Monthly Archives: January 2008

Huckabee gets shave and haircut, Capone-style

CBS sets the record straight

John Bentley of CBS sent me this e-mail yesterday, and I just got a chance to read it today:

Mr.
Warthen:

Thank you for reading our blog and
posting your comments (I’m assuming the comments are yours – if you could,
please reply to this e-mail to verify that I’m talking to the authentic Brad
Warthen). My editor and I have changed the posting to reflect your concerns.
My original copy was vetted before it was posted and we believed your posting to
be reflective of The State’s stance on Senator Thompson; however, if we have
taken that out of context, I hope the updated posting addresses the
issue.

Sincerely,

John
Bentley

Reporter, CBS
News

Political
Unit

I checked the updated post, and it’s all better. I wrote Mr. Bentley back to tell him so, reiterating The State does not have a position of any kind with regard to Mr. Thompson, and can no way be held responsible for my off-the-cuff, blog-level opinions. And yes, absolutely — anything you see on the blog is by "the authentic Brad Warthen" (don’t be fooled by cheap imitations!).

We’ll have an official opinion about Mr. Thompson by the end of the week, however — hopefully, after interviews with him and the rest of the GOP field. (We’ve only seen McCain and Huckabee so far.) Just to keep y’all up-to-date on all that, here’s what I told a colleague in an e-mail a few minutes ago:

We are working with the Giuliani, Romney and Thompson campaigns to get them in this week, but of course, none of them will really be focusing on us until Wednesday morning, and so far nothing is pinned down. We have our calls out to the Democrats, but will try to put them off until next week, since we’re so squeezed on the Republicans already, and we plan to run our GOP endorsement Jan. 13, which is the Sunday before the GOP primary. With the Dems, we’re aiming for Jan. 20.
I have a feeling that, the way things are unfolding, these things will be done very much on the fly, with short notice. Maybe, once N.H. is over Wednesday morning, we’ll be able to schedule the Dems a few days ahead of time. But we’ll have no such luxury with the Republicans…

If we don’t get the remaining GOP candidates in by the end of the day Thursday, we’re are up the creek, sans paddles.

By the way, in addition to McCain and Huckabee, we have talked to two other candidates — Sam Brownback and Joe Biden. Fat lot of good that does us now, huh? But I don’t regret it; both were interesting.

Another group for (unspecified) health care reform

What’s a ‘mainstream Republican?’

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Remember this David Brooks piece I called to your attention yesterday? I continue to be fascinated by the way "conservatives" are pulling their party apart, to the point that pundits not of their persuasion have trouble describing the viscera thus exposed.

Mr. Brooks wrote of how a nouveau kind of guy like Mike Huckabee can take on the various aspects of the GOP coalition embodied by "Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush" and prevail. In today’s paper we have David Broder and George Will trying to describe the same GOP elephant from different angles.

David Broder, a man whom I greatly respect even though he has an unshaken faith in the importance of the political parties that I believe are the ruination of America, is clinging to the definitions and alliances with which he is familiar. For instance, he uses the term, "mainstream Republicans," as though it is a term that is still easily understood, and therefor meaningful to the reader. He uses it here:

…But McCain and Huckabee have yet to build broad constituencies among
mainstream Republicans. Huckabee’s following is centered among
evangelical Christians, who dominated the low-turnout Iowa caucuses.
McCain’s greatest appeal is to Republican-leaning independents who
powered his 2000 victory and who remain loyal to him….

And again here:

…That opens at least something of an opportunity for Rudy Giuliani and
Fred Thompson to demonstrate their ability in Florida, South Carolina
and other states that were part of George W. Bush’s political base. The
mainstream Republicans in those states are still looking for a
candidate…

What do you suppose he means, in the Year of Our Lord 2008? Is a "mainstream American," in his usage, a mainstream American who happens to be a Republican, or a Republican partisan who happens to be at some ideological midpoint in his own party — which is not the same thing at all? I suppose he means the latter. In any case, he seems to be speaking of some theoretical type who remains loyal to "Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush," and is untroubled by any of the associations — if such still exists.

Or maybe he’s thinking of the folks, to be found commenting on this post, who see Fred Thompson as the last Paladin of a "conservatism" which I have asked them to define, because the word by itself means little nowadays.

Or maybe he’s talking about George Will, as being among the Old Guard of pundits. Here’s part of what he wrote for Sunday:

Like Job after losing his camels and acquiring boils, the conservative
movement is in distress. Mike Huckabee shreds the compact that has held
the movement’s two tendencies in sometimes uneasy equipoise.

Social
conservatives, many of whom share Huckabee’s desire to “take back this
nation for Christ,” have collaborated with limited-government,
market-oriented, capitalism-defending conservatives who want to take
back the nation for James Madison. Under the doctrine that
conservatives call “fusion,” each faction has respected the other’s
agenda. Huckabee aggressively repudiates the Madisonians.

He and
John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote
their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa,
encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. Edwards and Huckabee
lament a shrinking middle class. Well…

Mr. Will (whenever I type "Mr. Will," I hear Sally Field addressing John Malkovich in "Places in the Heart") misunderstands the difference between Huckabee’s and Edwards’ brands of populism, between hope and anger. He just knows he doesn’t like populism. Neither do I, generally speaking, but I can tell that there’s a chasm the happy kind espoused by Mr. Huckabee and angry kind pushed by Mr. Edwards.

In any case, conservatism, like liberalism, ain’t what it used to be. And considering the way those ideologies have been defined for the last three decades or so, that’s a good thing.

