I’ve just read the Meridian, Mississippi speech with which John McCain launched his “biography tour,” and found it more interesting and troubling than I expected.
Most obviously, I can’t recall any major speech by a president or presidential candidate that was devoted so thoroughly to the subject of the speaker’s own family background–not just the immediate family (which, for example, was the background theme in Richard Nixon’s famous “Checkers” speech, and in Bill Clinton’s “Place Called Hope” speech, and is obviously important to Barack Obama’s “story”), but the Family Heritage. McCain goes into considerable detail to establish himself as the scion of a very old (by American standards) and very distinguished warrior tribe, whose traditions he first spurned and then half-heartedly embraced, before rediscovering them in the crucible of his imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton.
In so doing, McCain runs afoul of two pretty important American political traditions: ambivalence towards military leaders in politics, and an expectation of modesty about the accomplishments of one’s forebears.
On the first point, yes, five (W.H. Harrison, Jackson, Taylor, Grant and Eisenhower) or perhaps six (if you add the planter-soldier George Washington) American presidents were professional soldiers. Several others were wartime military leaders but not really career military professionals (Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Teddy Roosevelt). But the list of military leaders who sought and failed to obtain the presidency is equally long, from Winfield Scott and George McClellan to Scott’s namesake W.S. Hancock, to Leonard Wood, to Douglas MacArthur, to Alexander Haig, to Wes Clark. And among those who succeeded, Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower were almost universally revered national heroes of an unparalleled magnitude.
While there’s nothing uncommon or surprising about John McCain’s highlighting of his own military record, his decision to identify himself as primarily the product of the military ethic, by family background as well as by personal experience, is unusual, and perhaps risky in a country that has always honored professional warriors but has also insisted on civilian control of the military. It’s no accident that the last Annapolis graduate to become president, Jimmy Carter, chose to identify himself as a peanut farmer rather than as a nuclear submarine officer.
McCain’s insistence on establishing a distinguished pedigree is counter-intuitive as well. The current president of the United States, after all, went to inordinate lengths to create a public persona remote from his actual aristocratic background as grandson of a U.S. senator and son of a president. Another president who often touted his own military service–John F. Kennedy–did so in no small part to provide a common link to Americans who might otherwise dwell on his father’s wealth and political connections. FDR’s polio, and TR’s cowboy-hunter-soldier machismo, offset their elite backgrounds. And most American presidents and presidential candidates have talked about their ancestors mainly to stress their humble roots, and thus accentuate their own accomplishments. In the Meridian speech and elsewhere, John McCain seems to be visibly struggling, even today, to live up to his family’s martial tradition. It’s all pretty remarkable.
The theme of the callow young man achieving maturity and then complete identification with his patrimony is as old as the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son. It’s complicated in McCain’s case by the fact that his callowness, by his own account, appears to have survived the Hanoi Hilton and persisted well into late-middle-age and into his political career (viz. the admitted serial carousing, not to mention the Keating Five).
It’s tempting to speculate that by design or accident, McCain’s self-description is an analogy for his latest political transformation from the “maverick” who flirted (or at a minimum, whose staff flirted) with becoming John Kerry’s running-mate in 2004 to today’s reinvented conservative. He’s rebelled against his heritage, but now, in the crucible of this campaign, McCain is falling back on the fundamentals of family, faith, party, ideology, and yes, maybe even a hereditary strain of military jingoism, and is determined, as prodigals often are, to live up to the heritage to a fault. This must be immensely reassuring to the conservatives who have for so long mistrusted him. And it’s an appeal that is also seductive for the many Americans who constantly struggle to reconcile libertarian impulses with the tug of traditions, even bad traditions.
Maybe this is all emphemeral, and at some point John McCain will abandon the biographical message to focus on policy issues. But Democrats need to understand what he’s trying to do in presenting himself as the embodiment of the Prodigal Son seeking to lead the Prodigal Nation back to its heritage of greatness, and react accordingly. In 1996 Bob Dole offered himself as “the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth… a time of tranquillity, faith, and confidence in action.” Bill Clinton successfully turned that offer into a contrast between nostalgic reaction and progressive action. At present, McCain is advancing a more appealing version of Dole’s political package, gussied up with plenty of Prodigal policy offerings that will make it harder to typecast him as reactionary. Exposing him will not just be a matter of deriding media credulity or hammering his voting record in the Senate. It will require an unwavering spotlight on his basic message and its troubling implications.
In a 1999 review of McCain’s memoir “Faith of My Fathers,” and of Robert Timberg’s hagiographical “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” Nathanial Tripp offered this assessement of both books and of the martial hymn that inspired the title of the first:

