Topping Memeorandum is Mike Allen’s wild speculation for Politico about a presidential run by Roger Ailes.

Friends and associates are encouraging Fox News chief Roger Ailes to jump into the political arena for real by running for president in 2012, top sources tell POLITICO.

“Ailes knows how to frame an issue better than anybody, and that’s what we need now,” says one Ailes friend who is encouraging the Fox founder, chairman and CEO to seek the Republican nomination to run against President Barack Obama.

Ailes, 69, has an aggessive, winning personality that made Fox News a huge success — and a huge target for liberal critics.

Frank Luntz, the well-known Republican pollster, said Ailes could be a force if he makes the run. “I have known Roger Ailes for 29 years,” says Luntz. “No one knows how to win better than Roger.”

Talk of an Ailes run, which informed sources said is based on more than mere speculation, could escalate the White House war with Fox war in wildly unpredictable – and fun – ways.

This is a befuddling idea.

To be sure, Ailes is a smart guy with good strategic sense and a command of Republican ideas. Presumably, he wouldn’t have trouble raising money.  And, until such time as he actually declared, he could get a lot of free air time on the most popular news network on the planet.

But he’s not exactly presidential material.  While one could make the argument that “media mogul” is better preparation for president than “community organizer,” he’s never sought elective office or held comparable positions of responsibility.  In modern times, no person has ever been elected to the presidency — or to my recollection nominated by one of the major parties — without having been vice president, governor, senator, or  a famous general.

I can’t see Ailes breaking that mold.  And he’ll carry the baggage of every silly thing that Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity has ever said with him on the campaign trail.

UPDATE:  Ailes has already dashed this one, citing an obvious point that I neglected to mention:

Fox News President and CEO Roger Ailes is laughing off the entreaties of some friends and associates and will not run for president in 2012, an aide said Friday.

Ailes replied when asked about the possibility, according to the aide: “This country needs fair and balanced news more now than ever before, so I’m going to decline a run for the presidency. Besides, I can’t take the pay cut.”

Can’t say I blame him.

Correction: The original version said no person had been elected president without holding major office. As two commenters rightly point out, Abraham Lincoln (who ran for senator and lost) did just that.  The circumstances were, of course, rather more unusual in 1860 than 2008.  Relying on more than my memory, I quickly discovered that James Madison had not been more than a member of the House prior to his election.  They seem to be the only exceptions.

Stephen Coll, president of the New America Foundation, has an article in Foreign Policy making the case for more humble objectives in Afghanistan. In the article he criticizes both the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U. S. forces in Afghanistan:

To succeed, counterinsurgency approaches require deep, supple, and adaptive understanding of local conditions. And yet, as General McChrystal pointed out in his assessment, since 2001, international forces operating in Afghanistan have “not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley.” To succeed, the United States must “redouble efforts to understand the social and political dynamics of…all regions of the country and take action that meets the needs of the people, and insist that [Afghan government] officials do the same.”

and the counter-terrorism strategy advocated recently by Vice President Joe Biden:

There are narrower objections that should be registered about the “counterterrorism-only” or “counterterrorism-mainly” argument. It is probably impractical over a long period of time to wage an intelligence-derived counterterrorism campaign along the Pakistan-Afghan border if a cooperating Afghan government does not have access to the local population; if American forces are not present; and if the Pakistani state has no incentive to cooperate. This is exactly the narrative that unfolded during the 1990s and led to failure on Sept. 11 for the United States.

The article is chock-full of intriguing observations about the situation in Afghanistan and is well worth your attention. I certainly agree with him that we should focus our energies in Afghanistan on objectives we can actually accomplish and that further real American interests. In the light of this I wonder if the bar has not been set too low for Gen. McChrystal? I read Gen. McChrystal’s report as a recommendation for averting defeat. Are they the same as the requirements for achieving success? Or will that require significantly more resources? Gen. McChrystal does say that both more resources and a definite change in strategy are necessary for success:

Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or “doubling down” on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.

and

Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it. Resourcing communicates commitment, but we must also balance force levels to enable effective ANSF partnering and provide population security, while avoiding perceptions of coalition dominance. Ideally, the ANSF must lead this fight, but they will not have enough capability in the near-term given the insurgency’s growth rate. In the interim, coalition forces must provide a bridge capability to protect critical segments of the population. The status quo will lead to failure if we wait for the ANSF to grow.

