Monthly Archives: January 2008

Video: Obama, Edwards, Clinton at the State House

Brokaw

We had a long, cold wait for the candidates to speak at King Day at the Dome today, although it wasn’t as long or cold for me as for some.

Barack Obama had met with our editorial board earlier (I’ll post about that later today, or tomorrow), and I couldn’t get away from the office for another hour after that, so when I arrived at the State House a little after 11, some folks were already leaving. One acquaintance told me he thought the candidates had been there and left. It seemed pretty clear that the candidates weren’t up there on the steps, but I also surmised that they were yet to speak. The security was there — a real pain, because they artificially compressed the crowd and limited movement so that it was difficult to get close to the steps, and impossible (as it turned out) to get into a good position for my camera. Wherever I stood, the speakers were in shadow, and worse, sometimes backlit. (NOTE: Because of the lighting problem, and the position from which I was shooting with my little camera, this is very low-quality video!)

So the security was still there, and the TV cameras were still in place. I ran into Warren Bolton who had arrived about the same time as I, and we were still wondering whether there was indeed anything to stick around for when Warren nudged me and pointed out Tom Brokaw a few yards away in the crowd (see photo above, which is higher quality than the video because he was in sunlight, and close by). We figured if the hopefuls had spoken before us, Brokaw would have left by now, so we stayed.

Speakers we could not identify from where we stood droned on, saying the things they usually say at these events, and I was beginning to resent the NAACP for letting all these folks (myself included) stand around waiting for what so many had come for. Remember, others had been there much, much longer. I was hardly the only one to feel the crowd was being abused. Warren overhead somebody leaving, muttering about it, and saying the NAACP was going to hear about this the next time he heard from them asking for a contribution.

Finally, just after noon, the main attractions came on. My wife, who was at home comfortably watching on TV, later said she assumed they had waited to go on live at the noon hour. Perhaps that is the logical, fully understandable explanation. Anyway, it was explained that the three candidates had drawn lots to determine their speaking order. Here they are, in the order in which they spoke. The videos are rough, incomplete and unedited, as I wanted to hurry and get them out (and the video quality wasn’t that great anyway); I just provide them to give some flavor of the event:

Barack Obama:


John Edwards:

   

Hillary Clinton:

Which do you want, JFK or LBJ?

