Soccer Dad

Didn't he used to write speeches for walter mondale?

Charles Krauthammer is on a roll. For the third straight week he's dissecting the dynamics of the Democratic primary race. And as he pithily puts it (in his column from two weeks ago)

The Democratic primary campaign has been breathtakingly empty. What passes for substance is an absurd contest of hopeful change (Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry change (John Edwards playing Hugo Chávez in English).

In that column two weeks ago psychiatrist pundit analyzed Sen Barack Obama in A sneer, a tear, a comeback.

It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability," Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet -- first demurely saying her feelings were hurt and mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on regardless, then generously conceding that Obama is very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."

At which point, Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.

So when the real Sen. Obama showed through, he wasn't all that hopeful and perhaps, more than a little cynical. Cynicism defeats hope.

But the problem isn't just Sen. Obama's. It's the free pass that he's given as Krauthammer relates:

The freest of all passes to Obama is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy: The bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn on every policy an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat.

He doesn't offer even a modest deviation from orthodoxy. When the Gang of 14, seven Republican and seven Democratic senators, agreed to restore order and a modicum of bipartisanship to the judicial selection process, Obama refused to join lest he anger the liberal base.

Last week in Black Dreams, White Liberals, Dr. Krauthammer examined the Clintons.

The analogy Clinton was implying was obvious: I'm Lyndon Johnson, unlovely doer; he's Martin Luther King, charismatic dreamer. Vote for me if you want results.

Forty years ago, that arrangement -- white president enacting African American dreams -- was necessary because discrimination denied blacks their own autonomous political options. Today, that arrangement -- white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty -- is a demeaning anachronism. That's what the fury at Hillary was all about, although no one was willing to say so explicitly.

The King-Johnson analogy is dead because the times are radically different. Today an African American can be in a position to wield the emancipation pen -- and everything else that goes along with the presidency: from making foreign policy to renting out the Lincoln Bedroom (if one is so inclined). Why should African American dreams still have to go through white liberals?

At once the Clintons want to be viewed as liberators and as the only interlocutors their grateful subjects should depend on.

This week he analyzes Sen John Edwards in Losing Ugly (or here).

People can change their minds about something. But everything? The man served one term in the Senate. He left not a single substantial piece of legislation to his name, only an astonishing string of votes on trade, education, civil liberties, energy, bankruptcy and, of course, war that now he not only renounces but inveighs against.

Today he plays the avenging angel, engaged in an "epic struggle" against the great economic malefactors that "have literally," he assures us, "taken over the government." He is angry, embodying the familiar zeal of the convert, ready to immolate anyone who benightedly holds to any revelation other than the zealot's very latest.

Apparently there are not only two Americas, there are two John Edwards(es).

But I digress, the doctor continues:

Nothing new about a convert. Nothing new about a zealous convert. What is different about Edwards is his endlessly repeated claim that the raging populist of today is what he has always been. That this has been the "cause of my life," the very core of his being, ingrained in him on his father's knee or at the mill or wherever, depending on the anecdote he's telling. You must understand: This is not politics for him. "This fight is deeply personal to me. I've been engaged in it my whole life."

"[V]ery core of my being?" Doesn't that recall "seared into my memory?" So maybe he has convictions, but they are very shallow as Dr. Krauthammer deftly describes:

By his own endlessly self-confessed record, his current pose is a coat of paint newly acquired.

So according to the one-time Democratic speechwriter, the current Democratic field is made up of a hopeful cynic, a narrowminded liberal and a shallow radical. It almost sounds if they're more likely on their way to Oz than to Denver.

UPDATE: more at buzztracker.

john edwards, hillary clinton, barack obama.

Posted by SoccerDad at January 25, 2008 2:26 AM