January 31, 2008
Long before Iowa, all through that year-long string of Democratic presidential debates, I sat before the TV thinking: "Dream Team." With the exception of Marijuana Mike Gravel and Don-Quixote Dennis Kucinich, any one of those people at the podium would make a superior president. Those were the days of bonhomie, when the candidates both complimented and complemented each other, unified in their goal of undoing the dismal Bush legacy here and abroad and taking the nation in a new and positive direction.
Though I knew that eventually I’d have to vote for one, I really wanted to vote for all. What stood before the voters at those early debates was less a group of contenders than a government, nearly ready-made. Again excepting Gravel and Kucinich (farther to the left but still in the camp), their policy positions were consonant, if not identical. Why go through the nastiness and misdirected cost now embedded in the primary process? Why not forgo those counterproductive campaign-ads and rely solely on the media for exposure? Why not refine the party positions on the issues through dialogue, not contention?
In an orderly and collaborative — that is to say, utopian — political world, this group of exceptionally qualified people would meet to assess their relative strengths, distribute their duties, and come out fighting as a team. The debates and the primaries would not be the pitched battles they are now but something like intra-squad scrimmages to reveal who is best at each position, who will call the plays and who will execute them.
Presuming that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will be the nominee, could the runner-up serve as Vice President, thus combining experience and inspiration? The other former candidates could also bring the particular competencies they have already demonstrated into play as a kind of campaign cabinet: John Edwards, on health-care reform; Joe Biden, on foreign policy; Bill Richardson, on immigration and other aspects of "homeland security"; Christopher Dodd, on education; and barely to mention the host of non-candidates specializing in other critical issues — Al Gore, for example, on energy and environment.
Seldom has a cabinet been formed before a candidate was elected, but the voters long for it. They not only want to evaluate a potential president, they want to see the kind and caliber of people that would be on the team. As we’ve amply seen from the last disastrous seven years, the executive is only as good, or as bad, as the ones that advise him or her and administer the sprawling branches of the federal government. Presidential candidates usually run for office claiming they know everything about everything, but the key to a successful administration is to assemble a core of people who know everything about something. And doing much of it before the election would allow voters to make a more realistic judgment.
Unity and solidarity for the upcoming campaign was an expressed hope of all the candidates, and up until the primaries they maintained an encouraging cordiality, critiquing each other’s positions on the issues without personal rancor.
It couldn’t last. Politicians are essentially adversarial — they have to beat their opponents after all, and they can’t do that by being nice, even towards people they agree with. And once the smell of power is in the air, they’ll do just about anything to get it, even if it means tearing their own party apart.
What this does to primary voters is something of a mystery. Most will say that they hate negative campaigning, and yet repeated surveys show that attack-ads are remarkably effective. But this time around, it may be different. Obama’s unexpectedly wide margin of victory in South Carolina last Saturday may partially be laid to a reaction to the petty smears of the Clintons; voters couldn’t stand it, especially from those they had admired and supported for so long, and especially against the man who from the outset made reconciliation and collaboration the centerpiece of his campaign.
There may be an upside to this downturn, however. Intra-party battles during primary season could be seen as sparring matches, toughening the eventual nominee for the real prize-fight ahead. The press has reported "bitterness" and "hatred" between the Clinton and Obama camps, but we’d like to think this is transitory, caused by the heat of the race, and that after the nomination is decided, all the former candidates with their formidable staffs will unite behind the nominee in a common cause that they already substantially embrace.
Super Tuesday is coming right up, but it may well be that the results will not be conclusive and that the selection process will continue for months, perhaps right up to the Democratic convention. In the short-term quest for long-term power, the dangers of bitterness and hatred increase. We the voters can only hope that the inevitable attacks will be friendly sparring and not friendly fire, and that the Dream Team will not end up as just a dream.
Showing posts with label presidential candidates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label presidential candidates. Show all posts
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
MAYOR MIKE MAKES A MOVE
June 28, 2007
It was hardly a surprise to New Yorkers that Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Republican party last week. He had dropped in to it only six years ago, not because he bought the ideological package but just because he wanted to be mayor.
Assessing his chances as a Democrat with no previous political experience, he cut his ties with the party in 2001, registered as a Republican, and let four seasoned New York politicians follow the customary Democratic pattern of eating each other up in the primaries. Meanwhile, he outspent and outspoke his lone Republican primary opponent, the tired political hack Herman Badillo, and won handily. He then sat back and watched the two surviving Democrats, Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green, go at it again in a runoff.
