he served with honor by refusing to come home earlier than captives ahead of him. McCain was a volunteer, but once shot down, as long as he was in captivity he really had little choice about the form his service to the country would take. Even if it's objectively true, Obama can't say that his teaching constitutional law to future attorneys and judges may have provided greater service to the country and be more relevant to the job than staying alive in a prison camp for five-and-a-half years.

McCain himself doesn't have to play the POW card, but his supporters certainly will remind voters every chance they get. That's why Obama has to keep his focus on the future instead of the past.

Power Suit, Drooping Eyelids.

Not long ago, I observed a mid-day meeting in which three high-powered people out of the dozen I could see were nodding off. In another setting, I watched a former legislator and candidate for statewide office doing the same in a late-afternoon working session. These were all people whose names you'd probably recognize.

This is not the sort of thing reporters include in their stories, and I don't attend a lot of such meetings, so I don't know how prevalent it might be. I don't know if the temporary dozers have medical issues, drinking problems or were just coming off a hard night. And I have no idea whether they were still listening or were off in dreamland.

But I do know they were also roughly contemporaries of mine, which is to say, younger than John McCain and older than Barack Obama.

Last May, I wrote about about Dick Cheney's heart and consequences his arterial health might have on his brain. That was also a theme in the Vanity Fair story on Bill Clinton, as a possible explanation for a change in his behavior. Bill's ruddy face in the photo of the Clintons in South Dakota may be a side effect of his medications.

As was my short Cheney piece, Todd Purdum's was only suggestive, not conclusive:

As a private citizen—albeit a very prominent one—Clinton has not received anything like the post-surgical media attention he would have if he were still president, and many details of his treatment in recent years are not known. After his first surgery, The New York Times reported that he would take a range of medications, including a beta-blocker to maintain regular heartbeats, a statin to lower his cholesterol, an ACE inhibitor to control high blood pressure, and aspirin to thin his blood. These medications may cause a range of side effects, including fatigue, muscle pain, dehydration, depression, and impotence. Coronary bypass can also cause subtle changes in cognition, which may, or may not, be temporary. There is further medical disagreement about whether such changes are caused in part by small particles of plaque that are discharged by the heart-lung machine and sent to the brain, or by the underlying artery disease itself. If a patient has arterial disease in his heart, he could have it in his brain too.

As voters, we may get a quick glimpse at candidate's medical records, but the doctors aren't examining them at work on an average day. And in the highly stage-directed presidential campaigns, neither are we.

The Last Day, Redux.

I want to say also that this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind.
— Bill Clinton in South Dakota, wrapping up his campaign

Scott McClellan's new book wasn't the only presidential "betrayal" this week, although the other one was at least once removed. In a long Vanity Fair piece, Todd S. Purdum — husband of Bill Clinton's first press secretary Dee Dee Myers — does a number on the ex-president. (Purdum states Myers was not a source for the story, which is no doubt true in the same way former presidents do not solicit lucrative business opportunities; they simply materialize of their own accord.)

The tale is not so much about the ultimately unknowable Clinton as his reflection in the people who surround him — notably some uber-rich (think private airliner, not private jet), hyper-smart, rampantly narcissistic men with intimations of mortality kept at bay by irrepressible sexual indulgence and exhibitionistic philanthropy — the-rules-don't-apply-to-me crowd, to which both Clintons so nakedly belong. Last December, Huffington Post profiled one such icky character, Jeffrey Epstein, unapologetic billionaire teen massage collector, who seems to be one of the few Clinton cohorts who isn't involved with the film industry.

It's not that the Clintons are extraordinary for attracting dodgy financiers, stock manipulators and outright fraudsters with international business connections. It's just that the Bushes show more refined judgment in whose money to take and whose jets to ride.

Though the story will no doubt get the Purdum/Myers household crossed off the Clinton Christmas card list, it will have no more impact on Clinton than McClellan's will have on President Bush. Both tell opponents what they already knew, partisans what they are ashamed to admit and presidents what they are unable to hear.

UPDATE: Bill Clinton has reacted to the story. In case you missed it, he says the story is all about Hillary.

"You know [Purdum] didn't use a single name, cite a single source in all those things he said.. It's just slimy. It's part of the national media's attempt to nail Hillary for Obama. It's the most biased press coverage in modern history. It's another way of helping Obama. They had all these people standing up in his church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn't do anything about it. The first day he said 'Ah, well.' Because that's what they do-- he gets other people to slime her."

Bill, on the other hand, will do his own sliming, thank you.

The Only Good Opponent is a Dead Opponent.

Hillary Clinton already had the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsement, so her comments in Sioux Falls about an assassinated candidate were not pandering. In fact, she apologized:

"I'm honored to hold Senator Kennedy's seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family."

Meanwhile, the Obama family can like it or lump it.

The President as Superfan.

Spot has already taken Michael Gerson to task for his characterization of the "Obama narrative [as] intellectual and ideological (not social) elitism." Voters want a goober, not an egghead, for president.

A president is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols. He is supposed to be the face-painted superfan at every home game; to wear red, white and blue boxers on special marital occasions; to get misty-eyed during the most obscure patriotic hymns.

I guess having a president as superfan works well, as long as your affairs don't extend much beyond the Nebraska-Iowa State game.

There ought to be an Constitutional amendment, in fact, just to make sure we don't accidentally hire another smart guy to do the hardest job in the world.

Great guy to have a beer with? Not a bad qualification for my insurance agent, golf pro, bike mechanic and dentist. But I wouldn't pick a president on that basis, or an airline pilot or a brain surgeon. (I hope those dudes with the painted-on skeleton ribs joined in front aren't, like, pre-med.)

Gerson doesn't get Obama, as is clear from this lame comparison.

Obama is easily the most religiously fluent and informed Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. But, over time, Obama has assumed a much more familiar, Democratic electoral profile — the candidate of the young, the educated and the secular (he has consistently won religiously nonaligned voters), who also gets nearly universal support from African-Americans. He increasingly resembles Bill Bradley or Gary Hart — a candidate of new liberalism — with this additional element of black enthusiasm.

Is churchliness all the evangelical Gerson can see that Carter and Obama have in common? And black enthusiasm all that separates Obama from a few liberal also rans? 

Carter, of course, also got near universal support from African-Americans and received a huge boost with younger voters from Hunter S. Thompson's Rolling Stone profile. I imagine Carter got more than his share of the young, educated and secular voters, too. The real difference is not in where their support comes from, their religion, or even their less warlike, more internationalist perspective. Carter's intelligence led him to  micromanage; Obama's seems geared toward enlisting other hearts and minds.

Folksiness has its uses, and genuine empathy is a great quality in a leader. But ultimately, I want my president to be a good decision maker, and there, intellectual rigor and vigor matter, not how just many people voted for the inner good old boy.