The problem with this hymn, and these books, is that they are not about leadership, they are about followership. Admittedly, the hymn’s type of rhetoric seems to have an almost narcotic effect on some voters, but distrust of authority is a salient legacy of Vietnam. Furthermore, civil leadership demands humanity, compassion and the skills of negotiation and compromise, which are often contrary to the military mind. Chimerically, McCain may go from the Keating scandal to campaign reform, from heavy smoking to anti-tobacco legislation, setting a zigzag course toward the White House and defying those who will put him in a box. But there is something hauntingly familiar about his confusion of mission with personal ambition.

This remains an important observation. If John McCain’s main credential for presidential leadership is his “followership” of the military traditions of his forefathers and the ideological traditions of the GOP, then the rest of us should rightly object to the harnessing of our future to his past.

One of the things you heard a lot from Obama supporters over the last couple of weeks was the rueful observation that the Jeremiah Wright controversy would at least greatly reduce the whisper-campaign-fed perception that he’s a Muslim. Not so, says a new Pew poll.

There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama’s affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. While voters who heard “a lot” about Reverend Wright’s controversial sermons are more likely than those who have not to correctly identify Obama as a Christian, they are not substantially less likely to still believe that he is Muslim. Nearly one-in-ten (9%) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim.

The percentage of Americans believing Obama’s a Muslim ranges from 14% among Republicans, to 10% among Democrats, to 8% among independents. At the risk of repeating one of those misleading triple-loaded poll findings, 23% of white Democrats with an unfavorable opinion of Obama think he’s a Muslim.
Moreover, a third of poll respondents–and a third of Democrats–say they don’t know what religion Barack Obama observes.
Otherwise, the Pew poll has a lot of welcome findings for Obama, showing a positive reaction to his “race speech,” and leads over HRC and McCain roughly the same as they found a month ago. But it’s beginning to become obvious that the “Obama is a Muslim” thing has become one of those ineradicable myths that evidence to the contrary can’t shake.

Appropos of my suggestion yestereday that John McCain may be repeating John Kerry’s 2004 mistake of placing too much emphasis on his military biography, it’s interesting to note that he is about to begin what his campaign calls a “biography tour.”:

The Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting begins a “biography tour” next week, visiting schools and military installations “that have played a significant role in shaping who I am today,” as McCain put it in a fundraising letter.

One such “tour” probably can’t do McCain much harm. But if his whole campaign becomes a “biography tour,” he could well be in trouble.