Despite a fractured and financially drained Democratic opposition and his targeted, multimillion-dollar campaign, his was a very long shot. In June of 2001 he’d gotten a tepid endorsement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ("Yes, sure, I think he’s qualified to be mayor," Giuliani said at the time; "he has a lot of managerial experience."), but after two terms of dictatorial rule, the mayor had so polarized the city that his endorsement might actually have been Bloomberg’s kiss of death. The dynamic changed after Tuesday, September 11 (the scheduled date of the primary, subsequently delayed for two weeks). Now a civic hero, Giuliani re-endorsed Bloomberg, which did the trick - though not by much. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, he barely eked past Green in the general election.
Four years later, things were the same, only different. As the primaries approached, Ferrer and Green were eating each other up yet again, but by then Bloomberg was far above the fray. This time it was Ferrer that he beat, and by a landslide. Even in the Bronx, where Ferrer had been a popular borough president, and among Latinos, his ethnic base, his showing was unexpectedly weak. Mayor Mike, as the tabloids were now affectionately calling him, had proven himself to the people.
Rudy’s dismissive comment in early 2001 was inadvertently prescient. Bloomberg’s managerial experience turned the city around. He eliminated an inherited $6.4 billion deficit by streamlining city government and boldly, and un-Republicanly, raising taxes. He furthered Giuliani’s success in reducing crime but did it coolly and collaboratively, without the abrasion and confrontation of his predecessor. He took control of the Board of Education, something that previous mayors had found impossible, and made substantial gains in reforming the bureaucracy-bound public school system, actually improving education in the process. He committed city resources to affordable housing, sparking a building boom here in the Bronx and in the other boroughs. And showing his aesthetic side, he invited the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to mount, at their own expense, "The Gates in Central Park," a project that previous mayors had scorned for 20 years. Those 7,500 orange banners packed the hotels in the bleak midwinter of 2005, filling city coffers with tax money and reinvigorating the worldwide tourist trade.
Like all good managers, he achieved his goals by hiring the most talented people for his team instead of doling out plums to his cronies. And like the best of managers, he did everything with elan, an appealing, level-headed optimism that has brought almost the whole city on board. Astonishing in the bruising world of New York politics, he has his critics but hardly an enemy.
He’s even defused Al Sharpton.
No wonder some people are thinking president. After the sinister secrecy and administrative incompetency of the Bush years, and the prolonged partisan deadlock in Congress, it is most refreshing to imagine, if only for an instant, a national leader who is straightforward, creative, non-ideological, practical, and collaborative, with a crackerjack cabinet of non-partisan experts and a national agenda with the nation in mind.
It is the overwhelming disgust of party pettiness and the longing for a politics of principle from a no-nonsense pragmatist that may make a Bloomberg bid realistic. Outsider candidates of recent memory - George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, yes, but also party dissidents like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean - ignited enthusiasm from a broad spectrum of Americans searching for an alternative, but they all failed because there was something vaguely or plainly kooky about them. There is nothing kooky about Michael Bloomberg.
And nothing quixotic, either. This is a man with an uncanny sense of political timing. He’s like a star running-back, able to see a hole in the line and shoot right through it to the goal. And because he can finance an entire national campaign all by himself, he can afford to do just as he did in 2001: sit back and let the party candidates eat each other up. If he sees a hole after the February primaries, he may make a run for it. (This must be scaring the dress off Rudy, who was recently beaten by Bloomberg 56 to 29 percent in a poll of New Yorkers by the Daily News as to who was the more effective mayor.)
Meanwhile, he will go on being mayor of New York, pushing his long-term proposals for a safer and greener city, setting out broader ideas on domestic and foreign policy for his now wider audience, and building a coalition of notable backers dissatisfied with their parties’ inflexibility and impotence. Judging from the warm words and the cover of Time magazine from last week,
Arnold Schwarzenegger may be one of the first on board.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Mike will play as well in Ohio and Alabama as he’s playing in New York. He hardly knows that himself at this point. But his detachment from party apparatus - and a net worth of $5 billion or so - will at the very least allow him the freedom to shape the national discourse uniquely, and positively.
Watch him.
It was hardly a surprise to New Yorkers that Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Republican party last week. He had dropped in to it only six years ago, not because he bought the ideological package but just because he wanted to be mayor.
Assessing his chances as a Democrat with no previous political experience, he cut his ties with the party in 2001, registered as a Republican, and let four seasoned New York politicians follow the customary Democratic pattern of eating each other up in the primaries. Meanwhile, he outspent and outspoke his lone Republican primary opponent, the tired political hack Herman Badillo, and won handily. He then sat back and watched the two surviving Democrats, Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green, go at it again in a runoff.
