2016

Two throwbacks

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As promised, this is the next in a series of posts on my thoughts about the 2016 presidential candidates. Today, I’ll cover two of the less popular candidates: Jim Gilmore and George Pataki, both of whom should just give up already.

Besides consistently polling below 1%, the two have a great deal in common. Both were governors of large states around the turn of the century: Gilmore in Virginia (1998-2002) and Pataki in New York (1995-2006). Both have considered running for President before, with Gilmore launching an exploratory committee in 2008 and Pataki trying to gin up support in Iowa in 2012. Both would have made excellent candidates in years ago and both have been out of elected office for so long that they have no real chance in 2016.

Gilmore is 66 years old and is best known in Virginia for reducing the car tax. That tax still exists down there and even my Democratic friends there still complain about it, so it must have been a real bear. After leaving office in 2002 (Virginia’s governors are term-limited) and making a failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 2008, Gilmore has served on various boards and contributed to Fox News. He made a good impression in the first Republican debate, but he was in the secondary group that received far less attention. He seems eminently qualified, but I can’t help thinking that being out of office for thirteen years has diminished the voters’ awareness of him to the vanishing point. I don’t know why he’s still running.

Pataki, at 70, is the oldest candidate in the Republican race (Trump is next oldest at 69). He served three terms as Governor of New York, having defeated lefty icon Mario Cuomo in 1994, a great year for Republicans. He was about as conservative as a New York Republican can be, bringing back the death penalty and cutting taxes while being more to the left of the national party on the environment and gay issues. Pataki was reelected twice and retired from the state house in 2006. After declining a run at the Senate in 2010, Pataki has been around, but not in office. In 2008, he probably would’ve made a good candidate. In 2016, having not run for office in fourteen years, he, too, has been forgotten by many voters. His debate performance stood out to me mostly for his enthusiastic endorsement of NSA surveillance. I don’t know why he’s still running.

Both of these men have decent credentials, but their time has come gone. The best thing they would do is drop out, endorse somebody more popular, and work to keep the party from nominating Donald Trump. But I think it will take a few more undercard debates to drive it home to them.

Lesser Son

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In Thursday’s post, I mentioned posting on all of the Presidential candidates and said “I should write up my thoughts on Chafee before it’s too late.”

It’s too late.

During the Democratic debate, Lincoln Chafee seemed unimpressive, even among a field of candidates I was not planning on voting for. I summed up my thoughts on him in a tweet:

But Chafee’s confusion goes beyond the bewilderment he displayed on stage that night. Why did he even run? Molly Ball at the Atlantic has a very nice article on the question, but I don’t think she has an answer to the enigma. I don’t even think Chafee does.

Chafee’s father, John Chafee, seems like an impressive individual. Yale and Harvard Law, two tours in the Marines, a succession of elective and appointive offices as a Republican in a state that was even then heavily Democratic. This was a man who, had he run, could have attracted some support for President.

Chafee the younger shows more clearly than other candidates the problem with dynastic politics. Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Rand Paul all benefited from family connections. But each of them shows the individual qualities that, absent the dynasty, might still have allowed them to be successful in some profession. With Lincoln Chafee, it’s hard to make that argument.

Benghazi and Madison

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I was too busy at work to watch any of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony at the Benghazi hearings yesterday, so I did the next best thing and checked out Twitter periodically to see the partisans on both sides of the media defend their standard-bearer. I obviously fall on one side of that line, but the willful blindness of the reporters in the Clinton camp was more difficult to take than usual.

Most of the press support her party in the upcoming elections, and that’s neither surprising nor likely to change, but pretending not to understand the problem here, and pretending to be shocked at the partisanship of the hearings is absurd. Some of us have memories that predate January 2009, and we recall that Congress has always, always had partisan hearings. It’s the whole nature of check and balances.

Part of the genius of our system of government is that it is designed to be carried out by self-interested people and factions. Our founding fathers did not delude themselves into thinking that only the purest of men would lead the nation; to the contrary, they knew that people craved power, and they set up a Constitution that would use that desire to help us govern.

