Timothy Sandefur is embarrassed:

So I was watching this insane video of Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie discussing the War on Terrorism with Mos Def. And it’s amusing to laugh at the utterly hapless ignorance of “Mr. Def,” as he is repeatedly called—until you stop and wonder. Why is the black community not outraged by this? Bill Maher hosts a talk show to discuss the threat of Islamic terrorism and the Middle East, and he invites two world-renowned white male intellectuals and Mos Def? If this show had been choreographed by the Ku Klux Klan it could not have been more infuriating. Did Maher not have the phone number of a black intellectual? Were Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Orlando Patterson, Julian Bond, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter all busy?

Here’s the video:

While I agree entirely that this is an absurd pairing, it’s most definitely not a racist one.  Sandefur has apparently never seen “Real Time with Bill Maher.”  The premise of the show, from its inception more than six years ago, has been to pair politicos and pop culture figures in discussion.  (Whether the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the latter are morons or that their opinions are equally valid, I could never determine.)

Here are the seven season openers.

February 21, 2003. Guests: Author Ann Coulter, actor Larry Miller, writer, radio host and professor Michael Eric Dyson, comedian Sarah Silverman, comedian Chris Rock.  Topics: The UN, Affirmative Action.

January 16, 2004. Guests: Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, artist Moby, Rev. Al Sharpton, actor Ron Silver, Rep. Darrell Issa. Topics: American values, Iraq, MoveOn.org, environment.

February 18, 2005. Guests: Correspondent Lesley Stahl, actor Robin Williams, former H&HS Sec. Tommy Thompson, Sen. Joe Biden, and actor Don Cheadle. Topics: On protecting sources, Jeff Gannon, on Interrogating prisoners, Iraq elections, Darfur.

February 17, 2006. Guests: Sen. Russ Feingold, commentator Fred Barnes, actor Eddie Griffin, reporter Helen Thomas, Iraq advisor Dan Senor. Topics: Cheney shooting, on the Patriot Act, Bush, Mohammad cartoons.

February 16, 2007. Guests: Fmr Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, fmr Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, TV host Craig Ferguson; via satellite, fmr Sen. John Edwards and basketball player John Amaechi. Topics: Developments in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq; global warming; Mitt Romney and Mormonism; Al Franken Senate campaign.

January 11, 2008. Guests: Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, fmr Court TV anchor Catherine Crier, fmr Bush Press Secy Tony Snow, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi (election correspondent); via satellite, humorist P.J. O’Rourke. Topics: New Hampshire primary, electronic voting machines, Iraq troop surge, subprime lending and prospects for economic recession.

February 20, 2009. Guests: Financial Times editor Chrystia Freeland, journalist Tina Brown, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA); via satellite, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), journalist Brigitte Gabriel The economy, President Obama’s first month in office.

See the Wikipedia episode guide if you fear the season openers are not representative.

The pairings are, in most if not all cases, patently absurd. They include plenty of famous white guys who would, on the face of things, seem to be woefully out of their elements and plenty of black guys who would seemingly mop of the floor with the competition.

For what it’s worth, Mr. Def was really good in this week’s “House.”

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.

Jim Geraghty is not buying the notion that Wes Clark’s attempts to diminish John McCain’s military service was done without coordination with the Democratic Powers that Be.

After statements by a half-dozen high-profile Democrats and Obama surrogates, you cannot persuade me that there is not a concerted effort on the part of Obama Democrats to criticize McCain on his war record. George McGovern, Jay Rockefeller, Tom Harkin, Democratic congressional candidate Bill Gillespie, Ed Schultz, Tony McPeak, and now Clark. Way too many to be coincidence. We’re seeing a lot more derisive comments about McCain’s wartime service than we are about Obama’s race.

To those examples, I’d add the “McCain didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam because he was a POW during the worst years” meme that floated around recently.

OTB commenter Bithead isn’t buying Obama’s attempts to distance himself from Clark.

