Pay No Attention To The Race-Baiter Behind The Curtain

Robert Novak writes,

In such a prolonged contest, Obama will enjoy overwhelming African American support. The question is whether the Clinton campaign can resist pointing this out in an effort to mobilize white backing. It certainly has not resisted so far, demonstrated by feckless Gerry Ferraro's mimicking what she heard from Bill and Hillary.

As Novak suggests, why would Clinton need to point that out when they have people like Gerry Ferraro Robert Novak making the argument for them?

Is It About Race, Or About Getting Noticed

It's tough to be a white man who wants to run for President. To be taken seriously you need an impressive résumé. Unless you're wealthy. Or your dad was President (and you're a wealthy heir). Or you're really wealthy. Or you're filthy stinkin' rich. Or your name is Kennedy. Or to have played the President on the teevee. There's also something about "being in the right place at the right time" - something that could never happen to a white guy.

So let's look at the remark that got Geraldine Ferraro into so much trouble.

"I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama's campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against," she said. "For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she continued. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

"I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he's going to be able to put an end to partisanship," Ferraro said, clearly annoyed. "Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship - that's the way our country is."

Ferraro is sticking to her words, while the Clinton campaign "disagrees". Maureen Dowd (of all people) provides some additional context:

Geraldine Ferraro, who helped Walter Mondale lose 49 states in 1984, was clearly stung at what she considered Obama’s easy rise to celebrity and electoral success. Last Friday, Ms. Ferraro, who is on Hillary’s national finance committee, told The Daily Breeze, a small newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Obama acknowledged when he arrived in the Senate that he got more attention, his big book deal and his celebrity, because he is not white. He was only the third black senator elected since Reconstruction.

But as he campaigned here Tuesday, he was outraged at Ferraro’s comments. “They are divisive,” he said. “I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd.”

Here's the deal. Getting noticed, for the most part, isn't enough to get you taken seriously. The insulting part of Ferraro's comment is not so much that Obama's race helped him get noticed; it's the implication that it's the only reason he was noticed, and that it's the only reason he remains a serious contender in the race. Beyond that, as Josh Marshall asks, "Can anyone seriously claim that it's an asset to be an African-American in a US presidential race?"

The same can be asked of gender - look at the media coverage of Clinton. And I suspect that Ferraro is correct that were Obama a female of any race, with all else being equal, he would not have been taken seriously as a Presidential contender. Within the right context, being African American or being female can help you "get noticed", but it's no free pass.

Putting political beliefs aside for the moment, were he to have tried to run as a Democrat this time around how many days do you think G.W. Bush's campaign would have lasted? Both Clinton and Obama are far superior candidates as compared to our sitting President. Stripped of his family name and fortune, a candidate as mediocre as Bush wouldn't have lasted a day.

The Clinton Tax Returns

There's a silly back-and-forth right now over Hillary Clinton's refusal to release her tax returns before April 15th. If it were just this year's tax return, that might be reasonable, but of course it's not.

The reasonable inference is that Clinton has something to hide. If it would hurt her in the primaries against Obama, it will hurt her in a general election against McCain. Come on, Senator Clinton - Rip off the Band-Aid and get it over with.

Trying To Outsmart A Sicilian

The New York Times brings us this from a long-term McCain supporter:

The nobler side of me admires him, even across party lines, for the tremendous interest and enthusiasm he has engendered among younger Americans. But the larger, less decent part of me believes that Hillary Clinton would be a more formidable general election opponent for the Republican nominee. She’s certainly on the ropes right now: her campaign has been flailing through the last few rounds of primaries in a way that Clintons are usually able to avoid. But we’ve been losing to Clintons for a long time now: I’d still just as soon avoid her in a general election campaign.

Ever see The Princess Bride?

All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

Whatever you make of this supposed fear of Clinton, this is also worth noting:

As an equally loyal fan of the Republican Party and of the Green Bay Packers football team, I had come to regard the Clintons the same way I’ve always thought about the Dallas Cowboys. I don’t like them. I root against them. I want them to lose and occasionally find myself wanting bad things to happen to them.

This of course is one of the leading problems with partisan politics. Sometimes the other team has the better players and better strategy, and its victory would be much better for everyone, but you still back "your" team because its "yours".

Health Insurance Mandates

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Russell Korobkin, an Obama supporter, criticizes Hillary Clinton's call for health insurance mandates.

Full disclosure: I am an unpaid member of a health care policy advisory committee for the Obama campaign, but I personally favor individual mandates as part of comprehensive health care system reform.