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
BARACK OBAMA and Hillary Clinton decided last week to put their spat over MLK, JFK and LBJ behind them. That’s nice for them, but the rest of us shouldn’t drop the subject so quickly.
Intentionally or not, the statement that started all the trouble points to the main difference between the two front-runners.
    And that difference has nothing to do with race.
    Now you’re thinking, “Only a Clueless White Guy could say that had nothing to do with race,” and you’d have a point. When it comes to judging whether a statement or an issue is about race, there is a profound and tragic cognitive divide between black and white in this country.
But hear me out. It started when the senator from New York said the following, with reference to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.:
    “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”
    The white woman running against a black man for the Democratic Party nomination could only get herself into trouble mentioning Dr. King in anything other than laudatory terms, particularly as she headed for a state where half of the voters likely to decide her fate are black.
    You have to suppose she knew that. And yet, she dug her hole even deeper by saying:
    “Senator Obama used President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to criticize me. Basically compared himself to two of our greatest heroes. He basically said that President Kennedy and Dr. King had made great speeches and that speeches were important. Well, no one denies that. But if all there is (is) a speech, then it doesn’t change anything.”
    She wasn’t insulting black Americans — intentionally — any more than she was trying to dis Irish Catholics.
    To bring what I’m saying into focus, set aside Dr. King for the moment — we’ll honor him tomorrow. The very real contrast between the two Democratic front-runners shows in the other comparison she offered.
    She was saying that, given a choice between John F. Kennedy and his successor, she was more like the latter. This was stark honesty — who on Earth would cast herself that way who didn’t believe it was true? — and it was instructive.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson was the Master of the Senate when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1960. If he wanted the Senate to do something, it generally happened, however many heads had to be cracked.
    LBJ was not made for the television era that was dawning. With features like a hound dog (and one of the most enduring images of him remains the one in which he is holding an actual hound dog up by its ears), and a lugubrious Texas drawl, he preferred to git ’er done behind the scenes, and no one did it better.
    Sen. Johnson lost the nomination to that inexperienced young pup Jack Kennedy, but brought himself to accept the No. 2 spot. After an assassin put him into the Oval Office, he managed to win election overwhelmingly in 1964, when the Republicans gave him the gift of Barry Goldwater. But Vietnam brought him down hard. He gave up even trying to get his party’s nomination in 1968.
    But he was a masterful lawmaker. And he did indeed push the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law, knowing as he did so that he was sacrificing his party’s hold on the South.
    He brought into being a stunning array of social programs — Medicare, federal aid to education, urban renewal, and the War on Poverty.
    So, on the one hand, not a popular guy — wouldn’t want to be him. On the other hand, President Kennedy never approached his level of achievement during his tragically short tenure.
    You might say that if Sen. Obama is to be compared to President Kennedy — and he is, his call to public service enchanting young voters, and drawing the endorsement of JFK’s closest adviser, Ted Sorensen — Sen. Clinton flatters herself in a different way by invoking President Johnson.
    They are different kinds of smart, offering a choice between the kid you’d want on your debating team and the one you’d want helping you do your homework.
    Sen. Obama offers himself as a refreshing antidote to the vicious partisanship of the Bush and Clinton dynasties. That sounds wonderful. But Sen. Clinton has, somewhat less dramatically, formed practical coalitions with Republican colleagues to address issues of mutual concern — such as with Lindsey Graham on military health care.
    Sen. Clinton, whose effort to follow up the Great Society with a comprehensive health care solution fell flat in the last decade, has yet to live up to the Johnson standard of achievement. For that matter, Sen. Obama has yet to bring Camelot back into being.
    As The Washington Post’s David Broder pointed out, in their debate in Las Vegas last week, the pair offered very different concepts of the proper role of the president. Sen. Obama said it wasn’t about seeing that “the paperwork is being shuffled effectively,” but rather about setting goals, uniting people to pursue them, building public support — in other words, about inspiration.
    Sen. Clinton talked about managing the bureaucracy and demanding accountability.
    Sen. Obama offers a leader, while Sen. Clinton offers a manager. It would be nice to have both. But six days from now, South Carolinians will have to choose one or the other.

The folks who won it for McCain

This afternoon, after I did my Alhurra gig with Andre, I dropped by the McCain HQ on my way over to visit my new grandbabies, to see what was happening. There was considerable worrying going on among some of the staff honchos, what with the mess in Horry County.

Of course, at that time they didn’t know that Greenville County would go for McCain. The conventionalMccainhq_2
wisdom was expressed to my Friday by McCainiac John Courson, when I asked him what impact he thought the predicted bad weather would have on today’s results. He said, not entirely jokingly, that the best
weather for McCain would be snow in the Upstate and sunshine on the coast. (Of course, we ended up with a mess across the state.)

But the folks doing the actual work of identifying and turning out the vote for McCain kept their heads down and kept at it, as shown in my double-naught spy camera photo. These folks did the job in the end.

McCain, when he came in to speak to our editorial board in August, said that’s how George W. Bush beat him in SC in 2000. Dismissing the smear campaign, and sounding like a good-sport losing coach, he said the other team just had the better organization, and more money.

This time, McCain had that advantage. At least, he had the advantage in organization. As for money — well, Mitt Romney can tell you that’s not everything.

Back in the dark days, when I wrote about McCain going to the mattresses, this HQ was a very lonely place. Not today, and that had a lot to do with making the difference.

AP calls it: McCain wins

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The Associated Press says McCain has won it:

Date: 01/19/2008 09:18 PM

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BULLETIN (AP) — John McCain, GOP, nominated President, South Carolina.

Very, very good news, considering that Huckabee had the Mo coming into today.

It’s been a long, long time coming, but South Carolina appears to have chosen the best of all possible Republicans for the nation.

If this is right, this is behind us with a most satisfactory conclusion. On to the Democrats. We’ll be endorsing in that race by midweek. Barack Obama is coming in to talk with us Monday morning.

Why Andre Bauer likes Huckabee

This afternoon, Andre Bauer and I were in a tent on the State House lawn, informing the Mideast.