I did an appearance today on the excellent syndicated public radio show, To the Point, to talk about the latest developments in Iraq and their impact on the presidential contest. Other guests included Peter Beinart of CFR and TNR; Bobby Ghosh of Time; Shawn Brimley of the Center for a New American Security; and GOP pollster John McLaughlin.
I was pretty much paired with McLaughlin, and thought I did reasonably well at swatting down his efforts to change the subject to the latest pseudo-stories about Clinton’s Kosovo experience and Obama’s “radical friends.”
But as often happens, my one real insight occurred to me just as the show ended. Listening to McLaughlin redundantly cite McCain’s military service record as establishing his vast superiority to the Democrats on national security issues, it finally hit me: what did this sound like? Yes, it sounded like John Kerry’s campaign talking points at key junctures of the 2004 race.
McCain may be in the process of making the same big mistake his friend Kerry made in 2004–making his biography the overriding centerpiece of his national security message. Sure, McCain’s war record attests to his character and patriotism, but hardly means he’d be an effective commander-in-chief. If that were the case, we’d only have military leaders as presidents. What McCain has to say about national security issues will, over time, have as great an impact on how he’s perceived by persuadable voters as endless clips of him in uniform or returning from the Hanoi Hilton. The tragedy of the Kerry campaign was that the man did have a pretty powerful grasp of national security challenges and what to do about them, but it never much got a hearing thanks to the back-and-forth about his own “story.”
In contrast, much of what John McCain’s been saying on the substance of national security and foreign policy strikes me as an odd combo of George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 messages: a multilateral, “humble” foreign policy based on the continuation and even expansion of the very single-minded military adventurism that’s made Bush a global pariah and empirical failure. Suggesting that the Democratic nominee isn’t fit to debate him on national security because he or she doesn’t have a war record isn’t going to cut it for John McCain.

Matt Yglesias read my quick take on Obama’s economics speech this morning as representing a distinctly “third-wayish” take on the role of government in the economy, and offered this dissent:

What struck me was the digs at the actually existing third way regime of the 1990s, when a certain someone’s husband was president, and when Obama says the powers-that-were betrayed the vision of a mixed market approach in favor of run-amok corporate power.

He goes on to quote a section of the speech that squarely says the financial de-regulation efforts of the late 1990s were excessive and destructive, in no small part because of blandishments from Wall Street lobbyists. He doesn’t note, though I should have, that Obama twice blames “Democratic and Republican administrations” for the current failure of oversight. I don’t think Obama was referring to the Johnson or Carter administrations.
So Matt’s right, though I don’t think that means I was wrong. The overall construction of the speech was indeed “third-wayish,” and in fact implies that the Clinton administration erred in going over the brink into something approaching the conservative laissez-faire ideology. So Obama is able simultaneously (in conventional terms) to attack the Clintons from the left while maintaining a firm position in the center, which on this and other subjects the GOP has long abandoned. Whether Obama’s history of oversight malfeasance is accurate or not, it’s pretty good politics.

We seem to be entering an intelude in the presidential contest in which candidates are now and then taking a break from frenetic campaigning to deliver themselves of Big Speeches on major topics. Yesterday John McCain gave a Big Foreign Policy Speech in LA apparently designed to establish a “break” with Bush-Cheney policies. The lede in Jonathan Martin’s Politico report on the speech nicely summarizes the fundamental problem with this effort:

Just back from a week of meetings with U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East, John McCain today signaled that he would seek to repair the perception of America abroad. But he wouldn’t back down on a conflict that much of the world has come to despise.
McCain, speaking to an international affairs organization here, sought to explain his unique foreign policy outlook, one that mixes elements of conciliation rejected by the Bush administration with a stay-the-course approach to Iraq and a tough-minded stance toward other potential threats.

There’s lots of talk about talking in McCain’s speech: talking to other countries, listening to their point of view, and being open to persuasion. But when you’ve made an inflexible commitment to war in Iraq–and to the threat of war with Iran–the centerpiece of your national security message, it’s hard to conclude all the talking and listening will amount to much other than Cheneyism With a Human Face. But the immediate issue is whether the new media will credit McCain with a “break” with the administration, and even Martin’s relatively skeptical take seems to suggest this political goal will be at least partially successful.
Meanwhile, this morning in New York, Barack Obama delivered a “major speech” on economics–more specificallly, the financial and housing crisis. It will be most interesting to see how this speech is interpreted. Some will focus on the new policy content (notably a second stimulus package that sounds a lot like the one HRC proposed last week), or the very detailed, wonky analysis of the financial industry the candidate displays. Others will cite Obama’s brief hit on McCain for his cold approach to the housing problem, or his characterization of the Arizonan as determined to “run for Bush’s third term.”
But as a non-economist who can barely tell a hedge-fund from a hedgehog, what struck me most in a quick reading of the speech was Obama’s distinctly “third wayish” thematics on government’s role in regulating the economy. Check out these two graphs:

I do not believe that government should stand in the way of innovation, or turn back the clock to an older era of regulation. But I do believe that government has a role to play in advancing our common prosperity: by providing stable macroeconomic and financial conditions for sustained growth; by demanding transparency; and by ensuring fair competition in the marketplace.
Our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between an oppressive government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. It tells us we can emerge from great economic upheavals stronger, not weaker. But we can do so only if we restore confidence in our markets. Only if we rebuild trust between investors and lenders. And only if we renew that common interest between Wall Street and Main Street that is the key to our success.