However, I don’t see a commitment in the report that if the general receives what he’s requested that it will achieve the desired outcome. Am I being too critical? Or, as Stephen Coll proposes, should we be seeking more humble objectives in Afghanistan?

Ariana Huffington has generated quite a bit of buzz for her unlikely-to-be-taken suggestion that Vice President Biden resign in protest if President Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan.   The cuteness of the suggestion has unfortunately overshadowed the opening paragraph in Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas’ Newsweek piece on “A Day in the Life of Joe Biden” (HTML title: “Joe Biden, White House Truth Teller”):

Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

As I explain in my New Atlanticist essay “Strategic Balance in AfPak,” Biden’s got a point.

AP Photo

A recent survey of Oklahoma public high school students found that the overwhelming majority can’t answer even simple questions about U.S. government and history.

A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens. About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.

Below are the questions and results:

Question		% of Students Who Answered Correctly
What is the supreme law of the land?		28
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?		26
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?		27
How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?		10
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?		14
What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?		61
What are the two major political parties in the United States?		43
We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?		11
Who was the first President of the United States?		23
Who is in charge of the executive branch?		29

Shocking, no?

This meme is spreading through the blogosphere with the consensus being that our education system is failing and our students are dumber than a bag of hammers.

But here’s the thing:  I simply don’t believe these results are accurate.   I taught Politics 101 to college freshmen for a decade, so I’m under no illusion that our kids have a strong working knowledge of how our system works.  (Indeed, having administered basic geography tests as part of my World Politics course, I’m shocked that 61% not only know the Atlantic Ocean but that they know east from west.)  I could see students not knowing the answers to several of the questions above, especially framed as they are.  But, seriously, your average 6-year-old knows who George Washington is.  They couldn’t tell you anything about his administration, of course, but they know:  wooden teeth, chopped down cherry tree, couldn’t tell a lie, Martha, and 1st president.  It’s, frankly, trivia.  (And hagiography in the case of the cherry tree fable.)  But they know it nonetheless.

Tom Maguire took the time to click the link to the actual survey results. He observes, “in defense of the Oklahomans, a ten question test was administered by telephone to one thousand high school students. That has to be an unfamiliar format for the respondents, and probably not all of them gave it their best shot. Still, this is pretty grim.”

Actually, it’s worse than that.  The exam was commissioned by a conservative activist organization whose mission is to show how lousy public schools are so as to advocate for home schooling and private, religious schools.  Read the long diatribe that serves as the press release for the survey’s results.

Here’s how they describe the methodology:

In Oklahoma, the telephone surveyors called a sample of 1,000 public high-school students and read the following statement: “On the next 10 questions, I will be asking you questions about American government and history. Give me your best answer, and it is permissible to respond ‘I don’t know.’”

Guess what the most popular answer was on just about every question was.  Yes sir: “I don’t know.”  It was the majority response on the two parts of the Congress (58%) and who’s in charge of the executive branch (51%) question and was in the 40’s on three others.  It was the number one answer on eight of ten questions.

How many of those were actually non-responses?  Given the purpose of the exam, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if the survey firm wasn’t instructed to code non-responses as “I don’t know” rather than going on to a student who would take the time to give thoughtful responses.  (The only thing holding back my confidence in this regard is that the Atlantic Ocean question is listed 6th and got a very high right answer rate.)

Interestingly, too, the right answer was the plurality actual response answer on almost every question.   And the runner-up answers were, for the most part, non-idiotic.  So, 17% thought the Declaration of Independence was the supreme law of the land, compared to 28% correctly identifying the Constitution and 41% “I don’t know.”  Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Adams were the most popular wrong answers on 1st president.

The chief “wrong” answer on the “Who is in Charge of the Executive Branch” question was “the Governor,” which garnered 10%.  That’s actually right, since the question doesn’t specify federal or state.  Similarly, shouldn’t the 11% who answered that the two parties are Communist and Republican be scored correctly?  (I jest, of course.)

