Having listed a group of long-shots for Mitt Romney to consider as his running mate, we hereby continue a multi-column analysis of who Romney should pick, and how, and why. This column will examine those last two questions — the “how” and the “why.” First, let it be understood just how important it is that the vice-presidential candidate be qualified and prepared to be president on Day One of the administration. This isn’t just a pro forma, substance-less requirement; it’s crucial. Being president is an incredibly difficult job — or, at least, doing a reasonably decent job as president is very, very hard. It’s far more than mere instinct or mere belief in the right principles. High-level politics, like the top rungs in just about any other field, requires a highly developed skill set and a deep reservoir of knowledge of policy, history, personnel, and procedural rules, among other things. It is absurd to the point of stupidity to think that high-level experience doesn’t matter. It is absurd to the point of stupidity to think that familiarity with the ways of Washington is completely unimportant. And it shows a lack of understanding of both history and of human nature to think that just a year or two as a conservative reformer is an indicator that a potential candidate really will be a conservative reformer over the long haul. If Mitt Romney is inaugurated on January 20 but, Lord forbid, dies of a heart attack on January 21, will his vice president be ready to assume the office? Here’s my rule: Everybody without at least two full years in a relevant position should be ruled out. Period. The political graveyard is littered with the bodies of people who looked for two full years to be hugely successful reformers, only to lose either their political touch, their moral compass, or their commitment to political principle, once the bad-old-gang who had been temporarily vanquished by the would-be reformer has had a chance to regroup, re-plan, reload, and counter-attack. Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer is a case in point: a good man and decent governor who bombed badly in his re-election campaign and in every subsequent run for office. Another was former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, being touted as the nation’s best governor one year and effectively in oblivion the next. Just about anybody with moderate political skills can look good during a honeymoon period in office; what really tests the mettle is how one behaves, and fares, once the honeymoon has worn off. (Christ Christie fans: Take note.) Remember, too, that the two-year rule is a bare minimum, not an automatic qualifier. Nearly four years as governor of a homogenous state like Idaho might be far less relevant to the presidency than two full years as speaker of the state House in, say, Michigan — not that the latter would necessarily be a qualifier, either, but just that it might require better political skills and an admirably thicker political skin. The question then becomes, what experience is indeed valuable? Other than my hard-and-fast two-year bare minimum, what are the criteria? Alas, it’s a sliding scale, requiring a somewhat subjective analysis rather than arithmetical precision. But common sense, combined with experienced understanding of politics, should make this subjective task more clear than opaque. One thing to reject is the current vogue that insists there is some sort of magic in executive experience, combined with a denigration of a legislative background. We should also reject the “Washington is bad, elsewhere is good” school of thought. Case in point for both: Jimmy Carter. Governor, business executive, Navy officer. Never in Washington. Yet utterly inept. Was Bill Clinton any more adept at presidential leadership in his first few years because he had been governor for 12 years? No; in fact, the early years of his presidency were an utter amateur hour. Harry Truman, on the other hand, assumed the presidency just a few months after leaving his perch in the Senate — the legislative arena where, by virtue of chairing a key committee that provided essential oversight of military procurement during World War II, he developed highly valuable knowledge and experience. Yet despite often moving in the wrong direction philosophically (according to conservative tastes), Truman quite clearly had a skill set that allowed him to assert vigorous leadership and to navigate the shoals of the lawmaking process. Much of this, of course, is a measure not of experience but of personal characteristics — but that’s my point exactly: Once someone has inhabited the realm of high leadership for enough time, what matters is more the leadership than the forum: legislative leadership can be as valuable as executive leadership; Washington leadership as valuable as outside-the-Beltway bona fides . And vice versa. In theory, I would take a 14-year House veteran who has led the Budget Committee just about any day over a 20-month governor of Wyoming, if the adherence to conservative principle had continued with only a few apostasies during those 14 years. It is the totality and quality of the experience, not just the title, that matters. Which leaves us, in terms of the requirements of experience… where, exactly? Well, to use names sometimes mentioned, it would leave South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley somewhat beneath Florida’s U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. Why? Haley has had a decidedly bumpy ride in less than two years as governor of a barely mid-sized state, before which she served just six years in the state legislature, including as a majority whip. Rubio too has served less than two years in his current post — but, as a U.S. Senator from a mega-state, his involvement with larger national issues is a bonus, plus he served