Despite a fractured and financially drained Democratic opposition and his targeted, multimillion-dollar campaign, his was a very long shot. In June of 2001 he’d gotten a tepid endorsement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ("Yes, sure, I think he’s qualified to be mayor," Giuliani said at the time; "he has a lot of managerial experience."), but after two terms of dictatorial rule, the mayor had so polarized the city that his endorsement might actually have been Bloomberg’s kiss of death. The dynamic changed after Tuesday, September 11 (the scheduled date of the primary, subsequently delayed for two weeks). Now a civic hero, Giuliani re-endorsed Bloomberg, which did the trick - though not by much. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, he barely eked past Green in the general election.
Four years later, things were the same, only different. As the primaries approached, Ferrer and Green were eating each other up yet again, but by then Bloomberg was far above the fray. This time it was Ferrer that he beat, and by a landslide. Even in the Bronx, where Ferrer had been a popular borough president, and among Latinos, his ethnic base, his showing was unexpectedly weak. Mayor Mike, as the tabloids were now affectionately calling him, had proven himself to the people.
Rudy’s dismissive comment in early 2001 was inadvertently prescient. Bloomberg’s managerial experience turned the city around. He eliminated an inherited $6.4 billion deficit by streamlining city government and boldly, and un-Republicanly, raising taxes. He furthered Giuliani’s success in reducing crime but did it coolly and collaboratively, without the abrasion and confrontation of his predecessor. He took control of the Board of Education, something that previous mayors had found impossible, and made substantial gains in reforming the bureaucracy-bound public school system, actually improving education in the process. He committed city resources to affordable housing, sparking a building boom here in the Bronx and in the other boroughs. And showing his aesthetic side, he invited the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to mount, at their own expense, "The Gates in Central Park," a project that previous mayors had scorned for 20 years. Those 7,500 orange banners packed the hotels in the bleak midwinter of 2005, filling city coffers with tax money and reinvigorating the worldwide tourist trade.
Like all good managers, he achieved his goals by hiring the most talented people for his team instead of doling out plums to his cronies. And like the best of managers, he did everything with elan, an appealing, level-headed optimism that has brought almost the whole city on board. Astonishing in the bruising world of New York politics, he has his critics but hardly an enemy.
He’s even defused Al Sharpton.
No wonder some people are thinking president. After the sinister secrecy and administrative incompetency of the Bush years, and the prolonged partisan deadlock in Congress, it is most refreshing to imagine, if only for an instant, a national leader who is straightforward, creative, non-ideological, practical, and collaborative, with a crackerjack cabinet of non-partisan experts and a national agenda with the nation in mind.
It is the overwhelming disgust of party pettiness and the longing for a politics of principle from a no-nonsense pragmatist that may make a Bloomberg bid realistic. Outsider candidates of recent memory - George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, yes, but also party dissidents like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean - ignited enthusiasm from a broad spectrum of Americans searching for an alternative, but they all failed because there was something vaguely or plainly kooky about them. There is nothing kooky about Michael Bloomberg.
And nothing quixotic, either. This is a man with an uncanny sense of political timing. He’s like a star running-back, able to see a hole in the line and shoot right through it to the goal. And because he can finance an entire national campaign all by himself, he can afford to do just as he did in 2001: sit back and let the party candidates eat each other up. If he sees a hole after the February primaries, he may make a run for it. (This must be scaring the dress off Rudy, who was recently beaten by Bloomberg 56 to 29 percent in a poll of New Yorkers by the Daily News as to who was the more effective mayor.)
Meanwhile, he will go on being mayor of New York, pushing his long-term proposals for a safer and greener city, setting out broader ideas on domestic and foreign policy for his now wider audience, and building a coalition of notable backers dissatisfied with their parties’ inflexibility and impotence. Judging from the warm words and the cover of Time magazine from last week,
Arnold Schwarzenegger may be one of the first on board.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Mike will play as well in Ohio and Alabama as he’s playing in New York. He hardly knows that himself at this point. But his detachment from party apparatus - and a net worth of $5 billion or so - will at the very least allow him the freedom to shape the national discourse uniquely, and positively.
Watch him.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
U Pick 'Em
February 12, 2007
By Roger Repohl
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Parlor game: Name the people currently running for President.
