Sign Me Up, Molly!

I was walking out of men's gathering this AM and one of the attendees is moving to Austin (dreaded leftwing and hippie center of the Texas universe). And — in the back-and-forth with three righteous, Panhandle, conservative Republicans — the name of Mollie Ivins was invoked. This would be the peril of living in Austin: breathing the same air as Molly Ivins. One of the righties proclaimed that he didn't know why the local fishwrap ran her stuff. I replied, her column today was worth the subscription fee. Ol' Molly has thrown the gauntlet. She's a Bush-hater. So am I. W wouldn't even make a respectable village idiot, let alone president of these here United States. If this be (fair & balanced) polemicism, make the most of it.

Amusing Cluckings
by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas -- Among the more amusing cluckings from the right lately is their appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W. Bush is a terrible president.

Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his 44 years of covering politics, he has never seen anything like the detestation of Bush. Charles Krauthammer managed to write an entire essay on the topic of "Bush haters" in Time magazine, as though he had never before come across such a phenomenon.

Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to -- our last president. Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice they haven't let up yet. Clinton-haters accused the man of murder, rape, drug-running, sexual harassment, financial chicanery and official misconduct, and his wife of even worse.

For eight long years, this country was a zoo of Clinton-haters. Any idiot with a big mouth and a conspiracy theory could get a hearing on radio talk shows, "Christian" broadcasts and nutty Internet sites. People with transparent motives, people paid by tabloid magazines, people with known mental problems, ancient Clinton enemies with notoriously racist pasts -- all were given hearings, credence and air time. Sliming Clinton was a sure road to fame and fortune on the right, and many an ambitious young right-wing hitman -- like David Brock, who has since made full confession -- took that golden opportunity.

After all this time and all those millions of dollars wasted, no one has ever proved that the Clintons did a single thing wrong. Bill Clinton lied about a pathetic, squalid affair that was none of anyone else's business anyway, and for that they impeached the man and dragged this country through more than year of the most tawdry, ridiculous, unnecessary pain.

"The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from," mused the ineffable Krauthammer. "Whence the anger? It begins of course with the ‘stolen' election of 2000 and the perception of Bush's illegitimacy." I'd say so myself, yes, it would. I was in Florida during that chilling post-election fight and am fully persuaded to this good day that Al Gore actually won Florida, not to mention getting 550,000-more votes than Bush overall.

The night Gore conceded the race in one of the graceful and honorable speeches I have ever heard, I was in a ballroom full of Republicans Party flacks who booed and jeered through every word of it. One thing I acknowledge about the right is that they're much better haters than liberals are. Your basic liberal is pretty much a strikeout on the hatred front. Maybe further out on the left you can hit some good righteous anger, but liberals, and I am one, are generally real wusses.

To tell the truth, I'm kind of proud of us for holding the grudge this long. Normally, we'd remind ourselves that we have to be good sports, it's for the good of the country, we must unite behind the only president we've got, as Lyndon used to remind us. If there are still some of us out here sulking, "Yeah, but they (SET ITAL) stole (END ITAL) that election," well good. I don't think we should forget that.

But, onward. So George Dubya becomes president having run as a "compassionate conservative," and what do we get? Hell's own conservative and zilch for compassion. His entire first eight months was tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich. Then came 9-11, and we all rallied. Country under attack, most horrible thing, what can we do? Ready to give blood, get out of our cars and ride bicycles, whatever. Shop, said the president. And more tax cuts for the rich.

By now, we're starting to notice Bush's bait-and-switch con. Make a deal with Ted Kennedy to improve education, and then fail to put any money into it. Promise $15 billion in new money to combat AIDS in Africa (wow), but it turns out to be a cheap con -- no new money. Bush comes to praise a job-training effort, then cuts the money. Bush says AmeriCorps is great, then cuts the money. Gee, what could we possibly have against this guy?

Then suddenly, in the greatest bait and switch of all time, Osama bin doesn't matter at all, and we have to go after Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9-11. But he does have horrible weapons of mass destruction. So we take out Saddam Hussein, and there are no weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the Iraqis are not overjoyed to see us. By now, quite a few people who aren't even liberal are starting to say, "Wha' the hey?"

