Primary Thread 3: Race to Denver

[DirtyMartini]

Originally posted by Oerdin


If she doesn't get the majority of delegates then her choices are to quit and wait 4-8 years or to take a place like VP. I'd even say accepting the VP spot puts her in a better position to eventually make another run at being big cheese.

Can't imagine Hillary wanting to be VP. Can't imagine Obama wanting Hillary to be his VP.

Hillary running for prez in 8 years? (It wouldn't be in 4 if she became the veep). She'd be very OLD, that's already a minor ding on her -- that she looks old and tired. If she did run again in 8 years though, the good thing would be that she wouldn't have to change any speeches -- she'd still be able to run on a platform of universalizing health care and getting out of Iraq.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by DirtyMartini
Can't imagine Obama wanting Hillary to be his VP.

He's all about "change." She's all about "experience" i.e the opposite of change. He's Mr. Let's-Get-Along. She's Ms. HighNegatives. It's not a good fit.

Hillary for Senate Pro Tem.

[Ramo]

Pro Temp is a powerless position. She'd be after Majority Leader (or a Supreme Court appointment).

[Kontiki]

If the Dems win, they should see about getting Hillary and Bill on the Supreme Court. How many heads would explode if that happened?

[DinoDoc]

Bill was disbarred IIRC.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Bill was disbarred IIRC.

I had forgotten about that. But IIRC, it wasn't a formal disbarment but rather he "voluntarily" surrendered his license to practice law. --Same effect.

[Ramo]

BTW, TNR has some interesting commentary on Obama's victory speech:

Obama's Best Speech Yet

It's been a week or so since I've heard Obama's stump speech, so maybe this is old news. But -- wow -- he is really going after John McCain. And he's doing a damn fine job of it.

He started by honoring McCain's service, with all apparent sincerity, and then pivoted quickly to this line: "John McCain has the wrong priorities -- because they are bound to the policies of the past." He then promised "a clear choice," tying McCain to the Bush tax cuts and, in particular, the war in Iraq: "John McCain won't be able to say I ever supported this war in Iraq, because I opposed it from the start. Senator McCain said the other day we mght be mired for a hundred years in iraq. A hundred years -- which is reason enough not to give him four years in the White House."**

The rest of the speech was Obama at its best: Compared to his early speeches, he's far more deft at weaving policy into his promises of movement-building. As I said previously, where he used to talk about change for change's sake, now he talks about specific changes -- and how he intends to build a popular mandate for those changes.

He's also doing a nice job of mixing the old Clintonian theme of rights and responsibliity. Talking about his proposals for college tuition assistance, coupled with national service, he promsied, "We'll invest in you, you invest in your country, together we'll move forward, that's what we dream of."

Towards the end of the speech, he returned to his theme of "yes we can" -- but in a way different than I hard heard before. (Again, maybe he's been doing this lately and I just missed it.) He tied that theme to all the great movements in American history -- the revolutionaries who fought the British for independence, the abolitionists who crusaded against slavery, the Greatest Generation who served in World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and so on. Not only did this cloak his ideas in the mantle of patriotism, which is always a good thing, but linked them -- once again -- to tangible, pivotal changes in American life, which is precisely what his campaign needs to be promising.

One final note -- and please forgive a little theatrical commentary here. I've had the opportunity to do some public speaking lately. And I've found, as I'm sure others have, that there are some nights when you are on and some when you are off -- some nights when you feel it and some nights when you just don't. I suppose it's like any other performance art or sport in that way.

Well, tonight I thought Obama felt it. He was at turns funny and poignant, cool and yet energized. I thought it was his best speech yet.*

*Yea, I think I said that last time. Why do I think I'll be saying it again soon?

--Jonathan Cohn

I'm inclined to agree. A really good speech, and the contrast with McCain's victory speech (which amounted to "boo welfare state, boo Islamofascists, yay Fear, I'm terrible at delivering speeches") couldn't have been stronger. McCain, who apparently is going to run on staying in Iraq and opposing universal health care, is a lot weaker than everyone seems to think.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
I had forgotten about that. But IIRC, it wasn't a formal disbarment but rather he "voluntarily" surrendered his license to practice law. --Same effect.

He volunteered to be booted from the SCOTUS bar. He was forcibly booted from the AR bar for 5 years. That ban maybe up already but I don't know if he'd have to take the bar exam again to get his license back though.

[Zkribbler]

He almost certainly NOT have to take the bar exam again.

I see some of this type of stuff here in Cali. The most the State Bar Court might order is that the attorney retake the "ethics" portion* of the exam as a condition of reinstatement.


______________________________
* That's right. Attorneys have an ethics portion on the bar exam. --Stop laughing!

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Arrian
Political systems do tend to suck.