I did this at a dinner party recently, and it went like this: “Hillary.” “Obama.” “‘Articulate Joe’ Biden!” “Kucinich, right? Or was that the last time?” “McCain.” “The mayor of America.” “The mayor of New York?” “Um, ah, there’s a dozen more. Why can’t I think of them?”
Why not, indeed.
Coming up short at the dinner table were not only the “Why-are-they-even-doing-this?” bunch like Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack and former Arkansas Governor Tom Huckabee, but also some “I-knew-thats” like John Edwards, Mitt Romney, and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. If you can’t remember them, is it because they’re forgettable?
It’s less than a year before New Hampshire and the Iowa Caucuses, probably followed by all those proposed February primaries, California’s included. By that time, some candidates will be forgotten, some you’ll wish you could forget, and one that you’ll remember in the voting booth. It all depends, but on what?
Joe Biden had it right, though in a very wrong context. The operative word in this campaign really is “articulate,” both as adjective and as verb.
The root word in Latin means “join” or “put together.” The winning candidate will be the one who can join comprehensive and detailed proposals on the crucial concerns of the nation with a rhetoric and personal image that unites and energizes the nation to implement them.
In past elections of recent memory, it was enough to nourish the base and entice the undecideds with slogans and negative ads and vague promises, but all that has changed, and with astonishing speed. Two years ago, very credible scholars were writing articles and books predicting a permanent Republican hold on all branches of government, thanks to the mastery of political vocabulary by strategists like Karl Rove. All of that imploded in last November’s election. The sturdy base of “family values” and the agenda of the Christian Right, once seen as a juggernaut, was engulfed by Iraq; the real family value now is to get the troops back to their families.
But that isn’t all. Another political vocabulary is emerging, also at astonishing speed. The whole conceptual infrastructure of “conservatism,” born of Goldwater, fed by Reagan, furthered by Gingrich, and enthroned by Bush, is destroying itself by its own hand. Beginning with the proposed privatization of Social Security, more and more people started feeling uneasy. They started to see that the rhetorical ploy of the “ownership society” was just another word for a final, multi-pronged attack on social and fiscal policies and institutions that they didn’t know they cherished - or depended upon - so much. And now the attack is coming not just from politicians but from their own employers: Job security is being made laughable by downsizing, and for those that are left, medical and pension plans are being cut back or eliminated.
Add to that the growing realization that global warming is now not just a theory but a threat, and a new, old vocabulary begins to appear: a vocabulary of “the common good.”
The politician who will succeed in this election will be the one who can fearlessly articulate a vision of the common good and develop “put-together” practical proposals for its realization.
What few of the dozen or more hopefuls yet seem to recognize is just how ready for the new vocabulary Americans are. Most indicative is the shift in attitude toward health care, another sign of the Baby Boom Bulge. As the first Boomers cross the threshold of sixty, faced with the present burdens of medical treatment for their parents and the increasingly imminent prospect of the same for themselves, a single-payer system loses its ideological onus and begins to look eminently sensible. The same shift applies to Social Security and pension plans - what people approaching old age want is not options but guarantees, not risky gambles but peace of mind.
Other aspects of the common good are taking on a bright light as well, especially regarding the environment, construed in its widest sense. It is now clear that any attempt to reverse climate change calls for a sweeping national policy, but that is not all; there is also the personal environment. Population growth demands creating livable cities with effective and convenient public transportation and a modernized infrastructure; it also demands preserving and expanding parkland and endangered natural spaces. Proposals for major public works projects no longer seem pariahs but prophetic.
So which of the pack in the presidential race will survive the shakedown? The ones who can articulate, both programmatically and personally, the new vocabulary of the common good. Single-issue candidates like family-values Brownback and anti-immigrant Tancredi are now anachronisms. Image-only candidates like Giuliani, “Mr. 9/11,” will eventually be judged by the sum of their public life, not just one day of it. Hillary says she is “listening,” but we are as sick of listeners as we are of Deciders. Biden, bright but neither articulate nor clean, broke his leg before leaving the gate. Obama has a vision, but is it just a vision of himself? Kucinich has the vision, but the articulation of the self-righteous. McCain and Romney run without a base. Edwards shows some daring, but carries Kerry’s baggage. Al Gore is more tarred by Clinton than Hillary herself. Richardson, with his national and international expertise, could be the dark horse, if he can only stay away from Comedy Central.
Well, it’s your turn. You pick ’em.
Published in the Hermosa Beach, Calif. Easy Reader, February 15, 2007.
By Roger Repohl
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Parlor game: Name the people currently running for President.