A Congress jealous of the executive’s strength is going to use its powers, including the power of investigation, to limit that executive. They will do this not because they are paragons of virtue, but because they want that power for themselves. And it works! Congresses investigate presidential wrongdoing. Is it political? Yes! And that’s a good thing! Politics is the way a free people governs itself.

James Madison put it best in Federalist 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Mankind is imperfect and antagonistic, but in their mutual antagonism, the branches of government check each others abuses and preserve the people’s liberty. That’s what we saw today, and that’s what we’ll see in the next administration, and the one after that, and the one after that. Today, whether anyone will admit it or not, the system worked.

Bye bye Biden

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Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he would not seek the Presidency, effectively ceding the field to Hillary Clinton. I had planned to write up my thoughts on each of the contenders, but we’ve already lost two Republicans and two Democrats. What’s worse is they were some of the better candidates out there. I should write up my thoughts on Chafee before it’s too late.

Webb and Biden were my two favorite Democrats, although that’s not saying much. Webb I liked because he is, in many ways, more of a Republican than a Democrat. Biden was the best of the real Dems, to me, because he seemed likable and not corrupt, even if he’s been wrong on most of the issues other than his support for Amtrak. But let’s be honest: I would almost certainly never have voted for him.

What excited me about a Biden candidacy, beyond an indecent schadenfreude in seeing her1 discomfited, was the thought that if he were to get in, it would have to mean that he knew something was coming down for her. Something bad. Something disqualifying.

I figured that Biden jumping in, against his better judgement, would have meant that he knew Clinton would be indicted for her crimes and that the Democrats would need some suave Trans Am enthusiast to save them from Sanders and his legions of Wobblies. Now that Biden’s out, the same thought process makes me fear that he knows the fix is in, which leaves him with no shot.

There’s still a chance that President Obama’s Justice Department will indict a former member of his cabinet, but that chance is a little smaller today.

  1. Yes, like Shelob to the Orcs of Mordor, there is only one her on this blog. ↩

Tangled Webb

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It looks like the end of Jim Webb’s quest for the presidency, at least as a Democrat. I thought he would hang around a little longer but, having given reporters a chance to dust off the word “quixotic,” Webb’s campaign appears to be an end.

As we discussed last week, Webb was bound to fail because the constituency he represented most strongly, Appalachian Democrats, no longer exists in any strength. The shift has been dramatic, much more so than the lowland South’s fifty-year mosey over to the party of Lincoln or New England’s gradual drift to the party of Jeff Davis. Parts of Appalachia, like eastern Tennessee, have always had Republicans (V.O. Key made that point in Southern Politics in 1949!) but much of the region stayed strong until much more recently. Look at the George Bush’s 1988 landslide: even as every state around it voted Republican, West Virginia was Dukakis’s sixth-best state. Clinton carried it twice, and it wasn’t even close! But since George W. Bush narrowly won it (and the surrounding regions of nearby states) in 2000, the Democrats have given up on West Virginia and the rest of Appalachia. Webb’s fate just proves the point to anyone who had any doubt.

Being abandoned by one party, though, doesn’t make you love the other. Plenty of Webb Democrats are now Republicans, but I suspect many others simply view the G.O.P. as the next best thing, rather than a true political home as FDR’s Democratic Party was to them. Without an effort from the Republicans, Webb Democrats have as much chance of becoming Trumpites as anything. Republicans have been getting better at envisioning solutions to urban poverty, they should not neglect the plight of the rural poor. The national Democrats have abandoned a whole section of America. The GOP should not do the same.

Blue on blue

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Saturday Night Live’s send up of the Democratic debate wasn’t half bad. Larry David appearing as Bernie Sanders fulfilled the wishes more viewers than anything since Tina Fey played Sarah Palin.

But my favorite moment was Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton answering the question about her refusal to obey the law on classified information while Secretary of State: “I welcome this question because I rehearsed this one the longest.” 

Nailed it.

Who Lost Appalachia?

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There was a lot of talk during the Democratic debate this week about Jim Webb, and his place in the Democratic party. Was he too conservative? Too martial? Too old-fashioned?

