More on Palin

Governor Palin's speech at the convention was pretty good. She managed to make some sharp attacks against Obama without coming off too harsh. What is becoming more apparent is the ways in which Obama and Palin are similar. Both are young and attractive, good speakers who are able to attack yet appear clean in the press, and even though neither have a lot of experience voters seem to trust them anyway. This later point is definitely the case with Obama, and it is what has been said about Palin in Alaska. You would think that with these two so similar, some of the attacks about experience would stop. Apparently not.

On another note though, it is becoming more clear how conservative she is. The scariest thing we have heard so far: she looked into banning books when she first became mayor of Wasilla.

Bush's Legacy

I doubt this will be my only post on this topic, so bear with me. I read two really good pieces on this recently. First, there was the long piece in the Sunday Times Magazine. This paragraph seems to sum up the debate:

Bush’s place in history depends on alternate narratives that are hard to reconcile. To critics, he is the man who misled the country into a disastrous war, ruined U.S. relations around the world, wrecked the economy, squandered a budget surplus to give tax cuts to fat-cat friends, played the guitar while New Orleans drowned, politicized the Justice Department, cozied up to oil companies and betrayed American values by promoting torture, warrantless eavesdropping and a modern-day gulag at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for people never even charged with a crime. To admirers, he is the man who freed 60 million people from tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq and planted a seed that may yet spread democracy in a vital region, while at home he reduced taxes, introduced more accountability to public schools through No Child Left Behind, expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs, installed two new conservative Supreme Court justices and, most of all, kept America safe after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

I think in the near term, this pretty much covers it. In fact, I think there is a lot of truth to almost everything said in that paragraph. The rest of the article though was not very memorable - focusing mostly on what / whether Bush thinks about his legacy.

I don't think that paragraph though gets at long term prospects for Bush's legacy. After all, we don't tend to remember much about former Presidents. Now I think too many conservatives (I won't mention any names), including Bush himself, seem to assume history will judge Bush favorably. Those people always mention Truman. (My question, where is Bush's Marshall Plan?) Other people (again, you know who you are) refuse to even consider the legacy question, leaving it for historians to judge. I find that to be a bit of a cop-out and I imagine those same people didn't give Clinton the same consideration.

This short piece in the Atlantic (June 2008) does a great job at looking at what we do remember about our past presidents and therefore what we'll likely remember about Bush.

But when things work out in the long run—and especially when we can claim the credit—Americans tend to forgive their leaders for the crimes and errors of the moment.

That’s why—to judge by the rankings that historians and pollsters regularly churn out—we’ve forgiven Teddy Roosevelt his role in the bloody and disgraceful occupation of the Philippines. It’s why we’ve pardoned Woodrow Wilson for the part his feckless idealism played in unleashing decades of strife and tyranny in Europe. It’s why we’ve granted Harry Truman absolution for the military blundering that prolonged the Korean War and brought us to the brink of nuclear conflict.

[Edit]

But these well-respected presidents have benefited, as well, from the American tendency to overvalue activist leaders. So a bad president like Wilson is preferred, in our rankings and our hearts, to a good but undistinguished manager like Calvin Coolidge. A sometimes impressive, oft-erratic president like Truman is lionized, while the more even-keeled greatness of Dwight D. Eisenhower is persistently undervalued. John F. Kennedy is hailed for escaping the Cuban missile crisis, which his own misjudgments set in motion, while George H. W. Bush, who steered the U.S. through the fraught final moments of the Cold War with admirable caution, is caricatured as a ditherer who needed Margaret Thatcher around to keep him from going wobbly.

So it's reasonable to think that, if Iraq works out, Bush might be looked back on favorably. This thought doesn't make me as depressed as it used to. But it does make me want to learn a lot more about Truman, Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson as well as Coolidge and Eisenhower.

And the comparison between Iraq and Korea does make me think differently about Korea. In our national consciousness Korea is seen as a great success. And South Koreans are grateful that they are not under the North's control. But if these two wars are similar, and if they end similarly, does this mean that Iraq was right and just mismanaged (as Korea was, although maybe not to the same extent), or was Korea wrong?

In large part, how we view Bush will affect how we view wars like Iraq in the future. Years removed, I do think we devalue deaths in war if the war was successful. Which makes it easy to hate Iraq now, but hard to hate the Korean War. Keep this in mind when the next Bush advocates for the next Iraq ten or more years from now.

Your Prediction

This electoral map at the Times is well worth checking out. What do you think? Will it be Obama or McCain?

Alaskan Veep

The political world is buzzing about McCain's choice for Vice President. I have long thought (although I apparently didn't write about it) that McCain was in a particularly tough position when it came to selecting his running mate. If he chose someone too conservative, he would turn off some of the moderates and independents who were leaning is way. But if he chose someone moderate, he would risk watching the Republican base stay home in November.

Considering that, I think his choice makes sense. Governor Palin seems to have excited the conservative base. As for turning off independents, we'll have to see. My gut instinct though is that she won't scare them as much as a Huckabee - or someone similar - would have.

One place I think it doesn't make a whole lot of sense is in the electoral college. Alaska was going to go to McCain no matter what. Minnesota on the other hand might have been in play had McCain chosen Pawlenty. In fact, I wonder if Gephardt would have been better at delivering Missouri than Edwards was for North Carolina in 2004. Anyway, it appears that McCain believes that Palin's impact nationally will be more meaningful than Pawlenty's impact in Minnesota.

As for whether she balances his governing philosophy, I don't have much input on that at the moment. But David Brooks has an interesting take:

He really needs someone to impose a policy structure on his moral intuitions. He needs a very senior person who can organize a vast administration and insist that he tame his lone-pilot tendencies and work through the established corridors — the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council. He needs a near-equal who can turn his instincts, which are great, into a doctrine that everybody else can predict and understand.

This is an interesting analysis, but I wonder if Brooks is putting too much into the VP position (probably based on the Clinton and Bush models of having a powerful VP). Conceivably, McCain could find people like that fill his administration. Although I guess his choice of Palin makes one doubt whether he will.

Now let's talk about the the real issue with this choice: gender. John McCain chose a woman. My initial reaction to the choice was positive. I am glad that if McCain loses, one of the top choices to run in 2012 will be a woman (a woman who by then will have considerably more experience). And any talk about whether she should be running for VP instead of spending more time taking care of her four-month-old infant is, well, sexist. Nobody says that about a man running in the same situation.

Unfortunately though, I still find the choice to be a bit of a let-down. Gail Collins says it pretty well:

This year, Hillary Clinton took things to a whole new level. She didn’t run for president as a symbol but as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack. Whether you liked her or not, she convinced the nation that women could be qualified to both run the country and be commander in chief. That was an enormous breakthrough, and Palin’s nomination feels, in comparison, like a step back.

The real question though is whether this will actually draw independent and liberal women. Are they upset enough still from the primaries that they will flock to Palin and McCain? This of course remains to be seen and I don't really have a prediction. The McCain camp is doing everything it can, including acting hurt on Clinton supporters behalf and suggesting that the Obama campaign was sexist. I have heard others say though that liberal and independent women will still vote Democrat, following issues (like abortion rights and equal pay laws) instead of symbolism. I hope so.