Again, I’m not Pollyannish on how much our kids know.  In 2001, Steven Taylor had a bonus question on a multiple-choice test he administered to 101 students at the university where we both taught at the time asking who the vice president was.  A woefully small number got it right.  (In fairness, Dick Cheney was  new in office and much less controversial than he’d be later.  Also, Steve’s eldest son, then perhaps 6, knew the answer.)   But a telephone survey of 17-year-olds who have no incentive whatsoever to take it seriously administered by a group that wants to prove how lousy our schools are is simply unfair.

UPDATE:  Kevin Drum emails to point out something I totally missed:  “not one single student got even 8 answers right.”

Kevin says, “That’s just not credible.”

No, it isn’t.   Indeed, few people got more than 4 right!  My strong guess is that:  1) they rotated the questions, rather than asking them in the order above and 2) the vast majority of students hung up after no more than three or four questions.

Dick Cheney is breaking the mold on how recently-departed vice presidents act. First, he immediately went into attack mode against President Obama. Now, he’s going after President Bush, too. Bart Gelman for WaPo:

Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

Gawker’s The Cajun Boy is quite amused:

Now, only Dick Cheney could ever possibly reflect on the “stay the course” presidency of George W. Bush and somehow come to the mangled conclusion that it was conciliatory in just about anything that it did. If there’s one thing that objective people can probably agree almost universally on when assessing Bush as a president, it’s that he and his administration were hopelessly, tragically stubborn.

But Cheney’s actually quite right here. As I’ve been arguing for months, Bush’s foreign policy returned to the Realist roots he campaigned on over time. Wolfowitz, Feith, and the gang were gone in 2005 and Rumsfeld followed them in late 2006. Gelman:

Cheney’s imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for “regime change.”

This apparently not only hurt his feelings but, more importantly, a shift away from a national strategy Cheney legitimately thought necessary to protect his country. As Kevin Drum intimates, it’s amazing that he thought we were on the right course.

But Cheney himself seems to have changed his mind on a matter of honor. He’s now working diligently on a tell-all book to set the record straight.

Some old associates see Cheney’s newfound openness as a breach of principle. For decades, he expressed contempt for departing officials who wrote insider accounts, arguing that candid internal debate was impossible if the president and his advisers could not count on secrecy. As far back as 1979, one of the heroes in Lynne Cheney’s novel “Executive Privilege” resolved never to write a memoir because “a president deserved at least one person around him whose silence he could depend on.” Cheney lived that vow for the next 30 years.

As vice president, according to one witness, Cheney “was livid” when the memoir of L. Paul Bremer, who led the occupation of Iraq, made the less-than-stunning disclosure that Cheney shared Bremer’s concern about U.S. military strategy. A Cabinet-level Bush appointee recalled that Cheney likewise described revelations by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill and former White House spokesman Scott McClellan as “beyond the pale.”

“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets. “When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”

I’m generally with Old Dick Cheney on this one. Unless one resigns in protest, one owes a certainly loyalty to those whom one serves. Cheney is one of the more controversial and important figures in recent American political history, though, and getting his considered reflections on why things unfolded as they did should be fascinating.

UPDATE: I appeared on Russia Today to talk about this issue.

In a sidebar on the Iraq War casualty predictions post, regular commenter Odograph observes, “I think ‘Bush was famously against nation-building’ is a retroactive political claim.”

Not at all.  While it’s hard to imagine in hindsight, Candidate Bush ran against nation building and promised a “more humble foreign policy.”

Remember, Realist Condi Rice was his chief foreign policy advisor during the campaign and he appointed Realist Colin Powell as his first Secretary of State.  The events of 9/11 changed his mindset considerably and his policy was shaped by Neoconservatives for a few years before quietly shifting back to a more conventional Realist policy agenda toward the end of his administration.

