Christopher Hitchens is an iconoclast’s iconoclast, famously willing to piss on anyone’s grave, whether it be Mother Tereasa, Bob Hope, or Teddy Kennedy. Interestingly, this time he smacks down with one hand whilst patting on the back with the other:

Sure, the “tragedy” of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara Walters was doing her damage control, and it was amazing to see a clip of Walter Cronkite referring deadpan to the “driving accident” that had kept Kennedy away from the Senate. It must take some ingenuity at the networks, even so, to simply airbrush the fascist sympathies and bootlegging background of Joseph Kennedy Sr., his sons’ murder campaigns in Cuba, the recruitment of the mafia for same, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, the increasingly frantic and pathetic narco-addictions of JFK, the exploitation of unstable broads like Marilyn Monroe, and so much else besides.

In some ways, this banana-republic coverage was a disservice even to the recently departed. After all, it was in part the case that the youngest brother had lived down the criminal and narcissistic and power-mad background of his family. His best biographer, Adam Clymer, wrote, on the morning after he died, that it was arguably wrong to see a discontinuity in Kennedy’s career and that he had actually been a decent-enough legislator before abandoning any yearning for the White House after 1980. This may be true as far as it goes, but the obituaries would still have had to be somewhat different in tone, even given the servility of the journalistic profession, if Kennedy had died at the time of the Au Bar episode in Palm Beach, for instance, and had not decided to take some kind of a pull on himself and become a citizen again instead of a drone.

A former Senate staffer of his stopped by for a drink last week and told me that, without fanfare, the socialist president of Chile had come in person to the Kennedy home a few months ago to bestow one of her nation’s highest human rights awards on him. His work on that subject alone was a part atonement for his siblings’ deployment of what Lyndon Johnson himself called “a goddam Murder Incorporated” in the Southern Hemisphere. So, of course, was his labor on health care (where Richard Nixon had a better political track record than the Kennedy administration) and his last decision to keep looking life in the face for as long as he had breath. In those waning months, after being disgusted by malicious anti-Obama propaganda being spread in the Democratic primaries—later picked up and used by the right in the general election—he withdrew his support from a candidate whose victory would have meant the continuation of the dynastic politics represented by the family names Bush, Gore, and Clinton. What a favor he did us all by that repudiation! And how fitting that it should have been a Kennedy who did it. The political rhetoric of Obamaism, alas, is even more bloviating at times than Camelot was, but you can’t have everything.

A fitting roundup, really.  The story of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers was of wretched excess and abuse of privilege followed by genuine and rather remarkable redemption.   As Hitch puts it in the close, “Kennedy’s very last year was quite possibly his best, and how many men or women will be able to say that?”

In my early morning Teddy Kennedy Dead at 77 media roundup post, I observed, “That the Chappaquiddick scandal didn’t make the first several paragraphs — or even first page — of several of these obits is quite remarkable. It would be like writing an obit for Richard Nixon that didn’t mention Watergate or one for Michael Jackson that glossed over repeated allegations of pedophilia.”

Hanna Rosin expands on that point quite a bit, including implicitly pointing out that it was a rather large elephant in the room:

Google Trends this morning is a perfect window into our tabloid culture and the recesses of our depraved minds. While the papers are full of words like “dynasty” and “legacy,” Mary Jo Kopechne, according to Google Hot Trends, is uppermost in our thoughts. Her name comes up as number one in the ranking, and several more places on the list, misspelled. Chappaquiddick shows up high and often, too; once correctly, and then in several illiterate incarnations.

Partly, I blame this discrepancy on the American papers, which are still bent on hagiography. I prefer British obituaries, which tell it like it is. And partly, of course, this is the fault of our vapid tabloid culture. The only surprise today is that Kate Gosselin has been knocked back all the way to number 30. “Michael Jackson alive” is a popular trend. Yeah. Jamming with Elvis.

Finally, there is the issue of the obvious narrative the papers are not stringing together. In my mind, I’ve always equated Ted Kennedy with Chuck Colson, the disgraced Nixon aide who went on to found an admirable Christian organization called “Prison Fellowship.” Public officials who do terrible things and then say they’re sorry (often in a press conference or book) are a dime a dozen. But the ones who do something terrible and then repent indirectly in the form of a lifetime of dedicated public service are rare. Colson and Kennedy are just about the only two I can think of.

Mary Jo Kopechne is on our minds because this narrative about Ted Kennedy makes sense, in some intuitive, appealing way. Kennedy killed a girl. That’s his rosebud. He made up for it partly by declining the ultimate glory of running for president, and choosing the more humble path—helping the underclass using the slow, steady machinery of the Senate.

Other than the fact that Kennedy actually did run for president — in a bitter primary battle with President Jimmy Carter in 1980 — that all strikes me as right. And, indeed, the Guardian obit covers this neatly in a single paragraph:

Kennedy’s career was significantly blighted by the Chappaquiddick incident of 1969 in which the car he was driving ran off a bridge and plunged into the water, killing his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. While he never reached the pinnacle of power, Kennedy eventually shed his playboy image to become a serious political presence in the Senate. His death marks the twilight of a political dynasty and deals a blow to Democrats as they seek an overhaul of the healthcare system, one of Kennedy’s personal goals.

Teddy Kennedy lived an extraordinary life of tremendous accomplishment interspersed with some horrible scandals and family tragedy.  It’s why he was such a fascinating figure. But his story simply can’t be told without the word Chappaquiddick.

UPDATE:  E&P’s Sam Chamberlain tallied how far into the obits the first mention of the incident appeared:

NY Daily News- 13^th graf

Associated Press- 7^th graf

Boston Herald-  10^th graf

Boston Globe-  5^th graf

NY Times- 14^th graf

NY Post- 14^th graf

Washington Post-  9^th graf

Wall Street Journal-  6^th graf

LA Times-  12^th graf

Chicago Tribune-  12^th graf (same obit as LA Times)

Miami Herald-  10^th graf

Reuters- 18^th graf

USA Today- 19th graf

Politico- 24th graf

The Hill-NO MENTION

Roll Call-25th graf

National Journal-11th graf

Times of London- 8^th graf

In fairness, for a variety of reasons having to do with the printing and editing process from bygone days, a newspaper “graf” is often much shorter than a proper paragraph.  Still, the most notable single fact about Kennedy’s life was mentioned well after the average reader would have lost interest.

Gary Farber continues his look at the latest document release from President Nixon’s archives and finds corroboration for his long held belief that Nixon and Henry Kissinger believed the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and “simply wanted to punt the issue until after the 1972 elections, after which they expected South Vietnam to collapse.”  And, of course, we learned not long ago that Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense for most of the Kennedy-Johnson era (and died this morning) had the same thought and similarly nonetheless prosecuted the war vigorously.