Dave Barry meets Dick Harpootlian

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Thought y’all might enjoy checking out this column, headlined "Harpootlian to take New Hampshire," by funnyman Dave Barry that appeared in The Miami Herald Saturday. In it, Dave has no end of fun — with Dick’s name:

The political landscape has been severely shaken up. To help you
understand what is going on, here’s a summary of the situation, with
key names and concepts in capital letters:

On the Democratic
side, HILLARY CLINTON, who was the FRONT-RUNNER based on her EXTENSIVE
EXPERIENCE being married to her HUSBAND, BILL CLINTON, totally got
pulverized in Iowa by BARACK OBAMA, who has been a U.S. SENATOR for
like FIFTEEN MINUTES during which he acquired many NEW IDEAS such as
CHANGE.

Also he has a supporter named DICK HARPOOTLIAN, which has to be one of the best supporter names ever…

And to think, people accuse me of being shallow in my analysis…

If Dave only knew some of the stories about Dick — especially the ones he tells on himself — he’d have all sorts of fun. He would have to use one of his stock punchlines — "I am not making this up" — so often, he’d wear it out.

Oh, by the way, in keeping with the in-depth reporting you’ve come to expect on this blog, here’s video of Dick talking about his support for Barack Obama. (This was at the Colbert brunch back in October, previously reported here):

Staying in touch with his bass

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We know Mike Huckabee is a versatile kind of guy — governor, preacher, ex-broadcaster, man from Hope, self-described conservative, populist — but does he play not one, but two separate musical instruments?

Until recently, I sort of ignored scribes
who wrote that he "plays guitar," assuming they don’t know a guitar from their elbows. Clearly, he plays bass — that’s what you see in all the pictures, as the one above, in which he is playing a Fender.

Les_paul_2 But one picture moved on AP recently over this caption:

** FILE ** Republican presidential hopeful, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee rests after playing his guitar while campaigning in Boscawen, N.H.,in this Dec. 14, 2007, file photo. As part of a series of questions the Associated Press asked presidential candidates about their personal tastes, traits and background, candidates were asked to name their favorite gadgets. Huckabee answered: "Probably my laptop. Or my bass guitar and amplifier." (AP Photo/Cheryl Senter, file)

In the photo, at right, he is shown standing next to (but not, mind you, playing) a Les Paul.

So does he actually play both? Does anyone out there know? I need to get this key fact straight in my mind before we consider endorsements next week.

By way of full disclosure: I am a Gibson man myself — although my particular instrument is a reproduction vintage Flying V.

Flying_v_002

Pay no attention to that man on the blog

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Folks, please disregard the error published on this CBS News blog yesterday, headlined "S.C. Paper Asks Thompson to Drop Out," which said:

GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — The largest newspaper in South Carolina is asking Fred Thompson to drop out of the Republican nomination and endorse John McCain.

“It’s time for him to do the principled thing,” writes The State’s
editorial page director, Brad Warthen. “He should bow out, and support
McCain. And he should do it now; now is when he can make a difference.”

The editorial from the Columbia, South Carolina, paper comes at a
time when Thompson is getting ready to focus all of his attention on
South Carolina, after finishing third in Iowa and admitting he is “not
competitive” in New Hampshire…

First, it wasn’t "an editorial." Editorials actually DO speak for the newspaper as an institution, and reflect the consensus of the editorial board, NOT of an individual. So the headline is wrong — this "S.C. Paper" said nothing at all on the subject.

Anyway, when I saw people were being directed to my site by CBS, and followed the link to that blog item (by a guy named "John Bentley") and found the error, I tried posting a comment there, as follows:

I’d like to request a correction.

This "S.C. Paper" has not said a word about Fred Thompson. It’s just a thought I happened to share on my blog. No one else on our editorial board had anything to do with it; in fact, I doubt that anyone else is even aware that I said it, since I posted that on a weekend and they all have other things to do.

It’s OK to say the editorial page editor [and not the editorial page "director;" what is THAT, some TV term?] said it, but The State did NOT say it.

As I said in a column (which is ALSO personal opinion, and does not speak for The State), "Such are the pitfalls of blogging. Some folks mistake my passing observations for final conclusions and (an even greater mistake) my opinions for those of the whole editorial board."

For more on that subject, here’s a link:
http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2008/01/its-now-or-neve.html

Anyway, please take note of this problem. I don’t wish to embarrass my colleagues by the world thinking they are somehow responsible for my personal eruptions.

So, to play on the allusion I used in my Friday column, pay no attention to that man behind the blog — especially not the erroneous one … but don’t attach to much importance to this one either. My thoughts are what they are — my thoughts. And I wouldn’t even want anyone to think they are MY final word on the subject, since one of the purposes of editorial board discussions is to make each other think a little more — as I also suggested in today’s column.