Obama’s been doing this all along; Surrogates end up saying the smears and other trash talk the campaign needs to spread, and when things get too hot because of what gets said, Obama simply tosses the speaker under the bus, and claims he’s running a ‘clean campaign’, and he’s shocked…. shocked… that any of his people would come up with such a comment.

Let’s leave Ed Schultz, a radio host who one reasonably presumes isn’t coordinating with anyone and Gillespie, of whom I’ve never heard, out of the mix.  Do the remaining attempts to dampen McCain’s trump card, his military experience, constitute a pattern?  And, even if they do, is doing this, as Dale Franks suggests, beyond the pale?

Barack Obama has wisely distanced himself from surrogate Wes Clark’s disparagement of John McCain’s military experience.

“For those like John McCain who have endured physical torment in service to our country — no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary,” Obama said. “And let me also add that no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters on both sides.”

The comment drew loud applause.

Andrew Sullivan, an unabashed admirer of Obama despite his own Oakeshottian conservative bent, is less temperate vis-a-vis Clark.

Wesley Clark is now and always has been a Clinton-type, but this is pretty revolting. This kind of personal attack was repulsive coming against Kerry from the far right. And it’s repulsive the other way round. Both Kerry and McCain served their country honorably; and their records should be revered, period. You can make an argument against McCain’s foreign policy experience and judgment on its merits. Do it and leave this crap out of it.

Quite. I’d be happy to see questioning of candidate patriotism and loyalty similarly consigned to the fringes of legitimate discourse.

General Wesley Clark is trying to argue that John McCain’s military experience is irrelevant to future service as commander-in-chief:

Clark said that McCain lacked the executive experience necessary to be president, calling him “untested and untried” on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” And in saying so, he took a few swipes at McCain’s military service.

After saying, “I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war,” he added that these experiences in no way qualify McCain to be president in his view:

“He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron,” Clark said.

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

Clark has been banging this drum for awhile now but this is the first truly high-level exposure he’s gotten. Pat Lang remarked on this gambit two weeks ago and, as Steve Benen notes, he’s trotted this out on early morning television as well. The trial balloon worked well enough to get Matt Yglesias‘ consideration as a VP candidate.

On one level, Clark has a point.  Commanding a training squadron isn’t the same as running a wartime theater. And, as I argued when John Kerry was relying too much on his Vietnam experience and I’ve continued to counsel vis-a-vis McCain, being a war hero only goes so far in making a case for a presidential candidate.  Nor is Clark “Swift Boating” McCain; he’s not questioning his wartime accomplishments.

Still, at the larger level, this strikes me as a poor argument.  While “getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down” might not be sufficient qualification to be president, it’s certainly more than Barack Obama ever endured.  And, while Obama has experience at the community level that McCain can’t match, it’s a dangerous game for him to send out surrogates to minimize McCain’s service.  As Bruce McQuain asks, “if the willingness to fight for your country, put your life on the line and suffer the brutality McCain suffered as a POW doesn’t make the cut as far as qualifications go, how far below that does a ‘community organizer’ show up on the list of non-qualifications?“

In the long months between now and the conventions, one recurring theme we’ll see in the press and the punditocracy is speculation of who Barack Obama and John McCain will chose as running mates. None of us have any idea, of course, other than that Dick Cheney is not on anybody’s list. But it’s still fun to speculate.

For Obama, the most prominent names I’ve seen, aside from Hillary Clinton of course, are former North Carolina Senator John Edwards (Motto: He did so well in 2004), Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius (a white woman who’s much less annoying than Hillary), former NATO commander and Marine Commandant Jim Jones (my boss’ boss at the Atlantic Council), former NATO commander and 2004 also-ran Wesley Clark and, now, former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn. Former Reagan SECNAV and current Virginia Senator Jim Webb, widely touted by myself and others, seems to have fallen out of favor. Also, since Jim Johnson has been ousted, we’re pretty sure that Obama won’t pull a Dick Cheney and pick his selection committee chairman.