Alhurra TV, which is a government-funded agency that broadcasts in Arabic to the region — it’s the Mideast version of Voice of America — asked me to do a live deal from their setup at the State House. It was my first direct experience with actual, sure-enough propaganda, and I liked it fine.

It was an unusual gig. Our host, Ephraim (sp?), was sitting to my right asking questions in Arabic. This is going to shock you, but Andre (who was sitting on my left) and I don’t actually understand or speak Arabic. There was a guy in some distant place speaking through a static-y connection into my left ear with a translation, of which I could only make out every other word during the first half of the show. We were getting a remote feed from Las Vegas, and Van Hipp spoke into our ears from Washington.

Andre, who had been out jogging with Mike Huckabee earlier in the day (it was his first jog since his plane crash), talked about why he had endorsed the former Arkansas governor on Thursday.

What’s interesting about his explanation of his decision (the English version, of course). He said he liked his ability to work with a Democratic legislature as governor, and the fact that he was unapologetic about having raised taxes to improve roads and schools. In other words, he was impressed by Huckabee’s understanding that a governor has an obligation to govern. (He specifically said that Huckabee shared his concern for aging issues.)

That’s just what I liked about Huckabee, and a significant reason why we said in our endorsement of John McCain last week that Huckabee would have been our second choice — although a distant second.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way he ran the last few days, which I have found very disturbing. More about that shortly, if I’m able to get to it. I’m typing this from the set at S.C. ETV,  where we’re on live.

(Final note: I just realized, watching Mike Campbell doing a live feed on the monitor, that this time, he and Andre were on the same side. OK, it’s not the biggest irony in the history of the world, but I thought I’d mention it.)

Fred’s lost

About an hour ago, my wife was approaching the I-26 overpass on Sunset in West Columbia. She saw Fred Thompson’s bus pull off the interstate, laboriously turn around on that huge, complicated overpass, and get back on the interstate to go back in the direction it had come from.

And those things aren’t nearly as easy to turn around as a pick-’em-up truck.

Voters being turned away in Horry?

A source with the McCain campaign here in the Midlands just passed on a report that the voting machines in Horry County have broken down.

But that’s not the really bad, or astounding, news.

The bad news is that they’ve run out of paper ballots, and are turning voters away from the polls.

If this is right, it’s extremely bad news for John McCain, and for those of us who think it’s important for our country that he be the nominee. And whomever you support, if you care about our republic, you’d have to agree with the McCain guy: "That’s a damned shame."

So what I want to know is, is this just one of these doomsday rumors that fly around on election days, or have any of y’all down on the coast experienced this? Gordon, you live down that way, right? What’s the word? Anyone else?

My crystal ball is murky

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As I’m always saying, in the editorial biz, we’re about who should win elections, not who will win. Endorsements aren’t predictions, yadda-yadda.

Well, we did our endorsement. It’s done, and I’m quite satisfied with it.

Who’s going to win is a separate question, and I’ve been known to indulge in the most indiscreet indulgence of making predictions since I took up the unwholesome habit of blogging.

But I just don’t know what to tell you. You know and I know who I hope will win, because I’ve been very clear about it. And there’s reason to be hopeful. Zogby shows McCain with a decent lead:

Arizona Sen. John McCain is holding on to his lead in South Carolina as the Republican primary election there approaches, a new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby three-day telephone tracking poll shows. But the survey also shows former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are closing in on him ahead of Saturday’s vote.

In the latest telephone tracking survey, McCain is holding steady at 29%, while Huckabee wins 22% support for the second day in a row.

Then there’s this, but it’s two days old, and I don’t know anything about that outfit’s record for accuracy.

And remember, "accuracy" is a relative thing. The best poll in the world captures a moment in time, and that moment often doesn’t match the one in which people vote. Campaigns move in four dimensions.

Also, Zogby has been known to be very wrong, very recently. And then there’s the poll that we published in this newspaper this very day, showing a McCain-Huckabee statistical dead heat.

Even with John Zogby, there’s reason for a McCainiac to be concerned. To subscribers to his service (one of whom shared this with me), he says:

There is movement afoot in the Palmetto State. The precise three-day rolling average is McCain 28.6%, Huckabee 22.3%, Romney 15.4%, and Thompson 13.2%. The very first day of polling McCain led by double digits. In the single day of polling on Thursday alone, Romney hit 19%, while McCains lead over Huckabee stood at only 3.2%. If Romney continues to gain after Michigan it will hurt McCain.