It’s now-or-never time for our endorsement decisions

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ON TUESDAY, New Hampshire votes. On Wednesday, presidential candidates will descend on South Carolina in such numbers as we’ve never seen, and stay for the duration — the Republicans until the 19th of this month, the Democrats through the 26th.
Time for us to get busy on The State’s editorial board. Not that we’ve been slacking off, but our pace starting this week is likely to make the past year look like a nice, long nap.
Watch for more columns than usual from me on this page or the facing one. And between columns, keep an eye on my blog. But the main work of the next two weeks will be interviewing the remaining viable candidates and writing our endorsements. Our plan, from which we will deviate only under the most extreme circumstances, is to endorse in the GOP primary a week from today, Jan. 13, and to state our choice in the Democratic contest Jan. 20.
But, asked regular gadfly Doug Ross on my blog last week, our endorsements have “already been written,” right? And as another writer, who goes by the pseudonym “weldon VII,” asked, “Why would Romney waste his time coming to see you, Brad?”
Such are the pitfalls of blogging. Some folks mistake my passing observations for final conclusions and (an even greater mistake) my opinions for those of the whole editorial board.
Right now — since I have not once asked any of my colleagues whom they currently prefer in the two primaries (I want that discussion to happen after the last interview — it makes for a more intense debate, but a much better-informed one), and since they haven’t hinted aloud or in print, I don’t know how near or far we are from our eventual consensus. (Ask me next week this time.)
As for “weldon’s” comment — well, let’s be frank: He’s thinking of my oft-stated respect for John McCain. You don’t have to read the blog to know about that; it’s been stated here often enough.
But I’ll say two things about that: First, I had good things to say about Mike Huckabee, too, after I met him for the first time on Sept. 20. He made a stronger impression than expected; he’s made a similar impression on a lot of other people since then.
Secondly, I was a big admirer of Sen. McCain back in 2000, too — but we ended up endorsing George W. Bush.
Let me tell you about that — and also answer another question Doug asked: Who breaks a tie on the editorial board?
It generally doesn’t come to a tie, because we work really hard for a consensus. Some of us change our minds during the discussion, while others concede to a second choice, seeing that their first isn’t going to carry the day. It’s complicated.
I can think of only two times when we had a “tie” to break, and one of them was in February 2000. Gov. Bush came in at 8 a.m. on the Wednesday before our endorsement; Sen. McCain joined us Thursday afternoon. (Alan Keyes had been in the previous week.) The moment Sen. McCain left, we began our final discussion.
The previous weekend, I had written and e-mailed to my boss, the publisher, a 4,000-word memo explaining why I believed we should endorse Sen. McCain. I did so knowing that he (this was two publishers ago, I should add) was just as firmly for Gov. Bush. But he was leaving the question open until after the interviews.
We went into those meetings with most of the group leaning toward McCain (based on comments volunteered to me). It’s amazing what a good meeting can do for a candidate, or what a bad one can do to a candidate. That Wednesday, George W. Bush had the most “on” hour of his life. I have never seen the man, before or since, present himself so well, or so articulately. (Maybe it was the time of day; maybe it was the two cups of coffee we watched him drink; most likely it was his firm knowledge that this was a make-or-break moment.)
John McCain was in a funk on Thursday. I’ve never seen him so “off” as he was that day. In a downcast voice, he spoke of a young boy who’d come up to him that day and told him the senator had been his hero, but not any more, after what a caller had told the boy over the phone. (Neither he nor we fully appreciated yet the devastating impact that smear campaign would have.)
The publisher had come prepared for our internal debate. He had a six-inch stack of documents he had gathered to support his position. When he was done, and I was done, we went around the table. Two people had changed their minds. It was a tie. And in a tie in which the publisher is on one side and the editorial page editor on the other, the publisher’s side wins.
Do I make my decision solely on the basis of a single meeting? Of course not. But some of my colleagues don’t pay the kind of attention to these candidates that I do day after day; that’s not what they’re paid to do. They come in with relatively fresh perspectives.
And while it doesn’t happen often, I’ve been known to change my mind in these meetings. I’m wary of this, and reluctant to give it too much weight. But if I don’t give it some weight, what indeed is the point of the interview?
We’re working with the campaigns to firm up the appointments, but I’m hopeful that we’ll have spoken with Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson by the end of the day Thursday. Once those are out of the way, we hope to see Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — and John Edwards, if he’s still in it after Tuesday.
I don’t know exactly how it’s going to go, but I know this is going to be interesting.

Passing of the GOP Old Guard

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Check out the David Brooks column we ran in today’s paper, particularly these paragraphs:

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.
Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

I believe he’s on to something. The folks who attended the Iowa GOP caucuses Thursday night certainly thought he was on to something.

If you want to win as a Republican these days, you have to approach things a lot differently from the way George W. Bush and Mark Sanford (as pure an example of a "Club for Growth" guy as you’re likely to find) have. And, unfortunately for Mitt Romney, being a "Suit" doesn’t cut it any more. (Thinking a person would be good at politics because he’s good at business is about like assuming that a good swimmer would automatically be a good tennis player — it MIGHT happen, but one does not really lead to the other.)

This New Wave going to be very interesting to watch, and it might be very good for the country.

In New Hampshire, we’ll get our next indicator as to the direction in which that wave is rolling. Will Huckabee’s crushing Iowa victory over Romney boost him to an unexpected victory — or will it push John McCain over the top?

Jake Knotts shocker!

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Were you shocked to read on Friday that state Sen. Jake Knotts just endorsed John McCain?

Well, I certainly was — on account of the fact that I was under the impression that he had been openly and visibly supporting Sen. McCain for quite some time.

Unless we have an even more incredible case of "separated at birth," that’s him standing behind McCain, next to Adjutant Gen. Stan Spears, in these pictures I shot at a McCain event in Lexington on Sept. 17.

Maybe he was just there to be polite.

Mccainbus_169

Thompson’s chance to make a difference: Bow out, endorse McCain

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A NOTE ON THE NOTE: Thanks to John Bentley at the CBS blog for addressing the problem. All fixed now.

NOTE to visitors from the CBS blog: The blog item posted by John Bentley Saturday contained a serious error! This is Brad Warthen’s Blog, and as such, it only reflects the thoughts of Brad Warthen. The jottings you find here are in no way the opinion of The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper. For further explanation, note this item.