Clinton, Edwards, and Sebelius would be traditional choices made for standard political reasons. Jones, Clark, or Nunn would be an admission that national security is a huge issue and that Obama needs help there. Frankly, unless he puts Jeremiah Wright on the ticket, I’m not sure it much matters.

The conventional wisdom is probably right that McCain’s VP choice matters more than Obama’s simply because of McCain’s age. At 72, it’s hard to see him running for a second term and, let’s face it, he’s more likely than his 45-year-old opponent to die in office.

Speculation centers on former 2008 challengers Mitt Romney (less conservative than McCain but more favored among conservatives), Mike Huckabee (reducing the Republican Party to its essential element), Louisiana governor and boy wonder Bobby Jindal (half McCain’s age and “of color”), Florida Governor Charlie Crist (who’s from Florida), Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (who’s a woman), and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (who’s not only a woman but good looking by VP candidate standards). Nobody’s much talking about Condi Rice anymore, given that distancing himself from President Bush is a key McCain priority. Former Democrat Joe Lieberman is a Hail Mary dark horse, creating a possible RINO-DINO* ticket.

Frankly, I’m not particularly enthusiastic with any of the above options. Palin and Jindal are interesting choices but make no sense for a candidate betting the ranch on national security expertise. Huckabee is simply a non-starter, since he alienates pretty much everyone who isn’t a die hard Evangelical. Hutchinson and Crist are safe but boring. Lieberman is the boldest choice, simultaneously doubling down on the Iraq bet and appealing to moderates, but he also energizes a large part of the Democratic base and irritates McCain’s conservative critics on domestic issues.

Is there someone out there that can simultaneously 1) help McCain carry a swing state, 2) bolster his conservative credentials, 3) complement the “Ready on Day One” message?

Image via HuffPo

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*Technically, Lieberman’s no longer a Democrat in name but there’s no cute acronym for “Caucusing With the Democrats But Poking them in the Eye with a Sharp Stick Whenever Possible” — much less one which rhymes with RINO.

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.

Publius draws some parallels between the Fred Thompson’s current campaign and Wesley Clark’s ill-fated 2004 effort.

The Clark and Thompson campaigns have eerily similar pre-histories. Because the party elites and rank-and-file weren’t very happy with the slate of candidates, Clark and Thompson’s names got floated for months. Party members didn’t know much about them, so they projected their desires on to the idea of them — and expectations ran high. Rather than seizing this opportunity early on, both candidates played footsie for months and months but hesitated to jump in. And then, finally, they did.

And both almost immediately started making embarrassing gaffes.

[R]aising money is not the only reason why campaigns start so early. It’s also important to get your sea legs and work out the bugs well before people start paying attention. People like Kerry and Edwards and Romney and McCain started visiting funnel cake stands in Iowa many months before Clark and Thompson did. It’s not fun, but the experiences gave the candidates a chance to respond to a dizzying range of questions — and tighten their message accordingly.

Clark wasn’t out there doing that. He didn’t get stumped by an Iowa farmer’s question in March of 2003 and go home to rework his responses. Instead, he jumped out when the spotlight was maximally bright (both because of the date and the drama surrounding his entry) and was completely unprepared for what was coming. And it showed — he made a fatal gaffe that completely undercut his campaign on the second day.

Thompson seems determined to repeat Clark’s mistakes — and for similar reasons. Running for President is hard. You get asked a lot of diverse questions. It takes time to hear them all and master good, persuasive, politically-safe responses to them. Thompson, however, clearly hasn’t been thinking about these questions (or let’s hope not anyway). Several months on the stump sharpens your message, improves your bullshit powers. Thompson sounds like I would sound if I jumped into a high-stress presidential campaign 4 months before the primary — like an unprepared idiot.

Indeed.

