Elizabeth has stepped back a bit from yesterday's statement that she has more confidence in Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama on the issue of health care, saying instead that she and John Edwards could be best effective at this point as "honest brokers" on issues they care about, rather than endorsing any candidate.
She also denied that a reported conversation with Barack Obama turned them off from his candidacy, but did acknowledge some differences: "And where there are differences, we talked about those differences and why I believed John's was right."
But there was one personnel decision that Weaver didn't control. McCain named Davis the campaign's CEO, or chief money-raiser; rather than cast Davis out, McCain offered him a consolation prize. His Solomonic decision backfired: Weaver and Davis's animosity proved too deep, and the McCain campaign soon reverted to tribalism. One problem was that Davis still wasn't content to be a mere fund-raiser. As Weaver and Nelson worked from the top-down Bush playbook, Davis pushed for a radically decentralized campaign, with regional offices around the country--going so far, at one point, as to line up space in Beverly Hills and Manhattan before Weaver and Nelson quashed the idea. But the bigger problem was that the factionalism created a situation in which the people raising the money (who reported to Davis) didn't communicate with the people spending it (who reported to Weaver), and the campaign soon faced a cash crunch, as inputs didn't keep pace with outputs. "Whoever heard of setting up a system where the strategic and political arms are so separate from the finance arm that they don't know how much money they're raising and can't be told?" asks one Republican strategist. "And that's the system McCain set up, because he didn't want anyone to get their feelings hurt."
Finally, last July, McCain installed Davis as campaign manager. Even then, McCain didn't totally break from his passive management style by taking the logical step of firing Weaver and Nelson. Instead, he left it to them to resign.
Now that Davis is in charge, he's taken his old decentralized strategy--the one Weaver and Nelson killed--off the shelf. As The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder first reported, the campaign will feature ten different regional offices that will be run as ten different campaigns. The offices will be helmed by regional managers who will have enormous autonomy--including the power to hire and fire and build their own field programs.
[...]
Black rightly describes the plan as unprecedented. And it is the extent of its ambition that has provoked grumbling from some McCainiacs, who view the plan as being less about winning the election and more about Davis trying to prove, once and for all, that he's not just a rainmaker--but a master strategist. According to these dissenters, the plan has the cash-strapped campaign footing the bill for nuts-and-bolts functions--like get-out-the-vote operations--that traditionally are the party's province. Some of these critics think Davis's plan is so crazy that it's actually a feint and a bit of misdirection. Others fear that it's all too real--and reflective of a campaign lacking strategic smarts. "The political pros were removed from the campaign and replaced with lobbyists," complains a former McCain aide who left the campaign last summer. "You don't have political pros there. I realize our craft ranks right down there with bail bondsmen and mattress salesmen, but I think we're still slightly above lobbyists."
Laments one prominent McCain supporter: "I think the campaign would be well-served if they had more of them involved. But I wonder if the organization could withstand the personality differences and the insecurities that would come along with that on both sides. The only way it would happen is if McCain brought them together and forced them to work together and took control of it, and that's not necessarily his management style." After all, the hardest thing about being a father figure is having to choose among your children.
Cheney Plays The Jeremiah Wright Card
By Greg Sargent - April 10, 2008, 5:51PM
Dick Cheney, in an interview today, fiddles with his deck of cards and fingers the one with the big "W" on it:
Quote:"I've watched what's going on on the Democratic side with great interest, and sort of blowing hot and cold in terms of who is going to win -- whether it is going to be Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama,'' Cheney noted in a telephone interview with conservative talk show host, Sean Hannity, today.
"I thought the controversy over Rev. Wright was remarkable," Cheney said. "I thought some of the things he said were absolutely appalling. And, you know, I haven't gotten into the business of trying to judge how Sen. Obama dealt with it, or didn't deal with it, but I really, I think -- like most Americans -- I was stunned at what the Reverend was preaching in his church and then putting up on his website.'"
He was shocked, SHOCKED! I bet it even shocked his conscience.
Their manner of courtship -- one wooing, the other arm-twisting -- seemed to reflect the candidates' different personalities and campaign styles.
Obama preferred the soft sell, calling Richardson every three days or so -- "dialing the phone himself, no operator" -- for long discussions about policy and campaign issues. The two developed a bantering relationship, building on the camaraderie they shared off-camera during debates, when they would roll their eyes at some of their rivals' sillier statements.
