This article reminds me of the analysis I did a while back on VPs who subsequently run for president. Sounds like the track record for mid-term appointees to the Senate is similar to that for VPs who try to move up a seat:

[New York Governor] Paterson kept talking and displayed why he is fast gaining a reputation as a governor who’s not only forthright and smart, but refreshingly analytical:

Interestingly enough, I was reading that there have been, there have been, I think in the last century, over 80 times when governors have had to appoint senators. And since 1960, there have been 48. Of the 48, 10 have just decided to serve out the term and not run for election. Of the 38 that ran for election, only 18 won. So, less than half actually won. So, as I think about that, because of the precious nature of seniority in Washington, I’m hoping that a candidate that I select would win in 2010. Because what’s very key in the U.S. Senate, and what the U.S. senators that I’ve spoken to have apprised me, is that seniority is very important.

I believe the going rate for re-election of sitting U.S. senators is about 90 percent. So, if Paterson’s reading of history is correct, a less-than-50 percent re-election rate for this subset of incumbents would seem to be a pretty good indication that they were pretty unimpressive. By announcing this fact, Paterson may have just made his own task a bit harder, but he sounds wise enough to handle it.

On that basis, the Republicans may well have a better shot than thought at the Illinois senate seat when the appointee comes up for re-election.

So, everyone wants Hillary to get out, and understandably so. She’s losing in such a way that it’s hard to see how she could come back. There are good arguments for dropping out now to allow the party to “heal” etc. But I think there are good reasons why she should stay in, which she could still deploy.

Look at what’s happened these past few weeks, which wouldn’t have happened if the Democratic race was sewn up. Obama’s Wright problem has been highlighted. His Michelle Obama problem has been highlighted. His “bitterness” / elitism problem has been highlighted. His inability to stay on message when going off script has been highlighted. None of that would have happened these last few weeks if there hadn’t been an intense fight going on on the Democratic side.

Why is that a good thing? Because all of these things would otherwise have come up in the general election. And why is that important? For two reasons. First, because these things coming up now means that our 24/7 news cycle burns them out as topics of conversation in a very short period. Yes, they’ll still be there to talk about later but they won’t have the same punch. And, if those concerns really are big, the Democrats get to really see them and chew them over while they still have a choice about whether he’s the candidate for them.

McCain’s baggage and Clinton’s baggage has been out there for so long that this part of the process doesn’t make that much difference at this point. But Obama is so untested and so relatively unknown that it’s actually really important for the Democrats to have this time to get to know their (presumptive) candidate. So, for all the Hillary is supposedly preventing Obama from taking on McCain head to head, I think she’s actually doing the Democrats a lot of good, and they should actually in a perverse way be grateful that Hillary’s as sore a loser as she is.

It appears there’s growing frustration among the media following the Obama campaign that the candidate has stopped talking to them. Toby Harnden of the UK’s Daily Telegraph writes in a blog entry today that details some of what’s going on in the minds of the press:

On Obama One, there’s a sense of growing mutiny. There’s been no press availability for 11 days and only two in April.

…

A few hours later, Obama was unrepentant, again rebuffing a reporter’s question. This time, it was Margaret Talev of McLatchy – who was in the press pool with Anburajan for the day – who had a go. Just as Obama was sitting down to tape a session of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, Talev asked him why he felt it important to respond to the late-breaking Clinton television ad with an ad of his own and what he thought of her ad.

“Are you supposed to be doing this with the pool?” Obama responded, and laughed. Then he sat down and had his earpiece put in. Talev asked him if he’d comment after the taping. He said: “Maybe, it depends on how well behaved you are.” As Talev put in her poll report, however “after the taping, I was whisked off ahead of him and didn’t get to bug him again”.

On Obama One, the only official to venture back to the press seats was the affable David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, a former reporter who appears to enjoy relaxing in the company of us hacks and pops back fairly frequently. This time, however, we were so starved of access that he immediately had a dozen tape recorders pushed under his nose and was peppered with questions.