The gap from any job to the presidency is wider than any other career progression I can think of. Clark, by all accounts, was incredibly talented and accomplished. Supreme Allied Commander isn’t exactly the minor leagues, after all, and it comes with a considerable amount of political and diplomatic responsibility. But there’s no job where you’re expected to have off-the-cuff answers to every conceivable question about policies foreign and domestic, national and local. Even the wonkiest, like Bill Clinton, don’t have those answers as candidates; most don’t have them after eight years as president. The successful ones, though, at least learn how to give vague, intelligent sounding answers or artfully redirect the question.

The new NFL season kicks off in earnest today, so football analogies are especially apt. Perhaps the second hardest career progression is that of a quarterback moving from college to the NFL. The offensive schemes are ridiculously more complicated and so are the defenses. The players are bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter. Even the eventual greats — John Elway, Troy Aikman, Joe Montana, Peyton Manning — are awful as rookies. One of the perennial questions in the game is how to handle the development of rookie quarterbacks: Throw them right in and let them take their lumps or have them sit and watch? Some of the all-time greats have been produced by both methods but there’s a fear of shattering a guy’s confidence by having him do it all at once.

Thompson (and Clark before him), though, are like the rookie who missed training camp because of injury or a contract holdout. I can’t think of a single case where one of those guys did well his first season.

Retired General Wesley Clark and UCLA law professor Kal Raustiala have an op-ed in today’s NYT arguing that the Bush administration policy of treating terrorists as “unlawful combatants” rather than criminals is problematic.

Treating terrorists as combatants is a mistake for two reasons. First, it dignifies criminality by according terrorist killers the status of soldiers. Under the law of war, military service members receive several privileges. They are permitted to kill the enemy and are immune from prosecution for doing so. They must, however, carefully distinguish between combatant and civilian and ensure that harm to civilians is limited.

[...]

The second major problem with the approach of the Bush administration is that it endangers our political traditions and our commitment to liberty, and further damages America’s legitimacy in the eyes of others.

They’re right, so far as it goes, on both counts. I’ve argued from the beginning of the GWOT that terrorists are not entitled to the honored privileges of soldiers and that legal residents of the United States have Constitutional rights that are not trumped by allegations of terrorism.

Clarke and Raustiala go too far, though, in their conclusion:

We need to recognize that terrorists, while dangerous, are more like modern-day pirates than warriors. They ought to be pursued, tried and convicted in the courts. At the extreme, yes, military force may be required. But the terrorists themselves are not “combatants.” They are merely criminals, albeit criminals of an especially heinous type, and that label suggests the appropriate venue for dealing with the threats they pose.

Accused terrorists caught on American soil are indeed mere criminals. But most terrorists and plotters are not subject to American law. Nor are most even living in societies apt to comply with extradition requests. So, while the investigative techniques of law enforcement might be useful, arrest and trial are not feasible goals. In those cases — which because of their sheer numbers are far from “extreme” — the military option is likely the only one available.

Evan Bayh is joining the increasingly long line of touted Democratic candidates who have bowed out of the 2008 race for the White House.

Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh will not seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, FOX News has learned.

Bayh made the decision depsite having made several visits to test states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and raising millions of dollars toward a possible White House run.

FOX News has learned that Bayh raised more than $10 million, making him competitive with other top possible Democratic presidential candidates like New York Senator Hillary Clinton and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards. However, future fundraising considerations may have been a factor as it is believed that Clinton will get a large share of financial support from party backers in 2007.

Personality issues may have been a concern as well as some insiders told FOX News that Bayh showed very little “fire in the belly” as a presidential prospect. Some of his supporters have acknowledged that his relaxed demeanor and calm tone lacked presidential charisma, even though Bayh has been re-elected by large margins in a red state over the past 20 years.

Fundraising is definitely a factor but I suspect the “fire in the belly” aspect played the biggest role. Running for president is a grueling endeavor. You’ve got to want it badly to endure that.

With Bayh and former Virginia Governor Mark Warner officially out of the race, the Democratic field is narrowing down pretty quickly–and without the most prominent moderates. Bill Richardson and Tom Vilsack would appear to be vying for the mantle of “moderate alternative to Hillary.”