Clinton was more persistent and tactical. There were eight or more phone calls a day, Richardson said: "Bill calling. Hillary calling, friends of mine that were in the Clinton administration, Clinton operatives, Clinton Hispanic operatives, New Mexico Clinton Hispanic operatives."
Some callers -- who suggested Richardson had an obligation to back Clinton -- did more harm than good. "I think the Clintons have a feeling of entitlement . . . that the presidency was theirs," Richardson said, and the persistent lobbying from "Washington establishment types" convinced him of a need for some fresher faces inside the Beltway.
He began admiring Obama back when they were rivals, and the sentiment grew the more they talked about foreign affairs, the environment and other issues. "I saw real growth in the guy," Richardson said, "a tremendous growth in policy and expression and experience."
Clinton was more persistent and tactical. There were eight or more phone calls a day, Richardson said: "Bill calling. Hillary calling, friends of mine that were in the Clinton administration, Clinton operatives, Clinton Hispanic operatives, New Mexico Clinton Hispanic operatives."
Some callers -- who suggested Richardson had an obligation to back Clinton -- did more harm than good.
Volume 55, Number 7 · May 1, 2008
Two Speeches on Race
By Garry Wills
Of the two speeches discussed here, Senator Barack Obama's speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, is available at www.barackobama.com and Abraham Lincoln's at the Cooper Union in New York on February 27, 1860, is available at showcase.netins.net.
Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an author and historian, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1993, he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction[1] for his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.
Wills is an adjunct professor of history, both American and cultural, at Northwestern University. He graduated from Campion High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1951, entered and then left the Jesuit order, and received his PhD in classics from Yale in 1961. William F. Buckley, Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. In 1995 Wills received a L.H.D. from Bates College. He received an honorary doctorate from the College of the Holy Cross.
In 1998, he won the National Medal for the Humanities. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His book Nixon Agonistes landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.
John Leonard said in The New York Times that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."[1]
[Tom] Cole is a year into his term as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group charged with managing the party's simultaneous campaigns for 435 seats in Congress, and this role has made him responsible for rebuilding the Republican Party from the ground up, and for mounting a defense of the political map. All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep.
Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party's representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend. [..]
In 2006, the Democrats won so many elections in what was traditionally Republican territory that Cole, as his party's chief Congressional recruiter, now finds himself in the unlikely position of flying into what used to be considered safe conservative districts and trying to goad Republican businessmen and state senators into running for Congress. His progress, he told me, has been mixed. He mentioned a black Republican prosecutor from Indiana named Curtis Hill, from a district that the party lost in 2006. Cole said he thought the seat was a more natural fit for his party than for the Democrats, and he wanted badly to convince Hill to run. Hill happened to be a founding-fathers buff, and so Cole flew him to Washington to meet with the White House political team and be briefed on how he could win, to look out at the monuments from his window seat and imagine himself as part of history. "Very intoxicating," Hill told me afterward. But he was not convinced. Cole then flew out to Indiana to press Hill to run, telling him that the Democratic congressman, Joe Donnelly, could be depicted as a tool of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and out of touch with the values of the district. Hill thought about it hard. But he had five kids at home, and he also didn't quite buy Cole's description of Donnelly, whom Hill considered "a relatively conservative Democrat. I don't think he's done anything in his record that's irritated anyone." Hill turned the offer down.
His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. Worse still, the National Republican Congressional Committee recently discovered, during an internal audit, accounting fraud so extensive that it had to call in the F.B.I., which is now investigating embezzlement by the committee's former treasurer. Many conservative activists have become so dissatisfied with the party's heresies, particularly on immigration and government spending, that as Cole's staff took over, the committee's fund-raising pleas were being ignored and, on at least one occasion, returned in an envelope stuffed with feces.
After the 2004 elections, Karl Rove began to talk with growing conviction about a permanent majority for the Republican Party. That majority lasted two more years. It would have been difficult then to imagine a more stunning reversal. [..] Cole maintains that the 2006 election was an event of equal scale and significance to the Republican victory in 1994 ?- "in many ways, it's a flip." Republican operatives now worry that the social conservatism that helped seal Rove's majorities might create for them a deficit that lasts a generation, that the party's position on social issues like gay marriage may permanently alienate younger, more moderate voters.
