Life of Kings

Maybe running for president and being president are the same thing

Clinton used to hammer Obama with the line that running for president and being president were not the same thing, in order to point out to undecideds that just because Obama can look presidential up on stage doesn’t mean he’d make a great president

In yesterday’s Washington Post though Peter Beinart refutes this idea, pointing out that, “presidents tend to govern the way they campaigned.”

He goes on:

Of the three candidates still in the 2008 race, Obama has run the best campaign by far. McCain’s was a top-heavy, slow-moving, money-hemorrhaging Hindenburg that eventually exploded, leaving the Arizona senator to resurrect his bankrupt candidacy through sheer force of will. Clinton’s campaign has been marked by vicious infighting and organizational weakness, as manifested by her terrible performance in caucus states.

Obama’s, by contrast, has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer. From the beginning, the Obama campaign has run circles around its foes on the Internet, using MySpace, Facebook and other Web tools to develop a virtual army of more than 1 million donors. The result has been fundraising numbers that have left opponents slack-jawed (last month Obama raised $40 million, compared with Clinton’s $20 million).

There is a lot of truth it seems to me. As pundits and oppo research pour over the childhoods and Senate careers of the candidates to figure out how they’ll act when they are in the Oval Office, the best play is to look is how they are every day out on the hustings.

This is because nothing can quite prepare someone for being president quite like campaigning. Campaigns are incredibly drain, require super-human feats of energy, and involve rallying people around new ideas. Candidates have to think on the feet, respond to crisis, and yet somehow exude inspire and exude charm and compassion.

In the early days of this race, when Clinton seemed all but inevitable, the best argument she had going for her was that she was running a near flawless campaign. I remember thinking in those days before Iowa, that if Clinton is a president anywhere near like she is a campaigner, then she would make a fabulous president. Her campaign up to that point exuded competence, beat back every refutation, and made shockingly few slip-ups.

But then the campaign sunk under its own weight, and tripped up Clinton in all the ways her backers feared—she seemed to shift personas constantly, her upper level staff was riven by infighting, and things of course descended from there.

Obama meanwhile has kept his campaign on message, tamped down any internal divisions, and dealt with mistakes (see Powers, Samantha) quickly, before any squalls could turn into storms. If he governs like he campaigns …

The Case for Clinton

Fascinating piece out of Salon today by Princeton history professor and avowed Clintonista Sean Wilentz on how HRC has been hung up by the Dems’ Byzantine electoral process:

Obama’s advantage hinges on a system that, whatever the actual intentions behind it, seems custom-made to hobble Democratic chances in the fall. It depends on ignoring one of the central principles of American electoral politics, one that will be operative on a state-by-state basis this November, which is that the winner takes all. If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.

 

This, of course, has been Hillary’s take for months.

And Wilentz’s take is a little bit of a flimsy one. Rules is rules, and if the rules were different, it seems reasonable to imagine that Obama would have been running a different kind of campaign, one that focused less on eeking out wins in small states and pouring more resources into the big-ticket items.

And for what it’s worth, the Dems, by doing proportional representation, do the thing right. It means that voters in every state, even those that vastly favor one candidate or another, count, unlike in the general election, which for all intents and purposes, disenfranchises all voters except those in Ohio.

The Death and Life of Politics in American Cities

The way most presidential elections play out, you’d think that the big issues facing the country are the demise of the family farm and the decline of the industrial base, while the 70% of us who live in urban areas are like the voters of Florida and Michigan: forgotten, forlorn, and dismissed.
At least that’s the way Inga Saffron sees it. The architectural critic for Philly Inquirer, she calls out the three candidates still standing for painting a picture of the United States as  “a collection of Norman Rockwell small towns surrounded by picture-book farms. “

She goes on:

For Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the plight of rural farm families ranks among the urgent crises facing America. Republican John McCain frets about veterans, the unborn, outer space. But you won’t hear much about aging cities on Earth fighting to keep their downtowns alive and their overcrowded commuter buses on the road. Cities just don’t figure in the political imagination anymore.

She has a point.  Out on the hustings, these guys are far more likely to be out touring chocolate factories or downing beers in American Legion Hall (both worthwhile activities, don’t get me wrong) than talking about important things, like gentrification, sprawl, why the 2 and 3 trains run so slow on weekends, etc.

Oddly, all the key issues—immigration, environmental sustainability, homeland security, all pass through cities in one way or another.

Saffron again:

Supposedly, the reason that candidates are loathe to mention the C-word is that the Suburban Nation of grill-obsessed dads and van-driving moms dominates the electorate. Since it’s assumed that cities will vote Democratic no matter how badly they’re treated, there’s no percentage for either party to talk up things like pocket parks, waterfront development, or - can you imagine? - wasteful sprawl. Besides, the discussion will only alienate voters who still associate an urban platform with cities in flames.

This is true, but the real reason cities are invisible in the national conversation, is I think, much deeper. Cities in America have always been seen as too dirty, too crowded, too immigrant, too radical, too perverted to be really and truly American.

From the earliest days of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson hated them, considering them to be, as he wrote to Benjamin Rush, “as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.”

Indeed it was not that long—the late 1980’s at least—that cities were thought to be hopeless charity cases, places of futile rehabilitation that were  the deathtraps of starry-eyed Jimmy Carter like idealism.

Obviously, this has changed. Saffron says this is because of cities getting a little Sex-and-the-City type glamour, but I think the fabulous life of Carrie Bradshaw was symptomatic of larger cultural changes than a cause of them.

The real reason that cities have turned around is because people, especially young people, decided that they were cool again, and that commuting out from Westchester or Marin County, in a word, sucks.  For other sociological reasons, those same young people started marrying later, which meant they stayed in cities longer, which meant they made—and spent—more money for a longer period of time.

And next thing you know—boom! you get the “Big Apples Little Boom,” as the Washington Post called it.

But again, why no place for us in the political discourse? Oddly, the best chance urban issues got to have a real serious airing was in the brief happy presidential run of Rudy Giuliani.

And we all know how well that went