In other sections of the speech, Obama discusses the destructive role of lobbyists–a common theme in his entire campaign–in terms of their distorting impact on competition and the efficient functioning of markets. This isn’t the sort of language that’s going to appeal to the neo-populists out there who want Democrats to attack corporate power as an evil in itself, or demand aggressive regulation as a matter of social justice and democracy, not opportunity and fair competition. But there’s no way you can read this speech and give much credence to the right-wing voices describing Obama as a crypto-socialist.

Yesterday we published a guest post by Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall warning that all three surviving major-party presidential candidates seem to be gripped by a primary-season focus that’s leading them to say things on certain issues they may regret in a general election contest or in office. His particular focus was on the alleged competition between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to demonize NAFTA and identify with an out-now position on Iraq, though McCain’s conservative-pleasing “victory” talk about Iraq drew his ire as well.
I beg to differ with my friend Will Marshall, not because I deny the primary-general tension that has always existed in every contested nomination contest, but because I think the Democratic candidates aren’t just pandering to primary voters, but are trying to address exceptionally complex issues in ways that are difficult to capture in simple campaign messages.
Iraq’s the clearest case. Will’s right that public support for immediate withdrawal from Iraq has always been low, and has sagged a bit in recent months. From my own reading of many polls on the subject, I’d say a strong plurality of Americans are pretty much where they’ve been for two-to-three years: the Iraq War was a mistake, and the U.S. military engagement there should be ended as quickly and as thoroughly as a non-catastrophic outcome will permit. Doubts about the pace of withdrawal seem to be linked to the fear of a collapse of the country into chaos; there’s not much evidence of strong support for the “flypaper” theory that the war is making America safer by “pinning down” al Qaeda militants, or for the constant GOP assertion that anything less than “victory” will “embolden our enemies” and represent a major blow to our overall security posture.
The specific Iraq plans of both Democratic candidates contemplate regularly scheduled withdrawals of combat troops accompanied by various political and diplomatic initiatives, hedged by a residual force commitment closely linked to avoidance of the very catastrophic contingencies that most Americans seem to fear. Both candidates predict that a decisive shift away from a combat role for U.S. troops will produce the international involvement and Iraqi political breakthrough necessary to maintain stability. But both candidates also refuse to rule out a renewal of more active military role in Iraq if the country dissolves into sectarian chaos, if outsiders intervene, or if al-Qaeda-in-Iraq stages a comeback. Looks to me like Clinton and Obama are nicely positioned with public opinion on Iraq, aside from their basic difference as to whether the whole Iraq commitment was a mistake in conception (Obama) or in execution (Clinton).
What seems to bug Will Marshall is that Obama and Clinton are emphasizing the aspects of their very similar plans that predict a move towards withdrawal will produce a breakthrough, rather than highlighting their residual military commitments. But while the two candidates may possibly be wrong about the positive galvanic effect of a withdrawal timetable, it’s hard to say they are being dishonest or are “pandering” to antiwar opinion or “base voters.”
Remember that both Clinton and Obama have resisted considerable and continuous pressure, from antiwar activists and other candidates, to renounce their “hedging bets” positions on withdrawal timetables and residual troops, and just flatly say they’d quickly liquidate the whole mess and hope for the best. It would have been easy for Obama–the consistent critic of the Iraq-o-centric focus of U.S. security policy–in particular to have adopted the “over-the-horizon” concept championed by John Murtha and eventually embraced by John Edwards, that would make near-total troops withdrawal from Iraq itself unconditional, while acknowledging a continuing U.S. interest in the fate of the country.