Eight years ago, Fred Thompson came for an editorial board visit after we had already endorsed George Bush, to tell us how wrong we were. We should have backed John McCain, he told us. I knew that, of course, but I sat still for his gruff advice as a sort of penance for my failure. I had tried hard (more about that in my Sunday column), but the consensus on our board had gone against me.

As futile as his gesture was at that point, I still appreciated Sen. Thompson’s position, as bad as it made me feel. McCain had been the man, and it was the nation’s loss that he was not elected in 2000.

Since he knew that then, and Sen. McCain is the same man he was, I’ve wondered all year why in the world Mr. Thompson even thought of running. As I said back in this column, he forgot to do one thing when he jumped in late: Tell us what it was he brought to the campaign that the candidates already running did not already offer.

Now, it’s my turn to return the favor and tell Fred Thompson something that he should already know: It’s time for him to do the principled thing again, and assert what he knew to be true back then: He should bow out, and support McCain. And he should do it now; now is when he can make a difference.

Sen. McCain is tied for first place in New Hampshire polls with a damaged Mitt Romney; Mr. Thompson is in single digits. By the time he comes South, all he will be able to do is be a spoiler, to pull just enough voters away from another candidate (and I suspect that candidate would most likely be his longtime ally McCain) to throw the victory to the surging Huckabee.

Nothing against Huckabee on my part; I just don’t see him as the alternative Mr. Thompson himself would prefer. Meanwhile, he has continued to express his continuing respect for Sen. McCain; this would be a chance to show he means it.

Speaking of Gov. Huckabee, his victory is his own. But he was not in a position to begin that rise, he was not in striking distance, until Sam Brownback gracefully departed from the race. They had both been drinking from the same well of voters, and Sen. Brownback clarified matters for them.

Quitting when he did was Sen. Brownback’s greatest contribution to this campaign, and was the best thing he could have done to serve the values and ideas he espouses. If Sen. Thompson wants to advance his own values, if he wants to make a difference and serve the country — or if he simply wants the gratification of being a player at all — he should get behind McCain now.

Separated at birth?

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Mike Huckabee, with that friendly Everyman face of his, seems to remind everybody of somebody. In a column coming up Sunday, George Will compares him to Richard Nixon — which I can sort of see, although I’ll warn you that Mr. Will doesn’t mean it in a nice way (but you sort of knew that, right?).

I’ll tell you who he reminds me of — so much so that, when I was flipping channels the other day on the off chance that there’d be something worth watching before popping in the DVD (there wasn’t), I saw this guy and stopped, thinking for a second that it was Gov. Huckabee.

But then I realized it wasn’t. It was another guy, pretending that he already was the president. I did a little research to get specifics.

It was Gregory Itzin, who portrays "President Charles Logan" on "24." Check out his picture, and imagine Mr. Huckabee frowning, rather than wearing his seemingly perpetual smile. See the resemblance? Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it was a little spooky.

By the way, here’s a fun fact to know and tell: At this moment, there are about 210 pictures of Huck on Grin1
the Associated Press wire. And in almost every single one of them, he’s captured with a friendly grin. I just thought I’d tell you that, in case you doubted that Gov. Huckabee is this year’s Jimmy Carter. Remember in 1976, when, if you went by what was printed, you’d think the man was always grinning?

And no, it’s not a conspiracy. The thing is, that’s just the way everybody thinks of this guy who has just fully burst onto the national consciousness. So far, his image Grin2_2
is one-dimensional. Photographers think, "This is the guy who grins," so they go through their exposures looking for the grinning shots, so they will look like him, and that’s what their editors put on the wire, and that’s what newspaper editors use, because those are the ones that "look like" Huckabee.

Grin3
It’s something you don’t even notice unless you do what I just did, which is deliberately look for a frowning shot. Here’s one of the few exceptions without the winning smile (below), and it still doesn’t quite meet my needs for the comparison to Mr. Itzin. But watch — if the Huckabee candidacy lasts a few weeks longer, we’ll start to see the image take on a fuller set of moods.

Huckabee_2008_iowa_wart

Our man at the Iowa caucuses

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Catching up on reading comments more closely, and I noticed this from first-time-poster Tim Cottle:

Posted yesterday for the first time. Attended the Iowa caucus (also for
the first time as I am a recent transplant to Iowa) and at my precinct
Obama had exactly 1/2 the vote of 184 voters. Edwards and Clinton split
the remainder almost evenly. Observations – There was not an African
American at my caucus location thus Obama is drawing from all races.
Clinton camp was predominantly the over 50 crowd and the party leaders
in the county heavily favored her. Obama had 90% of the voters under 20
and those that had never voted and were registering at the door. Obama
had the most organized ground organization. Edwards had the support of
local law enforcement and a mix of the remaining youth, professionals,
labor and seniors. It would have been a dead heat had the youth not
been energized and organized to get out and vote. Finally, there isn’t
a lot of negativity for Obama but a little mostly from the Clinton
camp, none against Edwards from anyone, and a ton against Clinton. She
is not well liked even in her own party. She may be the only democrat
that could lose the national election. Edwards would be a shoo in.

Of course, I don’t know Tim from Adam, so I’m just taking him at his word that he’s in Iowa, he was at the caucuses, and his name’s Tim Cottle. But until somebody provides me with evidence otherwise, I thought his comments relevant enough to promote to a separate post.

