Quin, I can’t see how Santorum could have won the debate when his most powerful moment came when he went after Newt Gingrich as someone who, for all his brilliance, you never know might “pop off” next. It’s insights of that sort that could slow Newt’s surge, especially in the wake of Newt’s explosive opening at gentlemanly John King’s expense. So by going after Newt the way he did Santorum only helped Mitt Romney maintain his lead in the South Carolina race, making Romney de facto winner. It was interesting nonetheless to see Santorum and Gingrich go at it in such personal terms, particularly given their heretofore all but forgotten closeness on the road to 1994. Back in the day Santorum used to openly acknowledge his debt to Gingrich and GOPAC and all they taught him about a Reaganite conservatism he hadn’t known much about. This time, it was rather embarrassing to see the onetime student attempt to put the mentor in his place, when he charged Newt with doing nothing to expose the House Bank scandal in the runup to the ’94 elections. Newt’s response to that pretty much wiped the floor with upstart Rick, a reminder that they don’t operate on the same level. That particular exchange would not have meant much to anyone who doesn’t remember that golden era, but to my mind it captured Santorum with all his limitations. Similarly, Santorum pleaded for understanding that he now supports right to work legislation having once opposed it. It was the sort of argument he wasn’t willing to extend to Romney on his changed views. Don’t see how such high schoolish debating behavior is the stuff of a winner.
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Santorum Helps Romney Survive
Soon after the death of Kim Jong-il was announced, U.S. television audiences were treated to many clips of North Koreans keening and wailing over the passing of The Dear Leader. Since he had died (on a train) two days before the announcement, there was plenty of time to stage-manage the grief. Kim was a master of keeping leaks about the poverty and repression of his people to a minimum.
In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney (Threshold Editions, 565 pages, $35) IF I HAD to sum up both the tone of this memoir and the character of its author in six words, I would quote–as he does on page 18–the words of Mi ss Korb el, his kindergarten teacher. “Richard,” she wrote on his first report card, “does not give up easily.” This simple, straightforward evaluation goes far to explaining both Dick Cheney’s many impressive achievements in public life and his occasional missteps. But before going any further, I need to make a personal disclosure. Although three years his junior, I was briefly, and only technically, Dick Cheney’s boss when we first met on Capitol Hill 42 years ago. I formed a high opinion of him then, and I still hold it today. What brought us together in 1969 was an unofficial task force of 22 rising young Republican members of Congress created and headed by Rep. Bill Brock of Tennessee (later a senator, Republican National Committee chairman, U.S. trade representative, and secretary of labor), for whom I worked at the time. As Brock’s man on the task force I served as de facto staff director, coordinating the activities of the 21 other staffers detailed by the participating congressmen. One of those congressmen was a future president and vice president, George H. W. Bush; one of the staffers was Dick Cheney–a very smart, slightly stolid young PhD candidate on a congressional fellowship in the office of Rep. Bill Steiger of Wisconsin. So, without knowing it, I had one future president and two future veeps on board. The mission of the task force was to visit college campuses around the country–a listening tour before the invention of the term–and meet with students, faculty, and administrators in as calm and non-confrontational a setting as was possible at the height of the Vietnam War. Afterward, as Dick Cheney explains in this memoir, back in Washington, “the congressmen briefed the president on their campus visits and issued a public report that offered a number of ideas, including lowering the voting age to eighteen.” Lending momentum to the drive to lower the voting age was not, however, the task force’s only historic legacy. Over lunch at the GOP Capitol Hill Club shortly after the task force wound down, Dick confided that the experience had convinced him that his future would be better spent in the corridors of power rather than in the halls of academe. Or, as he puts it in his forceful but sparely-written memoir, “I was beginning to realize that it was the political life that I preferred.” He soon hitched his wagon to one of the Congress’s fastest rising stars. Don Rumsfeld was a promising Illinois House member President Nixon had just named head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the organizational residue of Lyndon Johnson’s long lost and long forgotten–though we’re still paying for it–”War on Poverty.” Like Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld has a well-earned reputation for bluntness. Witness the way he welcomed Cheney to his OEO staff: “You, you’re congressional relations. Now get the hell out of here.” In fact, Cheney would stick close, becoming Rumsfeld’s trusted trouble-shooter at OEO and then following him to the Cost of Living Council and the Nixon White House