A website called zFacts rounded up several relevant Candidate Bush quotes.  I’ve reformatted them in cleaner fashion below:

• “Let me tell you what else I’m worried about: I’m worried about an opponent who uses nation building and the military in the same sentence. See, our view of the military is for our military to be properly prepared to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place.” – Nov 6, 2000

• “Somalia. It started off as a humanitarian mission then changed into a nation-building mission and that’s where the mission went wrong. The mission was changed. And as a result, our nation paid a price, and so I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops ought to be used to help overthrow a dictator when it’s in our best interests. But in this case, it was a nation-building exercise. And same with Haiti. I wouldn’t have supported either.” – Oct. 11, 2000

• “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America. Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That’s what it’s meant to do and when it gets overextended, morale drops.”  – Oct. 11, 2000

• “I think we’ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in national building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders.” Oct. 4, 2000

The above video, obviously redacted, is amusing in hindsight.  But that’s who Candidate Bush was.  I believe that this was his honest and sincere intention for conducting foreign policy.  But, like most presidents — including the current one — things look a little different from the Oval Office.

An amusing headline from NYT: “Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project.” I mean, obviously, Cheney is going to be linked. He’s everyone’s favorite evil mastermind.

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Now, if there’s anything we know about the CIA during the Bush years, they only kept secrets when they felt like it. Senior CIA officials routinely leaked to the press to cover their own backsides or when they disapproved of administration policy. Do we really think were going to break the law by lying to Congress on the orders of the vice president?

For that matter, it’s not entirely clear why they would consider Cheney part of their chain of command. Until early 2005, the CIA Director was dual hatted as Director of Central Intelligence, reporting directly to the president. Subsequently, the roles were split and the CIA Director reported to the Director of National Intelligence. The vice president has only referent power based on the strength of his relationship with the president. Indeed, some would argue that Dick Cheney wasn’t even a member of the executive branch!

UPDATE: Steven Taylor observes, “The broader problem here is that the current congressional oversight process over intelligence doesn’t work very well (if at all).”   Ultimately, that’s the key takeaway. CIA simply doesn’t feel like it answers to Congress.

Huffington Post is catching some grief over a post by Anya Strzemien titled “Sarah Palin’s Toenails: What’s Painted On Them? (PHOTOS, POLL).”  Apparently, the Alaska governor and former Republican vice presidential nominee had some manner of decorative adornment on her nails which were in display in some orange strappy sandals:

While some are taking HuffPo to task for journalistic silliness and questioning whether they have a foot fetish, the most prevalent theme of the critics is whether it’s sexist to comment on how a female public figure looks.

We’ve said many times that focus on a woman’s body parts instead of her ideas and actions is sexist, and that such belittling is aimed at women on both the left and right by both men and women.  In this case, some will argue that HuffPo is just having a little fun.  However the comments posted after the stroy are classist, sexist, and hateful, which can’t be a surprise to Huffpo.  So what about encouraging comments that you know are going to be a mysogyny fest?  Is that sexist, too?

Teresa Kopec, who tipped me to the story via Twitter, observes, “There is a lot of anti-woman BS that is going around lately against Palin, Sotomayor, the women targeted by Playboy, etc.”

While perhaps it’s splitting hairs, I would distinguish between sexism and double standards.  There’s not much doubt that the way women look is more commented upon than the way men look.  That doesn’t necessarily translate into thinking women’s intellects or skills are less important than those of men.

I don’t think, for example, that Hillary Clinton or Sonia Sotomayor have been viewed as silly sex objects.  It’s certainly true that Clinton’s appearance has been at issue as long as I can recall her being in public life (which is to say, since 1991 or so).   When she was First Lady, her hairdo was especially commented on, as was her choice of pantsuits vice dresses. And WaPo’s Robin Givhan devoted a whole story on C1 to Hillary Clinton’s cleavage.  And then there was the case of Condoleezza Rice’s commanding clothes which, according to a C1 story in WaPo, spoke of “sex and power,” also from Givhan.

Do we comment like that on how male public officials dress?   No, we don’t.

To be sure, there’s the occasional story on John Bolton’s hair or Dick Cheney’s Auschwitz outfit or John McCain’s $520 Ferragamo loafers.   But they’re decidedly less common.

Still, Clinton is almost universally perceived as an extraordinarily bright and competent woman.  She catapulted to the United States Senate despite no real record of her own and was considered the hands-down frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination six years later.  And Sotomayor’s words and judicial record, not her toenails or fashion sense, are what we’re focusing on.