Here’s what he had had to say the previous day, in response to this post (which was elaborated upon in this column):

Iowa matters and it should. Just as NH, SC and the states that follow
will matter. A state has to be first. Why not a state that forces
candidates to define who they are and what they stand for? Until now, I
never quite appreciated or supported the caucus format. Having recently
moved to Iowa from the Carolinas, I now see how it forces candidates to
get close and personal and commit to their beliefs. Commercials and
sound bites alone will not guarantee anything here. Iowans have come to
expect a discussion of the issues and solutions. Voting is a privilege
and should be entered into in an educated and informed manner. I have
heard or met all of the major candidates. Doing so has taken time (well
over two hours and more like 20 hours). This is time I have committed
in order to be an educated voter. To spend an additional two hours
tonight is a small price to pay for having the benefit of a caucus. All
of those at the caucuses tonight will have the same commitment. Food
for thought… is spending 3 hours at a football game, watching TV or a
movie more important than choosing our president?

Caucusers2

Iowa: The Politics of Joy Redux

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OK, since everybody ignored my plea and paid attention to Iowa anyway (as I knew they would), here’s an observation that is hardly original, but I thought I’d provide a place for y’all to talk about it.

What happened last night was a remarkable case of caucusers going for new, fresh, upbeat, hopeful change over ticked-off, bitter, resentful, angry same-old. It’s almost HHH’s "Politics of Joy," only more convincing.

Caucusers (as distinguished from voters, which is what you will encounter in New Hampshire and South Carolina), went for the squeaky-new, self-described "conservative that’s not mad at anybody over it" and Barack Obama’s optimistic, youth-and-future-oriented Call to Service. Rather than Humphrey, I’d cast Huckabee as Jimmy Carter (think, "Scandal-weary nation turns to evangelical Southern newcomer") and Obama as JFK in this context. Anyway, to the extent that this phenomenon is borne out in broader venues, it bodes well for America.

And it bodes very badly for Mitt Romney, whose constant attack mode, amplified with all that money, had to be a huge turnoff to folks in a looking-for-joy sort of mood. It bodes even worse for John Edwards, who picked the wrong year to switch from Happy Populist (a role gratefully seized by Obama and Huckabee) to Angry Populist. And (here I’m really reading way more into Iowa than anyone should) it could spell the beginning of the end for Hillary Clinton, whose candidacy depends completely on the voters being willing to endure four more years of the wretched partisan bickering of the Clinton-Bush years.

Last night’s result caused me to amend my opinion of Iowa in one respect — obviously, with these results, the caucuses this year were a measure of more than just "organizational skill" (fourth paragraph of today’s column). These results show that even the unabashed partisans who show up at caucuses are susceptible to a new mood rising and sweeping through the Zeitgeist. And that bodes even worse for the aforementioned campaigns, because if their money and organization don’t serve them well in THIS controlled environment, what fresh humiliations will they suffer out here in the broader electorate?

But enough about that. I’m more eager than ever now to see what happens in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Huckabeejoy

What do you want this blog to be for the next three weeks?

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You’ll notice that today’s column — which I mistakenly backdated to yesterday morning rather than this morning, but have now corrected — was an elaboration on a blog post. Watch for more of that; over the next three weeks — between now and the Jan. 26 Democratic primary here — I plan to write more columns than usual, and as often as not, the blog will be the place where the column ideas first take shape.

I also plan to post more than usual. I’m shoving as many of my other duties aside as possible to concentrate on covering (in my own way, which will differ from what you see in news) and writing about the primaries, both for the blog and the paper. (You would have seen more last night and this morning here, but my personal life has been rather full — and joyful — the last 26 hours or so.) I will not, of course, be as free as a reporter would — I’ve got to jam in time for as many as five candidate interviews in preparation for endorsements on the 13th (Republican) and 20th (Democratic). But those interviews should produce a lot of fodder for this venue as well.

I want to make the most of all this effort, and make what I’m doing as useful as possible. I won’t just be doing this to be busy; I’ve got granddaughters to rock, you know. So I’d like y’all’s suggestions as to what you would like to see here. More video? More accessible format? More links to news and other opinions? More pictures of grandchildren (sorry, that just slipped out)? Think particularly in terms of what the editorial page editor of South Carolina’s largest newspaper might contribute that you wouldn’t get elsewhere; there’s little use in my duplicating stuff you can get already.

One thing I want to get done this weekend is replace the Stephen Colbert video that’s at the top of my main page (that guy’s campaign just went nowhere) with some sort of quick-start daily briefing. Maybe links to latest news, latest posts of interest, latest issue-oriented posts, or something like that. Something that you would find useful and that’s doable without my dropping everything else to spend my days coding.

Anyway, I’m looking for ideas, so please pitch them my way.