Yet Cole has been almost strangely sunny about his prospects. "This isn't an ideologically conservative country, and maybe some of us overreached in thinking that it was, and have been corrected for that," he told me in January. "But I believe that it is still a center-right country, and I think this election will show that."
In the summer of 2006, the Democratic pollster Joel Benenson was conducting surveys for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the Eighth Congressional District of Indiana, working-class, conservative towns around Evansville and Terre Haute. Brad Ellsworth, a conservative Democratic sheriff who took pains to distance himself from the antiwar camp, had just been picked as the party's nominee against a six-term Republican incumbent named John Hostettler, a former power-plant engineer.
As the survey returns came in, Benenson noticed that one group was far more receptive to the Democratic position than he had expected: working-class evangelical voters, the lower-to-middle-income whites in small cities and small towns who had defected to the Republican Party under Reagan and not returned. When Benenson ran focus groups, he found that they weren't voting because of the war or against corporate influence ?- Hostettler didn't take money from lobbyists. The opportunity lay in very basic economic issues, like Hostettler's votes against raising the minimum wage.
"Every election is different," Benenson told me. "There are elections where evangelicals will vote on social issues. The difference in 2006 was that we finally caught up on fiscal responsibility and taxes. Those were supposed to be big parts of the Republican brand, and they've surrendered them on multiple levels."
Ellsworth, running on those issues, would eventually win the race. Lower-middle-class evangelical voters are a small segment of the national electorate ?- less than 10 percent. But for Benenson they seemed to augur a broader recalculation, the Reagan Democrats subsuming social concerns to economic ones, the populist sentiment in the country sliding from the Republicans to the Democrats and even firmly conservative districts suddenly thrown open to competition. In 2006, the Democrats won in those kinds of blue-collar districts not just in Terre Haute but also in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, in the old industrial towns in western Pennsylvania and in upstate New York. "The map," Benenson told me, "has already changed."
When the Democratic congressman and former Clinton administration adviser Rahm Emanuel took over the Democratic campaign committee for the 2006 election cycle, [his] plan was to expand the map, recruiting Democratic challengers in dozens of formerly written-off districts to force the Republican Party to defend seats in places where they had not expected to. As the Democrats used small-dollar donations, largely raised online, to erase the vast money advantage Republicans had recently enjoyed, it became clear, Cole says, that the G.O.P. was operating from "a deficient model."
By the early fall of 2006, the number of competitive seats had more than doubled, and this more complex field required a higher level of coordination and sophistication from the campaign committees than had generally existed before. The candidates Emanuel ended up running were, in many cases, rough around the edges, and some were inexperienced activists whom the committee had unsuccessfully tried to beat earlier in the Democratic primaries. They ran as politically diverse outsiders, not primarily against the war but against the Republican "culture of corruption" in Congress, and their ideological span was broad enough that the Democratic majority in the House now includes both the lefty singer-songwriter John Hall, who got his political start at anti-nuke rallies, and Heath Shuler, the North Carolina Democrat, "who is," Cole says, with a certain envy, "to the right of Genghis Khan."
By Election Day, the playing field ?- the competitive seats for which the Republican campaign committee bought advertising ?- was more than 80 seats, about two and a half times the usual. The committee, taken by surprise, went at least $18 million into debt trying to defend seats it once assumed it would hold without great effort. Their majority still collapsed.
For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich's insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. "The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992," he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: "I believe there's a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts."
In 2008, when the key Congressional battlegrounds are mostly not in the Northeast but in places like Albuquerque, Huntsville, Ala., and Canton, Ohio, the question is slightly different: Can Democratic candidates retain and expand their advantage in historically conservative parts of the country that have not been accustomed to voting for them?
What has been startling is how thorough some of the shifts have begun to look. Cole had said his first targets would be areas that were long-term Republican districts that flipped to the Democrats in the 2006 election. But few of those districts now seem likely to flip back to Cole's party. In some districts that had been held by a Republican for more than a decade before 2006 ?- Ohio's 18th, New York's 19th ?- Republicans haven't even been able to find a credible challenger. In others with long-running Republican histories ?- Florida's 22nd, Iowa's First, North Carolina's 11th ?- Cole's committee acknowledged early on that these races were long shots. It is possible to interpret this as a recruiting failure by Cole's committee. But it's also possible to see the void in these districts as an acknowledgement by up-and-coming Republican politicians that something has changed, and that this land has been swallowed by the tide.