Whether or not you agree with their policies, it’s just not plausible to conclude that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are making their Iraq positions contingent on embracing an implicit “out-now” posture. As for their general-election positioning, so long as John McCain continues to talk about “victory” in Iraq–and he’s made this a signature theme that he can’t abandon without seriously damaging his “straight talk” pretensions–they are far more in alignment with public opinion than the GOP candidate.
NAFTA is less important than Iraq, but probably more complicated. As John Judis clearly explains in a New Republic piece that Will cited, NAFTA in the public imagination is not the North American Free Trade Agreement in its specificity, but a symbol of U.S. confidence that virtually any market-opening agreement will redound to our ultimate benefit. It’s similar to the No Child Left Behind legislation–another policy disconnect between the Democratic left and center–where calls for repeal batten on general unhappiness with overall existing conditions rather than a specific focus on the policies and philosophies involved.
Here I would tend to agree with Will that NAFTA-bashing is a disingenuous way for either Obama or Clinton to convey their determination to rethink the U.S. strategy for dealing with economic globalization. But so long as John McCain and the GOP continue to present free trade as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, with the “losers” expected to suck it up and somehow survive, then the basic positioning of the Democratic candidates on trade and globalization may be both principled and politically expedient. Since Will is arguing that the Democratic candidates are pandering to the party “base,” I’d note that unhappiness with NAFTA and globalization goes well beyond the Democratic “base” ranks, and is probably more regional and generational than partisan.
In any event, while Will’s warning is welcome, it ultimately invites a direct comparison of the three remaining candidates. And I remain convinced that John McCain’s incoherent rationale for his various positions, along with his consistent but extremist positions on Iraq and on globalization, are a much bigger deal politically and morally than any possible prevarications fomented by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Yesterday’s Washington Post included a feature wherein economic advisors to the three surviving major-party presidential candidates did brief presentations on what their champions would do to deal with the current housing-driven economic crisis.
Former White House economic advisor Gene Sperling dutifully laid out Hillary Clinton’s latest housing plan, formally rolled out in Philadelphia yesterday, which features a foreclosure moratorium and a housing-focused “second stimulus package.”
Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee (apparently out of his “NAFTA-gate” doghouse) followed with an elaboration of Obama’s plan, which ranges from a bad mortgage conversion program and subsidies for low-income borrowers to incentives for middle-class savings.
And then you’ve got former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, speaking for McCain, who basically says the GOP candidate thinks those suffering from the housing crisis had it coming. Yeah, that’s right: after laying out McCain’s commitment to corporate tax cuts and a tax-credit based initiative to encourage individual health insurance, he goes on at some length excoriating those who would take action on the housing crisis, and setting forth strict conditions for participation in existing housing relief programs. Market forces will apparently take care of the problem one way or another.
It may take a while, but Americans troubled by the economy and the housing crisis will eventually get the message that John McCain’s idea of economic leadership is pretty much limited to high-end and corporate tax cuts, free trade agreements, an attack on appropriations earmarks, and whatever he means (beyond his support for Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme) by “entitlement reform.” I guess he could tout the stimulative effect of a Hundred Years War in Iraq, but that’s about it. And along with free market fundamentalism, the GOP candidate will also serve up a heaping hot bowl of moralism aimed at scorching those who fail to succeed.