While I’m neither a military historian nor even a Vietnam War buff, for my money the best short case that Farber, Nixon, and McNamara were right remains Jeffrey Record’s Winter 1996 Parameters article “Vietnam in Retrospect: Could We Have Won?”   The piece is short and worth reading in full.  The conclusion:

Norman Podhoretz, who believes that American intervention in the Vietnam War was “an attempt born of noble ideals and impulses,” has concluded that “the only way the United States could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying out of the war altogether.”[50] His judgment, in retrospect, appears to be as reasonable as any. The United States intervened in the Vietnam War on behalf of a weak and incompetent ally, and it pursued a conventional military victory against a wily, elusive, and extraordinarily determined opponent who shifted to ultimately decisive conventional military operations only after inevitable American political exhaustion undermined potentially decisive US military responses. Even had the United States attained a conclusive military decision, its cost would have exceeded any possible benefit. Vietnam was then, and remains today, a strategic backwater, and the US decision to fight there in the 1960s was driven by a doctrine of containing communism that in the 1950s was witlessly militarized and indiscriminately extended to all of Asia. Bernard Brodie observed in the early 1970s that “it is now clear what we mean by calling the United States intervention in Vietnam a failure. . . . We mean that at least as early as the beginning of 1968 even the most favorable outcome . . . could not remotely be worth the price we would have paid for it.”[51]

The key to US defeat was a profound underestimation of enemy tenacity and fighting power, an underestimation born of a happy ignorance of Vietnamese history, a failure to appreciate the fundamental civil dimensions of the war, and a preoccupation with the measurable indices of military power and attendant disdain for the ultimately decisive intangibles. In 1965, Maxwell Taylor confessed that “the ability of the Viet Cong continuously to rebuild their units and make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. We still find no plausible explanation of the continued strength of the Viet Cong.”[52] Four years later, Vo Nguyen Giap commented that the “United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn’t work here. If it did, they’d have already exterminated us.”[53]

The United States could not have prevented the forcible reunification of Vietnam under communist auspices at a morally, materially, and strategically acceptable price.

Jeremy Lott’s attempted response to my response piece on “Ending the Vice Presidency” was, for some odd reason*, rejected altogether by my commenting system.  Rather than pasting them into the comments of a post buried in the archives, I’ve done it below, with my original in blockquotes, followed by his retort in boldface, followed by my rejoinder, if any, in italics.

What alternative system does Lott propose for dealing with these emergencies? Why, none at all! He doesn’t even mention the possibility!

Yes, I used the 400 odd words I was given to make the case against the vice presidency, per my assignment, and only hinted at what could replace it. The horror. OK, let’s take these from the top:

Except for the fact that the Southern states wouldn’t have signed on and we’d have been stuck with the Articles of Confederation, of course.

My point was, the slavery stuff is not part of the Constitution where people still say, “Oh they got that one right.” Did I overegg that one? Perhaps.

Um, Richard Nixon was a respected United States Senator who thrice got his party’s nomination for president, winning two landslides and losing the  other in one of the closest contests in history.

Would he have got his party’s nomination if he wasn’t first vice president? I doubt it. Many of Nixon’s memorable moments — from Checkers to the Kitchen debate — came out of his vice presidency.

This is a fair point.  Nixon was only 39 when tabbed for the VP slot by Eisenhower, having served only four years in the House and two in the Senate.  He had become nationally prominent for his anti-Communism activities but might never have gotten a shot without the boost of the vice presidency.

Johnson and Bush were the second place finishers in their nominating contests. Bush would have almost certainly beaten Carter on his own merits. Further, we’ve had plenty of “troubling and divisive” people get elected to the presidency without a stint as second banana.

Carter managed to beat Ford and he lost very few seats in the midterm. He could have beat Bush, who was never a terribly impressive candidate. True, Johnson could have got the Democratic nomination. Winning would have been quite another thing.

Recall, though, that Ford barely lost despite the taint of having pardoned Nixon.  Of course, we’ll never know the counterfactual.  In 1960, Nixon would likely have beaten Johnson; then again, Nixon would be excluded by this rule, never having been VP, so we’re going totally hypothetical. As to 1964, virtually anyone would have beaten Goldwater, who was simply a candidate before his time.

As for those “troubling and divisive” presidents who didn’t stop off in the vice presidency first, please name them. That’s not a challenge; I’m honestly curious who you have in mind.

Well, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton come to mind just from very recent history.

Only the 12th — which (in effect) makes the VP part of the same ticket as the president rather than the second-place finisher in the — presidential race deals directly with the vice presidency; it was ratified 205 years ago. The 20th and 25th deal with arcane matters of presidential succession. The latter of which, incidentally, recognizes the dreadful possibility that the president is killed or incapacitated and there;s a vacancy in the vice presidency and remedies that.

We could split hairs over this “deals directly” business but that would be silly. All three amendments tweaked the vice presidency in some way, which was my point. Before the 25th amendment, if the president died or was forced aside then a person Congress designated became the president. That’s not an awful idea.

The fact a Constitutional amendment on the subject went through would be evidence to the contrary.

This is insane.

No it’s not.

Fair enough.

Seriously, we want a backup that’s independently elected and who could, theoretically, have an entirely different agenda than the guy who won? And who would take office and put in his own people? Really?

That’s happened before under the current system, so I fail to see your point. John Tyler was drummed out of the Whig party. Andrew Johnson was impeached and almost removed from office. Right up until Garfield was shot, Arthur was working against him.

That’s going back a piece.  My recollection of the Tyler and Arthur presidencies is dim, indeed. As to Johnson, one might argue that he was carrying out policies Lincoln would have had he not been assassinated but lacked the charm and gravitas to carry them out.  Moving ahead to the last half century or so, since presidents started  getting nominated based on personal popularity rather than backroom deals with party bosses, it’s hard to conceive of a major shift in policy when the VP takes over.  The only time it has been tested during that period was LBJ replacing JFK and, despite personal animosity and distinct policy differences, Johnson carried out the remaining months of the term under Kennedy’s legacy.

Presumably, then, we’d simply follow the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. Hello, President Nancy Pelosi! And, if something should happen to her, hello President Robert Byrd!

No, if history is a decent guide here it would be more like hello Gerald Ford. Congress would be unlikely to put Pelosi or Byrd-like figures in the relevant congressional positions if they were next in line for the Oval Office.

Under the 25th Amendment, if the vice presidency is somehow vacated, Congress appoints a replacement and, yes, a consensus candidate is the likely outcome.  But for the last 62 years, the law has it that if the president and the vice president are simultaneously killed or incapacitated, the Speaker of the House takes over, with the President Pro Tempore of the Senate next in line.   Presumably, if we abolished the office of vice president, we’d skip right to that.

But, sure, the Constitutional amendment that abolished the vice presidency could simply stipulate that Congress choose a successor.  The problem, however, is that a sudden vacancy in the presidency — especially if a result of assassination — is a national emergency, possibly even a national security crisis.  Do we really want to wait until Congress can be convened and make up its mind to replace the president?

