Avoiding chaos and deferring to mature judgment are worthy
strategies for any party seeking to govern a freedom-loving
country, but I’m beginning to think that in spite of the back-room
deliberations that their “superdelegate” rules are supposed to
support, Democrats are unwilling to screen their own candidates for
president. Together with that aversion, Donkey Party loyalists have
a concomitant ability to feign shock whenever Republicans do any
candidate screening for them, whether through open primaries or by
any other means.
Barack Obama has the top of the Democratic ticket all but sewn
up, in spite of having spent more time campaigning for president
than serving as a U.S. Senator or doing anything else of note, with
the possible exception of networking among fellow congregants in a
large church with the blessing of a fundamentally unserious pastor
(anyone who regards “social justice” as an adequate paraphrase of
the gospel is a disciple, however well-meaning, of Karl Marx).
With the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama will join the
likes of John “Cambodian Christmas Hat” Kerry, Al “Invented the
Internet” Gore, Bill “Better Put Some Ice on That” Clinton, and
Michael “One-Man Parole Board” Dukakis, all of whom were brutalized
by partisan pundits for faults that would have been apparent to
anyone doing even a cursory background check.
Not that Republicans always do the research they should, either.
The FEMA career of Mike Brown, the Supreme Court nomination of
Harriet Miers, the tragicomic bungling of Alberto Gonzales at the
Department of Justice, and the current Republican willingness to
explore the studio space with derivative slogans like “the change
you deserve” all testify to the bipartisan nature of failure to get
with the program.
But when it comes to nominating Commanders-in-Chief, Republicans
tend to throw their support to known quantities. In this election
cycle alone, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, and Rudy
Giuliani got a more thorough vetting from their colleagues than
John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Bill Richardson ever got from
theirs.
If this disparity were almost entirely the fault of some kind of
attention-deficit disorder in the news media, as Elizabeth Edwards
suggested in a column for the New York
Times, then how do you explain why, if you read anything about
economics written for non-specialists, you can bet that Thomas
Sowell has consulted more actual data than, for example, New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman? Are the well-known and very
different political sympathies of those two economists incidental
to their different approaches to column writing? I think not.
ONE CONSEQUENCE of elevating “the dog ate my homework” from an
excuse to a governing style is that Democrats, because they do more
opposition research than internal research, are more susceptible to
the proverbial “October surprise” than Republicans are. Moreover,
Democrats have inadvertently turned political rivals who actually
do their homework into folk heroes for some people. Say what you
will about Karl Rove, but he has more star power on the Sunday
morning talk show circuit than any Democratic operative, and is not
willfully blind to the shortcomings of the pols in his own party.
Ronald Reagan formulated his famous “Eleventh Commandment” about
not speaking ill of other Republicans precisely because he knew
that such speech would otherwise be commonplace. A Democrat would
never have phrased the axiom that way because Democrats resent
commandments to begin with, unless they apply exclusively to
Republicans.
Another consequence of Democratic unwillingness to perform due
diligence is that it fosters contempt for “divisive” and
“mean-spirited” people who have the temerity to fact-check. Have
you noticed that neither Hillary Clinton nor her husband has been
able to turn the policy wonkishness in which they take justifiable
pride into a sustained examination of Barack Obama’s gossamer-thin
judgment? Bill tried that, and was told to simmer down by ranking
members of the Congressional Black Caucus, apparently on pain of
losing the “first black president” card that novelist Toni Morrison
had once given him.
Bill Clinton’s valiant attempts to slow the Obama train by
asking questions of judgment are ironic, given his erstwhile pledge
to run “the most ethical administration in the history of this
country.” Of course, Bill said that at his inauguration, before he
had a look at the long list of people seeking presidential pardons,
before 115 pages of problematic billing records from his wife’s former law firm
were “lost” in the White House for two years, before he became only
the second U.S. President to be impeached, and before he
characterized a legal battle with special prosecutor Ken Starr as
nothing less than a “defense of the Constitution.” Never mind how
many reasonable people would read that assertion as expanding the
notion of “Executive Privilege” to levels that would impress even
George W. Bush.
A contemporaneous story in the New York Times reported
that when Rose Law Firm billing records were found in the White
House, Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) hailed the development with
sound-bite sarcasm as “the second miraculous discovery within the
past 24 hours.” D’Amato’s allusion was to the just-previous
disclosure of a two-year-old memorandum written by a former
Presidential aide saying that, as the Times put it, “Mrs.
Clinton had played a far greater role in the dismissal of employees
of the White House travel office than the Administration has
acknowledged.”
WHILE WE SHUFFLE down memory lane for the sake of underscoring the
Democratic fondness for shortcuts, what political junkie can forget
Al Gore’s embrace of hanging chads, or the image of National
Security Adviser Sandy Berger stuffing classified documents in his
pants so no intrepid Republican could leverage them into an
indictment of the Clinton administration’s wholly unremarkable
anti-terror policy? The security breach that Berger engineered and
the $5,000 fine he paid were a small price to pay for postponing a
reckoning that party strategists probably regarded as “revenge of
the nerds.”
Berger went on to advise John Kerry until cooler heads convinced
the Massachusetts senator that he was a liability. As a
Washington Post story put it while sounding a theme that Barack
Obama would later reprise to great effect, “A Kerry adviser said
the expanding controversy convinced the campaign that Berger’s
departure was essential because of the serious distraction it posed
for Kerry in the week before the Democratic Party nominates him for
president.”
The bet here is that an up-and-coming community organizer in
Chicago read stories like that and thought to himself, “Questions of judgment can
always be dismissed as ‘distractions’ if the rest of your message
appeals strongly enough to the base, because nobody wants to do any
legwork on a charismatic candidate.” Oprah Winfrey was not yet on
his Rolodex, but she would be. Of course, like any good Democrat,
the CEO of Harpo Productions is selective about where she and her
staff apply their considerable research acumen; else she would not
have insisted that Islam really is a “religion of peace.”
Apparently the dog ate her homework, too, but whether it was a
yellow dog would be impossible to say.