We got no Osama, we got no Saddam, we got no weapons of mass destruction, the road map to peace in the Middle East is blown to hell, we're stuck in this country for $87 billion just for one year, and no one knows how long we'll be there. And still poor Krauthammer is hard-put to conceive how anyone could conclude that George W. Bush is a poor excuse for a president.

It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad president. Grown-ups can do that, you know -- decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred. Poor Bush is in way over his head, and the country is in bad shape because of his stupid economic policies. If that make me a Bush-hater, then sign me up.

Copyright © 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Wesley Clark: Enough Already!

Hell, Wesley Clark — on the worst day of his life — would make more sense than W anytime. W was a real hit at the UN. And, he showed a lot of class in walking out on Jacques Chirac. The French leader sat and listened to W babble, but W walked and took Condi and Colin with him. W's chances of gaining UN support in Iraq? Slim and none and Slim went home. We have a fool in the White House. God save us. If this be (fair & balanced) blasphemy, make the most of it.

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Is General Clark's Political Inexperience a Handicap in the Campaign?
by E.J. Dionne

[T]he truth is that Americans are opportunistic, fickle and capricious on the subject of experience in politics -- which also means that we are practical and sensible. There are times when the voters are looking for a plumber, mechanic or doctor. The idea is to hire someone with a long track record who can fix problems and keep an eye on things. There are other moments when voters yearn for a preacher, an actor, a general -- even a wrestler -- who might lift their spirits by offering vision, or just by being different.

Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who announced his presidential candidacy last week, hopes this will be one of those moments. If elective office is the only relevant "experience" for the White House, Clark is a sure loser. As Ron Fournier of the Associated Press pointed out, Clark never even ran for student council. But for many Americans, that might be one of his strongest qualifications....

In truth, experience has always been a slippery concept in American politics. For one thing, experience is no substitute for ability. When Republican Party bosses picked Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio as their presidential nominee on the 10th ballot in 1920, they were nominating an amiable cipher. "Harding had no qualification for being president except that he looked like one," wrote historian William E. Leuchtenburg, even though Harding had held several public offices. Democrat William McAdoo memorably said that Harding's speeches "leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork."

But this was Harding's greatest asset. Americans had just had plenty of ideas and experience from Woodrow Wilson, including World War I and its disappointing aftermath. Harding gave Americans little to be against, promised "normalcy," and that was enough to win him a landslide.

In 1960, Richard M. Nixon based much of his campaign against John F. Kennedy on the experience issue. Both men had been elected to Congress in the same year, but Nixon was an exceptionally high-profile vice president and was seen as having lots of know-how in foreign policy. Kennedy had not made much of a mark on the Senate.

Nonetheless, Kennedy was a Democrat in what was still a New Deal country. He offered verve and drive and vision galore, even if the vision was a bit gauzy. Nixon tried to get past the party labels and glitz by being safe, sound -- and, well, experienced. "Because Experience Counts" became one of his main slogans. The 1960 result was one of the closest in U.S. history -- a virtual tie between experience and its competitor.

The big difference between 1960 and now is that the country has gone through one merciless anti-Washington campaign after another. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Howard Dean -- all, in one way or another, tried to turn Washington experience into a form of leprosy.

It's enough to make a grown member of Congress cry -- and protest.

Here's Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, the Democratic presidential candidate, who was first elected to Congress in 1976: "I'm not going to say what's fashionable in our politics -- that I'm a Washington outsider, that I couldn't find the nation's capital on a map, that I have no experience in the highest levels of government," said the former House Democratic leader in announcing his presidential candidacy. "I do, and I think experience matters. It's what our nation needs right now."

Yet what, exactly, constitutes "experience"? You can think of certain candidates -- among them Gephardt, Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry, Bob Graham, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Carol Mosley Braun and Dennis Kucinich -- who say elective office is an asset. That would seem to leave out a general like Clark. Generals are used to having people follow orders, which could make matters dicey with, say, Congress and the voters. Clark has no professional experience with domestic issues, and acknowledged to reporters on Thursday that he had few specific policy ideas to offer at the moment. More experience might have prevented his embarrassing flip-flop last week -- first he said he probably would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war in Iraq, then he reversed himself the next day.