Alternatively, I suppose, we could designate a cabinet officer — say, Secretary of State — to be the placeholder.  Al Haig did a fine job, for example, after Reagan was shot.  But this, too, creates potential problems.  During much of our recent history, the Congress and the White House were controlled by different political parties.  Without a vice president, this creates the strong possibility of an assassin’s bullet undoing the results of the election.

* Commenting was broken owing to a glitch caused by backend updates.  Fixed now.

Sunday’s WaPo put together a collection of half-baked ideas by smart folks, designed to generate controversy and discussion more so than shed serious light on policy ideas.  Thomas Ricks’ suggestion to close the service academies and war colleges got the most attention, overshadowing the abject silliness of Jeremy Lott’s column advocating doing away with the vice presidency, an idea not worth a warm bucket of piss.

The framers of the Constitution got many things right. But when they got things wrong, they were seriously off. Compromising on slavery, for instance. That’s a bad one.

Except for the fact that the Southern states wouldn’t have signed on and we’d have been stuck with the Articles of Confederation, of course.

Fourteen of our 44 presidents started on the bottom of the ticket, a high proportion with ill effects on American politics. The vice presidency has provided a springboard to the nation’s highest office for individuals unlikely to have made it there on their own.

From 1952 to 1972, only one election went by without Richard Nixon on the national ballot. For all his legislative smarts, Lyndon Johnson was an awkward bully who turned off many voters. George H.W. Bush was an also-ran who never would have reached the Oval Office had Ronald Reagan not kept the seat warm for him. (And would George W. have made it if his father hadn’t?)

The vice presidency has also put troubling and divisive men only a heartbeat away. Aaron Burr, Henry Wallace, Al Gore and Dick Cheney came too close for comfort.

Um, Richard Nixon was a respected United States Senator who thrice got his party’s nomination for president, winning two landslides and losing the other in one of the closest contests in history.  Johnson and Bush were the second place finishers in their nominating contests.  Bush would have almost certainly beaten Carter on his own merits.  Further, we’ve had plenty of “troubling and divisive” people get elected to the presidency without a stint as second banana.

Sure, a few vice presidents who get the top job do it well. (Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman come to mind.) But the downsides outweigh the standouts. That’s not surprising, since the office was poorly thought out and has been subject to three constitutional amendments (the 12th, 20th and 25th, for those keeping score).

Only the 12th — which (in effect) makes the VP part of the same ticket as the president rather than the second-place finisher in the presidential race — deals directly with the vice presidency; it was ratified 205 years ago.  The 20th and 25th deal with arcane matters of presidential succession.  The latter of which, incidentally, recognizes the dreadful possibility that the president is killed or incapacitated and there’s a vacancy in the vice presidency and remedies that.

It would be better if the president’s understudy were separately elected by voters,

This is insane. Seriously, we want a backup that’s independently elected and who could, theoretically, have an entirely different agenda than the guy who won?  And who would take office and put in his own people?  Really?

or better yet, if the office simply disappeared. For all the attention their campaign-time selections garner, few voters cast their ballots based on the vice-presidential candidate — even though that person has a nearly one in three chance of going all the way.

Recall, this “one in three” includes cases where the VP wins election in his own right.  But there have been an inordinate number of cases where the sitting president dies in office, mostly suddenly.  What alternative system does Lott propose for dealing with these emergencies?  Why, none at all!  He doesn’t even mention the possibility!

Presumably, then, we’d simply follow the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.  Hello, President Nancy Pelosi!  And, if something should happen to her, hello President Robert Byrd!

UPDATE:  See “Ending the Vice Presidency II” for Lott’s response.

I glossed over yesterday’s news that the Vatican blocked Caroline Kennedy’s appointment as U.S. ambassador for a variety of reasons.  Regular commenter Tlaloc emailed me, though, making a good point:

[T]he Vatican refuses to accept any ambassador who is not explicitly pro-life including anti-ESC research (such as Doug Kmiec).  Various voices on the right have praised them for this principled stand.  But if we accept this criteria doesn’t it set a bad precedent?  What happens when China demands our next ambassador be an avowed Maoist?  Or Saudi Arabia demand someone who openly accepts sharia law (up to an including the whole acid in the face for uppity girls)?

Us Ambassadors are supposed to represent us, not their host country. Obviously we should make sure that our ambassadors do not inflame their hosts by their mere presence but that’s a world away from them being required to openly affirm allegiance to the host’s ideals.  Or to put it another way, if the Vatican has the right to demand a vocal pro-lifer be our ambassador to them can’t we demand their ambassador to us be a vocal pro-choicer?  And where does such petty brinksmanship get us except a total break down of diplomacy?

The right-leaning blogs memeorandum links on this one are universally praiseworthy.

RedState’s Moe Lane is “curious about how many times this administration plans to insult the Roman Catholic Church.”  His colleague mbecker908 dubs this “an Easter gift from the Vatican” and adds, ” Good for the Vatican. This pentecostal Baptist boy (OK, old boy) is standing with the Pope on this one.”  He agrees with Lane that “being so tone deaf as to openly and forthrightly make an effort to offend the Vatican is off the charts.”

Dan Riehl observes, “Obama just got done going out of his way to inform Islam he had no intention of insulting or threatening it as a religion. So why the continued insults to Catholicism? It’s as if he doesn’t care about it as a religion at all.” Even Michael van der Galien, a staunch moderate, agrees that, “Instead of giving the Church the impression its opinions do not matter, the Obama administration is wise to treat it as it treats enemies of the United States: with respect and understanding.”

Dan and Michael have the right take on this.  If we’re going to have an ambassador to the Vatican (and I’m sympathetic to Michael Stickings‘ view that we probably shouldn’t) then it behooves us to respect their sensibilities when selecting our representatives to them. It’s just good diplomacy.

Now, Tlaloc is right that our ambassador is supposed to represent us, not the country to which he’s sent.  Ron Chusid makes that point as well.

The Vatican might not like it, but support for both abortion and embryonic stem cell research is the position of the Obama administration and both are legal in this country. What if the Vatican were to also demand an ambassador who believes in creationism instead of evolution?

What of other areas where countries disagree with the views of appointed ambassadors? Do Muslim nations object to non-Muslim ambassadors from the west?  Should we go along if one were to insist that we only appoint an ambassador who opposes the existence of Israel?

During the cold war it would have been ludicrous for Communist nations to reject western ambassadors who did not support Communism. Imagine if the Chinese had refused overtures from Richard Nixon to begin diplomatic relations because Nixon and his potential ambassadors were not Maoists.

The difference, of course, is that, despite the legal fiction to the contrary, the Vatican isn’t really a country; it’s a church with a big yard.  States, even those that are theocracies (Iran) or close to it (Saudi Arabia), have traditionally operated on the principle of sovereign equality.  They either have diplomatic relations with a given state or not, on a take it or leave it basis.  Not so much with churches.

Now, again, that may be a reason to not send an ambassador.  For most of our history, we didn’t.  Ronald Reagan was the first to have a formal ambassador.  But if we’re going to have diplomatic relations with a church, it only makes sense not to go out of our way to offend it.