I did this at a dinner party recently, and it went like this: “Hillary.” “Obama.” “‘Articulate Joe’ Biden!” “Kucinich, right? Or was that the last time?” “McCain.” “The mayor of America.” “The mayor of New York?” “Um, ah, there’s a dozen more. Why can’t I think of them?”
Why not, indeed.
Coming up short at the dinner table were not only the “Why-are-they-even-doing-this?” bunch like Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack and former Arkansas Governor Tom Huckabee, but also some “I-knew-thats” like John Edwards, Mitt Romney, and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. If you can’t remember them, is it because they’re forgettable?
It’s less than a year before New Hampshire and the Iowa Caucuses, probably followed by all those proposed February primaries, California’s included. By that time, some candidates will be forgotten, some you’ll wish you could forget, and one that you’ll remember in the voting booth. It all depends, but on what?
Joe Biden had it right, though in a very wrong context. The operative word in this campaign really is “articulate,” both as adjective and as verb.
The root word in Latin means “join” or “put together.” The winning candidate will be the one who can join comprehensive and detailed proposals on the crucial concerns of the nation with a rhetoric and personal image that unites and energizes the nation to implement them.
In past elections of recent memory, it was enough to nourish the base and entice the undecideds with slogans and negative ads and vague promises, but all that has changed, and with astonishing speed. Two years ago, very credible scholars were writing articles and books predicting a permanent Republican hold on all branches of government, thanks to the mastery of political vocabulary by strategists like Karl Rove. All of that imploded in last November’s election. The sturdy base of “family values” and the agenda of the Christian Right, once seen as a juggernaut, was engulfed by Iraq; the real family value now is to get the troops back to their families.
But that isn’t all. Another political vocabulary is emerging, also at astonishing speed. The whole conceptual infrastructure of “conservatism,” born of Goldwater, fed by Reagan, furthered by Gingrich, and enthroned by Bush, is destroying itself by its own hand. Beginning with the proposed privatization of Social Security, more and more people started feeling uneasy. They started to see that the rhetorical ploy of the “ownership society” was just another word for a final, multi-pronged attack on social and fiscal policies and institutions that they didn’t know they cherished - or depended upon - so much. And now the attack is coming not just from politicians but from their own employers: Job security is being made laughable by downsizing, and for those that are left, medical and pension plans are being cut back or eliminated.
Add to that the growing realization that global warming is now not just a theory but a threat, and a new, old vocabulary begins to appear: a vocabulary of “the common good.”
The politician who will succeed in this election will be the one who can fearlessly articulate a vision of the common good and develop “put-together” practical proposals for its realization.
What few of the dozen or more hopefuls yet seem to recognize is just how ready for the new vocabulary Americans are. Most indicative is the shift in attitude toward health care, another sign of the Baby Boom Bulge. As the first Boomers cross the threshold of sixty, faced with the present burdens of medical treatment for their parents and the increasingly imminent prospect of the same for themselves, a single-payer system loses its ideological onus and begins to look eminently sensible. The same shift applies to Social Security and pension plans - what people approaching old age want is not options but guarantees, not risky gambles but peace of mind.
Other aspects of the common good are taking on a bright light as well, especially regarding the environment, construed in its widest sense. It is now clear that any attempt to reverse climate change calls for a sweeping national policy, but that is not all; there is also the personal environment. Population growth demands creating livable cities with effective and convenient public transportation and a modernized infrastructure; it also demands preserving and expanding parkland and endangered natural spaces. Proposals for major public works projects no longer seem pariahs but prophetic.
So which of the pack in the presidential race will survive the shakedown? The ones who can articulate, both programmatically and personally, the new vocabulary of the common good. Single-issue candidates like family-values Brownback and anti-immigrant Tancredi are now anachronisms. Image-only candidates like Giuliani, “Mr. 9/11,” will eventually be judged by the sum of their public life, not just one day of it. Hillary says she is “listening,” but we are as sick of listeners as we are of Deciders. Biden, bright but neither articulate nor clean, broke his leg before leaving the gate. Obama has a vision, but is it just a vision of himself? Kucinich has the vision, but the articulation of the self-righteous. McCain and Romney run without a base. Edwards shows some daring, but carries Kerry’s baggage. Al Gore is more tarred by Clinton than Hillary herself. Richardson, with his national and international expertise, could be the dark horse, if he can only stay away from Comedy Central.
Well, it’s your turn. You pick ’em.
Published in the Hermosa Beach, Calif. Easy Reader, February 15, 2007.
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