How's yours?

sucks in different ways

when parties have internal elections though we have a single result even when it's not accurate

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
That's right. Attorneys have an ethics portion on the bar exam. --Stop laughing!

I think they need to fix that exam.

[Impaler[WrG]]

As a Constitutional law professor Obama is the only one even remotely qualified to be on the Sup ream Court, Bill on the SC is a total pipe-dream and it would get shot down faster then Harriet Myers.

If Obama wins the nomination I don't think he or the party will need to give anything to Hillary or Bill in compensation. They were the establishment and for them to loss is essentially a coup and you will see them marginalized to a great degree. The Clinton's will be told to endorse and then get out of the public eye. Bill has squandered his legacy and won't be campaigning actively for Obama. If Obama wants to be magnanimous he might offer Hillary secretary of Health and Human Services but she will be enacting his policies rather then her own.

[Kidlicious]

Yeah, the Clintons have already said too many wrong things about Obama. That ship has sailed.

[Cyclotron]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Perhaps we are looking at this from different points of view. IMO, every candidate that emphasizes style is hoping (but not meeting) a cult of personality develops around him. In that way, he won't have to be drawn into a policy discussion and can simply focus on being inspiring or whatnot.

Now, like I said, that's not always a bad thing. But it isn't something I necessarily like.

The use of "cult of personality" I am familiar with is much more selective than that. In its perfect form, it looks a lot like this. It's not just charisma or inspiration; those things are just a part of leadership. Nobody is just a policy book on legs, and a policy wonk with no inspirational or leadership ability whatsoever would be a very poor president. A cult of personality is a negative attribution used to indicate that a leader is creating a cult of heroism and infallibility around himself as a national guide or savior - in its extreme form, it's Mao as the "great helmsman" or Hitler as "the greatest warlord of all time."

I think being "mass" fits in nicely with a COP outlook . I don't necessarily think Klein was bracketing his argument to only apply to one speech... I think he was trying to describe a general trend and using that event as an example. I think that his point in that was that the mass messianism, while apparent in the speech, flows beyond that.

Mass messianism is by definition not a cult of personality, because in a cult of personality the image of the leader as the single savior is emphasized. That doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive - at the risk of Godwinizing the thread, Nazi germany had a mass messianism of race that was simultaneous with the single messianism of Hitler, but those things were not the same thing. They don't have to coexist, however, and I don't think rhetoric on one necessarily implies the other.

I do think that Edwards expected that the unions/working class and the progressive movement at large would join behind him and catapult him to the nomination. If he's just going after the union vote, then there really was no sense to even run.

Again, I didn't say he only went after that. I said his rhetoric appeared to specifically speak to them; it's impossible to believe that the mill speech was deployed for any other reason than to win over the people who would be most affected by it. I like to give the candidates credit - they know what their easiest demographics are and pursue that assiduously even while they try to win over others too. Politics is about converting the moderates, but it's also about bringing out the base, especially in the early caucuses.

I use it to mean more 'hero worship', and like I said, some could apply to Clinton or McCain's rabid supporters. It is just that it appears Obama has far more of these folks who seemingly have joined on solely based on the personality of the candidate and the belief that he's somewhat of a savior for the democracy.

Maybe, but in my interaction with Obama supporters it's kind of a chicken-and-egg situation. The supporters, especially the vocal ones, talk about inspiration, but to some extent this is because inspiration is a concerted part of the campaign. Obama has more of the quality of the inspirational leader than Hillary does, and Obama supporters know it. Most that I've met, however (an unscientific sample, but a large one), when asked (by me) why they supported him, mentioned issues first - typically the Iraq War. When I made calls for Obama, the script was mostly about issues - the phone campaign, at least, doesn't seem to take the same tack as some of his speeches.

My point was that it isn't just me looking at things this way. I think McCain, in his speech last night, indirectly went after this when he was talking about the fact that his country saved him and he didn't think he was there to 'save the country'.

Yes, and McCain is surely an unbiased commentator

I don't have much to say to that - the argument "people agree with me" can only really be countered with "well, people agree with me too." I think it's problematic to conflate leadership style with a cult of personality; otherwise, we'd be calling "cult of personality" left and right in US politics (and everybody else's). I don't want "cult of personality" to be another misused phrase relegated to the meaning of "that person is popular and I dislike him." Khrushchev called it (speaking of Stalin) "to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior."

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Kidicious
Yeah, the Clintons have already said too many wrong things about Obama. That ship has sailed.

I don't think it will be the Clintons' Wrongspeak that gets them barred from the VP.

Remember when Papa Bush pointed out that Reagan's plan to balance the budget by cutting taxes was Voodoo Economics? Papa Bush was selected as VP because he'd bring moderates to the voting booth. But the Clintons can bring few additional voters to Obama.

They will be barred because they are emblamatic of the Old School of Washington that Obama is running against.