When we asked him why Obama wasn’t talking to us, he responded: “I’m sure that he’ll be spending time with you some time soon. He’s done a series of interviews today on national television, on local television with local press so he’s done a lot of media.”

The impression Harnden got – and one that’s difficult to escape, is that Obama has done so badly when he’s gone unscripted recently that essentially he’s almost always off message when speaking off the cuff. His handlers appear to have decided that the only way to keep him “on message” is to have him only deliver formal, scripted messages and essentially restrict him to “no message” in all other situations.

This is going to be problematic for a guy who is trying to avoid allegations of elitism. Not that journalists truly represent the common people, but they’re the only proxy there is in many cases, and his desire to avoid them smacks of a desire to avoid engaging with anyone in a real way. Perhaps he’s hoping that he can simply pull this strategy until Pennsylvania is over, then re-engage more afterwards once Hillary is seen off. Quite apart from the fact that CNN is currently projecting a Clinton win in PA, this strategy can’t pay off. There are almost seven months left until the general election, and Obama can’t simply hide out for that period. He must begin to engage again and no amount of spin and damage control can prevent him from putting his foot in it if that’s his tendency. The result may just end up being that it becomes too late for the Democrats to do anything about this tendency and then they’re stuck with him in the general election. Fine by me.

With all this talk about “bitterness” in Pennsylvania, I’ve actually been thinking about the two Primary campaigns and the fact that the Democratic campaign appears to have become more bitter than the Republican campaign was. Howard Dean told CNN that he wants a nominee chosen ASAP because:

We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time. We’ve got to know who our nominee is.

Did the Republicans need “healing time”? There were one or two stories about the bitterness behind the scenes – mostly on the part of the other candidates and directed at Romney. But that has blown over so quickly that it’s barely a memory at this point. Romney, of course, is campaigning for McCain. Thompson and the others have endorsed McCain strongly. Huckabee is perhaps the weakest link at this point, but it really didn’t take very long for the “healing” process to take place.

The other point that strikes me is the fact that the bitterness on the Republican side (other than that directed at Romney) was mostly between rival factions who had distinctly different policy goals. Huckabee supporters distrusted the other candidates because they were not conservative enough on social issues. Thompson and Romney supporters mistrusted Huckabee because of his unserious policies on taxation. This was, on the whole, not about personality differences.

On the Democratic side, however, the bitterness is very much about personality, since there’s very little that separates the candidates on the major issues. And that may make it that much harder for them to “heal” afterwards, because the criticisms the two camps have directed at each other have not been about differences of opinion on policy. If they were – as on the Republican side – they would be easily overcome by taking the approach that the Democratic platform is ultimately what people need to get behind. But suggestions that your opponent is too inexperienced to be President are not so easy to brush off when they become the party’s nominee. Some of McCain’s best ammunition in the general election will be comments made by Hillary about Obama (assuming he’s the nominee): “If your own party doesn’t think you’re experienced enough to govern, why should the American people feel differently?” etc.

Long may the Democratic primary continue.

As in almost every election cycle recently (or so it seems) there have been allegations from some quarters that there is little to separate the candidates on the issues, and this is one of the reasons why people aren’t engaging in the process more. There’s always some truth in this, and certainly (for all Barack Obama’s protestations to the contrary) all candidates and both parties are more or less equally guilty of playing the game of politics as usual.

But it is worth remembering that there are real and significant policy differences between the major candidates and especially between the two major parties, and pointing out what these are. This, after all, is what we’re all fighting for.

So, what are we fighting for?

• Taxation – the Democrats want to revoke the Bush tax cuts and generally raise taxes, with the only significant difference being how open they are about the latter aim. Certainly the increases in spending they propose must lead to increases in taxation, but they’d rather leave the voters to connect those dots themselves than spell it out for them.
• Foreign Policy – the Democrats are essentially embarrassed for America and want to make things right with the rest of the world. Rather than believe that the US needs to act in its own interests, they believe it needs to do what will make the rest of the world happy. This means mea culpas over Iraq and Afghanistan and a speedy withdrawal from the former regardless of the consequences to the US or Iraq itself.
• Judges – at least in theory, John McCain would appoint the kind of judges Bush has to the Supreme and lower courts – that is, strict constructionists who will not read the constitution’s aura to find new “emanations” and “penumbras” containing hitherto hidden meaning justifying massive increases in governmental power. These judges would further continue to take the court in the direction it has been going in the last several years on abortion, finding room for more restrictions on it and perhaps eventually overturning Roe vs. Wade and leaving individual states to determine their own abortion laws.
• Healthcare. Here, the Republican position is essentially to do nothing to change the current system, which has flaws but consistently provides higher standards of health care to the vast majority of Americans than citizens of any other country enjoy. Democrats, of course, want to effectively nationalize healthcare and turn the American system into a more expensive version of Britain’s National Health Service, with bloated bureaucracies and massive waiting lists coupled with second-world care.

These are, I think, the four key reasons why anyone who supports the Republican position on these issues needs to be actively engaged with the electoral process and committed to getting John McCain elected. The economy is a red herring as an issue, other than as it relates to tax policy. Education is another where there is little daylight between the positions of the candidates or parties. But these issues ought to get Republicans energized and invested in the process, because if they don’t win there will be a significant negative impact on our economy and way of life.

I posted a few months back about JFK and Democratic snobbery.The thrust of that post was that Democrats, while claiming to be the party of the little guy – of the working class – in fact engages in a greater degree of snobbishness than the Republicans, who nominally favor the middle and upper classes and have little sympathy for the little guy.

Barack Obama this week has demonstrated that, for all his appeal to the little guy and his suggestion that he had a hard-knocks upbringing, he’s just as guilty of this as his predecessors have been. The comments in question came at a poorly-reported event in California, and ironically were only reported by a liberal blogger at the Huffington Post:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The comments were made to a snooty crowd and so to some extent the snobbishness is not out of place. But of course these days you can’t tailor your message to audiences in such a way that you can cater to one with comments that will be taken hard by another, and Obama’s found out the hard way. Both McCain and Clinton have pounced on the remarks and made hay as much as they could. But this is just another signal that Obama may not be quite the friend of the little guy many think he is.

It appears that Obama may actually have a policy we can really associate with him, albeit one which seems to be being pursued more aggressively by another Senator keen to use his name just at the moment (no prizes for guessing why). The Hot Air blog highlights an interview with Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio published by the Nation in which he states the following:

I’ve talked to Barack a lot about his Patriot Corporation Act, which is not trade per se, but it’s certainly part of the economic package around globalization. The Patriot Corporation Act has not gotten the attention that I would hope it would. But, basically it says that if you play by the rules, if you pay decent wages, health benefits, pension; do your production here; don’t resist unionization on neutral card check, then you will be designated a “Patriot Corporation” and you will get tax advantages and some [preference] on government contracts.

So we have something Barack Obama apparently believes in enough that he was willing to put pen to paper (or have his staffers put pen to paper) to craft legislation to make it a reality. And is it the kind of soaring, high-minded proposal we’ve all come to expect based on that wonderful rhetoric of his? Er, no.

It’s clear where the Nation’s own William Greider stands on this – he thinks it’s wonderful. But it’s just a tiny bit shortsighted, isn’t it? For starters, it ignores the main reasons why companies offshore and outsource in the first place – high labor costs (thank you Democrats), lots of burdensome regulation (thank you Democrats), high taxes (thank you Democrats) etc. etc. It reminds me of the experience we’ve all had sometimes – we have a table or chair where one of the legs is short, so we trim the others to make them symmetrical, but then we realise we overdid it, and now we have to go back to the original one and shorten that a bit too. Pretty soon we realise the table or chair is now about the right height for a garden gnome and give up and throw it away. The Democrats’ tendency to want to intervene throughout the economy will lead to the same result – one bit of tinkering leads to another and before long we’ve completely hamstrung the entire business sector and have nothing but a mountain of unemployment and a recession to show for it.

I’m just glad we finally know where Obama stands on something, and it’s particularly wonderful that it highlights the heavily left-leaning, interventionist philosophy we all know is hiding beneath the “yes we cans” and the unity message. Now if we could just infiltrate the mainstream media enough to actually get them to report on this stuff…

James Taranto in his Best of the Web column today puts into words very well something I’ve been thinking for some time but haven’t been able to express nearly so well:

Such empty oppositionalism has been the dominant theme of Democratic politics at least since the emergence of Howard Dean in 2003. But there is a weird genius about the way Obama, with his soothing style and inspiring persona, is able to present it as if it were something of real substance.

This is the real issue with Obama – there’s no substance there and yet he’s able somehow to convince his supporters that there is. Will the media ever call him on this? Or will the scales fall from the electorate’s eyes at some point anyway? I find it hard to believe that he can really keep this up for another nine months, but with the media’s help it’s perhaps just possible.

An article in the Wall Street Journal today captures nicely the disconnect between those who ought to be the natural supporters of the Democratic Party (and its equivalents in other countries) and those who actually hold most of the leadership positions in those parties. The article is about the way the Democratic party has lost its way since the days of JFK precisely by misunderstanding and inflating the achievements and appeal of JFK himself. Towards the end we get the following astute observations (emphasis mine):

“John F. Kennedy & Co. took the party up-market, making it an Ivy League and, later, a Hollywood operation. After the Kennedy administration, the Democrats were no longer the party of the little man (Harry Truman’s party), or the party of the underdog (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s party), but that of the intellectual and cultural sahibs pretending to speak for the little man and the underdogs because it makes them feel virtuous to do so; they turn politics into an affair of snobbery, where politicians are judged on elegance not substance. One recalls how much of an outsider the Kennedy people made Lyndon Baines Johnson feel — LBJ, that vulgar Texan who attended Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

Because of the regularity with which John F. Kennedy’s name is invoked by his skillful PR flacks, the Democrats keep turning up rather anemic Kennedy imitators — Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, John Kerry (with only an occasional genuine hustler like Bill Clinton popping up almost by accident) — to head their presidential tickets. But the criteria for president of the United States aren’t the same as those set by the deans of admission at Harvard or Yale, Brown or Duke. The happy snobbery of feeling culturally superior and morally virtuous that is at the heart of the Kennedy myth shouldn’t be what politics is about.”

The quote attributed to Andrew Jackson, “One man with courage makes a majority,” (see this link for an explanation of why we shouldn’t really attribute it to him) appears to have been both taken a little literally and distorted by his political descendants.

For the last several years (essentially since the 2000 election) Democrats and other liberals have acted as if small groups with strong enough opinions should be treated as if they were in fact majorities. After accusing George W Bush of “stealing” that election, they have since claimed that he was “not listening” on the war in Iraq, that we needed to pull out of the war, etc. even though for a long time these people did not constitute a majority. James Taranto included some comments on a recent story in his Best of the Web column this week (see Vandals for Peace).

Although the 2000 election provides a pretext (the 2004 election surely should have neutralised this, but of course didn’t), Democrats no longer even tie their civil disobedience back to the stolen election. They just act like they’re in the majority, and express disbelief when neither Bush himself nor their elected Democratic leaders in Congress are willing to adopt their extreme positions. They assume this means that they are “not listening” rather than understanding that their political leaders have listened and yet disagree with them. This must be particularly frustrating for them since Democrats now have a literal majority in Congress and yet haven’t pulled troops out yet. On the other hand, it appears the original quote (even if attributed to Jackson’s biographer and not Jackson himself) appears to have been “desperate courage makes one a majority” – so not such a far cry from the Democrats’ current interpretation “desperation makes a majority”.

Will this trend continue, or will things change if a Democrat wins in 2008? Chances are, the left wing of the left wing will continue to be unhappy with virtually any political leadership and will continue to act as if its strong opinions (not courage) make a majority.