The problem with Kmiec and Kennedy, as I understand it, is not so much that they’re pro-abortion but rather that they’re pro-abortion Roman Catholics.  Sending them as our ambassador to the Holy See is the equivalent of sending a Soviet defector as ambassador to Moscow during the Cold War or sending an Orthodox Jew as ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

In its quadrennial no-brainer, TIME has named Barack Obama its Person of the Year. Oddly, it takes several paragraphs of throat clearing to get to anything like making a case for the choice:

As Obama has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That’s why he’s here and why he doesn’t care about the furniture. We’ve heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We’ve observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity.

The real story of Obama’s year is the steady march of seemingly impossible accomplishments: beating the Clinton machine, organizing previously marginal voters, harnessing the new technologies of democratic engagement, shattering fundraising records, turning previously red states blue — and then waking up the day after his victory to reinvent the presidential-transition process in the face of a potentially dangerous vacuum of leadership.

Of course Obama is the Person of the Year.    For one thing, he got elected president, which almost always gets you the nod.  George W. Bush won in both 2000 and 2004.  Bill Clinton in 1992.   George H.W. Bush lost out to “The Endangered Earth” in 1988 but got a makeup in 1990,  Ronald Reagan won in 1980.   Jimmy Carter in 1976, Richard Nixon (along with Henry Kissinger) in 1972, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964.   John Kennedy was passed over in favor of “U.S. Scientists” in 1960 but got it in 1961.   Harry Truman won in 1948.  Franklin Roosevelt won in 1932, 1934, and 1941.

Since the award was established in 1928, the presidents who have been snubbed include:  Herbert Hoover and  Dwight Eisenhower.   That’s the list.  And Ike had won the honor as a general in 1944.  Richard Nixon didn’t win it upon winning the office, either, although he shared the award upon re-election (albeit for the China opening).

Even aside from tradition, Obama deserved the award.  He dominated media coverage for a whole year.  Other contenders — Michael Phelps, Sarah Palin, and Henry Paulson — were in the spotlight for a short time.

Beating Clinton and overcoming the barriers of inexperience and racial prejudice to win the presidency were remarkable achievements and his transition has thus far been superb.   Given the troubled times in which he’s taking office, he’s got every opportunity to repeat.

Glenn Greenwald, reacting to reports that Barack Obama has told Harry Reid that Joe Lieberman should not be stripped of his committee chairmanship and thus making it very difficult for him to do so, has written a long and passionate plea for a return to vigorous separation of powers with strong institutional jealousies.

[W]hatever the outcome here is, it’s vital that it be the Senate’s decision, not Barack Obama’s.  How the Senate organizes itself and which members chair its Committees is about as purely within the legislative domain as it gets.  It makes sense that Senate Democrats want to cooperate with Obama and that they have good feelings towards him in light of his election victory.  Still, if the Senate has any sense of its own institutional integrity and any intention to defend its constitutionally assigned prerogatives, the last thing Senators would be doing is allowing Obama to interfere with, let alone dictate to them, how they proceed in deciding what to do about Lieberman.  If they don’t jealously safeguard that arena from executive intrusion, what do they safeguard?

[...]

That is what “separation of powers” means, and it’s at least as vital — probably more so — for it to be honored when the same party controls the White House and both houses of Congress.  What fueled the abuses of the last eight years as much as anything else was the ongoing (and severely accelerated) abdication of power by Congress to a bordering-on-omnipotent presidency.  It’s critically important that an Obama administration reverse the substantive transgressions of the Bush era — closing Guantanamo, ending torture and rendition, restoring habeas corpus, rejuvenating surveillance oversight, withdrawing from Iraq, applying the rule of law to political leaders past and present — but it’s at least as important that this be accomplished in the right way, that our constitutional framework be restored.  That means restricting the President’s role to what the Constitution prescribes and having Congress fulfill its assigned duties and perform its core functions.

This is anything but an abstract concern.  Central to the design of the republic is the power of the citizenry to remove all members of the House and 1/3 of the Senate every two years.  That’s the central mechanism by which the people, through their representatives in Congress, keep the Government responsive.  But none of that matters — it’s all just illusory — if Congress has no real power and exists as little more than a passive and obedient vassal of the President.  We shouldn’t want that arrangement even if, at a given moment, we are lucky enough to have a magnanimous President who makes good decisions and wants to do good things with his centralized, unchecked and imbalanced power.

Greenwald makes clear that he’s not blaming Obama for the advent of the imperial presidency, merely calling on the Congress to push back.

While I think he overstates things a bit, he’s right on the principles here. Indeed, I’ve made similar calls over the years, including calling on a Republican Congress to carry out its oversight duties much more vigorously against a Republican president.

As a practical matter, political parties create a cross-branch bridge that simultaneously makes it easier to govern and yet weakens the individual character of the institutions.   Reid’s free to do whatever he wants within the limits of his considerable power, as will be Obama.  Yet, while Reid theoretically answers only to his delegation in the Senate and the people of Nevada, Obama is the effective head of his party.

Since at least Franklin Roosevelt, presidents have taken on many roles clearly delegated to the Congress in the Constitution.  They submit budgets, propose legislation, and otherwise have significant a priori sway over the workings of Congress rather than serving in the reactive role — sign or veto — envisioned by the Framers.

More significantly still, the expansion of government is not so much a function of the passage of more laws but rather the creation of permanent regulatory bureaucracies.  These institutions carry out virtually all of the Enumerated Powers:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;

To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;

To establish post offices and post roads;

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;

To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;

All but a handful of these things are run by federal agencies and bureaus through the quasi-legislative processes of rule making and regulation rather than by Acts of Congress. The president and his designated representatives run these bureaucracies on a day-to-day basis with Congress acting only in reactive mode — if at all — through the oversight process.  In other words, we’ve stood the Constitution on its head.

While I agree with Glenn that Paul Begala’s statement “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool” is antithetical to the way our government is supposed to operate, it’s actually a pretty apt description of how it has come to operate.

Furthermore, while Congress can and should do more to reclaim its prerogatives, the only practical way for them to shift the balance of power very far back in their direction — there’s simply no question but that the Framers intended the legislature to be the dominant branch, schoolboy lessons about co-equality notwithstanding — is to radically decrease the number of federal bureaucratic agencies and the scope of their power. We’ve seen very little of that with any Republican president going back at least to Richard Nixon — and the GOP is supposed to be the small government party. I have zero hope that we’ll see it happen under a Democratic president with commanding Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress.

Bill McInturff, John McCain’s chief pollster, released a memo last night saying the campaign has made “significant progress” in the last week and that “All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.”

Disclaimer up front: As I’ve noted numerous times before, my wife is Chief Operating Officer of McInturff’s firm, Public Opinion Strategies. For a variety of legal and tactical reasons, neither she nor the other partners of the company are privy to the McCain numbers, which are held to essentially three members of Team McInturff. Given that I neither have the numbers and that I’m often critical of McCain and his campaign strategy, I minimize this connection out of fairness to my wife and POS.