Palin is almost a separate case.  She was a virtual unknown on the national scene when McCain tabbed her, so her national image was forged by instant impression.  By vice presidential standards, she’s extraordinarily attractive.  She’s young and a former beauty queen. Further, she dresses in a way that plays up her sexuality.  Why, a recent scientifical study found that Palin’s sexiness hurt the ticket.  Naturally, the news of said study sparked a round of blogospheric discussion about Palin’s hotness and a backlash against bloggers talking about Palin’s hotness.

Still, while the focus on her appearance goes well beyond what would be normal for a male candidate, it’s not like there wasn’t plenty of commentary on her preparation for the job.  Indeed, I’m sure she’d rather we spent more time talking about her legs.

As to this particular controversy, it’s a silly blog post and some of the commentary it drew was particularly unattractive.  Palin is a polarizing figure, which doesn’t help.  Then again, one can scarcely imagine, say, Tim Pawlenty appearing at a public event in jean shorts and sandals, the male analog to what Palin was photographed in.

Taegan Goddard passes on word that Tom Ridge, once Pennsylvania’s governor and putatively contemplating running for Arlen Specter’s seat representing that state in the Senate, is a resident of Maryland for the purposes of federal tax and lobbying filings.

Do these sort of things matter in statewide elections?   Is anyone otherwise disposed to vote for Ridge going to be dissuaded by the notion that he’s a carpetbagger?

Rather obviously, Ridge has strong ties to Pennsylvania.  But he moved to Washington for the Homeland Security post a few years back and stayed in its suburbs to cash in as a lobbyist.  Obviously, he’s not going to commute from Pennsylvania to K Street every day.

Rick Santorum represented Pennsylvania in the Senate while living in Leesburg, Virginia; at least Maryland and Pennsylvania are contiguous. Indeed, most Senators and Representatives reside in DC or its suburbs, maintaining their legal residence in their home states only as legal fictions.

George H.W. Bush spent years in Texas before moving to DC but maintained his “Texas” residency by virtue of a Houston hotel room.  Dick Cheney ran for Vice President from Wyoming, where he grew up and which he represented in the House of Representatives, even though he was living in Texas running Haliburton.  Hillary Clinton was twice elected to the Senate from New York even though she came from DC via Arkansas via Chicago.

Rebecca Frankel collects Joe Biden’s Top Five Political Gaffes, which make for an amusing list.  She rightly gives top honors to Biden’s comments on swine flu.

In case you missed it (I’m catching up a bit myself), Biden said this Thursday morning:

Appearing on NBC’s “Today Show,” Biden said he has already advised his family to avoid traveling in small spaces. “I would tell members of my family, and I have, I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places right now,” he said. “It’s not that its going to Mexico, its that you are in a confined aircraft when one person sneezes, it goes everywhere through the aircraft. That’s me.”

“I would not be at this point, if they had another way of transportation, suggesting they ride the subway,” the vice president went on. “From my perspective, it relates to is mitigation. If you’re out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes that’s one thing. If you’re in a closed aircraft, a closed container, closed car, a closed classroom, it’s a different thing.”

In fairness, Biden walked this back substantially later in the day.

Says Frankel:

But this latest foot-in-the-mouth, did-he-really-say-that-out-loud comment he made yesterday on NBC’s Today Show was worse than a gaffe. It was a serious misstep in leadership. The hysteria and fear gripping the American public is no laughing matter, and those in a position of influence must chose their words — not to mention their tone, and their demeanor — very carefully.

In his 100-day speech, President Obama used analogies with horses and barns, reassuring folks there was no need to be alarmed. This was good. Joe Biden telling folks that he doesn’t want his loved ones in confined spaces like planes, trains, and classrooms, was the opposite of good. It was bad.

Indeed.   The thing is, pretty much all of Biden’s greatest hits are defendable.  Indeed, I’ve defended him on most of them.   Obama is clean, bright, and articulate and Obama himself obviously rightly regarded Biden’s comment as an awkwardly delivered high compliment.   Biden’s “you cannot enter a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have an Indian accent” was silly but based on something so widely regarded as true that it has been a staple of our pop culture for a generation.