In their intimacy with the numbers, many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.
"What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics," said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.
For operatives like Cole, focused on expanding the party's appeal, the conservative movement had become too demanding: its aggressive rhetoric on some social issues alienated young voters, its swagger on immigration hardened Hispanic voters against Republicans and its emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy made it difficult for the party to appeal to populist voters. [..] "If there are Republicans out there who think that 2006 was a year that could be changed by a few votes in a few districts, they need to wake up," Mehlman told me. "It was a rejection."
The day that President Bush delivered the State of the Union in January, Cole met in his offices at the National Republican Congressional Committee with a favored Congressional challenger from a Midwestern swing district to be briefed on the progress of the campaign and to give what advice he could ?- on what consulting firms to hire, how to plan for the cadence of the campaign. [..] Cole began to talk through Republican figures who might be brought in to help raise cash. If McCain were the nominee, Cole and the candidate agreed, donors would turn out for a fund-raiser he headlined. Cole mentioned Bush, but everyone thought that would be a mistake. "I think this cycle he and the vice president are going to be doing a lot of fund-raisers in the South and the Plains," he said, and everyone guffawed in agreement.
Cole says that his task is to help the Republicans move from something that looks roughly like Bush's party to something that looks mostly like John McCain's. The places where Cole must hold the Republican line are largely moderate districts, where the president's conservatism is a divisive thing and where McCain's maverick reputation might permit the party to pull the trick of running against Washington even while controlling the White House. "I don't need the nominee to win; I just need him to be competitive enough that we can win behind him in the places that should be ours," Cole said. "I need him to be Gerald Ford."
Throughout the winter, Cole watched the presidential primaries with apprehension. The problem was the gap in intensity between the party's bases; in many states twice as many Democrats were turning out to vote as Republicans. Last month, Obama's campaign passed around a memo listing six states won by Bush in 2004 where Obama's votes in the primary beat the votes of the top two Republicans combined: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota and South Carolina. The map looked as if it were beginning to cave in on itself.
But surprisingly, the ground began to shift after the March 4 primaries, and with it Cole's disposition. [T]he Republicans had a nominee, [..] and the Democrats did not. "Who would've thought two months ago that we'd essentially be over by Super Tuesday, and the Democrats would be in the middle of a death fight between Clinton and Obama?" Cole told me earlier this month.
Cole has been giving that race a lot of thought. "I happen to think Hillary Clinton is a stronger candidate in the end," he told me. "You couldn't raise money against Obama right away like you could with Clinton, that's true, and so maybe by the time you were able to raise money it wouldn't matter. But he's ideologically well to the left of Hillary Clinton, for all his rhetorical gifts, and I also think he's got a national-security deficit. I think she's a plausible commander in chief, and I don't think he is. [T]hose two areas are where we would fight the election, and with McCain, I think we contrast with him very well."
"Let's break it down," he said. "Obviously in the Southwest, he's going to make us much stronger. In Arizona, we have a couple of opportunities where he'll help us, but also in New Mexico. Frankly, while some people have problems with his stand on immigration, he probably keeps Hispanics in play at the presidential level in a way no one else could. He really helps us in the Northeast and upper Midwest ?- Illinois and Pennsylvania. Then, anywhere where there's a veterans population or military bases. Think of Jim Marshall's seat in Georgia. That's a huge advantage for us. Florida, big military presence. We have a couple of opportunities in Texas. But I think the biggest thing is he's seen as an authentic American hero, someone who can take on and shake up Washington."
Cole's basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party's resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. ("Those three little words ?- ?'San Francisco liberal' ?- are just magic for fund-raising," one of Cole's staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain's emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. [..]
Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party's other grand strategists having abandoned the field ?- five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired ?- Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. "I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher," Cole says. "And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective."
You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend," Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole's committee, told me. "The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we've tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it's not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there's more of a libertarian view on social issues."
Cole says that the party's rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. "My problem on social issues is the tone ?- sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us," he told me. The challenge, then, is finding a new generation of candidates who aren't.
at a moment when Boehner was trying to rebuild the party's reputation on small-government principles (Boehner told me that the matter of the Republican abuse of earmarks, in which congressmen secure funds for favored projects in their districts, is "the most poignant" reason voters rejected Republicans), Cole was openly skeptical of this approach. "Earmarks are not the reason that we lost the election," Cole told me. "I can't find a single seat we lost because of them."