That apparently means that he supports mandates for the right reasons, while Hillary supports them for the wrong reasons. (But he doesn't tell us what his reasons are.)

Clinton alleges that, simply because it includes a mandate, her plan would lead to universal health insurance while Obama's would not. This is not true.

Well, yes, it is. If mandates exist and are effectively enforced, you have universal health insurance. If they don't exist, you won't. Speaking about how Obama's reforms could make health insurance more affordable, and sharing a dream that everybody may voluntarily buy affordable health insurance? That's fine, but he admits, "[Obama] is open to mandates down the road if, after the reforms and subsidies reduce costs, a large number of healthy "free riders" still do not buy coverage". Either way, we end up with mandates. The question in a sense becomes, will reforms make health insurance more affordable in the absence of mandates? I think, there, the Clinton camp is being far more realistic - if you let people wait until they require health care to buy insurance, you will drive costs up.

Clinton wants to require all Americans to purchase health insurance, but she refuses to describe how she would enforce such a requirement.

Okay... And Obama is open to mandates if people don't voluntarily buy health insurance, "but [he] refuses to describe how [he] would enforce such a requirement". This is what we call "election year politics".

What makes Clinton's criticism of Obama really off the mark, though, is that she is trying to market mandates as a benefit for the large number of currently or potentially uninsured Americans, when mandates actually are a concession to constituencies that otherwise might favor the status quo against attempts to make insurance more affordable. Auto insurance mandates are good for the people who might be hit by an uninsured motorist, but they are hardly welcomed by the uninsured who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they can't afford coverage. Similarly, health insurance mandates are good for people with insurance, employers who would be forced to pay into an insurance pool, and private insurers who would face greater regulation under a reform plan, because expensive subsidies that would be required to help the "sick" uninsured to purchase coverage would be at least partially offset by requiring the "healthy" uninsured to contribute their fair share to the system. But telling someone without insurance that the government will force him to buy it at whatever price the market charges is unlikely to convince him that his problem is solved.

As Paul Krugman observed several months ago,

Mr. Obama claims that mandates won’t work, pointing out that many people don’t have car insurance despite state requirements that all drivers be insured. Um, is he saying that states shouldn’t require that drivers have insurance? If not, what’s his point?

Look, law enforcement is sometimes imperfect. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have laws.

Krugman more recently observed,

So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?

To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper.

Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.

That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.

You would think that by now Obama's advocates would have updated their argument.

Back to the Obama suppoorter:

To see why Clinton's argument is nonsensical, consider that the country could achieve nearly universal health insurance immediately simply by enacting an individual mandate coupled with a truly draconian penalty for non-compliance. But so what?

This rebuke of Clinton is silly on its face, given that many people do not have health insurance because it isn't affordable, and many others do not have health insurance or are severely underinsured due to pre-existing medical conditions. But even if we pretend that's not the case, the real purpose here seems to be to suggest that draconian penalties would be required to enforce mandates - whether by Clinton today or by Obama down the road (as necessary). Back to Krugman:

Third, and most troubling, Mr. Obama accuses his rivals of not explaining how they would enforce mandates, and suggests that the mandate would require some kind of nasty, punitive enforcement: “Their essential argument,” he says, “is the only way to get everybody covered is if the government forces you to buy health insurance. If you don’t buy it, then you’ll be penalized in some way.”

Well, John Edwards has just called Mr. Obama’s bluff, by proposing that individuals be required to show proof of insurance when filing income taxes or receiving health care. If they don’t have insurance, they won’t be penalized — they’ll be automatically enrolled in an insurance plan.

Although you wouldn't get this from Korobkin's post, Clinton has endorsed Edwards' proposed solution.

The silliest part of all is that Barack Obama's refusal to discuss mandates reflects, in my opinion, the politician's instinct to tell the public, "You can have it all - without paying any price at all." Clinton (and formerly Edwards) let people know up front that there is a price to universality - an obvious price - in that everybody must be insured.

Korobkin also skips right over the fact that we presently pay an enormous price to provide medical care for the uninsured and underinsured. Right now, the "subsidy" for that comes from charging higher health care prices to everybody else.

To lambaste Clinton for a lack of specifics on how mandates might be enforced, even while suggesting that Obama recognizes that they are necessary (but won't specify when or how they would be implemented or enforced), is not the way to convince me that Obama has the better plan.

Korobkin ignores Krugman, so I have no reason to believe he would respond to any challenge from me, but I would love to see him detail the "good reasons" to enforce mandates - those which inspire his own support for mandates. I would love to hear him explain how Obama would enforce mandates, with no hedging about how they may not become necessary. For that matter, how he would enforce the mandates that he expressly endorses. There is no such thing, after all, as a voluntary mandate.