And then consider the bad weather forecast, and consider:

Likely voters of different ages had different tastes, the survey shows. Romney led among voters aged 18-29, with 33%. Huckabee was favored by those aged 30 to 49, with 30% of their support. Voters aged 50 to 64 liked McCain best, giving him 33% of their support. McCain also dominated among those over 65, with 42% support. Romney was a distant second among seniors, with 19% support.

So it can go either way. We wait to see which face emerges from the crowd.

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The Convenient Nativist

Odd, isn’t it, that this anti-immigrant bit of propaganda — which purports to be about Sen. Lindsey Graham — should emerge at this particular moment:

This offensive nativist screed makes no policy proposal. The thrust here is about people speaking Spanish — as opposed to fine, decent folks with "South Carolina values." Appalling.

And as we all know, there’s a lot more at stake with an emotional play like this than a quixotic slap at a secure incumbent senator.

Huckabee on the Confederate flag

No time to get into this right now — I’m way behind on my Sunday column — but just to let you know, Mike Huckabee is now apparently bringing up the Confederate flag at campaign events, and here’s what he’s saying:

MYRTLE BEACH, South Carolina (CNN) – Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told South Carolina voters Thursday that the government had no business making decisions over the Confederate flag.
    "You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," Huckabee said at a Myrtle Beach campaign event. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole, that’s what we’d do."
    Later, in Florence, he repeated the remarks. "I know what would happen if somebody comes to my state in Arkansas and tells us what to do, it doesn’t matter what it is, tell us how to run our schools, tell us how to raise our kids, tell us what to do with our flag — you want to come tell us what to do with the flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole."

Evidently, I talk with my hands

Just finished a taped interview with Michele Norris of "All Things Considered." Listen for it this afternoon — maybe. At last word Michele says today’s broadcast isn’t set yet. I’m betting I don’t make it if they have anything else that’s decent at all. I’m not exactly at the top of my game today.

To give you a taste of it, here is a clip that undoubtedly represents the worst video I have ever shot. I learned two things this morning:

  1. It’s very easy to forget you’re holding a camera, and that it’s turned on, when you are the interviewee rather than the interviewer.
  2. Obviously, I talk with my hands.

Anyway, that was my third radio thing this morning — I did Andy Gobeil’s show over at ETV studios and a phone thing with a station out of Little Rock, Ark. The Arkansas station wanted to hear about Mike Huckabee. I told them they should be telling me.

I’m back at my normal job now, for the rest of the day. I’ll blog as I can. Getting a little tired, though. I’ve got a lousy cold. Here we are with this historic opportunity — with South Carolina in position to make a major difference in both parties’ nominations — and today I’m sort of wishing this were the 27th.

Oh, one last thing — Michele mentioned reading my blog when she first contacted me. So did her sound woman, Andrea Hsu, when I met her today. Once again, I’m struck by the fact that, in spite of the much-lower readership numbers (a fraction of a fraction), the blog is cited more and more by people who contact me. So maybe this thing does have an impact, and isn’t just a useless symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Just one more day