Without the money, the party's power has begun to wane, and with it the usual ability to control the process. Early in the fall, the Club for Growth, the hyperaggressive low-tax lobbying group, chose to run ads attacking Bob Latta, a Republican state senator who was running for Congress in a special election in Ohio, on behalf of another Republican who was contesting the nomination, Steve Buehrer, whom the Club considered more conservative. Cole was damned if he could figure out the ideological difference between the two. "Bob Latta is a straight arrow," he told me. "Nice guy, conventional Republican. And they go dump a bunch of money into another guy who you can't tell the difference! Bob Latta's not going to raise taxes. He's with them on dividends. He's a free trader."
[..] Though Latta survived the primary, his Democratic competitor in the special election began to run ads mimicking the Club's line of attack. "The problem I have with the club is I think they're stupid," Cole said. "I think they're politically inept. They spend more money beating Republicans than Democrats." He shook his head. "I mean ?- Bob Latta! Give me a break!"
If Cole has a final argument, a closer to convince his preferred candidates that they should run for office, it is the briefing delivered by the consultants John Morgan Sr. and John Morgan Jr. [..] Late in September, Cole brought a millionaire businessman named Steve Greenberg, a moderate Republican from the Chicago suburbs, into Washington to woo him [..]. Cole wanted Greenberg to run against a Democrat named Melissa Bean, who had managed to hang on to a Republican-leaning seat, Illinois's Eighth District, through two competitive elections. [..]
The Morgans are geographic essentialists; they are working on an encyclopedia of American elections that will trace in minute detail the results of every election since the Constitutional Convention. They began to show Greenberg slides detailing the ways each township in Bean's district had voted over time. They had broken the township down by religion, income and ethnicity ?- Americans of German descent are solid Republican voters in the Chicago suburbs, controlling for income and hometown, while Polish- and Italian-Americans are iffier propositions. Through all of this a few townships in the center of the district kept flipping their colors, from blue to red and back again. "There are five townships here, and that's the whole race," Morgan Sr. said. "Those are the only votes that flip in this district, and they decide every election."
Cole's staff didn't know all that much about Greenberg ideologically, but then they don't make it their business to know. I once asked Cole about the positions his candidates were taking on immigration and the war. "I don't think I've ever asked a candidate what he believes," he said. "We're just looking for winning candidates." But one of the things they did know, and do make it their business to know, was geography. Greenberg was from one of the towns that tended to flip back and forth, the wealthy suburb of Long Grove. If he could simply prevail upon his neighbors to vote for him, Greenberg would have gone a long way toward winning back the seat. "There's a head start already," Morgan Sr. said.
The Democratic Congressional committee's eight-to-one fund-raising advantage over its Republican counterpart has been understood by Republican operatives in the stiff terms of a morality play. Though Republicans traditionally built their fund-raising on small donations from grass-roots conservatives, the party began to pay less attention to that group after 1994, when its position in the majority meant contributions from K Street, which came more easily and in larger chunks. After 2006, the party found that its financial support from both groups had eroded ?- the base because it was disappointed by a party that had ignored it, and the lobbyists because the Democrats were now in control of Congress.
"Corporations and PACs go where the power is," the Republican strategist Scott Reed told me. But mostly the party's operatives blame themselves for not realizing this. (Republican operatives say that the Republican National Committee's small-donor list, diligently tended to, is the reason it, alone among the party's committees, has been able to outraise the Democrat's national committee.) When I asked the House minority leader John Boehner how he assessed the committee's fund-raising so far, he told me: "It stinks. No other way to put it." [..]
When I visited the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in February, the group's executive director, Brian Wolff, told me that he considered his central competition not to be Cole's committee but outside conservative groups that he expects will outspend the N.R.C.C.
I flew to Oklahoma to travel with Cole through the rougher end of his Congressional district. South-central Oklahoma is raw territory, poorly off. "You ever read Robert Caro's ?'Means of Ascent,' the L.B.J. book?" Cole asked. "The first chapter, where he's talking about the hill country where L.B.J. came from, how poor it is? That's this. We're still in the development business in Oklahoma."