Why was this posted at the Volokh Conspiracy, a purported "libertarian" blog? It's hard to guess. Maybe because it is critical of Clinton?

Foreshadowing For A Clinton Campaign

Attacks on the Clintons? For those who think they've seen it all, here's the latest product of Charles Krauthammer's fevered mind.

What they don't understand is that for Clinton, there is no legacy. What he was doing on the low road from Iowa to South Carolina was fighting for a legacy -- a legacy that he knows history has denied him and that he has but one chance to redeem.

* * *

Except for the spousal loophole. Hence his desperation, especially after Hillary's Iowa debacle, to rescue his only chance for historical vindication -- a return to the White House as Hillary's co-president. A chance to serve three, perhaps even four terms, the longest in history, longer even than FDR. The opportunity to have dominated a full quarter-century of American history, relegating the George W. Bush years to a parenthesis within Clinton's legacy.

It was to save this one chance, his last chance, to be historically consequential that Bill Clinton blithely jeopardized principle, friendships, racial harmony in his own party and his own popularity in South Carolina.

Why not? Clinton knows that popularity is cheap, easily lost, easily regained. (See Lewinsky scandal.) But historical legacies are forever.

He wants one, desperately. But to get it he must return to the White House. And for that he must elect his wife. At any cost.

By what reasoned analysis would anybody think that Bill Clinton will get credit for Hillary Clinton's achievements as President, any more than she gets credit for his? (Or Laura gets credit for GW's? Or Nancy gets credit for Reagan's?) History may not be as harsh to him as Krauthammer suggests - he may become known as the last President to preside over a vibrant economy and U.S. global hegemony, before G.W.'s disastrous policies undermined our nation's financial, political and military dominance and for decades to come. Or perhaps history will remember his ham-handed efforts to force a final status deal in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and his atrocious use of the pardon power on his way out the door. But whatever history decides, it will be based upon his Presidency, not his wife's.

I don't think Krauthammer's the drooling idiot he seems to be when he writes stuff like this - he's giving us a preview (or perhaps a test run) of a new way to attack Hillary Clinton's candidacy through her husband. This follows on the heels of Republicans sophomorically sniggering about what Bill Clinton will do if he returns to the White House with no official responsibilities. That followed the apparently ineffective (yet continuing) strategy of suggesting that a Clinton victory would inevitably mean a "co-presidency".

Krauthammer capably illustrates is how somebody with an overblown ego, a propensity toward mendacity and a national platform can launch dishonest attacks on a political candidate. Point conceded. But it verges on hilarious that Dr. Krauthammer can diagnose that speck in Bill Clinton's eye, while....

On a peripheral note, given the choice between a spouse of a candidate who attacks an opposing candidate to benefit his wife, or a candidate who belittles his wife to attack an opposing candidate, I'm not so sure that I prefer the latter.

Breaking News

Nicholas Kristof has figured out that Bill and Hillary Clinton are related.

If Hillary Rodham Clinton serves two terms, then for 28 years the presidency will have been held by a Bush or a Clinton. By that point, about 40 percent of Americans would have lived their entire lives under a president from one of these two families.

Wouldn’t that make our democracy seem a little, er, Pakistani?

No. For that we would need a military coup.

I have previously shared my thoughts on "dynasty" and my conclusion,

I personally have some real problems with Hillary Clinton's ascendency, but they aren't about dynasty. With no offense intended, as good as the Democratic slate of candidates looks when contrasted with the Republican slate, is this truly the best we can do? I think not, so perhaps it is time for our nation to spend some time thinking about why those we would truly like to serve as President are turned off of politics, or are unable to get any traction within the major political parties. With no slight intended to Ms. Clinton as compared to anybody else in national politics, if our political system were currently elevating our best and brightest to the leadership positions of our nation we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Dynasty

A few days ago The Opinionator shared some bloggers' thoughts on Hillary Clinton as an example of nepotism and dynasty. They close with a comment by Andrew Sullivan:

A reader responds to Andrew Sullivan’s approving link to Wheatcroft’s column by writing, “And is there any chance George W would have risen to anything more than a district sales manager at a photocopy company if his Daddy hadn’t been president?” Sullivan’s retort: “None. And your point is that Dubya has proven that nepotism and dynasticism don’t matter?”