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain — please

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Baker

Howard Baker and me — Des Moines, Iowa, January 1980

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said the great and powerful Oz. But I say it’s the guy voting in the privacy of a booth that we should heed. It’s the Iowa caucuses we should ignore.
As I write this [we’re talking Thursday afternoon, folks], I don’t know who won last night, and don’t care. I’ve got my eye on New Hampshire — and, of course, South Carolina.
The Washington Post’s David Broder had it right in his Thursday column when he called the caucuses a “double-distortion mirror” on the campaign. The turnout is tiny, consisting only of people who are willing to attend a two-hour night meeting during the week and declare their preference in front of the world.
Forget what happened last night if you were watching to see which candidate has the strongest support among voters of either party. All the caucuses measure is who can most effectively corral the most highly committed, vocal partisans at a given moment. It tests organization — and a very specialized form of it at that. Organizational skill is important — but it’s hardly everything. [Note this amendment today to this opinion.]
I used to believe in the Iowa mystique, but I learned my lesson. As a reporter for a Tennessee paper in January 1980, I spent a few days following Sen. Howard Baker as he campaigned among the frozen chosen of Des Moines and Dubuque. Ronald Reagan had made the “fatal mistake” of not contesting Iowa. My deadline story on a GOP candidates’ debate began with the solemn pronouncement that while it was difficult to determine the winner, it was clear that Gov. Reagan was the loser, because he had not shown up.
I really felt vindicated when George H.W. Bush emerged as the caucus winner. (Remember the “Big Mo”?) Needless to say, my perceived political I.Q. dropped precipitously over the succeeding weeks.
I witnessed the partial unraveling of my thesis up close and personal at another set of caucuses — in Arkansas. At a congressional district caucus in a motel in Jonesboro, I saw what a subversion of the popular will a caucus could be.
A lot of people in the room favored Mr. Bush after his Iowa win. If the participants (a tiny subset of Republicans in that district) had stepped immediately into voting booths upon arrival, he likely would have come in a weak first or a strong second.
But the Reagan people and the Baker people had done a deal. They voted for each other’s delegates, giving Mr. Reagan a huge win, boosting Sen. Baker (whose candidacy was essentially over at this point) to second, and giving Mr. Bush — in a gesture that seemed consciously intended to add insult to injury — exactly one delegate.
The head of the Baker team on the scene smiled slyly in response to my questions and said golly, he couldn’t help it if his people and the Reagan people just happened to like each other’s delegates, could he? It was the first time I’d ever met Don Sundquist, but he was obviously headed for bigger things (Congress, and governor of Tennessee, to be precise).
But you couldn’t fool George Herbert Walker Bush. He showed up at the caucus for what had been intended as a triumphal appearance. Instead, he kept it jarringly short, then tried to dodge the press. We had to do an impressive bit of broken-field running through the chairs and tables of an empty restaurant to head him off. Trapped, he answered a couple of questions, but he practically had smoke coming out of his ears as he did so.
He was ticked, and who could blame him? He knew exactly what had been done to him — and it was something that no one could have done in a primary.
I was peeved myself eight years later, when — having moved back home to South Carolina — I was shut out of the state Democratic Party’s process of choosing delegates to its 1988 national convention.
You may recall 1988 as the year South Carolina vaulted to a national significance that rivaled the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire. South Carolina gave the furious loser I had last seen fulminating in Jonesboro the momentum he needed to win the nomination and the presidency.
That year’s primary also gave a boost to the state’s Republican Party as then-Gov. Carroll Campbell — who had helped engineer the Bush victory — built it into a force that would dominate South Carolina politics.
Things were different in the other party. I’m not saying the fact that Democrats chose the insular, insider-oriented caucus path over the GOP’s successful “y’all come” primary caused its slide from relevance. But it didn’t help.
Personally, I hated the caucus approach because I value my right to vote, and the caucuses disenfranchised me: The editor supervising The State’s political writers could not attend a party caucus and publicly declare for a candidate.
But there’s a larger point here than my own predicament: Even if they weren’t professionally disqualified from participating, few independent voters will declare themselves at a caucus when they have the option of voting anonymously in a primary.
Whatever happened last night in Iowa, it can hardly be seen as the collective will of that state’s voters.
But, you say, the caucuses last night do matter because in such an absurdly compressed nomination process, Iowa can give one candidate a critical image boost on the eve of New Hampshire, and prove a fatal stumbling block to another, with no time to recover.
Exactly. Iowa shouldn’t matter, in that it does not provide a fair contest of any candidate’s true electoral appeal. But to the extent that it does matter, it constitutes a disservice to the republic.

Must we fight about evolution AGAIN?

34 Replies

This morning I was in the men’s library (to use an old Knight Ridder Washington Bureau euphemism) perusing The New York Times. Turns out it was the NYT of Dec. 19, but under such circumstances beggars can’t be choosers.

Anyway, I ran across a piece about Mike Huckabee’s famous "floating white cross" TV commercial. We’ll set the cross controversy aside for the moment. What struck me was the Times‘ assessment of the potential downside of the ad:

While that may work in Iowa, the religiosity of the message may turn
off more-secular voters elsewhere, and remind them that Mr. Huckabee
has been dismissive of homosexuality and indicated that he does not
believe in evolution.

We’ll also, if you don’t mind, set aside the homosexuality thing. What got me going was the bit about how "he does not
believe in evolution."

What does that mean — "believe in evolution?" As an overriding credo — as opposed to, say, believing in God? If so, then put me in the disbeliever’s corner with Mr. Huckabee.

Or does it mean believing in evolution as a mechanism through by which organisms have developed into their present shapes? If so, yeah — I believe in evolution. But I can certainly understand why Mr. Huckabee has been dodgy on the issue, saying such things as "I believe God created the heavens and the Earth. I wasn’t there when he did it, so how he did it, I don’t know."

Or at least, I can understand why I would be dodgy about the issue, were I in his shoes. I would resist every effort to pin me down on one side or the other of what I see as a false choice: That between religion and science.

To me, this dichotomy is as bogus, as pointless and as unnecessary as the chasm that the MSM tell us exists between "liberal" and "conservative," "Democrat" and "Republican," or what have you. I’ll tell you a little secret about this universe: Very few things that are true fit into an either-or, yes-or-no, black-or-white model. At least as often as not, it’s "both-and" or "neither."

Trying to make a Southern Baptist preacher either offend secularists by asserting that the world was created in six days or dismay his co-religionists by saying that’s a metaphor is a lot like those wise guys asking Jesus to offend either his followers or Caesar with the trick question about taxes. I’ve gotten nothing against asking a guy to be clear; I do have a problem with a question that seems designed to make the questioned a bad guy either way.