staff. Post-Watergate, when Rumsfeld was named President Ford’s White House chief of staff, Cheney would be his deputy. Both men were alpha male Washington political types, very smart, very aggressive, and very ambitious, but they were far enough apart in age–Cheney being younger by nearly a decade–to avoid career collisions. Indeed, as the younger man, Cheney would literally follow in Rumsfeld’s footsteps, replacing him as White House chief of staff when Ford named Rumsfeld secretary of defense, then, while still a young man, successfully running for Congress just as Rumsfeld had before him. Later, he would emulate Rumsfeld by transferring to the private sector and becoming a dynamic CEO (Rumsfeld at Searle Pharmaceuticals, Cheney at the energy giant Halliburton), amassing a personal fortune that would allow him to re-enter public life whenever and however he chose. Cheney would also follow in his mentor’s footsteps at the Pentagon, serving as the senior Bush’s defense secretary just as Don Rumsfeld had served Jerry Ford. Only in 2001, more than 30 years after they first worked together, would their roles be reversed with Cheney jumping the queue to be W’s vice president and Rumsfeld returning to the Pentagon for a second stint as secretary of defense. Small wonder that the two men would think so much alike politically and militarily when facing the biggest challenge of their careers: charting the right response to 9/11. Their like-mindedness would be reinforced by a mutual reliance on a tight circle of advisors with a doctrinaire view of the world and a lock-step approach to foreign policy. To label this influential group of unelected operatives as Straussian neoconservatives is a gross oversimplification, but men like Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s right hand man at the Pentagon) and Scooter Libby (Cheney’s vice presidential chief of staff) shared a formulaic, interventionist view of Middle East policy and recognized the unique opportunity that the national trauma of 9/11 offered for putting it into effect by launching twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Billions of dollars and thousands of American lives later, what is one to make of that response? In his thoughtful, well-researched Sands of Empire , the distinguished journalist and historian Robert Merry–hardly a raving lefty–summed it up rather neatly: Administration rhetoric justifying and explaining the war policy turned out to be riddled with inaccuracies and misperceptions. The war was justified primarily on the basis of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam possessed and was building. No such weapons were ever found. Vice President Cheney insisted Saddam was linked to the al Qaeda network that perpetrated the September 11 attacks, but there was no evidence of consequence to that effect, and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet felt obliged to correct Cheney privately on more than one occasion. Donald Rumsfeld, he adds, bluntly asserted that “no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.” Subsequent events proved that statement erroneous, Merry points out; the ongoing terrorist threat “was much greater than any threat from the hapless Saddam Hussein and his military, severely attenuated by the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent U.N. Sanctions.” Believing what his advisors told him, Dick Cheney had said of the Iraqis, “I really believe we will be greeted as liberators.” The same advisors had also sold both Cheney and Rumsfeld on the merits of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, a shadowy exile group headed by convicted bank swindler Ahmed Chalabi who fed his backers doctored or fabricated intelligence inciting America to invade. Interestingly, in the many pages he devotes to defending his role as chief administration hawk, Dick Cheney omits any mention of the dubious Mr. Chalabi. IT IS UNFORTUNATE that a book with such an overwhelmingly positive story to tell–a triumphant and honorable personal rise from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of power, a warm family saga, and an instructive look behind the curtain of public politics to the way the executive and legislative branches really work–should in the end be weighed down by an obsessive attempt (as Miss Korbel recognized all those years ago, “Richard does not give up easily”) to justify understandable mistakes rather than acknowledge them. Given his parlous state of health, I can sympathize with Dick Cheney’s sense of urgency in going to press. And, like the president he served, he deserves full credit for keeping our country safe from further mass terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. But history will surely record that the greatest victories in the war on terror have been won on the ground in America where murderers with box cutters can no longer board planes at their pleasure, and through carefully targeted intelligence work and small, elite force operations like the one that took out Osama bin Laden. And let’s not forget Dick Cheney’s masterful election debate performances in 2000 and 2004. They helped keep two prime liberal goofs (Al Gore and John Kerry) and one dirty, rotten scoundrel (John Edwards) at a safe distance from the White House. In the end, that alone should earn Dick Cheney a place of honor in the conservative pantheon.