As I read the comment, the point is that Mr. Sullivan had none of these concerns when he actively supported G.W. Bush in his first campaign, even though G.W. Bush was chosen for that job principally on the basis of his family name - and even within the family was deemed a suitable second choice only after older brother Jeb lost his first gubernatorial election. Concerns about reaching the presidency principally because of family name and connections apply in both cases, but should have been far more pronounced in relation to G.W. Bush. Did Mr. Sullivan even whisper a concern at that time?

Perhaps in retrospect, Mr. Sullivan recognizes the folly of his embrace of the underqualifed Bush. Sullivan's retreat from Bush seems to be primarily one of policy, particularly in relation to gay rights. Has he ever said, "I should have seen at the outset that Bush was unqualified, and was propped up as a Presidential candidate merely because he shared his daddy's surname"? (I admit that I don't follow Sullivan or his blog, but I don't recall that he has ever made such a statement.) If he disagrees with that position, his consternation over Hillary Clinton would seem hypocritical.

As I see it, there is a big difference between the ascendency of G.W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. In the former case, the selection was made and the primary process was constructed to lead to the nomination of the pre-approved candidate. In the latter case, while name and relationship similarly helped Hillary Clinton get the necessary résumé, opportunity and financial support to enter the race, she entered with a lot of negatives, is up against other candidates who still have a legitimate chance of defeating her for the nomination, and has managed to (largely) overcome those negatives (so far) and take the lead. Her party is not handing her the nomination. When Sullivan sneers that "modern, developed, Western societies" don't "actually bestow[] political office on women because they were once the wives of presidents", he may wish to take note of the fact that none exclude them from seeking office.

If she does win, perhaps the proper question is not how she got into the race, but why she was determined by the primary process to be the best candidate for the Presidency. If you take the position that she is not, you can examine how she managed to win, and the extent to which her name and marriage may have factored in. If you take the position that she is, then even if she advanced herself on her name and marriage, we still got the best candidate of those who ran.

I personally have some real problems with Hillary Clinton's ascendency, but they aren't about dynasty. With no offense intended, as good as the Democratic slate of candidates looks when contrasted with the Republican slate, is this truly the best we can do? I think not, so perhaps it is time for our nation to spend some time thinking about why those we would truly like to serve as President are turned off of politics, or are unable to get any traction within the major political parties. With no slight intended to Ms. Clinton as compared to anybody else in national politics, if our political system were currently elevating our best and brightest to the leadership positions of our nation we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The Military of Tomorrow

General Wesley Clark writes,

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. military embarked upon another wave of high-tech modernization - and paid for it by cutting ground forces, which were being repeatedly deployed to peacekeeping operations in places such as Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Instead of preparing for more likely, low-intensity conflicts, we were still spoiling for the "big fight," focusing on such large conventional targets as Kim Jong Il's North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq - and now we lack adequate ground forces. Bulking up these forces, perhaps by as many as 100,000 more active troops, and refitting and recovering from Iraq could cost $70 billion to $100 billion.

Clark's assertion begs the question of whether we want to be involved in numerous long-term, low-intensity conflicts. Further, if we expect to do so, should we really be preparing for another Gulf War II scenario where we have minimal international support (despite G.W.'s claims to the contrary), or should we instead only contemplate getting involved where there is broad international support and commitment. If the latter, an easy response is that we don't need an extra 100,000 active troops - we would get troop commitments from our allies, in a manner similar to Gulf War I (or to the World Wars).

If the former, Clark is implicitly calling for a military capable of carrying out a unilateral, interventionist foreign policy, we run into a lot of serious policy concerns. G.W.'s vision of the U.S. is that of a nation which will eschew world opinion or press our allies into nominal troop commitments in order to claim broad international support for overseas adventurism. A larger military not only facilitates that type of foreign policy, if you look at the history of the Bush Administration's Middle East policy it provides no assurance that there will not be similar military overreach. We had plenty of troops to invade and occupy Afghanistan. We still had plenty of troops to invade Iraq, although not enough to occupy the nation. But even at that level, Bush was willing to deprive Afghanistan of troops in order to advance operations in Iraq. With 100,000 more troops, does Clark truly believe that Bush would have been satisfied and would have bolstered occupation forces in both nations to prevent the backsliding in Afghanistan and chaos in Iraq? Or would we presently be occupying another country - Syria, Iran, maybe both?

Perhaps Clark imagines that no G.W. will ever again control the White House, and instead his favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, will be our next President. What does Clark envision that she would do with an expanded military? If she intends to draw down forces in Iraq, functionally ending the occupation, what need does he envision? If he favors an interventionist policy toward the world's low-level conflicts, with long-term U.S. troop commitments at occupation levels, I wish he would say so directly - particularly if he believes that Hillary Clinton would share that approach. And if not, why the call for more troops?