All of the evident modernity and wealth in this part of Oklahoma ?- the occasional office buildings, the restored hot-springs resorts, the new hospitals and gyms ?- seems to have been built by the Chickasaw Nation, with money that began to accumulate after they won the right to operate casinos two decades ago. Cole remains extremely close to the leadership of his tribe. There's a hand-in-hand relationship here: Cole works to win government support for Chickasaw projects, and the entrepreneurial Chickasaw, like a shadow government, use their profits in part to build social-service projects that help Cole's constituents.
This is the territory ?- the poorer sectors of the red states; populist, patriotic and Christian ?- that operatives of Cole and Rove's generation have spent their careers turning from bedrocks of the permanent, post-New Deal Democratic majority in Congress to the soul of the rising Republican one. Cole has been in the politics business here for decades. [..] By 1994, he had [..] become the most influential Republican consultant in the state. He ran four campaigns for Congress that year, as well as Frank Keating's campaign for governor. All of his candidates won. "Oklahoma had been voting Republican for president since Goldwater. What we had to do was convince them that the Democrats in Washington were completely out of touch with Oklahoma values."
Nineteen ninety-four is the source of Cole's generation's war stories, its clutched box of poems. It was also the moment when the economically populist feeling that had lingered for decades began to change, converted into a Republican sensibility more amenable to business interests. [..] But that conversion was never perfect or complete.
When Cole has differed from the Republican Party in Congress, it has often been on the New Deal-legacy projects that he views as doing right by Oklahoma and that they view as pork. He has voted against the party's small-government wing on the farm bill, the water bill, most native issues and, maybe most significantly for him, on a bill that provides federal money for the first member of a family to attend college, a population that in his district is more than three times the national average. "I knew the moment we did that it'd be cast as, the president's heroic, you're pork-barrel spenders. Well, no, it's just the green-eyeshade guys are wrong about this," Cole said. "If it's a transcendent national question, then I'm a Burkean conservative, but I like to think I represent the interests of my district."
The danger is that these positions, held at the same time, can come to look like hypocrisy. In Ada, Okla., at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, Cole gave a localized version of his national partisan pitch, that the Democrats were out of touch with the country on tax-and-spend issues, when a man raised his hand and asked how he could be expected to believe that line, given the excesses of the Republicans. Cole launched into a disquisition on why the contributions of earmarks to the federal deficit was overhyped but eventually conceded that the man, who turned out to be the publisher of an Oklahoma travel guide, had a "good point." When I talked to him afterward, the publisher, Bob Rubin, said he was "not very impressed. They are not accepting responsibility." It was hard not to conclude that Cole, and his party, were caught in something. And it was hard to see what else exactly he might have said.
"The biggest problem with earmarks," Cole told me, "is the potential for corruption." He said he believed that the impact of the scandals ?- Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham ?- that eroded the party's majority in 2006 would fade fairly quickly. "Scandals kill a politician," he said. "They don't kill a party, or the next guy to run in that district." But it was beginning to seem more difficult to box up the Tom DeLay era and ship it off into the past. In August, the Arizona Republican Rick Renzi announced he would not run for re-election. Last month he was indicted on 35 federal charges, including of fraud and extortion, involving a series of land deals; some of the individual counts carry sentences of up to 20 years.
For the Hastert seat, Cole spent $1.2 million on the race ?- close to a quarter of the committee's cash on hand and more than what the exponentially richer Democrats had contributed. McCain himself, in the middle of the presidential election, flew in to hold a fund-raiser. It was a strong effort, the strongest they could muster. When a reporter asked Cole, a couple of days before the vote, how the public would interpret the results of the election if the Republican candidate, the dairy millionaire Jim Oberweis, lost the election, the Oklahoman couldn't help himself. "My God, it's the end of the Republican Party," he said.
The vote was decisive. In a district where President Bush won by 10 percentage points in 2004, Oberweis, running against a physicist and political novice named Bill Foster, managed to lose even Kane County, where Hastert is from.
In this fight, the Clinton camp is the more aggressive of the two, and it's adept at what might be called molehill politics: making a very big deal in the press about something that's a very small deal?-such as a single word in a mailing or a slip-up by an aide. Clinton's strategists pounce on whatever opportunity presents itself to attack Obama, and try to knock him off his own message, and his stride. Clinton's approach resembles her tactics in the White House, in which her inclination was to attack (which caused a number of problems, and was one of the reasons her health care bill was defeated). The Obama camp has sometimes been slow, and even reluctant, to respond, because if he attacks her personally (which the Clinton campaign would like him to do), he's not Barack Obama anymore. Moreover, Obama takes care not to come across as the "angry black"?-a stereotype he does not fit, but that could be imposed upon him by others.