In fact, in the interest of clarity, here’s what I believe:

Evolution seems to me exactly the sort of majestic, awe-inspiring way that God would have created us. He’s no magician doing parlor tricks, as in Poof, here’s a man! or Zing! There’s a mountain; he’s the actual Master of Space and Time (and more; I just can’t explain it, being trapped as I am in space and time). He’s the only Guy I know who can complete a project that takes billions of years. Therefore evolution has his handwriting all over it. It’s his M.O.
I believe in "natural selection," if by that you mean mutations that adapt an organism to his environment and enable him to
survive to reproduce are the ones that prevail. The guy who can
outrun the saber-toothed tiger is the one who gets all the grandkids.
I do not believe in "natural selection" if by that you mean "random chance." I don’t believe those aforementioned mutations just happen. That offends me intellectually. So many adaptations seem so clever, so cool, so inspired, that there’s just gotta be somebody out there to congratulate for having come up with the idea. Yeah, 4.54 billion years gives random chance a lot of room to work with, but not enough to satisfy me. If you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with a typewriter you do not get Shakespeare; you get an infinite amount of monkey poop smeared on a perfectly good sheet of paper.
I believe that, judging by this photograph, Charles Darwin may indeed be descended from an ape. Check out the brow on that guy!
I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, in that it describes better than any other book the development of a continuing relationship, a blossoming revelation, between Man and God over a period of thousands of years.
I do not believe that Adam and Eve were actual individuals, living at the same time, whom you could photograph if you had a time machine, the way you could photograph Benazir Bhutto if you dialed that same machine back a couple of weeks (and had a plane ticket to Karachi). I read a lot, you see, and I’ve developed a knack for telling poetry from prose, hyperbole from understatement and the like. And reading Genesis, it’s pretty clear that this is an allegory that describes truths about our relationship to God, not a court stenographer’s version of what happened in a leafy garden in Mesopotamia one week long ago. Have you never noticed that novels often tell us more true things about how life is lived in the world than, say, nonfiction textbooks about geology or algebra do? There is great moral truth in Genesis, and that’s what we’re supposed to take away from it.
I do believe that some wise guy asked Jesus (who was probably known as "Yeshua" among friends) the aforementioned trick question about taxes. That has the ring of a very real situation, one that takes its meaning from the particular political situation in which a first-century rabbi would have found himself. It was clever, but not nearly as smart as his answer, and it’s just the sort of thing his friends would have remembered and told about him later. It also contains great moral truth, as does the story of the Garden of Eden.

Well, I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I get offended when someone is questioned in a format that seems designed to make him choose sides between the "godless Darwinists" or the "Bible-thumping rubes."

Finally — and this is really where I was going with all this; the Huckabee stuff was just my way of warming up — do we really have to have another stupid, pointless argument over evolution in the classroom? This story I read over the holidays seems to indicate that we do. May God deliver us.

We Got Babies!

7 Replies

I have no idea how to make money; the surest way to make a stock drop through the floor is to get me to buy a share of it.

But I am a tycoon, a regular Warren Buffet, when it comes to the grandfathering line. Why in one stroke today (Thursday, Jan. 3, 2008), I tripled my assets, going from one granddaughter to three.

Here are my latest acquisitions. That’s "Baby B" (as we knew her for the past seven or eight months; I’m withholding her real name until she signs a release form, which she has thus far been strangely reluctant to do) on the left, in my wife’s arms, and "The Baby formerly known as ‘A’" held by yours truly.

Forgive this digression from politics to the personal, but a blog should reflect the news, and this is the biggest, and the best, news I’ve had in a while to share.

Mother and twins are doing fine.

Twins_169

Ignore Iowa; watch New Hampshire closely

28 Replies

David Broder’s column today reminds me of something I keep meaning to mention:

You know those Iowa caucuses today? You may have heard about them. Well, pay no attention to them if you are watching to see:

Which candidate has the strongest appeal among Democrats.
Which candidate has the strongest appeal among Republicans.
Which candidate has the strongest potential appeal for the general election in November.

Remember that these are caucuses, and only reflect the views of a very small minority in each party who are willing to attend a two-hour meeting and publicly declare, and argue for, their preferred candidate. It’s difficult to conceive of most voters being willing to do anything of the kind, and the turnouts at these caucuses have long borne that supposition out.

Who would attend such an event other than a few very vocal partisans, professional advocates of various stripes, and a few bloggers (and among bloggers, we’d be speaking only of those of you who have the guts to comment with your real, full names)?

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from what Mr. Broder had to say:

The maddening thing about the caucus system, for candidates and outside observers as well, is that large and enthusiastic rally crowds tell you almost nothing about the dynamic of the decision-making. I have been dazzled this year, not only by the thousands who filled arenas in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids to see Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama but by the turnouts of hundreds in high school gyms on freezing Friday nights in small towns such as Oelwein.
Yet getting crowds to a rally or a town meeting is child’s play compared to getting them to caucus. In 2004, 1,506,908 people voted in Iowa in the general election for president. Turnout at the Democratic caucuses that year was estimated at 122,000. The biggest number ever for Republicans was 115,000 in 1980.
That system empowers the activists and those with built-in organizational ties who can mobilize people to leave their homes for a couple hours on a weeknight and motivate them to declare a public — not private — preference for a candidate.
On the Republican side, those networks belong principally to conservative Christian groups, anti-abortion organizations, home-school advocates and some economic interests.
On the Democratic side, organized labor and the teachers boast the best existing networks, but the main impulse is a broader populist tradition that tugs the Democratic Party of Iowa to the left…

Of course, you may be tempted to ignore Mr. Broder and me both, seeing as how he and I have a personal beef: Caucuses bar him and me from participating, because the canons of our profession bar us from such public participation in the process.