Elizabeth Holmes prints the entire memo in WSJ’s Washington Wire:

1. We are witnessing a significant shift across the battleground states.

The race has moved significantly over the past week, closing to essentially tied on the last two-day roll. These gains are coming from sub-groups it should be possible to sustain over the next week, including:

• Non-college men;
• Rural voters, both men and women;
• Right-to-life voters; and most encouragingly;
• We are beginning to once again get over a 20% chunk of the vote among soft Democrats.

Importantly as well, our long identified target of “Walmart women” – those women without a college degree in households under $60,000 a year in income are also swinging back solidly in our direction.

Finally, in terms of critical improvement, even as this track shows more Republicans voting for us than Democrats supporting Obama, we are witnessing an impressive “pop” with Independent voters.r

As I said during our Sunday briefing, we do substantially more interviews per day than any public poll, but, given the shift we were witnessing, it was my expectation that by Tuesday/Wednesday multiple public polls would show the race closing. A quick glance at Real Clear Politics would indicate this is happening by today, Tuesday, and that’s good!

Indeed, RCP does show the race closing both at the national and the actually important state-by-state level.  It also shows Obama with a comfortable lead in Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia — all states that went for Bush in 2000 and 2004 — and slight leads in several other battlegrounds that were Red in those elections.  Meanwhile, McCain is leading in precisely zero Blue states.

2. It is not surprising we are witnessing this closing as we are finally having an opportunity to run a campaign that focuses on Senator Obama’s record on taxes and his lack of experience.

We are tracking how much people have seen, read, or heard about a number of thematic elements from both campaigns, including the false charges about Senator McCain’s health care plan, being out of touch on the economy, and the Obama’s campaign charges about Medicare. At the same time, we are testing awareness of “Joe the Plumber,” Senator’s Biden’s quote about his own running mate being so inexperienced it invites being tested by our enemies around the world, and Obama’s proposals that will raise federal spending by a trillion dollars.

This has been the week where “Joe the Plumber” has literally become a household name. An astounding 59% of voters in these battleground states have heard “a lot” about this story, 83% have heard “a lot” or “some” about this episode.

The 59% “a lot” dwarfs the other stories/thematic elements we are tracking this week.

The campaign’s relentless focus has helped strengthen our margins on the issue of taxes and broadened as well to the attribute of handling the economy and jobs.

I do think the “Joe the Plumber” meme, silly as the constant repetition sounded on debate night, is getting traction.  Given that it didn’t cause a major swing right away, however, I’m dubious that it’s going to be decisive.

3. Our opponent is being correctly perceived as the most liberal nominee in modern times.

In our tracking, now 59% of battleground voters describe Senator Obama as being a “liberal,” a percentage that is higher than previous Democrat losers Gore/Kerry, and significantly higher than for President Clinton and President Carter.

A majority (54%) of voters profile as saying Senator Obama is more liberal than they see themselves politically.

As Senator Obama’s profile as a “liberal” increases, it has helped further erode his support among key sub-groups.

This is interesting and not something that’s being tracked in media polls.  It’s also true, rather than a case of smear tactics working.  Then again, given his plans to have one massive government giveaway after another in response to the financial crisis, McCain is the most liberal Republican nominee in my lifetime.

4. Turn-out IS going to go through the roof.

Public Opinion Strategies has been using a 1 to 10 scale to help look at self-described interest in the election since 1993. In 1996, in our last track, 48% of voters described their interest in the election as a “10.” In 2000, the last track was 54% saying “10.” Remarkably, in 2004, our last track had self-described “10s” at 75% of the electorate.

You need to understand we are witnessing a day-to-day trend of serious magnitude as self-described “10s” increase in every roll.

Last night, 81% of voters described their interest in this election as a 10! Wow.

Here is the importance of this number: We have watched as turn-out has gone up in the last three presidential elections from roughly 96 million voters in 1996, to 104 million voters in 2000, to a whopping 122 million voters in 2004.

I now believe turn-out will begin to approach levels not seen since other comparable presidential campaigns in 1960 and 1968.

In today’s terms, that could mean breaking the barrier of 130 million voters!

There is simply no model that begins to know or predict the composition of the electorate at this level of turn-out.

My own view … and our own weights in our surveys … reflect a belief that African American turn-out will be at historic levels, there will be a significant boost with voters 18 to 29 years old, yet the overall high level of turn-out will begin to mute the increase in the percentage these sub-groups represent in the overall electorate.

I’ll defer to Bill’s expertise on this one.  The conventional wisdom is that high turnout — and Bill’s team acknowledges that it comes from Democratic subgroups — helps the Democrats.  We’ve seen several elections, though, where Republicans won despite (?) high turnout.

5. There is more elasticity in this campaign than is imagined.

We have merged all of our interviews over the last three plus weeks to identify undecided and respondents who “refuse to respond” on the ballot question. This can be as high as one out of ten voters, but is generally about eight percent (8%) of the electorate in battleground states.

These voters might generally be non-voters in most cycles. But, in this cycle, 61% describe their interest in the election as a 10. This is higher than the last track among ALL voters in 1996 and 2000.

These voters are older, downscale, more rural, and are certainly economically stressed. They are quite negative about the direction of country and seek change. They voted for Bush over Kerry by a margin of 47% to 24% and this partisan advantage is a critical element to understanding our capacity to “get” these voters.

They have significant hesitations about Senator Obama’s experience and judgment.

Given an Obama TV media barrage we have not witnessed since the last candidate to run without public financing, Richard Nixon in 1972, and the daily drumbeat about Obama’s chances, given their demographics, it is my sense these voters WILL vote in this election and WILL break decisively in our direction.

These undecided/refuse to respond voters breaking decisively against Senator Obama mirrors the pattern of the last two months of the Democrat primary season.

When they do break, I believe they will add a net three plus points to our margins.

This, I think, is the ballgame.  So long as Obama stays under 50 percent in the state polls — and he is in Ohio, Florida, Missouri, and North Carolina and is just barely north of there in Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia — the gap is theoretically closeable.  Again, however, the conventional wisdom is that the late breaking undecideds either stay home or vote for the challenger.   Maybe not, though.

6. I am becoming more and more convinced Senator Obama “gets what he gets in the tracking.”

Typically a Republican candidate trails among African Americans on a survey by a margin of something like 78% to 14%. As a firm, we consistently warn our clients that on Election Day, they will underperform their polling margins with African American voters. If their tracking says 78% – 18%, they should expect to only carry 8% of the African American vote, as the Democrat candidate will typically carry more than 90% of the African American vote.

Senator Obama’s numbers are different than anything we have ever seen before among African Americans.

In most polls, McCain is losing these African American voters by margins like 97% to 1%.

This means when you see Senator Obama’s number in a survey, it already reflects his significant and full support among African American voters.

Functionally, this means the only undecided/refuse to respond voters are white and Latino.

