Trifecta: 1The Krait, 2The Nickster, and 3Roger The Dodger

Wow! The Op-Ed section of the NY Fishwrap was chock full o'nuts today. ¹The Krait led off with comments on The Hopester's latest political adventure and she concludes with a piece of advice to The Hopester: Take a nap! ²The Nickster (Nicholas Kristof) suggests a new speech for The Hopester: a meditation on sexism to bookend with his earlier mediation on racism. There's one thing about The Hopester: he can speechify. The Geezer sounds more and more like Bob Dull. The election of '08 could be a replay of '96 if The Geezer can't do any better than an imitation of an old coot yelling from his front porch: "Hey! You kids! Get off my front yard!" Today's trifecta ends with Paris-based, ³Roger The Dodger (Cohen) writing about The Dubster's final world tour. The world has changed and The Dubster (like The Geezer) doesn't have a clue. If this is (fair & balanced) commentary, so be it.

PS: Mrs. Hopester recently was dissed by Faux News. Those fools referred to Mrs. Hopester as "Obama's Baby Mama." Don Imus and his "nappy-headed ho's" chit-chat would fit in at Faux News. A "baby mama" is an unwed mother is urban slang and the pejorative belongs in the same box with "nappy-headed ho's." The beat goes on with the Righties and Dumbos. Stupid is as stupid says.

[x NY Fishwrap]

¹Barack’s Bad Day
By Gail Collins

Everybody knows that the very first rule in picking a vice president is to do no harm. Really, you can choose anybody. How dumb would you feel if it turned into an embarrassment? This is why the careful, modern candidate sets up a screening system.

Now ask yourself: how dumb would you feel if you got in trouble over your selection for the vice-presidential screener.

Barack Obama is having the first postprimary crisis, a moment in which the only conceivable response is: what was he thinking?

James Johnson, who resigned Wednesday as the leader of the Obama vice-presidential selection committee, is an old Washington hand who had helped Walter Mondale and John Kerry with the same task. His aura of experience was apparently not diminished one whit by the fact that both the candidates he assisted lost and that one of them ran into embarrassing controversies over his running mate.

The immediate cause of Johnson’s downfall was a charge that he had been given a sweet deal on three home loans by the head of the Countrywide Financial Corporation, which Obama had criticized for its role in the subprime lending crisis. Since Countrywide seems to hold the mortgage on every house in the United States, it is also disliked by many, many Americans on general principles.

So far, not so bad. As Obama pointed out, you cannot really expect a presidential candidate to set up a committee to vet the people who are going to be on the vetting committee. Although you can bet that by 2012, that will become standard operating procedure.

But there’s all this other stuff. Johnson is the former head of Fannie Mae, which under his direction, according to regulators, engaged in accounting practices that were, at best, sloppy. At the same time, he sat on the boards of five different corporations, where he appeared to serve as cheerleader for the theory that corporate executives deserve to be paid obscene amounts of money.

How does someone go up to Barack Obama, who once sponsored a bill to curb excessive executive compensation, and say — “You know the vice-presidential search committee? For chairman, how about Jim Johnson? Remember, the guy who tried to give the head of UnitedHealth Group $1.4 billion in stock options?”

When Johnson quit on Wednesday, the McCain headquarters issued a statement saying that the fact that he had been selected in the first place raised “serious questions about Barack Obama’s judgment.” This does not seem like a great avenue of attack for a campaign in which a large chunk of the top staff was recently dismissed for being lobbyists.

Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate the cases, the McCain spokesman said: “America can’t afford a president who flip-flops on key questions in the course of 24 hours.” Under a McCain presidency, the bleeding would presumably go on for weeks and weeks before the inevitable occurred.

Although McCain has, so far, not demonstrated that he can manage anything more challenging than a backyard barbecue, that still does not make the Johnson story look any better.

Keep in mind that the head of the vice-presidential vetting committee is not a job for which there are a limited number of qualified candidates. You could appoint a hero firefighter or a nun to be the public face of the search. You hire experts to do the background checks. You would want your own trusted advisers sitting in on the interviews. The other two committee members, Caroline Kennedy and a former deputy attorney general, could have managed on their own.

But no, we have to have a seasoned wise man whose high standing among the movers and shakers of the nation’s business and political elite seemed to hinge on the fact that he feels every single one of them deserves more money.

