Okay, so Bill is still the best politician in the country, despite all his "warts". He can probably even steamroll Newt, these days.
I don't believe him that Hillary is more grounded than Barack.
BILL FOR A THIRD TERM?
I'd like to think that we'd be getting Bill again, for a third term; but that is pretty clearly not the case, right? Hillary is doing her own thing. They may agree on a lot of issues, but she has her own sensibility and way of weighing what is important and how to express it.
The upshot is that I think that if anyone can, Barack can best him. It will take all his effort, perhaps more than he is bargaining for, but who can deny that Obama has the seeds of greatness, as well as the backdrop of the times to achieve it?
MAXIMIN CONSIDERATIONS
Now, the conventional wisdom that Barack has a bigger downside has to be challenged.
The most serious downside, the parallels with Jimmy Carter, doesn't burn so brightly (for me), as it once did. Carter got isolated (even from his own party). Obviously, we do not know whether Barack's Executive style might eventually lead him to the same thing (or his choice of chief-of-staff, etc.). However, we can say that Barack has a sense of timing, or staging. This may ultimately give him superior judgment in how to build and expend political capital in Washington, in a way that Carter, one could argue, did not have. I don't know how much patience he has (is he a fox?); but he is disarming, so ... Last, at least in the near-term, it's not clear how much he could screw up, post Bush-Cheney. In other words, aren't we already sort-of skipping along at rock-bottom?
PROCESS REVOLUTIONARIES
Now, I don't trust in process revolution in politics, as a rule. Too often, this is merely a ploy to stir the pot to one's advantage, among other things.
However, it is easy to be convinced, as many have been, that changes in Washington do require a whole new approach to "managing" Washington (apart from Al Gore inspired effort to bring the bureaucracy into the next century, I mean).
Congress has changed so much already, in the past 40 years, if you ask someone like Bob Dole, say, who is intimate with the backroom dealing; the stacked deck; and the money, money, money.
However, the concurrent rise in abject power-partisanship and in wealth disparity make plain to all patriots that the best thing for the American Polity, short of a Constitutional Convention (flowers to Sandy Levinson), might be pushing for as many new ways as possible ... to keep the ruling class closely at heel, for lack of a better phrase.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Bill Clinton at College Station, TX