While it's true that the two remaining Democratic candidates have few substantive differences, they have very different approaches to campaigning, which give us clues about the differences in how they would govern?-and that, after all, is what this whole thing is, or should be, about. It's useful to try to imagine these people in the White House, and, from their campaigning, to try to figure what they will be like there: how they will use power; how well they would sustain their appeal over a considerable period of time.
Hillary Clinton is employing conventional politics, while Obama is trying to create a new kind of politics. Similarly, as they respond to the country's desire for change, they have very different concepts of what "change" means: briefly, for Obama it means changing the very zeitgeist of Washington, creating a new way to get things done by building coalitions that transcend longstanding political divisions. For Clinton it means passing bills?-though sometimes she has suggested that it means electing a woman president. ("I embody change," she said in a debate in New Hampshire.)
That the presumed neophyte Obama has stood toe-to-toe with the Clintons (for all of Hillary Clinton's complaints about being "ganged up on," Obama has had to face both Clintons every day), has beaten them more often than not, and still might prevail is in itself remarkable. But in one important way his campaigning has fallen short. A great many people who follow politics closely simply don't "get" Obama, and can become quite angry about him. (This election is dividing friends and families like no other I've seen.) They see him as offering empty rhetoric, as simply building a movement, even a cult; the huge crowds he has drawn, his rock-star appeal, have only reinforced these suspicions. Actually, Obama is a serious student of policy?-even, in the words of one adviser, a "geek"?-and highly informed as a result. In Wisconsin, in some frustration?-as Clinton was calling him "a talker, not a doer"?-Obama said:
Everybody has got a ten-point plan on everything. You go to Senator Clinton's Web site, my Web site, they look identical.... The problem is not the lack of proposals. The question is, who can bring Democrats, independents, and Republicans into a working majority to bring about change. That's what we're doing in this campaign. This is what a working majority looks like. That's how we're going to move the country forward. That's what I offer that she can't do.
Obama has a big idea: he believes that in order to change Washington and to get some of those ten-point programs through, and to reduce the power of the lobbies and "special interests," he must first build a large coalition?-Democrats, independents, Republicans, whoever?-to support him in his effort to change things. He has figured out that he cannot make the kinds of changes he's talking about if he has to fight for 51-49 majorities in Congress. Therefore, he's trying to build a broader coalition, and enlist the people who have come out to see him and are getting involved in politics for the first time because of him. If he can hold that force together, members of Congress, including the "old bulls," according to a campaign aide, "will look back home and see that there is a mandate for change." Thus, Obama talks about working "from the bottom up" to bring about change. When he says he will take on the special interests and the lobbies, to him it's not as far-fetched as most jaded Washingtonians think: he intends to do that with the army he's building.
Georgian recalls rooming with Michelle Obama
By BRIAN FEAGANS
Published on: 04/13/08
Excerpt:
Catherine Donnelly shopped at Kmart, settled into her dorm room and soaked up the Gothic stone buildings where, over the next four years, she would grow into her own woman.
But her first day at Princeton held a surprise, too. And Donnelly knew it would mean confronting the past.
She walked into the historic Nassau Inn that evening and delivered the news to her mother, Alice Brown. "I was horrified," recalled Brown, who had driven her daughter up from New Orleans. Brown stormed down to the campus housing office and demanded Donnelly be moved to another room.
The reason: One of her roommates was black.
"I told them we weren't used to living with black people ?- Catherine is from the South," Brown said. "They probably thought I was crazy."
Today both Donnelly, an Atlanta attorney, and Brown, a retired schoolteacher living in the North Carolina mountains, look back at that time with regret. Like many Americans, they've built new perceptions of race on top of a foundation cracked by prejudices past ?- and present. Yet they rarely speak of the subject.
Barack Obama's run for president changed that. When the Democratic senator from Illinois invited more dialogue on race last month, Donnelly and Brown, both lifetime Republicans, were ready.
But their willingness to talk isn't a response to the candidate born to a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. It's more about Obama's wife, Michelle.
She's that roommate from a quarter century ago.