And, frankly, I’ve said the same thing about swine flu and airplanes in private conversation as Biden.  Indeed, we’ve canceled a family vacation to Mexico and have decided to instead go on a road trip because we don’t want to risk exposing a 4-month-old to the virus.  (And, yes, I realize that the probabilities point to driving being more dangerous.)

But Frankel’s right: Senior public officials saying these things simply has a different impact than an ordinary Joe.

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.

Ben Smith quotes lawyer A.B. Culvahouse explaining legal obstacles to Joe Lieberman’s having been John McCain’s running mate.

“Five states have sore loser statutes … [making] it very difficult for someone who’s not a member of the Republican Party to become the vice presidential nominee if they only switch parties to become a Republican shortly before the convention,’ Culvahouse said in public remarks at the Republican National Lawyers Association annual meeting aired on C-SPAN.

Culvahouse specifically noted the example of West Virginia, a state Republicans have relied on in recent elections, saying “the constitutionality of that statute has already been litigated in West Virginia.”

“So you were looking at going to the Supreme Court, which is not particularly appetizing,” he said.

I can’t find the West Virginia statute with a quick Google search but none of the sore loser laws I’m aware of would apply.   What they’re designed to do is prevent what Lieberman did in his most recent Senate bid and John Anderson did in 1980 and Pat Buchanan did in 1996:  run in one party’s primary, lose, and then run in the general election with another party.   Lieberman was not a candidate for president in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

Glenn Reynolds points to a story in a local Chester County, PA paper titled “Breeder Regrets Dog Sale to Biden.”  I clicked the link, expecting to find a story about Biden neglecting the pooch because he’s too busy doing whatever it is that vice presidents do.

Instead, it’s a tale of what a royal pain in the ass it is to do business with a high profile government official.

After the story about the puppy sale ran in the newspapers and on TV newscasts, three dog wardens from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture showed up on Brown’s doorstep for a kennel inspection. And they showed up again and again for four visits over four months.

She said she has also received death threats from animal activists against her and Biden, which were reported to the Secret Service and the FBI. Bob Slama, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Philadelphia field office, said the agency “cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.”  J.J. Klaver, special agent at the Philadelphia field office of the FBI, said his agency is not investigating the matter at this time.

“I thought when Joe Biden bought a puppy from me, what an honor,” Brown said. “Out of millions of breeders in the country, in the world, he picked me.” The glow dimmed almost immediately. Following a story about Brown and Biden in the Daily Local News, readers posted 131 comments, some chiding Biden for having the Secret Service with him when he went puppy shopping and others complaining he did not get the dog from a shelter.

And then PETA got involved . . . .

The Internet has turned virtually everyone into a potential public figure.  Ten years ago, she might have gotten a few nasty letters or a couple of crank calls from people who read about the story in the local paper.  Nowadays, though, hyper-local stories can be nationalized and acted upon by activist groups.

Townhall’s Greg Hengler seems pleased to have caught Vice President Biden in a contradiction of the Obama administration’s new verbal policy eschewing the phrase “Global War on Terror.”  Hengler quips, “Maybe Biden just forgot the phrase ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’”

Others reacting to this and aggregated at memeorandum seem to have watched said video and come away with the same conclusion.  Ed Morrissey, for example, writes, “CNN tried getting VP Biden to explain this, and while not accusing CNN of making it up, clearly he couldn’t believe anyone would be this stupid.”

It’s pretty clear to me that what Biden’s saying is that “Global War on Terror” was problematic because it treated a series of discrete problems as if they were one and the same — implying that the same tactics should be used to address all of them — and that the new team wanted to signal a clean break in policy. Now, I don’t happen to believe that the Obama policy is much of a change from the Bush policy; rather, it’s a break from the Bush policy circa 2004 and its subsequent caricaturization. But I sympathize with the desire to shed whatever baggage the old phrase carries.

I don’t, however, think “overseas contingency operations” will supplant “war on terror” in the popular lexicon.  We’re likely stuck with the phrase in that the media and academics need some sort of unifying phrase to describe a series of problems that, while different, are part of one larger fight.  Just as “post-Cold War era” stuck with us far longer than was useful because we didn’t have anything else to call it, we’ll likely have a “Global War on Terror” whether Team Obama wants it or not.