eight full years in Florida’s legislature, including a full term as Speaker of the House. Being House Speaker in a large and diverse and intensely competitive state outpoints being whip in a smaller, much more overwhelmingly conservative state. Anybody who doesn’t understand that legislative leadership is a major proving ground of political skills, and who doesn’t understand that legislative chairmanships are often de facto executive positions, has no real sense of how republican (small ‘r’), American governments work. Likewise, major business leadership or military leadership or civic leadership, if it required a relevant set of personal skills, could also serve as significant training. In short, again, the totality and quality of experience matters. OKAY, LET’S MOVE ON. Romney could probably compile a list of as many as 30 people who have the requisite combination of experience, personal and leadership characteristics, political smarts, attractiveness, and political principles strong and conservative enough to at least be considered as president-in-waiting-at-a-moment’s-notice. The hard part comes in winnowing down that list to a final five or six who offer the best of all of that plus a high ratio of political upside to political detriments. The reality is that, once the baseline requirements have been met, every single other consideration will be, and should be, purely political. Chris Christie might float your boat more than Tim Pawlenty does; Michele Bachmann might be more ideologically pure than Rudy Giuliani — but that doesn’t matter. Once it comes down to the final choice, politics should rule. Again, this applies only after winnowing the field to a select few. But once that has been done, the only relevant criterion is, who will best help Romney beat Barack Obama? Conservatives should not let minor differences obscure major goals. To determine this, Romney should use every tool in the political handbag. This should not be a bunch of insiders — the Washington conventional-wisdom cognoscenti who so often wouldn’t really recognize middle America if Dorothy’s cyclone set them down in front of a large-block signpost saying “Welcome to Middle America” — sitting around opining on who might help Romney win Ohio while not costing him Missouri, or on who they think will help attract single women without turning off blue collar men. Instead, this should involve serious, costly, comprehensive polling and focus-group testing, primarily in a group of about 21 states that might conceivably be competitive. Specifically ask respondents to rate a Romney-plus-X ticket versus an Obama-plus-Biden ticket. Also, do focus groups with voters from the key states. Give them brief biographies of the five or six top contenders and show them video of them speaking in public settings. Then feed them negative information about the candidates, as the Obama team will do, and see how their reactions change. And while the Romney camp should try to keep its polling and group interviewing quiet, it shouldn’t worry too much if the fact of its poll-testing gets out, as it certainly will. It is far better to get it right than to miss something because you are so worried about secrecy that you leave some homework undone. If this testing shows, for instance, that U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey boosts the Romney ticket so much in Pennsylvania that he makes the state a dead heat, while not costing Romney anywhere else, that should be a huge consideration. If focus groups outside of Ohio get turned off by a mock attack against U.S. Sen. Rob Portman for being born wealthy and being tied to both presidential Bushes, it almost doesn’t matter that Portman could help nail down Ohio because the overall drag on the ticket would be too big. (Again, these are purely hypothetical examples.) Now, keep this in mind: Polling in, say, Massachusetts or Utah is useless in this regard. No vice-presidential choice is going to move the former to Romney’s column or the latter to Obama’s. So too with Vermont, Maryland, Nebraska, Mississippi, and probably New York. The key thing is to help with the electoral map, not to help with overall opinion polls. The rest of us in the public will never know all the polling and group-testing results, but the Romney inner circle should know, and it certainly has plenty of time to find out, every single aspect of all of this. Finally, even after the choice has tentatively been made, the Romney camp should move heaven and Earth to prepare the new candidate for the madhouse that will ensue when the choice is announced. Sarah Palin, for example, never had a prayer of avoiding a horrid backlash because the McCain team did not have its, or her, ducks in a row. Now this part of it, unlike the fact of the polling, should be done in secret. The way to do it is to hold over any of the finalists who interview with Romney: Lock them in a room with Romney aides; grill them for hours; tell them what to expect and what to expect to be forced to answer, if they are chosen. Obviously, word of the meetings with Romney will leak out anyway; the key thing is to do all this prep work behind closed doors in conjunction with the meetings, and then tell the potential candidates that any loose lips on their end will automatically disqualify them from consideration. All of which is to say that, if the Romney folks do their jobs right, not a single bit of speculation or informed analysis from any of us on the outside, myself included, should matter. The Romney team, unlike McCain’s, should know exactly what they are getting and why. On the other hand, every single bit of public analysis has the potential to help Romney’s folks do their job better — because some new argument, some new consideration, might arise from these analyses that the Romney team otherwise would miss, but