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
AT TIMES this week it has seemed as though, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the media themselves were the message.
    For me, the apex of absurdity was achieved Monday morning, when I sat in a conference room here at the paper shooting video of a guy from French television who was shooting video of me talking about Saturday’s S.C. Republican presidential primary. You remember how, in old-fashioned barbershops, you could see yourself sitting in the chair in the mirror in front of you, reflecting the mirror behind you, and on and on? It was kind of like that.
    After the interview, the Frenchman followed me to the Columbia Rotary Club, where I had been asked to speak about the newspaper and its endorsement in said primary. In case you missed it, we rather emphatically endorsed Arizona Sen. John McCain in Sunday’s paper. See more about that at my blog (address below).
    As I was stepping down from the podium at Rotary, a Danish journalist gave me her card, saying she wanted to interview me later. She had followed Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson to the meeting. Poor Hal. I had been sending some of the national media who were calling me to him, as a good, thoughtful example of the “religious conservative” kind of voter they were so eager to talk to. Now here he was, dragging journalists right back at me. (Just keep looking into the mirrors. Whoa … is that what the back of my head looks like?)
    On Tuesday, Michele Norris of NPR’s “All Things Considered” called on her cell while traveling across South Carolina, and we spoke for 53 minutes. But that was just the preliminary; we’ll tape the actual interview this morning. I’m also supposed to be on local public radio with Andy Gobeil this morning — and Andy and I will be on ETV live for primary results Saturday night.
    Thursday, I spoke with Dennis Miller of SNL fame, who’s now a conservative talk show host. He wanted to know how come South Carolina was having its Republican primary Saturday, but the Democratic primary a week later. I couldn’t give him a good reason, because there isn’t one.
    All this attention can be fun, but some get tired of it. Bob McAlister, for one. Bob is a Republican media consultant who made his rep as chief of staff to the late Gov. Carroll Campbell. In 2000, he was for George W. Bush. This time, he’s for McCain. He’s feeling pretty confident that he’ll be on the winning side again.
     But he’s got a beef with all the media types. “The national press wants to know about segments” of the GOP electorate, he complained. As in, don’t you think McCain has the retired military vote sewn up, or will McCain, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney split the evangelical vote?
    “They talk about evangelicals as though we were some sort of subset of the culture,” Bob (a Baptist) complains. “They try to put us in a little box, as though we were apart from the mainstream in the Republican Party.
    “But in South Carolina, we are the mainstream.”
    As The Wall Street Journal said Thursday, “McCain campaign aides are hoping Mr. McCain and his rivals — Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson — divide the evangelical vote, leaving the state’s sizable population of military and independent voters to Mr. McCain.”
    Mr. Huckabee’s main hope, as a Baptist preacher himself, is to attract that whole evangelical “subset” of the GOP here. But it seems pretty divided. Fred Thompson, surprisingly, has the endorsement of S.C. Right to Life. Bob’s for McCain. Hal Stevenson is for Huckabee, but he seemed worried Thursday that there aren’t quite enough like him to put the former Arkansas governor over the top. He said he’s found “a lot of support for McCain and Romney among social conservatives,” because they think they have broader appeal. He particularly notes the McCain advantage on national security.
    Sen. McCain is counting on people like Jack Van Loan, about whom I wrote in this space yesterday. Jack’s a retired Air Force pilot, now a Columbia community leader, who met Sen. McCain when they were both prisoners of the North Vietnamese.
    In the interests of full disclosure, and in order to keep with my theme of media-as-message, he’s also counting on people like my Dad — a retired Navy captain who lives in West Columbia. My father is like most career military officers — politics has been something other people did, while those in uniform did their duty.
    Not this time. Dad spent a couple of hours working the phones at McCain HQ in Columbia Thursday morning. He was given a list of names to call, which he dutifully did. Speaking of mirrors, he was amused to find his own name and number on his list. Orders are orders — he called the number, and talked to my Mom.
    I did go out and check the pulse of the real world once or twice this week. But I didn’t gain much new information.
    Take Tuesday night: I went to hear Fred Thompson speaking at the Sticky Fingers in Harbison. He did OK — the crowd was good-sized, and seemed to like him. If you were in the Fred Thompson bubble, you might think he had a chance to win.
    Then I went out toward Lexington, to Hudson’s Smokehouse, to hear Mike Huckabee. Wow. The place was packed, and the people were pumped. That, I thought, was what a contender’s rally looks like in the last week. The crowd was impressive, even though from where I sat it was hard to see past the — you guessed it — media types.
    I missed the McCain rally on Gervais Street Thursday, because it happened at the same time that I had promised to talk to Dennis Miller. Bob McAlister says it was awesome, and had all the marks of a campaign headed for victory. But he would say that, wouldn’t he, being a McCain man.
    Maybe I’ll call a reporter who was there and get an objective view. Just kidding — sort of.
    Just one more day, folks. Tomorrow, it’s what you say that counts. Then we can do it all over again with the Democrats.

Time to do a Ned Ray on the Clintonistas

We’re still waiting, waiting to get Hillary Clinton in for an endorsement interview. We want to give her every opportunity, yet still get our endorsement published in time for folks to digest it.