Talk about unnecessary disasters. It’s like having your career ruined because you invited the wrong person to host a party in honor of your nephew’s godparents.

Gentle spirits may decide that it’s a good thing that the Obama campaign is getting this sort of thing out of the way early. Crueler ones may note that at least they can’t blame this one on Hillary.

Rather than falling into complete depression at such an early point in the game, let’s work under the assumption that the people involved were so tired that they didn’t know what they were doing.

Just before the final primaries, I was in South Dakota talking to George McGovern, who is the gold standard when it comes to disastrous vice-presidential selections. If Obama ever asked him for advice, McGovern said, he’d tell him to avoid exhaustion.

“I got that advice from Barry Goldwater. He said watch out for fatigue. That’s when you make mistakes,” McGovern added.

One ridiculous decision doesn’t mean that Obama won’t be a good candidate.

But it does suggest that he needs to take a long nap.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.]

²The Sex Speech
By Nicholas D. Kristof

One of the missed opportunities of the primary season was that Hillary Clinton never gave a speech about gender comparable to Barack Obama’s speech about race.

That was understandable: She didn’t want to be reduced to the “woman candidate.” But such a speech might have triggered a useful national conversation about women in leadership, and so, Mr. Obama, now it’s up to you: Why don’t you give that speech? I’m helpfully offering some talking points:

Racism is deeper, but sexism may be wider in America today. In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate, and sexist put-downs are heard more publicly than racial ones.

Presumably in part because of sexism (and also because of self-selection), women today are still hugely underrepresented in the political arena. Women constitute about 23 percent of legislators in the 50 states, a proportion that has risen only slightly in the last decade. In addition, the political commentariat is overwhelmingly male, which is one reason that Mrs. Clinton’s supporters felt unfairly battered.

We aren’t always aware of our own biases. Some of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are sure that she was defeated by misogyny, while those who voted against her invariably are dismissive: The reason I didn’t vote for her isn’t that she’s a woman. It’s that she’s a dynastic opportunist who voted for the Iraq war and ...

The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of. Many studies have presented research subjects with the exact same C.V., alternately with a male name and a female name. Usually, the male is perceived as a better fit for executive posts — even among well-meaning people who are against gender discrimination, and even among women.

At the end of the day, none of this proves or disproves the thesis that gender bias played a role in the election. But if Mrs. Clinton was hurt by gender, her problem wasn’t misogynists so much as ordinary men and women who believe in equal opportunity — but also are conditioned to think that a president speaks in a gravelly voice.

A conservative may end up the first woman president. The first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, wasn’t “very Catholic.” In the same way, the first black president probably won’t be “very black,” either in complexion or in any personal history with the civil-rights struggle. And the first female president probably won’t be “very female,” in the sense of emerging from the women’s movement.

Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, both conservatives with no association with the women’s movement, offer hints of the kind of woman who may rise to the White House. Or consider the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman nominated for president at a major political party convention. She was a Republican.

Women make a difference in politics, but not a large one. When women first received the right to vote in 1920, the assumption was that they would be a big help to Democrats, who had been more sympathetic to women’s suffrage. Instead, Republicans won the next three presidential elections. Today, the best guide to a senator’s voting behavior is his or her political party and home state, not his or her sex.

Still, it has been disproportionately women in Congress who have championed issues like family planning and abortion rights, and they also seem modestly more attentive to concerns about gender discrimination. Less perspicaciously, women were crucial players in achieving Prohibition.

Politics can make a difference for women. If Mr. Obama wants to show that gender issues are on his radar, he could embrace an issue that no president has ever shown interest in: maternal mortality, the orphan issue of global public health. It’s a disgrace that a woman dies in childbirth once every minute somewhere in the world.

In some African countries, a woman has more than a 1-in-10 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. If men were dying at such a rate for fathering children, the G-8 would be holding emergency summits.

Yet President Bush has actually proposed an 18 percent cut in 2009 in our aid agency’s negligible spending for maternal and child care abroad. Family planning, which reduces pregnancies and thus also prevents both abortions and maternal deaths, is perennially starved for funds.

What better way to repair America’s standing in the world than a major initiative on behalf of women hemorrhaging to death in remote villages — paid for by, say, two weeks’ spending in Iraq? Working with Britain and Norway, the two global leaders on this issue, we could together save 300,000 women’s lives a year.

That truly would be a noble legacy of this campaign debate about gender and politics.