that they really ought to plug into their polling and interviewing and strategizing. That’s why, for example, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was dead wrong last week to tell all the outside analysts, in effect, to shut up. Barbour’s message was to let the insiders do all the work — ignoring how often the insiders get things wrong in large part because they ignore outside considerations and so don’t even put those considerations into their equations in the first place. So… to review: First, make a long list of about 30, based on both experience and political principles. Second, cut the list to five or six by rigorously combining those qualifications with overtly political considerations. Third, constantly reconsider the process and all available information, including from pundits that might otherwise be morons. Fourth, use sophisticated and targeted political tools, adjudging results on an almost brutally and purely political level, to make the final choice. Fifth, painstakingly prepare the nominee for the “roll-out” of the announcement. With that framework in mind, then, my next column on this topic will start naming names. First up: the qualified mid-range potential choices. After that, the semi-short list of those who should be in the top ten. Then two more columns, assessing five or six truly short-listers, any of whom should ably fill the bill for Romney. Stay tuned.
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Veep, Veep: The How and the Why
“Every person in Indiana who wants me to continue, every person wherever they might be at this point, I encourage them to come out,” the six-term senator exhorted. “Come out immediately, as fast as you can.” So the Indianapolis Star quotes Richard Lugar, first elected to the Senate in 1976, as saying the weekend before his state’s Republican primary. Are those the words of a confident candidate? The Star reports : As a bell rang each time a volunteer won a commitment from a voter, Lugar pleaded with groups that he has helped over the years to now help him salvage his political career…. He appealed to veterans, Jewish voters who cared about his work to help Russian Jews, women who might have benefited from his program to build political networks and minority students who were helped by his scholarship program. Most of all Lugar is hoping for an inflow of Democratic and independent voters to rescue him from the Republican base. “I’m not asking anybody to cross over,” Lugar said. “I’m just saying positively, ‘Register your vote, because if you do not, I may not be able to continue serving you.’ At this point, help.” How the mighty have fallen. Six years ago, Lugar was returned to the Senate with 80 percent of the vote. The Democrats didn’t even bother to run a candidate against him. Now the Democrats are looking past him entirely. In a Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech to 1,200 party activists Friday night, Rep. Joe Donnelly, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate, didn’t even mention Lugar’s name. He trained all his fire on the longtime senator’s primary challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock. “Richard Mourdock has said he is opposed to bipartisanship. I am the fifth of five kids. As the fifth of five kids, if you are not bipartisan, you do not eat at night,” Politico quoted Donnelly as saying. This country works best when we work together as a family.” Peggy Noonan also stressed family ties when making the case for sending Lugar back to the Senate: “What Washington needs is sober and responsible adults.” Noonan didn’t disclose who the children were in this relationship. But it is the sober and responsible adults who have accumulated a national debt larger than the country’s economy. There are two ways to demonstrate one’s sobriety and responsibility in Washington: to be as supportive of druken sailor-style fiscal irresponsibility as possible or to be as timid as possible in opposition to it. Noonan’s brief misses a larger point: The very reason Lugar is in trouble is that many Hoosiers see him as a creature of Washington, not Indiana — to the point where his residency has actually been challenged. Perhaps the handwriting was on the wall when Dan Coats, a former senator turned lobbyist, was barely returned to the Senate when two Tea Party candidates split the conservative vote in the Republican primary. This time, there is no split. Mourdock has Lugar’s right flank to himself. Lugar has recently been aggressive in defending his own conservative credentials and casting doubt on Mourdock’s. The Democrats are already keying in on Mourdock’s resistance to the unfunded Obama stimulus package. Lugar has specifically hit Mourdock on the flag-burning amendment and a comment in which the state treasurer seemed to open to consolidating military service branches. A late April Lugar statement asks: “Which military branch do you think is no longer necessary in the 21st
Hilarious. Via DC Examiner: President Obama included the “Obama eats dogs” joke into his speech last night at the White House Correspondence Dinner. “Even Sarah Palin is getting back into the game, guest hosting on The Today Show,” Obama said, “Which reminds me of an old saying: What’s the difference between a hockey mom and
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Video: Obama Jokes About Eating Dogs At White House Correspondent Dinner…
I agree with Quin Hillyer that having Joe Biden lecturing Mitt Romney on foreign policy doesn’t exactly help their cause. It would be like Obama lecturing us on the virtues of humility. Remember, when during his debate with Sarah Palin, he said the U.S. & France had “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon” ? Surely that was news to the people of Beirut. On the other hand, that didn’t stop them from getting elected.