Yet if the presidency is in part about command, who better than a former general? George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Dwight D. Eisenhower were no slouches. How many senators have ever run things? In the wake of 9/11, which "experience" is more relevant -- Clark's in foreign policy and war, Howard Dean's as a chief executive, albeit of a small state, or the extensive legislative experience of most of the rest of the field? (Senator Graham, former governor of Florida, can claim both executive and legislative experience, but it hasn't helped him in the polls so far.)

The fact that "experience" is itself a mushy concept becomes even clearer if you consider this question: Was George W. Bush's six years' experience as a governor sufficient to prepare him for the presidency? Ask any dozen people and I bet you an old Nixon button that their answers break down almost entirely along party lines -- proving that experience can have little to do with our view of "experience."

That we are terribly ambivalent about experience is brought home by our vacillation between the Cincinnatus and Richard J. Daley models of leadership. Our hearts regularly go to the proud and independent person who has never been soiled by politics or compromise and comes to our rescue out of nowhere. This sort of character (Jesse Ventura played him on TV) appeals to our mistrust of politics and our desire to escape it.

Copyright © 2003 Washington Post

General President Wesley Clark?

I can still hear my grandmother ranting: No military man should be president! However, my grandmother didn't know W. If this be (fair & balanced) political analysis, so be it.

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Is General Clark Presidential Material?
by David Greenberg

Gen. Wesley K. Clark's entry into the Democratic presidential contest has delighted voters opposed to the administration's war policies and hungry for a candidate with national security bona fides. A four-star general who led the war in Kosovo, Clark has also been an outspoken critic of President Bush's foreign policies.

Clark's detractors, however, offer this warning to his Democratic fans: most Americans have supported Bush's post-9/11 adventurism. Clark's epaulets, these skeptics insist, won't make his dovishness any more palatable to the public.

Yet to dismiss Clark's prospects for electoral success as a liberal delusion is to misread the historic allure of military officers as presidential contenders. Generals who have become president (there were ten, six of them notable as commanders) have usually succeeded by presenting themselves as bearers not of war but of peace. They do so because of the public's long-standing ambivalence about military heroes in politics.

Americans, to be sure, expect their leaders to be tough. During both the Cold War and the post-9/11 period, politicians often won followings with bellicose and chauvinistic rhetoric.

But the American appetite for militarism has limits. The colonial struggle against British occupation forces in the Revolutionary era instilled an enduring skepticism about permanent armies, and the Founders pointedly placed the armed forces under civilian authority. Remote from Europe, the United States sought, in its idealized self-portrait, to be a peace-loving country. (The wars against Native Americans were left out of the story.)

Accommodating such ambivalence, generals have taken to emulating Cincinnatus of ancient Rome, who famously heeded the call to leave his farm and defend the city, only to return voluntarily to his plow after victory had been secured. In his own day, George Washington was explicitly likened to that Roman general: Having led the Revolutionary army, Washington retired to Mount Vernon, then answered the call once more when the new nation needed a president. Largely because of Washington's example, other office-seeking generals cast themselves as nonpolitical public servants. They disavowed all personal ambition and entered politics as if bowing to public demand.

In 1840, William Henry Harrison, a hero of the Indian wars, professed selfless public service as the rationale for his candidacy, as did the Mexican War veteran Zachary Taylor in 1848. So a century later did Dwight D. Eisenhower, the victorious commander of the Allies in Europe during World War II, who cultivated an aura of non-partisanship so skillfully that even the Democrats tried in vain to get him to bear their standard.

In this respect, Clark has played the Cincinnatus role beautifully. For a long time (maybe longer than was plausible), he refused to identify with either party, outing himself as a Democrat just this month. And he has appeared to revel in the "Draft-Clark" outfits that have emerged at the grassroots, as if he were capitulating to public demand.

Beyond a reluctance for politics, the Cincinnatus archetype also entails a disavowal of warmongering. Here, too, Clark is following the tradition of generals entering high office. Although Ulysses S. Grant won fame during the Civil War for his ferocity, his battlefront glory lent him credibility as a peacemaker. After the Confederacy's surrender at Appomattox, he squelched his soldiers' gloating, telling them that "the rebels are our countrymen again." In accepting the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1868, he concluded, "Let us have peace."