So, in a state like Indiana where he has recently “led” Senator McCain, in most tracks, Senator Obama is at 46% to 47% of the vote.

I am becoming increasingly persuaded it will be very difficult for Senator Obama to perform much above his percentage of the vote in a state. This puts any number of historically red states very much “in play” and MUCH more competitive than is generally believed by the media. But critically, as Obama drops below 50% in other blue states, some of these states may also becoming back in play as well.

This is a variant of the previous point.  Very interesting, if true.

Here’s one thing I’m sure of:  While Bill McInturff is not only on McCain’s payroll but his longtime friend, he’s not going to put his reputation at stake releasing a memo containing embarrassingly wrong information to give his candidate a PR boost.  He makes a very good living by getting the numbers — and, more importantly, the interpretation of said numbers — right and continues to attract clients because he does it time and again.  So, contra Ben Smith, this isn’t just some B.S. being released for public consumption.

Further, while I don’t have McInturff’s numbers, I know enough about his methodology that I’m not concerned about Nate Silver’s objections.  While — as the memo acknowledges — predicting turnout in such energized races is more art than science, I can guarantee that McInturff isn’t counting on 2004-level black turnout and that he’s damn well accounting for “young persons with cellphones.”

That said, there are a lot of “Ifs” here and pretty much all of them have to go McCain’s way to turn this thing around.  He’s got another six days.  And a goodly number of people have, like myself, already voted or will vote before Election Day.

I’ll make my formal state-by-state Electoral College prediction Monday.  (I went 51-for-51 in 2004.)  My inclination now is that McCain holds all the 2000 and 2004 Red states that are even close.  But it’s looking like Obama will peel off Colorado and quite probably Ohio and I don’t see any McCain pickups out there.

via Memeorandum

Josh Marshall headlines as “Sadly Nuts” a post responding to John McCain’s retort, to questions of Sarah Palin’s qualifications to serve as president, “If they want to go down that route, in all candor, she has far, far more experience than Senator Obama does.”

Says Josh,

Set aside the bravado. Can McCain possibly believe that? And if he does, what are we supposed to think of his own fitness to serve? Sen. Obama is certainly new on the national scene. But he’s serving his fourth year in the US senate. He’s run a successful national primary campaign. He’s deeply versed on all the relevant policy issues. Palin has been the governor of one of the smallest states in the country (by pop.) for 18 months. As recently as 2006, she said she hadn’t focused enough on Iraq to have an opinion one way or another about the surge.

Now, I agree, the burden is certainly on Team McCain to convince the country that Palin, a relative neophyte, passes the laugh test for Commander-in-Chief.  As regular readers — or even those who’ve read anything I’ve written about the subject since Friday’s announcement — know, I’m skeptical.

But McCain’s assertion that Palin has more “experience” than Obama is hardly absurd.  After all, all Josh can marshall in support of Obama is that he’s been studying up on national policy for his presidential run.  Three and a half years (if we’re not rounding Palin’s up, we’re not doing it for Obama) in the Senate, most of which he’s spent running for president, is hardly an impressive résumé by presidential standards.  (For comparison, see Biden, Joe or McCain, John.)   Palin’s been the chief executive for a state government for a year and a half, during which time she’s actually been doing her job, and was chief executive for a municipality for six years immediately before that.   Again, not exactly impressive, but it stacks up nicely.

If one goes beyond the job titles and dates part of the résumé and moves on to the “Accomplishments” section, as Bill Dyer does, one can even more easily argue that Palin is more qualified than Obama.  She’s actually gotten things done during her tenure in office, after all.

Many people would argue that eightish years of executive experience trumps none.  Indeed, as my colleague Dave Schuler pointed out yesterday in the comments of my “Sarah Palin, Small Town Mayor” post, it’s been twelve elections — 48 years — since the last time the American people elected a United States Senator to the presidency.   Since then, they’ve chosen:  A sitting president (Lyndon Johnson), a former two-term vice president (Richard Nixon), a sitting president (Nixon), a one-term small state governor (Jimmy Carter), a two-term large state governor (Ronald Reagan), a sitting president (Reagan), a sitting vice president (George H.W. Bush), a sitting multi-term small state governor (Bill Clinton),  a sitting president (Clinton), a sitting two-term large state governor (George W. Bush) — who lost the popular vote to a sitting two-term vice president (Al Gore) — and a sitting president (Bush).   That trend will be broken this year, barring tragedy, since both major parties have nominated a sitting Senator.  But, rather clearly, the American people prefer their presidents with serious executive experience.

My own predilections put Obama ahead of Palin in the preparation department because of his Harvard law degree, his years teaching law at Chicago, and his having boned up on national issues in a way that Palin hasn’t yet been forced to.   Whether the American people will see it that way is another question.

It should be noted, of course, that Palin is her party’s choice for backup quarterback.  Obama, on the other hand, would be the QB1.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, this topic is generating a lot of discussion.

Nolan Finley, the editorial page editor of The Detroit News, doesn’t think either Palin or Obama are qualified, likening the to baseball rookies who need more time in the minor leagues.

[I]s Sarah Palin ready for the Oval Office? She’s been governor for just two years, and before that was the mayor of a small town. Had she finished this term and another, and sustained her early success, she would have earned a look for the ticket.  She’s certainly one of the GOP’s top young prospects, but she’s being called up to the big leagues too soon.

And so is Barack Obama. His resume is as thin as Palin’s. He was a community organizer in Chicago, served briefly in the Illinois Legislature and lucked into the U.S. Senate when his Republican opponent, the runaway favorite, got tangled in a weird sex scandal.  He, too, has a young family, plays pickup basketball and is very GQ. And as an added bonus, his wife is hot.

But it is embarrassing to hear Obama, 47, explain how his work on the streets of Chicago fully prepared him to be leader of the free world because he met a lot of people down on their luck. He’s been in the Senate just four years and has spent half of that time running for president.

And yet, last week in Denver, the elder statesmen of the Democratic Party walked one by one to the podium to extol the leadership skills of Obama. They had to be choking on their words. Obama doesn’t chair a Senate committee, hasn’t been one of its most influential voices, has never really led anything

[...]

This may just be old guy talk, but I still believe in the value of touching all the bases. Politicians like John McCain and Joe Biden spent decades learning their craft. They’ve dealt with crises on both personal and professional levels. There’s not much that will catch them off-guard.

And there are many others like them, men and women from both inside and outside Washington, who have been learning, doing and maturing for a long time and now stand ready to lead.  Yet for half of this year’s presidential ticket, we passed them by in favor of rookies.

This election will indeed prove the adage that anyone can grow up to be president. Only now you don’t have to bother with the growing up part.

Gerard Baker, US Editor and Assistant Editor of The Times of London, thinks it’s a slam dunk that Palin’s the better choice. He has a whole list of comparisons along these lines:

Obama: Worked his way to the top by cultivating, pandering to and stroking the most powerful interest groups in the all-pervasive Chicago political machine, ensuring his views were aligned with the power brokers there.