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…Or Like Obama on Humility
MOBILE, Ala. — Last Saturday night at 8:20 p.m., when the white Matthew Owens was beaten into critical condition by a mob of dozens of black neighbors, Al Sharpton and the New Black Panthers got what they wanted: a white victim, any white victim, in payback for the killing of Trayvon Martin. May God have mercy on their miserable souls — because the rest of us should shun them mercilessly from all decent society. Delmar Drive is one of those long, long blocks, the equivalent of probably four long city blocks without a single cross street, which sometimes gets wedged into odd nooks of American cities. At its entrance off of Pleasant Valley Road, Delmar seems to feature mostly black residents in decently maintained houses. From about three-fourths of the way down the street and on to the dead end, most residents, of similar houses, appear to be white — but without an absolute segregation on either end of the street. One sees no reason why race should necessarily be an issue there. Nonetheless, a white man in a business suit at dusk in a racially tense neighborhood under a national spotlight is wise not to ask too many questions of angry black people on the street. Better to return in broad daylight. But the composite picture from white witnesses about what happened last Saturday night leaves almost no doubt that racial animus played the major role in the vicious beating. Their account, perhaps one-sided but told quietly and with obvious sincerity, follows. Yes, Mr. Owens apparently had run-ins with black neighbors before. There was another incident where he was reportedly hit in the head (once) with a stick. This beating wasn’t just about basketball in the street. Neighbors do describe children or teenagers playing ball and refusing, rather belligerently, to move to let cars pass, but that’s the least of it. They also said the children run into neighbors yards, pick up things from yards and porches, make a lot of noise, and adopt aggressive postures. Neighbor Calvin Speed told Lagniappe , the centrist Mobile alternative weekly, that a few “hoods… looking for trouble” aggravated what was otherwise a merely unpleasant but not necessarily dangerous situation. “It’s strictly been a racial issue that’s been building,” he said, adding that he personally has cordial exchanges with a number of other black residents of the street. Anyway, on Saturday night, report the witnesses, the tensions seemed higher than usual. Owens, who is no shrinking violet, has a criminal record that includes arrests for domestic assault and driving under the influence. He was visiting people in the yard of 1013 Delmar when the trouble really began. Youths were running through various yards, causing commotion. Owens told them to stop. They didn’t; instead repeatedly denigrating him as “white boy.” As they argued in the middle of the street, some apparently went to get parents or other adults. It was the adults speeding up in three or four cars within five minutes, not the youths, who are described as basically going berserk. Owens tried to get to safety at 1012 Delmar, where he was staying. He made it to the porch but not through the door. The mob — described variously as 15-20 people or, in one telling from a witness, as many as 40, although that is hard to imagine in such a short time period — grabbed anything they could find as weapons. They beat Owens with paint cans — paint clearly remained on his clothes and body in the hospital — brass buckles, chairs, perhaps some bricks, and even some unlit tiki torches (used as sticks) that were in a neighbor’s yard; they hit him mostly around the head, with a few kicks or other blows to the groin and stomach for good measure. Some describe the attack as lasting at least five minutes, with Owens screaming for help but neighbors unable to do much in the face of such a large mob. Several witnesses (not just Owens’ sister in the initial TV report) told me and other reporters that at least one of the attackers, a woman, said as she was leaving the scene that “This is justice for Trayvon,” referring to the nationally discussed tragedy in Florida that took a black 17-year-old’s life and led Sharpton to start his usual race-based histrionics and the New Black Panthers to put a bounty on the shooter, George Zimmerman. When the Mobile incident was finally over and Owens was taken to the hospital, he was admitted in critical condition, with bruising on his face and jaw, extreme pain, deafness