Here’s my e-mail correspondence over the last few hours with Zac Wright of the campaign. (And Zac is by no means the only Clintonista I’m pestering.) Zac’s an ol’ boy from West Tennessee, where I spend the first decade of my career (’75-’85), so I’ve tried to speak in terms he would fully understand:

ME: Zac, we’ve GOT to get Sen. Clinton in here for an editorial board meeting!
    What’s our status?

ZAC: Brad,
    Pursuing logistics, but no further developments at this point.

ME: Doggone it, Zac, what would Ned Ray McWherter say about all this lollygaggin’?

ZAC: Now that was spoken like a man with real West TN roots!  I’m working on it and hope to know more COB today.  Monday is the absolute latest, correct?

ME: It would be damnably hard to go any later. But if you have something later to propose (say, early Tuesday) at least run it by us so we have the chance to refuse.
 
Our plan at this point — and mind you, this is already plan B, or maybe C — is that the board will assemble here at the paper (it’s a newspaper holiday, so people would be coming in just to deal with this) to meet with Sen. Obama at 11. Figuring that would be the latest candidate we’d see (because Obama wasn’t going to be in SC this week, and we thought Sen. Clinton would be), we were going to go straight into making a decision. (And don’t think having the last word gives him a leg up; McCain had the last word in 2000, and we went with Bush). Then Mike and I would stay the rest of the day to get everything written, but we would not publish until Wednesday, to give other board members a chance to see proofs — and to give me a chance to record a video as we did with McCain, and post online early (3 p.m. Tuesday).
 
A Wednesday endorsement is really late, in terms of giving folks a chance to respond. But we moved it back to there to give the leading candidates what we thought was plenty of EXTRA time in which to get here. Remember, we had really wanted to endorse on Sunday.
 
When you talk with the folks in your organization, deal with them the way Ned Ray would have when he was Speaker. I remember once the House was having trouble moving along on an issue the way he’d like, so he rumbled something like, "Y’all better get it together before I come down there and rip off some arms and beat you about the head and shoulders with ’em."

What it was really like at the ‘Hanoi Hilton’

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        Jack Van Loan in 2006.

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ON MAY 20, 1967, Air Force pilot Jack Van Loan was shot down over North Vietnam. His parachute carried him to Earth well enough, but he landed all wrong.
    “I hit the ground, and I slid, and I hit a tree,” he said. This provided an opportunity for his captors at the prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”
    “My knee was kind of screwed up and they … any time they found you with some problems, then they would, they would bear down on the problems,” he said. “I mean, they worked on my knee pretty good … and, you know, just torturing me.”
    In October of Jack’s first year in Hanoi, a new prisoner came in, a naval aviator named John McCain. He was in really bad shape. He had ejected over Hanoi, and had landed in a lake right in the middle of the city. He suffered two broken arms and a broken leg ejecting. He nearly drowned in the lake before a mob pulled him out, and then set upon him. They spat on him, kicked him and stripped his clothes off. Then they crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt, and bayoneted him in his left foot and his groin.
    That gave the enemy something to “bear down on.” Lt. Cmdr. McCain would be strung up tight by his unhealed arms, hog-tied and left that way for the night.
    “John was no different than anyone else, except that he was so badly hurt,” said Jack. “He was really badly, badly hurt.”
    Jack and I got to talking about all this when he called me Wednesday morning, outraged over a story that had appeared in that morning’s paper, headlined “McCain’s war record attacked.” A flier put out by an anti-McCain group was claiming the candidate had given up military information in return for medical treatment as a POW in Vietnam.
    This was the kind of thing the McCain campaign had been watching out for. The Arizona senator came into South Carolina off a New Hampshire win back in 2000, but lost to George W. Bush after voters received anonymous phone calls telling particularly nasty lies about his private life. So the campaign has been on hair-trigger alert in these last days before the 2008 primary on Saturday.
    Jack, a retired colonel whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing for more than a decade, believes his old comrade would make the best president “because of all the stressful situations that he’s been under, and the way he’s responded.” But he had called me about something more important than that. It was a matter of honor.
    Jack was incredulous: “To say that John would ask for medical treatment in return for military information is just preposterous. He turned down an opportunity to go home early, and that was right in front of all of us.”
    “I mean, he was yelling it. I couldn’t repeat the language he used, and I wouldn’t repeat the language he used, but boy, it was really something. I turned to my cellmate … who heard it all also loud and clear; I said, ‘My God, they’re gonna kill him for that.’”
    The North Vietnamese by this time had stopped the torture — even taken McCain to the hospital, which almost certainly saved his life — and now they wanted just one thing: They wanted him to agree to go home, ahead of other prisoners. They saw in him an opportunity for a propaganda coup, because of something they’d figured out about him.
    “They found out rather quick that John’s father was (Admiral) John Sidney McCain II,” who was soon to be named commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, Jack said. “And they came in and said, ‘Your father big man, and blah-blah-blah,’ and John gave ’em name, rank and serial number and date of birth.”
    But McCain refused to accept early release, and Jack says he never acknowledged that his Dad was CINCPAC.
    Jack tries hard to help people who weren’t there understand what it was like. He gave a speech right after he finally was freed and went home. His father, a community college president in Oregon and “a consummate public speaker,” told him “That was the best talk I’ve ever heard you give.”
    But, his father added: “‘They didn’t believe you.’
    “It just stopped me cold. ‘What do you mean, they didn’t believe me?’ He said, ‘They didn’t understand what you were talking about; you’ve got to learn to relate to them.’”
    “And I’ve worked hard on that,” he told me. “But it’s hard as hell…. You might be talking to an audience of two or three hundred people; there might be one or two guys that spent a night in a drunk tank. Trying to tell ‘em what solitary confinement is all about, most people … they don’t even relate to it.”
    Jack went home in the second large group of POWs to be freed in connection with the Paris Peace Talks, on March 4, 1973. “I was in for 70 months. Seven-zero — seventy months.” Doctors told him that if he lived long enough, he’d have trouble with that knee. He eventually got orthoscopic surgery right here in Columbia, where he is an active community leader — the current president of the Columbia Rotary.
    John McCain, who to this day is unable to raise his hands above his head — an aide has to comb his hair for him before campaign appearances — was released in the third group. He could have gone home long, long before that, but he wasn’t going to let his country or his comrades down.
    The reason Jack called me Wednesday was to make sure I knew that.