The two big questions among Democrats at the moment are (1) whether there is any way to avoid a presidential nomination contest that extends at least into June, and (2) whether this extended contest might ultimately be a good thing.
Given the remorseless mathematics of the nomination process (the link above refers to Chris Bowers’ exhaustive account), this basically boils down to a much simpler question: at what point, if ever, do Democratic Party poohbahs, exercising their power via the news media and superdelegates, force Hillary Clinton out of the race?
Clearly, there are those who think this should have already happened–that HRC’s odds of winning the nomination on the basis of primary and caucus results have gone down to the longest of long shots, leaving her with the Hobson’s Choice of going negative in a destructive way or losing quickly.
The reason it hasn’t happened is pretty simple. What HRC most needed after the March 4 primaries was a hit on Obama that didn’t have her fingerprints. And that’s exactly what she got with the Jeremiah Wright controversy. While you can make the argument that Obama’s dazzling speech in Philadelphia last week mitigated the damage, and just as importantly, may have cauterized the wound by taking the issue off the table for the future, it still represented an unforced error that gave HRC’s campaign some hope that Obama might “crater” without a divisive push from her rival.
On the other hand, the second big development after March 4, HRC’s apparent failure to secure a “do-over” or ratification of the MI and/or FL primaries, is a major blow to her ability to plausibly argue she will wind up the primary/caucus season with a pledged delegate plurality (almost impossible now), or an acknowledged popular vote plurality (still possible but increasingly remote).
But so long as HRC is winning primaries–particularly if Obama’s sag in general election trial heats with McCain continues–Party Poohbahs are very unlikely to intervene to administer a coup de grace.
So: to answer the $64,000 question as to when a concerted effort might be made to squeeze Clinton out of the race, the most compelling answer is that it will happen about fifteen minutes after she loses another primary. Like the participants in the NCAA basketball tournament, she’s into single-elimination territory now.
The good news for her is that it might not happen soon, and theorectically might not happen at all.
If you look at the rest of the primary calendar, after PA, which everyone expects HRC to win, there’s IN and NC on May 6. Obama’s currently favored in both, but not by large margins, and neither is exactly hostile territory. West Virginia on May 13 ought to be Clinton Country, as is KY on May 20. OR also votes on May 20, and Obama’s favored there, but not by a big margin. Obama’s narrowly favored in two of the three final states–MT and SD, voting just after an assumed Clinton win in Puerto Rico.
There’s zero margin for error here for HRC, and even if she ran the table, she probably would not win by big enough margins to take the lead in pledged delegates, and would struggle to gain a popular vote plurality. Moreover, there’s the example of past candidates who won big in late primaries (e.g., Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Gary Hart in 1984) but couldn’t win the nomination. But that’s the strategy she’s left with, and until such time as she loses, don’t expect her to be forced out of the race.

It’s a pretty fair assumption that Democrats looking towards the general election are feeling exceptionally conflicted right now. On the one hand, the extended Clinton-Obama competition, which could easily extend into June and could possibly remain unresolved until the convention in August, is clearly inflicting damage on both candidates’ general election prospects while giving John McCain an enormous breather. In a very unhappy article in The New Republic today, Noam Scheiber argues that it may take a relatively early superdelegate intervention to nail down an Obama nomination and give Democrats a shot at victory in November.
But on the other hand, there remain certain fundamental factors that are almost certain to boost the Democratic nominee down the road and create some serious problems for McCain. Chief among them is the economy. At Bloomberg.com, Alison Fitzgerald reminds us that incumbent parties have rarely if ever managed to hold onto the White House in a recessionary atmosphere. Moreover, John McCain’s relative ability to avoid association with the record of the Bush administration does not necessarily extend to economics; even his own campaign concedes that his chief economic talking point is support for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent.
Beyond the economy, the belief of many conservatives that McCain is going to win by making the election a foreign policy referendum centered on Iraq is exceedingly strange. Yes, the tactical successes associated with the “surge” in Iraq have made this issue less deadly for Republicans, but there’s simply no evidence that Americans are shifting towards support for perpetual war or a reconsideration of the judgment that the invasion was a mistake.
In other words, there’s almost no doubt that John McCain will be fighting a powerful, historically high “wrong track” sentiment that may actually grow stronger in the fall, particularly if gas prices rise to over $4 a gallon and the collateral damage from the subprime mortgage disaster continues to play itself out. It’s always possible that McCain’s battered-but-intact “maverick” reputation compounded by unhappiness over the views of the retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ will trump these fundamentals. But the fundamentals are not going away.