I was really ticked when I moved home to South Carolina in 1987 and found that in the following election year, only the Republicans were going to afford me a chance to participate in the winnowing process that takes us down to the two candidates left in the fall. That’s because the Democrats, probably influenced by the sorts of party purists who don’t want independents having a say, were choosing their delegates by caucuses. As the editor in charge (at that time) of The State’s political reporters, I couldn’t very well turn up at a party caucus and express a preference. So it was that I was disenfranchised.

But this is a much bigger problem than just Broder and me. I’ve noted over the years — and had the lesson emphasized by my blogging experience — that most citizens are extremely reluctant to surrender their anonymity as political participants, for whatever reason. So the caucus process intimidates them out of their franchise. Not to mention braver souls who nevertheless are too fastidious to participate so directly and publicly in a party function.

Primaries are bad enough as it is — they force us to choose one ballot or the other. Then, once we do, the party in question has the audacity to count us among its adherents as it proudly touts its turnout. I don’t know about you, but preference for one party or the other (as an UnParty man, I despise both equally) plays no role in which ballot I choose in a given election cycle. It’s purely a matter of which ballot offers a more critical choice, the choice most worth spending my one shot on.

What I just said is pretty straightforward to me, but in case it isn’t to you, I’ll explain: It may be that I prefer ALL of Party A’s candidates to any candidate in Party B. But I know that Party B’s nominee is just as likely to be elected in the fall as Party A’s, and one of these people will almost assuredly become president for the next four years. And I have a preference among Party B’s candidates — perhaps a strong preference for one over ALL the others. So of course I will vote in Party B’s primary, where I believe I can make the most important difference. In the next election, presented with different candidates, I’m just as likely to choose Party A’s ballot, for the very same reasons.

Partisans take that equation and turn it on its head: They claim that people who are not their loyalists only vote in their primary to "sabotage" it, intentionally voting for the weaker candidate. Perhaps there are people who will do that, but I submit that they are as blindly, insanely partisan as their critics, a class of people who in my experience make up a small minority of the electorate. What sane person would cast a ballot for someone who, by virtue of becoming a party’s nominee, would have close to an even chance of being elected, if the voter believed that person could not do the job? Maybe they’d do it for dogcatcher, but for president of the United States? If a significant portion of the electorate would do that, we need to scrap this whole system of representative democracy.

Anyway, back to my original assertion: Mr. Broder’s right. Pay no attention to what happens in Iowa, unless all you care about is turnout organization (an important political skill, but nothing more than what it is). Watch New Hampshire for a real test of the candidates’ appeal among the electorate.

As for what happens in South Carolina, I won’t feel fully enfranchised until I’m allowed to vote in both primaries, and neither should you. With eighteen or so candidates running, you shouldn’t be forced to choose from among only half of them, as the decision is being made that will leave you with a choice in the fall between just one or the other. And too often, what’s left at that point is essentially no real choice for those of us who despise parties.

Belated, inadequate thoughts on Bhutto

11 Replies

I was actively avoiding posting last week, trying to have a real vacation for once and saving my strength for the home stretch heading up to the S.C. primaries. Not to mention the Legislature coming back next week.

So I didn’t say anything about Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. But I will now share what I was thinking at the time. It was basically two simple thoughts:

This should provide a good gut check for all those people running for president — do they really want this job? Do they really think they know how to react in a situation such as this? Are people like Mike Huckabee, who has so many fine domestic sensibilities but NO foreign policy experience, thinking "Hey, wait a minute…"?
Does an event like this reverse the process that David Brook wrote of last month. I thought his explanation of why Iowa voters were turning to Mr. Huckabee and Barack Obama was on-point: The success of the surge had made foreign affairs sink to the background in the public’s mind, and made them feel free to look around for a "postwar" president.

But make no mistake. Dealing with ungodly messes such as this is the main, chief, most essential part of the job description. The rest is mostly window-dressing by comparison. We need a wartime consigliere. Maybe it should be Obama or Huckabee. But if people are turning to them because they think "Happy Christmas/War is Over," they should think again.

I resisted writing the above during my vacation because … well, because I hate the way so many commentators change the subject from an important, knotty policy problem to electoral politics. They do it because they know electoral politics, or think they do, so that makes things easier.

But the truth is, it’s what I was thinking. And the further truth is, the biggest effect that you and I can have on the course of events in Pakistan and the next, yet-unidentified powder keg is to choose a president who’s a lot better qualified to choose a course of action than I am. Personally, looking at the chaos that Mrs. Bhutto’s death created, I would have no idea what to do or say next — if I were the one who had to do the saying and doing. I was truly at a loss.

bradwarthen.com

All The News That Gives You Fits

Monthly Archives: January 2008

Huckabee gets shave and haircut, Capone-style

CBS sets the record straight

Another group for (unspecified) health care reform

What’s a ‘mainstream Republican?’

Dave Barry meets Dick Harpootlian

Staying in touch with his bass

Pay no attention to that man on the blog

It’s now-or-never time for our endorsement decisions

Passing of the GOP Old Guard

Jake Knotts shocker!

Thompson’s chance to make a difference: Bow out, endorse McCain

Separated at birth?

Our man at the Iowa caucuses

Iowa: The Politics of Joy Redux

What do you want this blog to be for the next three weeks?

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain — please

Must we fight about evolution AGAIN?

We Got Babies!

Ignore Iowa; watch New Hampshire closely

Belated, inadequate thoughts on Bhutto