Politics as baseball

Readers who are well familiar with Washington Post columnist George Will know that he is also a baseball fan. Not a giddy, “don’t you love the smell of a glove well-conditioned with linseed oil?” kind of way, or a “Dad, do you want to play catch?” way. George Will is a fan of baseball in a serious, no-nonsense, highly complex, analytical sort of way.

Yes, baseball fans tend to be more obsessed with statistics than other kinds of sports fans, but most baseball fans haven’t written a book about that boys’ game titled Men at Work.

Only recently has it occurred to me the extent to which Mr. Will has taken to writing about politics as though it were baseball. Witness this passage from his column on today’s op-ed page:

    In 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush carried North Dakota with 60.7 percent and 62.9 percent of the vote. A Democratic presidential candidate has not carried the state since 1964. Bush carried South Dakota with 60.3 and 59.9. It has not voted Democratic in a presidential election since 1964. Bush carried Missouri with 50.4 and 53.3. This bellwether state has voted with the winner in every election but one (1956) in the last 100 years. Bush carried Nebraska with 62.2 and 65.9. It last voted Democratic in 1964. Bush carried Colorado with 50.8 and 51.7. It last voted Democratic in 1992. Bush carried Arizona with 51 and 54.9. It last voted Democratic in 1996. Bush carried Virginia with 52.5 and 53.7. It last voted Democratic in 1964. Bush narrowly lost Wisconsin with 47.6 and 49.3.

Sure, but how did Bush do against left-handers in post-season night games?

Perhaps Mr. Will hopes through such observations to impose a stately orderliness upon our politics, causing elections to seem as calmly rational as the game we used to call the national pastime. If only it could be so.

What did Hillary say that was so wrong?

Democrats_debate_wart

So Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have put their spat over race behind them. That’s good, but it still leaves me with a question that I guess only a Clueless White Guy could ask: What was that all about?

Maybe it’s that when it was all brewing I was too busy with the GOP primary to take notice. It seemed to happen late last week, when I was trying to get our endorsement of John McCain decided, written, elaborated upon, discussed in multimedia, and put on the Sunday page.