[Nicholas D. Kristof writes op-ed columns that appear twice each week in The New York Times. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner (1990 and 2006), he previously was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for the Sunday Times.]

³Bush Does Europe Incognito
By Roger Cohen

An American president is in Europe and nobody cares. That’s a moment.

Of course, a couple of months ago an American president went to a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, and said Georgia and Ukraine should be on a fast track to membership, and nobody listened. That was a moment, too. Last time I checked, NATO without the United States didn’t amount to squat.

The president had choreographed his Bucharest appearance with a prior stop in the Ukrainian capital. Did his NATO allies care that he would lose face? Nope. I care because, like this president, I think Georgia and Ukraine should join NATO as soon as possible. Lock in liberal systems where you can.

But that’s not my subject here.

The American president, of course, is George W. Bush. He’s doing a farewell lap, or limp, around European capitals, or retreats. His German stop has been in downtown Meseberg. A rapturous Berlin welcome was not assured.

Rome, Paris, London — an itinerary to stir the imagination, but never his. That’s been the thing about Bush: no curiosity. “Russia’s big, and so is China,” he opined in 2006. The insights tended to stop there. He’s probably happier at Schloss Meseberg, a kind of German Crawford.

“Ich bin ein Crawforder.” Has a ring to it, even if it’s as meaningless as this exit tour.

But Bush-bashing has become a bore. I won’t indulge in it, except to say one more thing.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament.” Bush’s endless malapropisms have made his intellect the object of ridicule. But his mind was not the problem. It’s a better mind than his “nukelar” trashing of language suggests.

Bush’s chip-on-the-shoulder temperament is another matter. He has proved mean, vindictive, surly, controlling and impatient, as befits his guns-at-the-ready gait. Apologizing for tough-guy rhetoric now, as he has, is no remedy. There’s nothing worse than a control-freak chief executive with no interest in details like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army or the strength of New Orleans levees.

This deficiency of temperament has been devastating. America’s leader must still inspire and give hope. The U.S.A. is the last ideological country on earth. If its message doesn’t resonate, big issues go unaddressed. When it’s dusk in America, the shadows spread wide.

This desultory stroll around a Europe more focused on his successor is a reflection the damage a flawed temperament has done to trans-Atlantic ties. Europeans got tired of being scowled at.

In selecting Barack Obama and John McCain as the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively, Americans have chosen men in full, unafraid to betray contradictions. They are tired of brittle bravado. With Bush, they have seen that, after a certain age, you get the face you deserve.

So Bush goes not with a bang, but a whimper. That’s not just about him. Europe and America need each other less in a changed world. Europeans have less need to bow and scrape when a U.S. leader arrives. Their continent is whole and free.

For the United States, fast-developing relationships — with China, India, Brazil — and the challenges of the Middle East loom larger than puzzling out what clout some treaty might one day give an E.U. president.

Still, a lesson of the Bush presidency has been that trans-Atlantic cooperation matters. Its absence in Iraq has been disastrous. Its unevenness in Afghanistan has been costly. Its wooliness over Iran has been unproductive.

Bush, in Kranj, Slovenia, said at the start of his European tour that Iran “can either face isolation, or they can have better relations with all of us if they verifiably suspend their enrichment program.” That’s a tired theme. The joint statement with European leaders on Iran could have been issued any time in the last several years.

Let’s face it, now that the curtain’s almost down, nobody’s been itching to present Bush with a diplomatic triumph, whether in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel-Palestine. An ungenerous temperament does not inspire generosity. It’s time for some fresh thinking, but above all a fresh spirit, a fresh temperament.

Just before Bush showed up in Europe, I was on a panel with Robert Boorstin, a senior Google executive. He didn’t talk about Iran. He talked about the world’s 1.4 billion Internet users and the way that number’s growing by 250 million a year.

He talked about the 10 hours of video being uploaded on YouTube every minute of every day. He talked about the world’s 3 billion mobile devices, with another billion coming in the next three years. He described the “largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”

Connectivity: pass it on. We need an American president who embodies it, in Berlin and, eventually, in downtown Tehran.

[Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming Foreign Editor in 2001. Since 2004 he has written a column for the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, first for the news pages and then, since 2007, for the Op-Ed page. He is the author of three books: Soldiers and Slaves, published by Alfred A. Knopf; Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo, published by Random House; and (with Claudio Gatti) In the Eye of the Storm, publised by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.]


Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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