Palin: Worked her way to the top by challenging, attacking and actively undermining the Republican party establishment in her native Alaska. She ran against incumbent Republicans as a candidate willing and able to clean the Augean Stables of her state’s government.

That’s mostly unfair and, frankly, a little silly.  Still,  one can see that one needn’t be “nuts” or totally lacking in judgment to think it other than obvious that Obama is superbly qualified while Palin is unworthy.

How rich and out of touch with ordinary American working stiffs is John McCain?  Why, he doesn’t even know how many houses he owns!

This story, published by The Politico, is now the top story on Memeorandum.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

The correct answer is at least four, located in Arizona, California and Virginia, according to his staff. Newsweek estimated this summer that the couple owns at least seven properties.

In recent weeks, Democrats have stepped up their effort to caricature McCain as living an outlandishly rich lifestyle — a bit of payback to the GOP for portraying Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as an elitist, and for turning the spotlight in 2004 on the five homes owned by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

The subject has especially captivated Matt Yglesias, newly of the Center for American Progress, who has written not one, not two, not three, not four, but five posts on the subject as of this writing.  And Matt, who is no McCain fan and who will certainly pull the lever for Obama in November, isn’t even upset about the issue.  Indeed, he’s perfectly fair about the whole thing, noting in  post four that it takes some really bogus math to come up with some of the high numbers of McCain property opponents are touting.

Andrew Sullivan, who some have accused of being over-the-top in his praise for Obama and criticism of McCain, likewise gives this a big, “So what?”  He’s right, too, that this is tit for tat:

McCain invited accusations of elitism by calling Obama an arugula-loving, berry-tea-drinking, Starbucks-swilling, elite liberal know-nothing. But watching the left attack McCain for having multiple houses and $520 shoes is not exactly uplifting either.

Indeed.  The whole “I’m a regular guy and my opponent is an elitist poof” meme that gets trotted out every four years is silly.  The last time we had a regular working stiff get elected president was . . . when, exactly?  Never?  I suppose Bill Clinton wasn’t rich when he got elected in 1992 nor was Richard Nixon in 1968.  But a sitting governor or a former vice president isn’t exactly Joe Lunchpail.

Photo credit:  JAMD

A North Carolina bureaucrat retired rather than honor Jesse Helms.

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he’d ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours’ delay, one of Eason’s employees hung the flags at half-staff.

The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.  “Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week,” Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request. He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his “doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice” and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Retiring in protest is, of course, his right as an American. Ordering civil servants to disobey the lawful order of the Governor?  Not so much.

One can understand antipathy to Helms.  Regardless, however, Helms is entitled to this treatment as a former United States Senator. Period.  Goodness, Richard Nixon got a state funeral and had flags lowered for a month — the protocol for the death of United States Presidents, sitting or past — despite having to resign in the face of sure criminal charges.  Helms, so far as I’m aware, broke no laws.

Amusingly, it turns out that Eason was spared having to quit before being eligible for a retirement pension:

A registered Democrat who frequently votes a split ticket, he said he had no problems lowering the flag for former Sen. Terry Sanford or President Reagan. But he remembers wondering whether he would be willing to lower the flag after President Nixon’s death. He never had to make that decision, since it rained both days.

Lucky for him they apparently haven’t heard of all-weather flags in the  Tarheel State.

James Kirchich, recent nominee for an Yglesias Award for fairness, says that, while the Obama campaign is setting itself up to believe that “The only obstacle between Barack Obama and the presidency is the mountain of smears that will no doubt come his way,” the truth of the matter is that most of the smears are coming from his side.

Thus far, no one with any serious affiliation to John McCain’s campaign has resorted to the alleged “scare” tactics in which Republicans — and, apparently, only Republicans — have been perfecting since Richard Nixon was first elected. On the contrary, if the past few months have showed us anything, it’s that the Obama campaign is the one dealing in crude smears.

There have been only two incidents in which people officially associated with McCain have done anything approaching what Thomas and Wolfe predicted those dastardly, conniving Republicans would inevitably do. In February, a conservative talk radio host speaking at a McCain rally made reference to “Barack Hussein Obama.” McCain immediately condemned the statement, leading the embittered and embarrassed professional yacker to complain that McCain “threw me under the bus.” The only other smear-worthy episode occurred in March, when the McCain campaign suspended a low-level aide who provided a link on his Twitter account to a video featuring the rants of Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Heavy stuff, to be sure.

Contrast the absence of smears from the McCain camp with some of the outlandish remarks made by high-ranking Obama supporters. In April, West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV said that because McCain “was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet,” and “was long gone when they hit,” the Arizona senator who spent five and a half years in a Vietcong tiger cage having his arms repeatedly broken didn’t really understand the carnage of war. “What happened when [the missiles] get to the ground?” Rockefeller asked a crowd at an Obama rally. “He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.” That the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller would impugn the wartime experience of John McCain is especially rich, given that the only “battle” Rockefeller has seen is when he hunts wild game at his 80-acre ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyo. g in crude smears.

He gives other examples, many of which detailed yesterday in “Democrats Attacking McCain’s Military Record: Is A Pattern Emerging?”

Greg Sargent, meanwhile, asserts that,

The truth is that there’s zero evidence that there’s any coordination going on or that the Obama campaign wants this conversation to be taking place. Not that this matters: The McCain campaign is very determinedly pointing to anything it can — Webb’s comments included — to drive the message that Obama is demeaning McCain’s military service.

Not to resort to the undergraduate paper standby of “they both have good points and bad points,” the argument seems rather silly.  Professionally run campaigns make a concerted effort to maintain plausible deniability, ensuring that the candidate and senior campaign staff can disavow any negative attacks that get judged as beyond the pale while nonetheless benefitting from their effects.

Do I think there’s a concerted effort on the part of Democrats to call into question the degree to which John McCain’s military service makes him more qualified than Barack Obama to step in as commander-in-chief?  Of course.  Are some of the attacks over-the-top?  Yup.  Have they reached the worst levels of the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry in 2004?  Not yet.

Is there a smear campaign to undermine public confidence in Barack Obama’s patriotism and that of his wife?  To say that he’s a Muslim and might be terrorist-friendly?  Yup.  Were they promulgated by Republicans?  No, by Hillary Clinton supporters, actually.  Will Republicans pick up the ball?  Probably.

The “Who’s smearing more?” game is silly at this point since McCain has been the presumptive Republican nominee for months and has thus been the object of Democratic attacks for much longer.  By contrast, there hasn’t been much need for the GOP to smear Obama, since Clintonistas like  Larry Johnson were more than happy to do it.   I’m pretty sure McCain won’t touch any of that nonsense.  Pro-Republican or Pro-McCain or Anti-Obama 527s, though, are another story.

A Newsweek poll of registered voters shows Barack Obama with a whopping 15-point lead over John McCain, 51 to 36. Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh is stoked.

Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator wrested the nomination from Hillary Clinton. With numbers consistently showing rock-bottom approval ratings for President Bush and a large majority of Americans unhappy with the country’s direction, the opposing-party candidate should, in the normal course, have attracted more disaffected voters. Now it looks as if Obama is doing just that. A new NEWSWEEK Poll shows that he has a substantial double-digit lead, 51 percent to 36 percent, over McCain among registered voters nationwide.

[...]

The latest numbers on voter dissatisfaction suggest that Obama may enjoy more than one bounce. The new poll finds that only 14 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction of the country. That matches the previous low point on this measure recorded in June 1992, when a brief recession contributed to Bill Clinton’s victory over Bush’s father, incumbent George H.W. Bush. Overall, voters see Obama as the preferred agent of “change” by a margin of 51 percent to 27 percent. Younger voters, in particular, are more likely to see Obama that way: those 18 to 39 favor the Illinois senator by 66 percent to 27 percent. The two candidates are statistically tied among older voters.

Um, Tim, this is one poll. It’s safe to presume, then that voter dissatisfaction is already being factored into the Obama numbers.

Andrew Sullivan notes that, “You need to go back to Dukakis to find a similarly big Democratic lead.” Then again, as Eric Kleefeld reminds us, Dukakis “went on to lose the election.”

Furthermore, the Newsweek numbers are ridiculous. As Nate Silver observes, “Newsweek’s data tends to be fairly volatile, and we have a whole bunch of polling on both the state and national level that implies that Obama’s real margin is closer to 5 points.” And that’s including the Newsweek numbers! Here’s the latest poll aggregation from RealClearPolitics:

The latest Gallup poll, also released yesterday, found, “Among likely voters, Obama led McCain by 50%-44%, an insignificant change from his earlier standing of 49%-44%.”

As the chart of polls at Pollster.com shows, Newsweek has huge swings from month-to-month that just aren’t showing up in the other polls. Simply put, there’s either something serious wrong with their methodology or that of all the other major polls. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the former. I simply don’t believe, for example, that Obama has a 7 point lead among men. Or that only 16 percent of Independents are undecided.

This campaign has been going on a long time. And people are particularly engaged in politics this season because of the war, gas prices, and a general sense that we’re “headed in the wrong direction.” But the fact of the matter is that most Americans are barely paying attention at this point. Polls taken in June, before the conventions and before the general election campaign begins in earnest, are just incredibly poor predictors of the future outcome. Indeed, more often than not in recent elections, the person ahead at this stage goes on to lose.

Further, as if it needs to be pointed out after the last two presidential cycles, national head-to-heads mean precisely squat. It’s the state polls and the race to 270 Electoral Votes that matters.

That said, my dismissal of the Newsweek findings goes to magnitude, not direction. I think the following are true:

• Obama is ahead nationwide and in enough states to win the Electoral College

• President Bush is the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon and McCain’s association with him is toxic

• The public desperately wants “change” and Obama’s youth, energy, party ID, and color make him the more plausible vehicle for that

• Obama’s a better campaigner than McCain

• Obama will have a huge financial advantage which should help him expand on the other advantages

Were the election held today, I’m pretty sure Obama would win. The only reasons I’m not absolutely sure is that Obama’s appeal is particularly strong with demographics that historically don’t actually show up to vote (although I think they will this time) and, frankly, I have no way of gauging the “Bradley effect,” since we’ve never had a person of color as a major party presidential nominee. As to the latter, I think it’ll be a factor but a rather minor one, since most of the documented cases are from quite some time ago and there’s evidence that it’s no longer much of a problem.

Of course, the election is not being held today.

Pat Lang, a retired Green Beret colonel, is somewhat bemused at how much is being made of John McCain’s military experience.

John McCain is an admirable man. There are many such who wore the uniform of the United States in adverse circumstance. Jim Webb, Chuck Hagel, Daniel Inouye, Bob Dole… Shall I go on? How many names would there be? How many million names? In their new found love of soldiers Americans ascribe something almost sacramental to the experience of military service. This is unexpected. There has emerged a kind of reverence for those who have served which is unfamiliar to the veterans of earlier generations. I am old enough to remember the aftermath of World War II. Veterans of that war were treated with respect, but not with veneration. Perhaps there were too many of them for that.

McCain’s brief experience as a junior naval aviator and his extended suffering in North Vietnamese hands seem to be thought by many to be serious qualifications for the ultimate job of making national level policy decisions about the country’s security. Television newsies gush about his empathy with soldiers and understanding for the horrors of war. Sentimentality abounds in these discussions. Sentimentality is good in Valentine’s Day cards. It is bad in picking a president for the country and a commander in chief for the armed forces.

He notes, too, that we have had presidents who made excellent wartime presidents despite little or no military experience.

I’ve argued for quite some time that it’s a mistake for candidates to tout their wartime heroism as a major factor in selling their qualifications for higher office. First, as Lang notes, being a heroic junior officer doesn’t have much bearing on being commander-in-chief. Second, to the extent that military prowess is an asset with the voters, others will make sure that they know about it. Third, and perhaps most importantly, its simply unseemly to toot your own horn in that way. Real heroes don’t shout, and all that.

Moreover, it’s far from clear that it works. If did, George H.W. Bush would have been a two-termer and his son would have been a no-termer. Indeed, it’s rarer that the candidate with the most military experience wins. The match-ups over the last forty years:

2004: Bush re-elected over John Kerry, Silver Star recipient

2000: George W. Bush, National Guard bare minimum stateside flyboy beats Al Gore, Vietnam vet

1996: Clinton re-elected over Bob Dole, massively wounded WWII vet

1992: Bush loses to Bill Clinton, dope smoking draft dodger

1988: George H.W. Bush, Distinguished Flying Cross winner, beats Mike Dukakis, peacetime Army vet

1984: Reagan beats Walter Mondale, peacetime Army vet

1980: Ronald Reagan, wartime Army movie star beat Carter

1976: Jimmy Carter, distinguished peacetime Navy career, beats Gerald Ford, WWII Navy officer

1972: Nixon beats George McGovern, WWII hero

1968: Richard Nixon, WWII non-line Navy service beats Hubert Humphrey, no military service

Only twice did the candidate with the more impressive military record win and, really, only 1988 is a true example. Nixon was a Quaker whose Navy career was most distinguished for his skill as a poker player; he wins this by default to a man who “tried twice to join the armed forces [during WWII], but was rejected both times due to a hernia.”

McCain’s military service was distinguished and what he endured at the hands of the Viet Cong is unimaginable to most of us. Presumably, we can draw some conclusions about his character from how he conducted himself during those times. And, certainly, 27 years in the Navy (counting his time at Annapolis) should be factored in as important experience in weighing him for the presidency.

But banging us over the head constantly with the fact that he went to Vietnam won’t get him elected president. Citing experience and contrasting with his opponent’s relative dearth of same is fine. But he’s still got to sell us on his vision for the future. The election is about 2009 and beyond, not 1967.