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Two Cheers for The World According to Cheney
James Madison By Richard Brookhiser (Basic Books, 287 pages, $26.99) Over the last half century Americans have sought a more enlightened, often politically correct, evaluation of their founders. Not for us, for example, are Parson Weems’ tales about George Washington or Washington Irving’s affectionate treatment of the father of our country. But modern appraisals of America’s earliest statesmen, which too often dwell on their failings, of which they had many, rather than their virtues, of which they had many more, shed light on our own times and mores rather than those of the founding generation. It is a challenging and important task to recognize and understand the founder’s faults without losing sight of their greatness while illuminating their enduring significance along the way. No historian does this better than Richard Brookhiser. For nearly two decades, he has produced brief but profound, clear but challenging, explorations of America’s early history. His latest effort, James Madison , is a small, unvarnished monument to its diminutive namesake. Drawing from and explicating Madison’s own public and personal writings, Brookhiser, employing equal doses of his customary acumen and wit, walks readers through the man’s eight decades in little more than 200 pages. It is an honest and at times unflattering rendering, but one that reaffirms Madison’s genius, and proves authoritatively that his fingerprints remain all over our institutions. Though he is most celebrated for creating America’s Constitution, here, however, he is less its father than its “midwife.” Madison was the great multitasker and collaborator of the Founding. He could, in Brookhiser’s words, “execute double plays by himself” — laying the groundwork for the Constitutional Convention in Annapolis, then returning home to Virginia to secure the participation of his own commonwealth; producing the blueprint of the Constitution, bringing it to fruition through compromise and then to parchment with the help of Gouverneur Morris, all while recording the proceedings for posterity. He then huddled with Alexander Hamilton to seal the deal through the Federalist Papers. And finally he assumed the role of, in Brookhiser’s words, an “American Moses,” by crafting the first ten amendments to the document. This is the legacy we are most likely to recognize and honor. But as Brookhiser points out, we might be a bit more hesitant to celebrate Madison’s other progeny: When he and Thomas Jefferson (his mentor and dear friend) clashed with Alexander Hamilton, they constructed the country’s first organized political faction — the Republican Party (today’s Democrats.) To accomplish this, Madison cultivated strategic regional alliances, recruited sympathetic minds and pens, and then through a series of, by Brookhiser’s estimation, crudely written and realized essays in the National Gazette (a freshly launched Republican instrument) laid out an ideology extolling the value of an agrarian economy and the wickedness of cities and manufacturing.
If someone looked at your face while watching President Obama make a speech or hold a press conference, I’ll bet it would reflect pain and discomfort. Your facial expression might be described as a grimace. There are a number of reasons for that kind of reaction. It might not even matter whether you are liberal or conservative. There is much about Mr. Obama’s style and content that repels rather than attracts. For example, the man is tiresomely repetitive. How many times has he used the terms “millionaires and billionaires,” “shared sacrifice,” and “corporate jet owners”? He gives new meaning to the term ad nauseam . Most of what he repeats wasn’t worth saying the first time. You’re left wondering, “Is that all you’ve got?” Saying the same thing over and over makes you totally predictable and uninteresting. Mr. Obama has become tedious and boring. How many times has he told us that creating jobs is going to be his number one priority? Has it ever happened? His “credibility gap” is growing wider than LBJ’s. A particularly annoying aspect of Mr. Obama’s personality is that he has virtually no sense of humor. There are very good reasons why humor is categorized as a “sense.” Humor is akin to a sense of taste or sense of balance. Individuals vary widely in regard to these characteristics. Successful comedians have inherent and highly developed senses of what’s funny and what’s not. They are “naturals.” Of course, there are people on the other end of the spectrum, such as Mr. Obama. It’s painful when people with no sense of humor attempt to be funny. Mr. Obama frequently makes lame attempts at being funny, and people in the room usually laugh, particularly members of the press. If you listen, however, what you hear is an uncomfortable, polite, and brief kind of laugh. Mr. Obama makes use of awkward and unusual figures of speech. One glaring example that I’ve never figured out is the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope . I realize it is a phrase he took from his mentor and long-time pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wherever it came from, what in the world does it mean? It is typical of most of what Mr. Obama says. I suppose that it was meant to sound profound, but if you think about it, it’s anything but. In the midst of the health care debate Mr. Obama said, “There’s something about August going into September where everybody in Washington get’s all wee-weed up. I don’t know what it is, but that’s what happens.” So far as anyone could determine, no one had ever used the term “all wee-weed up” previously. Later the White House explained that it meant wetting the bed. That still doesn’t make any sense. Let’s just say, the man is not a great communicator. Articulate he is not. Recently in the debt limit negotiations Mr. Obama warned the Republicans, “don’t call my bluff.” That’s just weird. Anyone with half a brain knows that a basic requirement of a bluff is that you don’t let it be known that you’re bluffing. Admitting that you’re bluffing cancels its effect. If you admit that you’re bluffing, you are sure to be called on it. Mr. Obama is often cloyingly folksy. One obvious example is his insincere and frequent use of the word “folks.” A similar lame attempt at sounding like a down-home good-old-boy is the dropping of the g in words like going, doing, etc. It just makes him sound phony. Mr. Obama is attempting to act a part, but he’s not a very good actor. Watching bad acting is no fun. The odds are looking better all the time that Mr. Obama will be a one-term president. There’s a good chance we will only be burdened with his tiresome style for another eighteen months.
Excerpt from:
Why President Obama Is Painful to Watch