in his right ear, fluid in his abdomen and, most dangerously, bilateral subdural bleeding inside his cranium. By late Tuesday afternoon, his condition had recently been upgraded from “critical” to “serious.” All day long the police had promised at least a couple of arrests in the case, as witnesses had identified some of the attackers, but as of 10 o’clock Tuesday night no arrests had actually been announced. Mayor Sam Jones (see photo above) issued a statement: “Police will certainly explore a racial motive if the evidence supports it. This type of mob violence will not be tolerated. If people think we are going to tolerate that to bring attention to some national event, they are sorely mistaken. They will be arrested and prosecuted for assault or whatever the appropriate charge may be.” Nonetheless, the Mobile police department, at least in public, has been ludicrously behind the curve. Its spokesman said as late as Tuesday that the “Trayvon” statement could not be independently corroborated, even though it took this reporter less than five minutes on the street to find multiple people who say they heard it, and other news outlets reported the same. It must be stressed that this is not the norm for Mobile. Mobile integrated peacefully in the 1960s even as the rest of Alabama featured infamous scenes of violence; the city elected Mayor Jones, who is black, in 2005 when the black voter registration percentage was in the low 40s. While nobody could honestly claim that racism doesn’t exist around here and that it isn’t obnoxious where it does, this is a coastal rather than “Deep South” city, one that has historically enjoyed at least a genteel comity among the races. This sort of incident is definitely an anomaly here. All of which lends credence, although far from proof, to the idea that national race-roiling by the likes of Sharpton provided the match-light to an unfortunate tinderbox on one particular city street. Now, however, look back to my opening paragraph. It’s not really fair. It represents the sort of racially inflammatory cheap shot in which Sharpton and an unfortunate number of media mavens specialize. One woman may have made reference to Trayvon, but that doesn’t mean that all 20 or more of the attackers had anything in their minds other than a criminal version of racial animus, further inflamed by purely street-level friction. I hereby take back the allegation that Sharpton “got what he wanted” when Delmar Drive produced a white victim. The allegation remains in the opening paragraph as a demonstration of how easy it is to stir racial tensions beyond the boiling point. Oh, yes, of course it was racism, not some other motive, that caused George Zimmerman to pull the trigger. Oh, yes, of course it was right-wing hate that caused Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and others. Just like it was left-wing moral depravity and corruption of cultural norms that caused a woman named Susan Smith (according to Newt Gingrich) to deliberately drown her own children in an automobile. This is crazy. These sorts of blanket-level blame games are outrageous. Yes, Sharpton has instigated violence before, and yes he has been wholly irresponsible with respect to the Trayvon Martin case. Yes, Attorney General Eric Holder was morally depraved when lauding Sharpton, just days after Sharpton’s latest outrages regarding Trayvon Martin, while lifting not a finger to punish New Black Panthers for putting a bounty on Zimmerman’s head. But they aren’t responsible for the brutal beating of Matthew Owens. Twenty or more individual attackers are responsible. But Lord Almighty, if Sharpton and Holder and their ilk aren’t at least more obviously culpable indirectly for fomenting racial hatred than anything Sarah Palin said was responsible for the Giffords shooting, then Alice’s rabbit hole has taken over all of reality. A real leader with Sharpton’s profile would travel to Mobile, denounce the Owens beating, announce that this is not how self-respecting members of any race should act, and call for swift and sure punishment for the attackers whether their motives were racial or “just” hateful and vicious without regard to skin color at all. Matthew Owens is a seriously injured man, not a seriously injured white man. And his attackers are criminal individuals who should be punished regardless of their skin color — and made an example of the wages of mob violence, which cannot and must not be allowed to use race or even racial insults as pretext for outright thuggery.