The real problem with Webb for Democrats is not what ideas he represents, but what geographic region he represents: Appalachia. Once the stronghold of FDR’s Democratic coalition, this region has been abandoned by Roosevelt’s successors. And the change is happening quickly. Look at this chart of the decrease in Democratic vote in Kentucky, and note that the mountainous counties have been in much steeper decline:

Appalachia Democrats

If we take the date back to 2004, the shift is even more pronounced:

Appalachia Democrats 2

Democrats in Appalachia are abandoning their party in droves, and they’re not coming back. Democrats at the national level claim to be the party that supports the poor, but when it comes to America’s poorest region, they seem to be going out of their way to alienate their erstwhile supporters. (For more on that, check out Kevin Williamson’s 2014 article on Appalachia here.) On guns, on religion, and on individualism, the party promotes everything Appalachians are against, and tries to make up for it with more welfare spending.

The people Jim Webb represents don’t want handouts, they want jobs. The Democratic establishment responds by fighting the coal industry, historically the biggest employer in Appalachia. Every step the Democrats take pushes them farther away from these historic stalwarts of the party. Webb is the last Democratic leader to care about them. With his inevitable defeat, Democrats will close the book on the region as they’ve closed their hearts to its people long ago.

Vegas, the morning after

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The story of the night at the Democrats’ Las Vegas Debate was that Hillary 6.0 was ClintonCo’s most bug-free release since 2009. She made no obvious errors, and her anger subroutine was almost as good as real live angry man Bernie Sanders. Her logic programming was still flawed, as shown in the discussion of whether she was progressive or moderate, but flawed logic may be a feature, not a bug, with the Democratic electorate. All in all, though, I think she calmed the Democratic Establishment’s nerves, and may have helped to stave off the Draft Biden movement. There will be more stumbles–Hillary is still a deeply flawed candidate–but this competent performance may stop the slide, for now.

Sanders’s performance was also strong. He came off at times as a crazy, partially deaf old man, and at one point he definitely wasn’t paying attention, but he, too, made no obvious errors. Sanders projected his weird vision of bourgeois socialism as effectively as his followers could have hoped, and recovered from his earlier struggles with black Democrats by showing that he had been adequately reeducated in the new dogma (which he likely believed all along, but lacked the adequate buzz words to convey).

As to the rest: O’Malley sleepwalked through most of the debate, but showed some flashes of fire at the end when discussing green energy, an issue no one cares about. Webb spent half his time complaining that he wasn’t given enough time, and the other half demonstrating that there’s no place for men like him in the Democratic party. I’d love to see him on stage at the next Republican debate. And Chafee. Even though he’s had months to prepare, his answers sounded like what you’d hear if you broke into his house in the middle of the night, woke him up, shined a flashlight in his eyes, and demanded he explain his PATRIOT Act vote. I don’t think he or Lessig have much of a shot, but I know who would’ve added more serious content to the debate.

On a lighter note, here are some of the best debate tweets of the night:

Mutants:

On guns:

Simpsons quote:


Dodging the question:

Webb:

 

Chafee:

InfoSec:

The PATRIOT Act:

Biden?

And my favorite, on legalizing marijuana:

Vegas!

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There’s not much that can be said about tonight’s Democratic debate that hasn’t been said elsewhere. My thoughts, briefly, are that for the lesser-known candidates (Webb, O’Malley, and Chaffee) the debate represents their first chance to talk to the nationwide Democratic primary electorate. If they don’t make a splash, they will never get more than a few hardcore supporters to vote for them.

For Clinton, expectations are set pretty low. All she has to do is show she’s not robotic or unpleasant and avoid making any obvious mistakes. I don’t think she has it in her to be exciting, but she might manage to look interesting and competent. If she fails at that, we will hear a lot more about Biden in the coming days.

The biggest test, I think, is for Sanders. He’s amassed legions of hardcore fans, but he has to look like a serious alternative to Clinton if he’s ever to attract anyone besides the white socialists who currently support him. He’s unlikely to do anything to lose the support of those people, but coming off as a wild-eyed lunatic could foreclose his chance of winning over any of the party’s remaining moderates.

Here’s a few articles that might interest you: