H. N. Burdett
The HBO presentation of "Game Change" probably will not change the thinking of those who write and produce docu-dramas hereafter, but it should.
In preparation for watching it, I re-read the chapters of the book on which the movie focused. I was impressed by how faithful the film was to the 2008 presidential campaign page-turner by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, among the best of that genre.
The television version is necessarily limited in scope and the behind-the-scenes John McCain-Sarah Palin portion of the Heilemann-Halperin opus was dramatized to near perfection. One critic has correctly noted that the tranformative campaign of four years ago could have become an eminently watchable mini-series. The book covers the runs for the Democratic presidential nomination that year by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the McCain-Palin saga.
Both Palin and McCain have dismissed the television production without actually viewing it, which can only mean that they were less than thrilled with the book on which it was based. That's too bad because Ed Harris's portrayal of McCain, if anything, enhances the senator's image as a politician who flatly refuses to play mudball politics. And Julianne Moore, in the role of Palin, at times poignantly reveals a side of Palin that would give pause to at least a few entrenched liberal Democrats who see the erstwhile Alaska governor as the personification of everything they detest.
Though no self-respecting progressive watching "Game Change" could be converted to Palin's politics, there might be at least a dollop of empathy for her as a human being going through emotions shared by all of those who have ever confronted a challenge that was simply over their heads.
Palin is revealed in both the book and the movie as a successful Alaska politician who was clearly out of her depth once she was elevated to the national stage. Stephen Schmidt, the senior McCain campaign strategist played by Woody Harrelson, freely admits that the Palin vetting process was shoddy at best. Nicolle Wallace, Palin's "handler" during the campaign, was understandably frustrated and ultimately distraught in feeling that Palin was a detached prima donna.
But both Schmidt and Wallace also seem to be shifting the entire blame, which in reality both shared, to those who checked out Palin and gave her their enthusiastic approval. Though not mentioned in either the book or the movie, the latter included neo-conservative intellectuals William Kristol and Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, who went up to Juneau to meet Palin personally. My guess is that they came back believing they could easily mold and manipulate her into a spirited advocate for their fatally-flawed foreign policy views. That Kristol and Barnes later turned their spineless backs on the Alaska governor speaks volumes about their paltry principles, something McCain, a congenital hawk, would never have done and indeed did not.
In the end, McCain's feeling completely comfortable with Palin was what led to the decision that ultimately sank any hope at all he had of winning the presidency. Whatever else one might feel about the Arizona senator, there can be no disagreement regarding his unwavering loyalty, which is generally lauded as a commendably courageous trait but can also be a crippling weakness.
Reasonable questions arise as to why, when Palin's insurmountable shortcomings were recognized, she was not cut loose from the ticket. If this was ever suggested to McCain, he almost certainly would have rejected it - not necessarily because of his refusal to admit that he was wrong, but rather because, as a maverick politician as well as a onetime purposeless youth who had himself undergone an incredible transformation, he could identify with her plight in ways his campaign staff could not.
Furthermore, abandoning her might have been even a greater political risk than keeping her on the ticket. There was the case of George McGovern, who as the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, dropped his running mate, Tom Eagleton, in mid-campaign. Eagleton had not revealed to McGovern his long earlier nervous breakdown, and it was the very reason the vetting process became more exhaustive in subsequent national campaigns, at least until 2008. After Eagleton was dumped and replaced by Sargent Shriver, questions arose regarding McGovern's initial judgment in making his vice presidential choice and later about his loyalty when he declined to stand by his running mate. While this may not fully explain why the Democratic national ticket was crushed in that election year, it most certainly did not help.
One need not be a Palin die-hard to wonder why even a marginally competent staff could have been so clueless about the need to take special pains to prepare a state governor with absolutely no foreign policy experience, much less expertise, for a national campaign.
When Schmidt finally presented Palin with 25 talking points and four "attack lines," and reiterated the necessity to pivot away from certain questions, she did well enough. But this was a textbook case of too little, too late. More recently, Mitt Romney clumsily executed such a pivot in a television interview. When the reporter repeated the original query, Romney told the interviewer he was free to ask his questions and he, the candidate, was equally free to respond the way he chose. Rather than finding himself mired in yet another swamp of vilification for that graceless riposte, as Palin doubtless would have been, the incident was all but ignored by the media.
The larger and unresolved question is why Palin was not presented with the talking points to memorize well before her bungled interview with Katie Couric revealed that the Alaska governor was a foreign policy featherweight. Was there really no one in McCain's seasoned inner circle to suggest that she learn talking points and how to bob and weave around and away from an interviewer's grilling? Palin's ability to deliver rousing red-meat speeches, both at Wright State University in Ohio and at the GOP National Convention, had convinced McCain's campaign staff that all would come up roses if they just let Sarah be Sarah.
Next to an inexplicably incompetent job of vetting, McCain's people flubbed the preparation process that would be fundamental in running the campaign of the town dogcatcher. That savvy professionals like Schmidt, Wallace and Mark Salter allowed crucial slips through the cracks proliferate beyond damage control is, in a word, inexcusable.
No two campaigns are exactly alike. There are pitfalls around every corner. While it is not always apparent when or where they may occur, the one certainty is that they will. The job of the campaign strategist is to expect them to pop up, be able to respond quickly when they do happen, know the candidate's strengths and deficiencies, know how to emphasize the former and be as thoroughly prepared as possible for the latter. The best possible preparation cannot avoid or retaliate against every potential slip-up, but the bottom line was that the Palin debacle, which many blame for McCain's defeat, was as much the campaign team's fault as it was her own.
None of this, however, should be a distraction from the glaring fact that the process for selecting vice presidential candidates is long overdue for closer examination.
Running mates have been selected less on their ability to serve as president than on how they can help the ticket win. That assistance is generally sought to compensate for an obvious shortcoming at the top of the ticket, which can range from the perception that the vice presidential choice might bring a key state, or even entire regions of the country, into the fold, to filling an experience or ideological gap in the presidential nominee's makeup.
For example, John F. Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator, selected Texan Lyndon Johnson as much for the probability that the latter could carry his electoral vote-rich home state as for his mastery of the United States Senate. At the other end of the spectrum, George H. W. Bush was perceived to have chosen Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, less for his legislative acumen than to ensure that Bush, a bland and colorless presidential nominee, would not be upstaged by someone more vibrant and colorful.
In McCain's case, there were three decisive factors for choosing Palin: (1) She could deliver hardball rhetoric likely to woo the GOP's conservative base that had not been enamored of McCain's ideological transgressions as a member of Congress;(2) She just might resonate with women who felt Hillary Clinton was the victim of a raw deal by Democratic primary voters who preferred a relatively inexperienced, freshman senator merely because Hillary happens to be a woman, and (3) McCain saw her in his own image as a maverick unafraid to buck the party line when the occasion called for it.
The apparent very last consideration in a national campaign is whether the vice presidential nominee will be able to immediately assume the role of leader of the nation and the free world. The most significant decision the top of the ticket must make is who will be next in line of succession should the unthinkable happen. If "Game Change" should somehow finally lead to a serious re-thinking of this vital question, it will have become a truly unique entity - something unlike anything the realm of art and entertainment has ever before achieved.
###
Friday, March 16, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
THE FAULT LINE IN COMMON GROUND
H. N. Burdett
While recent polls show that 82.5 percent of the American public disapprove of the job the United States Congress is doing, one would be hard pressed to find anyone professing to be among the 11.3 percent who approve. The polls do not reveal how the media stands on our representatives in Washington. But the legendary Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen pointed out some seven decades back that Congress-bashing has been a time-honored pastime of the media.
In July 1942, Dirksen read to his colleagues a litany of newspaper and magazine criticism of national lawmakers, including:
(1837) "A more weak, bigoted, persecuting and intolerant set of instruments of malice and every hateful passion, were never assembled in a legislative capacity in any age or any land."
(1873) "We are not certain that it is not possible to make the situation worse and Congress would probably speedily reach that result if that were possible."
(1908) "If God had made Congress, he would not boast of it."
(1942) "It is true that for collective brains, guts, vision and leadership, the Seventy-seventh would stand pretty close to the bottom in any ranking of the seventy-seven Congresses that have assembled...since 1789."
Polarization of the two major U.S. political parties has virtually stagnated the current Congress on virtually every major issue confronting it. National lawmakers' perpetual legislative treadmill has assigned to the realm of limbo priorities ranging from the budget to possible remedies for a swifter recovery from the worst economy since the 1929 stock market crash.
Neither of the two parties is blameless. President Obama turning his back on the report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Simpson-Bowles), which he himself had appointed to draw up a blueprint for compromise, must be counted as a major disappointment of his presidency. The report placed on the table entitlements dear to Democrats, as well as taxes that are anathema to Republicans, draining any interest a significant segment of either party had in pursuing it.
Future historians would do well to examine closely the results of two ideology-fueled blunders of the present era: The congressional overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Supreme Court's overruling of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.
The calculated collapse of Glass-Steagall, which in 1932 legislated a firewall between commercial and investment banks, contributed substantially to the evidence that capitalism - a vital underpinning of American democracy - is unsustainable without reasonable regulations that are actually enforced.
Though Glass-Steagall did not assure foolproof protection against the chicanery of the least scrupulous of Wall Street operatives, for nearly 70 years it at least prevented wholesale conflicts of interest by prohibiting commercial banks from peddling securities - including those that were deceptively risky and others that were blatantly worthless.
Three Republican lawmakers - Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and Representatives Jim Leach of Iowa and Tom Blilely of Virginia - introduced legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives to end Glass-Steagall. This pried the lid from the Wall Street cookie jar and the crumbs could be followed down the path of economic disaster.
Polarization further led to the brazen distortion of the U.S. Constitution by those charged with dispensing justice from the nation's pinnacle of jurisprudence: the Supreme Court.
Conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy voted to overturn McCain-Feingold in the Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case on grounds that the law violated corporations' right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Their 5-4 decision opened the door for unlimited sums from undisclosed sources to influence elections.
The cornerstone of Justice John Paul Stevens's 90-age dissent was that the Constitution protects individual rather than corporate rights. For conservatives who had railed long and loud against political activist jurists to deny that their ruling was anything but judicial activism is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty if not outright hypocrisy.
Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, among the few remaining GOP moderates in the U.S. Senate, not only voted for McCain-Feingold, she was also one of the fewer still members of her party to denounce the Court's Citizens United ruling. In her words, the decision was "a great disservice to American democracy."
Sen. Snowe recently announced that she will not seek a fourth term in the Senate. In a Washington Post op-ed explaining her decision, Senator Snowe wrote: "The great challenge is to create a system that gives our elected officials reason to look past their differences and find common ground if their initial party positions fail to garner sufficient support. In a politically diverse nation, only by finding that common ground can we achieve results for the common good. That is not happening today and, frankly, I do not see it happening in the near future."
The 1963 Civil Rights Act, which has been characterized as the completion of the "second American Revolution," was dependent upon the earlier mentioned Senator Dirksen rallying sufficient Republican votes to ensure its passage. Were that same decision left up to the present U.S. Congress, that landmark legislation would languish in the desert of irresponsible inaction. Inability by the major political parties to locate common ground is without doubt the greatest and continuing threat to American democracy.
###
C
o
While recent polls show that 82.5 percent of the American public disapprove of the job the United States Congress is doing, one would be hard pressed to find anyone professing to be among the 11.3 percent who approve. The polls do not reveal how the media stands on our representatives in Washington. But the legendary Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen pointed out some seven decades back that Congress-bashing has been a time-honored pastime of the media.
In July 1942, Dirksen read to his colleagues a litany of newspaper and magazine criticism of national lawmakers, including:
(1837) "A more weak, bigoted, persecuting and intolerant set of instruments of malice and every hateful passion, were never assembled in a legislative capacity in any age or any land."
(1873) "We are not certain that it is not possible to make the situation worse and Congress would probably speedily reach that result if that were possible."
(1908) "If God had made Congress, he would not boast of it."
(1942) "It is true that for collective brains, guts, vision and leadership, the Seventy-seventh would stand pretty close to the bottom in any ranking of the seventy-seven Congresses that have assembled...since 1789."
Polarization of the two major U.S. political parties has virtually stagnated the current Congress on virtually every major issue confronting it. National lawmakers' perpetual legislative treadmill has assigned to the realm of limbo priorities ranging from the budget to possible remedies for a swifter recovery from the worst economy since the 1929 stock market crash.
Neither of the two parties is blameless. President Obama turning his back on the report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Simpson-Bowles), which he himself had appointed to draw up a blueprint for compromise, must be counted as a major disappointment of his presidency. The report placed on the table entitlements dear to Democrats, as well as taxes that are anathema to Republicans, draining any interest a significant segment of either party had in pursuing it.
Future historians would do well to examine closely the results of two ideology-fueled blunders of the present era: The congressional overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Supreme Court's overruling of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.
The calculated collapse of Glass-Steagall, which in 1932 legislated a firewall between commercial and investment banks, contributed substantially to the evidence that capitalism - a vital underpinning of American democracy - is unsustainable without reasonable regulations that are actually enforced.
Though Glass-Steagall did not assure foolproof protection against the chicanery of the least scrupulous of Wall Street operatives, for nearly 70 years it at least prevented wholesale conflicts of interest by prohibiting commercial banks from peddling securities - including those that were deceptively risky and others that were blatantly worthless.
Three Republican lawmakers - Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and Representatives Jim Leach of Iowa and Tom Blilely of Virginia - introduced legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives to end Glass-Steagall. This pried the lid from the Wall Street cookie jar and the crumbs could be followed down the path of economic disaster.
Polarization further led to the brazen distortion of the U.S. Constitution by those charged with dispensing justice from the nation's pinnacle of jurisprudence: the Supreme Court.
Conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy voted to overturn McCain-Feingold in the Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case on grounds that the law violated corporations' right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Their 5-4 decision opened the door for unlimited sums from undisclosed sources to influence elections.
The cornerstone of Justice John Paul Stevens's 90-age dissent was that the Constitution protects individual rather than corporate rights. For conservatives who had railed long and loud against political activist jurists to deny that their ruling was anything but judicial activism is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty if not outright hypocrisy.
Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, among the few remaining GOP moderates in the U.S. Senate, not only voted for McCain-Feingold, she was also one of the fewer still members of her party to denounce the Court's Citizens United ruling. In her words, the decision was "a great disservice to American democracy."
Sen. Snowe recently announced that she will not seek a fourth term in the Senate. In a Washington Post op-ed explaining her decision, Senator Snowe wrote: "The great challenge is to create a system that gives our elected officials reason to look past their differences and find common ground if their initial party positions fail to garner sufficient support. In a politically diverse nation, only by finding that common ground can we achieve results for the common good. That is not happening today and, frankly, I do not see it happening in the near future."
The 1963 Civil Rights Act, which has been characterized as the completion of the "second American Revolution," was dependent upon the earlier mentioned Senator Dirksen rallying sufficient Republican votes to ensure its passage. Were that same decision left up to the present U.S. Congress, that landmark legislation would languish in the desert of irresponsible inaction. Inability by the major political parties to locate common ground is without doubt the greatest and continuing threat to American democracy.
###
C
o
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Corporate Political Access and Free Speech
H. N. Burdett
"A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold," wrote Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in his 90-page dissent from the court's 5-4 decision in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission case. That ruling swung open the door for super political action committees to pour unlimited funds from undisclosed sources into election campaigns.
Citing data to reveal that 80% of the American public feel unfair legislative access is what corporations receive in return for generously contributing to a candidate's campaign war chest, Justice Stevens predicted that corporate domination of elections would lead to disaffected voters ceasing to participate in elections.
Stevens challenged the contention of the court's conservative majority, which voted solidly in favor of Citizens United, that restricting corporate spending on political campaigns was a denial of free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. He argued that the First Amendment protects individual self-expression, self-realization and the communication of ideas and that corporations are not entitled to the same constitutional protections as individuals.
Stevens concluded that the court's majority opinion was "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government. . .and have fought the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. . .While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of the Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
Along with a number of Democrats, Republican Senators John McCain and Olympia Snowe spoke out against the Citizens United ruling. McCain predicted "a backlash. . .when you see the amounts of union and corporate money that's going into political campaigns." Senator Snowe characterized the Court's decision as a "serious disservice to our country."
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who placed third in the last three presidential elections, said, "With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of cororate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars."
Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and columnist George Will, staunchly defend Citizens United, arguably the worst Supreme Court decision since the 1857 Dred Scott ruling which upheld the abominable argument equating human beings with property. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, has introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
Two years ago, the DISCLOSE act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, and in the Senate by Charles Schumer, D-New York. The legislation would not have overturned Citizens United. But it would have required transparency, including timely disclosure of funds corporations donate to super PACS that spend money on campaign advertisements. It further required lobbyists to disclose campaign expenditures to contributing corporations' shareholders. The measure would have forced super PACS to reveal their five largest donors in each political ad and further compel heads of these groups to approve an ad's message at the end of each ad. This would have at least identified corporations and organizations with at least 500,000 members that were exercising their dubious freedom of speech right by seeking to buy elections.
The initial DISCLOSE act of 2010 was approved in the House of Representatives by a 219-206 vote. Only two Republicans - Mike Castle of Delaware and Joseph Cao of Louisiana - voted for it. Neither is still in Congress. The bill failed in the Senate by a single vote. All 59 Democratic senators voted in favor of the measure, but no Republicans offered support.
Rep. Van Hollen re-introduced the bill earlier this year, stating: "We need to restore accountability in our elections. The American people have a right to know the source of the money that is being spent to influence the outcome of our elections. They should be told who is behind the millions of dollars in campaign ads and they should receive this information in a timely fashion."
Citizens United gives labor unions, which traditionally support Democratic candidates, the same First Amendment right as corporations, which historically back Republican candidates. Why then is the Republican National Committee pursuing its current state-by-state union-busting campaigns? Which, of course, has nothing to do with the unions' empowerment under Citizens United, right?
That odor one detects emanating from the conservative establishment's rabid support of the Supreme Court's cynical Citizens United decision is the stench of the defense of political corruption once an opening to advantageously tilt the playing field is recognized.
###
"A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold," wrote Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in his 90-page dissent from the court's 5-4 decision in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission case. That ruling swung open the door for super political action committees to pour unlimited funds from undisclosed sources into election campaigns.
Citing data to reveal that 80% of the American public feel unfair legislative access is what corporations receive in return for generously contributing to a candidate's campaign war chest, Justice Stevens predicted that corporate domination of elections would lead to disaffected voters ceasing to participate in elections.
Stevens challenged the contention of the court's conservative majority, which voted solidly in favor of Citizens United, that restricting corporate spending on political campaigns was a denial of free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. He argued that the First Amendment protects individual self-expression, self-realization and the communication of ideas and that corporations are not entitled to the same constitutional protections as individuals.
Stevens concluded that the court's majority opinion was "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government. . .and have fought the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. . .While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of the Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
Along with a number of Democrats, Republican Senators John McCain and Olympia Snowe spoke out against the Citizens United ruling. McCain predicted "a backlash. . .when you see the amounts of union and corporate money that's going into political campaigns." Senator Snowe characterized the Court's decision as a "serious disservice to our country."
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who placed third in the last three presidential elections, said, "With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of cororate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars."
Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and columnist George Will, staunchly defend Citizens United, arguably the worst Supreme Court decision since the 1857 Dred Scott ruling which upheld the abominable argument equating human beings with property. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, has introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
Two years ago, the DISCLOSE act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, and in the Senate by Charles Schumer, D-New York. The legislation would not have overturned Citizens United. But it would have required transparency, including timely disclosure of funds corporations donate to super PACS that spend money on campaign advertisements. It further required lobbyists to disclose campaign expenditures to contributing corporations' shareholders. The measure would have forced super PACS to reveal their five largest donors in each political ad and further compel heads of these groups to approve an ad's message at the end of each ad. This would have at least identified corporations and organizations with at least 500,000 members that were exercising their dubious freedom of speech right by seeking to buy elections.
The initial DISCLOSE act of 2010 was approved in the House of Representatives by a 219-206 vote. Only two Republicans - Mike Castle of Delaware and Joseph Cao of Louisiana - voted for it. Neither is still in Congress. The bill failed in the Senate by a single vote. All 59 Democratic senators voted in favor of the measure, but no Republicans offered support.
Rep. Van Hollen re-introduced the bill earlier this year, stating: "We need to restore accountability in our elections. The American people have a right to know the source of the money that is being spent to influence the outcome of our elections. They should be told who is behind the millions of dollars in campaign ads and they should receive this information in a timely fashion."
Citizens United gives labor unions, which traditionally support Democratic candidates, the same First Amendment right as corporations, which historically back Republican candidates. Why then is the Republican National Committee pursuing its current state-by-state union-busting campaigns? Which, of course, has nothing to do with the unions' empowerment under Citizens United, right?
That odor one detects emanating from the conservative establishment's rabid support of the Supreme Court's cynical Citizens United decision is the stench of the defense of political corruption once an opening to advantageously tilt the playing field is recognized.
###
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