That’s got to be it. There’s got to be something I just missed entirely. That’s why I find myself still asking, What did Hillary Clinton say that was so wrong? (And note that I’m not even getting into Bill Clinton saying Sen. Obama
was peddling "fairy tales." Supposedly, that was taken by some as
racially insensitive also. But Mr. Clinton say
anything about anybody’s race? He did say "fairy," but it
seems that would offend a whole other demographic group, and then only
if it was really, really willing to stretch to be offended.)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but did this controversy not erupt when the senator from New York said:

    "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson
passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done."

And did it not only deepen when she said:

    “Sen. Obama used President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. to criticize me. Basically compared himself to two of
our greatest heroes. He basically said that President Kennedy and Dr.
King had made great speeches and that speeches were important. Well, no
one denies that. But if all there is (is) a speech, then it doesn’t
change anything.”

This was deemed offensive by some, and the nature of the offense was racial, apparently because Dr. Martin Luther King was mentioned. Or maybe because Sen. Obama is black, or not, depending on who’s keeping score.

Where did the offense lie? Haven’t all great, inspirational leaders been followed by more prosaic types who did much to make the dream a reality? Did Moses not have his Joshua? Did Jesus — whose sudden execution essentially left his movement, at first, in shambles — not have his St. Paul? And do any of us think that, because he essentially invented the idea of a "church" as something Gentiles could join, that St. Paul was greater than Jesus? I would hope not.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t MLK, in the most famous passage of one of his most inspirational speeches, compare himself to Moses? And was that comparison not specifically with regard to the fact that, while he had led the movement right up to the border, someone else might have to lead it into the Promised Land? ("I may not get there with you.")

Or did I miss something? It’s highly possible that I did, which is why I’m asking. I’ve looked at several stories on this subject, but it’s certain that I haven’t read them all.

But if I didn’t miss something, then I think Sen. Clinton caught a lot of grief she didn’t deserve. She might be called all sorts of things, by those who are inclined to criticize her — overbearing, perhaps. Condescending, maybe. But racist? I don’t think so.

By the way, that was what I didn’t like about the Ariail cartoon that I showed you in sketch form yesterday: I thought it was way unfair to Mrs. Clinton. Of course, it is in the essential nature of caricature to exaggerate, and even to offend. But I thought the Ariail cartoon we actually used made the same point (with which I disagree, but what Robert wants to say is Robert’s business), and since it left out the emotional hand grenade of the lawn jockey, it did so in a way more likely to be clearly understood. But it’s hard to be sure about such things, which is why I asked y’all about it.

Democrats_debate_wart2

Consensus forms regarding Edwards

You’ve heard me speak of how we work by consensus on the editorial board. Usually, this is based on face-to-face interaction, but here’s an example of a consensus forming in writing.

This morning, Mike Fitts sent this group e-mail message to his fellow associate editors and me:

    Do we owe John Edwards an op-ed piece? His staff has submitted this.
    To recap: An Obama op-ed ran in August, I think, and Hillary’s around the 1st of the year, and Brad called Edwards a big phony.

What?!?! Can I never live that one thing down? Anyway, before I had even seen Mike’s message, Warren and Cindi had both replied. Warren wrote:

I’ve only skimmed it and it seems like his stump speech. That said, I think he does deserve a shot

Within two minutes, Cindi said:

    I’m inclined to agree with Warren. That said, I’d say the sooner the better in terms of running it.

To which I said (is this starting to sound sort of like the Little Red Hen? in that case, who’s Turkey Lurkey?):

Sure. Does this mean I get to call him a big phony again?

Kidding aside, I haven’t read it yet, but I trust the others. I’ll read it on the proof.

Liston Barfield supports Mike Huckabee

Barfield

… So does David Beasley. In fact, here they are together at the Mike Huckabee event at Hudson’s Smokehouse near Lexington last night.

Rep. Barfield complained to me tonight that he had been reported in the paper as being for somebody else, and he’s been for Huckabee ever since this time last year, back before it was cool. He started supporting Huckabee after it became screamingly obvious that George Allen wouldn’t become president any time this century.

He said he had notified folks in our newsroom today about the error, and he understood a correction was in the works, but since he seemed to want me to do something, I told him I’d tell everybody that he’s a Huckabee man on my blog. Which I just did.