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Related:

Bill Richardson: ‘I Am Running’ in 2008
Dennis Kucinich Pondering 2008 Run
Tom Daschle Rules out Presidential Bid
Barack Obama Emerging as Clinton Alternative #1
First Hat Officially in the Ring: Vilsack’s
Wesley Clark Signals 2008 Presidential Bid
Mark Warner Rules Out 2008 Presidential Run
Frontloading Marches On

It looks like Wesley Clark is running again for president.

Wesley Clark said Tuesday he wants to avoid waiting too late to make a decision on whether to run for president — a mistake he made in his failed 2004 bid. “I think it was clear that I got in too late last time,” the retired general and former NATO commander told The Associated Press in an interview.

Clark announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in September 2003, just four months before the first votes were cast. He dropped out of the race the following February, with his only victory in 14 caucuses and primaries coming in Oklahoma.

Clark is considering running again, but he said the late start was one of the mistakes he learned from in his last attempt. “(There was) an inability to create a staff in a timely fashion,” Clark said. “I didn’t have a campaign manager until the end of November. I had no money. I had no strategy when I started. It was my only faith-based initiative…. It’s one of several mistakes that if I were to run that I would hope I wouldn’t repeat.”

Interestingly, the Democratic field looks to be shaping up as Hillary Clinton versus a bunch of folks who have run before an failed: Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and now Clark. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Indeed, several recent presidents have gotten elected after having previously failed in primary (Bush the Elder and Reagan) or general election (Nixon) bids. Indeed, it will be even more difficult than usual for someone without name recognition to break through against that field.

This may be bad news for the Democrats, though, as none of these candidates are governors and only Gore is a former vice president. It has been a long time, indeed, since someone who was not from one of those groups got elected president. And Wes Clark is no Dwight Eisenhower.

via Paul Glastris

Kevin Drum, reflecting on the recent spate of retired generals speaking out both both for and against Donald Rumsfeld’s being replaced as SECDEF, remarks, “Regardless of whether or not we agree with the generals’ criticism, I think it’s wise to be uneasy about something that has a bit of a sense of a palace revolt against the current civilian leadership of the military.”

Steven Taylor thinks this concern odd, arguing that that “employing the ‘civilian control of the military’ card in this context is a non sequitur, because the generals in question are retired, and therefore are civilians and are exercising their rights as such to critique the sitting government.” In follow-up posts, he notes that guys like Wesley Clark have spoken out without similar criticisms and, citing an Explainer piece noting that there are “about 4700 retired generals,” the pronouncements of a few of them will hardly undermine civilian control.

While I am sympathetic to the “civilian control” argument and would like to see retired generals (and, indeed, public officials period) be silent, I ultimately agree with Taylor on this one. As I’ve noted before, we’ve had much more aggregious cases at even more inauspicious times without undermining the Republic.

Update: Steve Bainbridge examines the issue from the standpoint of institutional economics:

It does not impugn the patriotism or courage of members of the military to point out that the military as an institution tends to be plagued with careerism and politics. . . . Ambitious generals at the end of their career, facing imminent mandatory retirement, seem especially unlikely to buck those who control their prospects for advancement.

In contrast, recently retired generals provide a source of external monitoring that has many of the advantages of insider oversight. They have access to information about the SecDef that is nearly as good as their active duty counterparts, without the political and carrier constraints. To be sure, one must take it all with a grain of salt, because the retirees may well have their own political axes to grind (or career scores to settle).

Yet, in thinking about the problem as one of monitoring within organizations, critiques by recent retirees strikes me as a useful combination of external and internal review. We get the informational advantages of insiders coupled with the freedom to criticize of external forces. It isn’t perfect, but in a system in which civilian control must be held accountable, this strikes me as a legitimate form of accountability.

While the warrior culture and the nature of esprit de corps makes any analogy between the military and other businesses imperfect, I agree. While having recently retired generals criticizing their former bosses is somewhat problematic, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Even if it were a push, one seldom goes wrong chosing the side of freedom.