Who's Mas Beatable?
DAVID FRUM
My working assumption on the 2008 cycle has been that this will be a very, very bad year for Republicans, with only one shaft of light: the weakness of the leading Democratic presidential candidates. If the Dems could have combined their dominance on the issues with a candidate who was a) America's best-loved war hero, or b) a successful governor and businessman, or c) a mayor who had saved a major city, or d) a famous TV star, then clomp, the GOP would be crushed. Instead they are offering a choice of an ambulance chaser, the wife of a president, and a nice young man.
(Take a look at this oped by Charlie Peters to see how pathetic the case for Obama's accomplishments is. Seems he helped pass a couple of laws in his state legislature. Gee, there can't be more than 3,000 or 4,000 Americans who can say that for themselves!) washingtonpost.com
Still, there is so much wind at the Democrats' backs that even this sad crew can hope to do very well in November. Not that we Republicans can influence it very much, but which of these Dems looks most beatable today?
In first place I'd say is John Edwards. Every time I see him, I think "the voice is the voice of John L. Lewis, yet the face is the face of Zac Efron."
Even leaving aside the scandal rumors, the man seems such a palpable phoney - and the message so narrowly focused on left-leaning Democratic primary voters - that I think he'd be the easiest to send off, despite the presumed advantages he derives from being white, and male, and southern.
Till now, my operating assumption has been that the second most beatable would be Barack Obama. He's left-wing, he's got a funny name, and he's never ever been tested in a crisis. His supporters tell us that Lincoln had never been tested either. That rejoinder tells us more about the self-delusion of Obama's supporter than about Obama himself.
Likewise, I had assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the hardest to beat: She has struck me as the savviest, most disciplined, and certainly most expert of the Democrats. She's had the advantage of participating in two previous national election campaigns, against Edwards' one, and Obama's zero. She has a natural constituency in the nation's growing population of unmarried women. Her practical bread-and-butter politics - as opposed to Obama's bathetic triumph-over-cynicism appeals - seemed well aimed at the anxious middle-income voters who feel let down by the GOP.
Yet I think I have to revise my first view. This is not a personal prefrence. During this campaign, I've been warming to Hillary a little. I oppose almost everything she'd want to do, and I certainly don't find her an appeaing personality, but she has been sounding, well, responsible. And this much-derided rebuttal to Barack Obama seemed to me exactly right. "Making change is more than making speeches." I have a feeling that Democrats will be quoting that line to themselves in early 2010, as President Obama careens from one hubristic error to the next.
Conversely, I remain immune to Obama's appeal. Who's writing his speeches? Rob Reiner? How such utter empty gas-baggery could sound to so many people like the second coming of Pericles utterly baffles me. And yet evidently it does thrill millions of people, not only the Beatlemaniacs in the liberal blogosphere, but (much more importantly) the still-powerful custodians in the big media, who have decided that any criticism of Obama no matter how well founded is out of bounds. (See negative reaction to Hillary Clinton's rebuttal, as above.)
I really blame Colin Powell. Had he nerved himself to run for president in 1996, we'd have already completed two terms of the first black president. The Republican nomination would have been his for the asking, he'd have beaten Bill Clinton, and been I think a better-than-adequate president. (I have a theory that he'd have done better as president than as secretary of state, but I'll spare you my reasoning for the moment.)
But the moment was missed, and the vast reservoir of goodwill accumulating for the first serious African-American presidential candidate has only risen since 1996. Instead, it is Barack Obama who will tap that enormous source of power and immunity.
There's an irony here: I think it was Mort Sahl who said of Barry Goldwater that he had always suspected that the first Jewish president would be an Episcopalian. It's even weirder that the first African-American president should have no African-American relatives! Maybe that's why he plays so well in white America: Obama too learned about slavery and segregation from books. Nonetheless, go argue with success. Whatever he is doing, it is working. Even many Republicans who really should know better are allowing their wishes to over-rule their analysis. In that sense, yes, he really does remind one of John F. Kennedy - not the martyr of mythology, but the actual Kennedy whose presidency was built on the power of image-making to obscure policy failure.
As they look back at 2008, I think that the historians of the future are likely to be reminded of that old political truth: There is no force as powerful as a bad idea whose time has come.
frum.nationalreview.com |