Similarly, Eisenhower pledged just before the 1952 election to go to Korea, to make peace in a frustrating and demoralizing war. No one dared call the hero of World War II soft on communism. In contrast, his rival, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, could never subordinate his martial persona to a softer peacetime profile, and he never advanced in the political arena.

Like Ike and Grant, Clark has the authority to denounce a misbegotten military adventure. His experience can assure voters that restraint in his case will not mean an abdication of America's global leadership role.

Whether Clark sinks or soars on the campaign trail will hinge on many variables. But he has historical precedents on his side. He doesn't seem to hunger for the presidency, and -- just as important -- neither does he hunger for war.

David Greenberg is the author of NIXON'S SHADOW: THE HISTORY OF AN IMAGE (2003). He teaches history and political science at Yale University and is a writer for the History News Service.

Copyright © 2003 History News Service

A President Named Wesley?

Are the times right for a military coup d'etat? If this be (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.

HNN Poll: Is Wesley Clark America's Cincinnatus?

As Gil Troy has pointed out in See How They Ran, America is "haunted by the ghosts of George Washington and Andrew Jackson." Presidential candidates are required to be "as aloof , as virtuous, as restrained as Washington, while being as popular, as political, as dynamic as Jackson." The inherent contradictions in this formula have often been resolved by picking presidents drawn from the ranks of the military. Because military heroes have become popular through their behavior on the battlefield, they do not have to pander to the crowd to attract support through naked political appeals. It is no mystery therefore that Americans have elected ten generals as president. Particularly during times of high cynicism, military leaders have made especially popular candidates. Like Ike in 1952, they can argue convincingly that they will sweep the Augean stables clean of political corruption.

Of course, not all military leaders possess the political shrewdness needed to win the presidency. The most famous case of a leader who proved unable to translate heroism on the battlefield into political gain was Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay.

After the Spanish-American War, pressure mounted on Dewey to make a run for the office. He demurred, telling the press, "I am unfitted for it." Nonetheless Democrats, eager to back an alternative to the wild William Jennings Bryan, pressed him to change his mind. Finally, in April 1900 Dewey agreed to run. "Yes," he told a reporter for the New York World, "I have decided to become a candidate." But his candidacy fizzled, in no small measure because he told the press that he had decided to run because "since studying this subject, I am convinced that the office of the president is not such a very difficult one to fill." As Mark Sullivan recounted, this astonishing statement resulted in scornful headlines. "Leaders Laugh at Poor Dewey," was one. Another: "The Entire Capital Is Laughing at the Former Hero."

No one is laughing at General Clark's candidacy. But he did get off to a bad start, telling reporters initially that if he were in Congress he would have approved the war resolution on Iraq, though he would have insisted that it include a provision requiring President Bush to return to Congress for express authorization to go to war. (Democrats in Congress also favored such a provision but were unable to persuade Republicans to go along.) Clark's statement in support of the war resolution immediately undermined his appeal to anti-war Democrats. The next day he clarified his position, explaining that while he supported the war resolution to apply pressure on Saddam, he opposed the war itself.

Our question this week: Are the times ripe for a candidate like General Wesley Clark?

Copyright © 2003 History News Network

10 Generals Have Been Elected President

I just exchanged some back-and-forth with Tom Terrific in Madison, WI about Wesley Clark. My maternal grandmother always preached against making a military man president. Were her parents offended at the Grant scandals? I will never know. Not that she would have voted for Eisenhower, but I heard that mantra often in my childhood. If this be (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.

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How Many Generals Have Been Elected President? Ten
David Greenberg, writing in Slate (Sept. 18, 2003):

The president generals are George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight Eisenhower. Unlike the other six, who were famed for their battlefield achievements, Pierce, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison were not known for their military records. Generals who have lost general elections include Lewis Cass, Winfield Scott, George McClellan, and Winfield S. Hancock. Douglas MacArthur and Al Haig are among the generals who planned presidential runs but never got close to the November ballot.

Copyright © 2003 Slate