McCain's Mixed Bag of VPs

As Democrats put Obama/Clinton issues behind them, the Republican identity crisis comes front and center in John McCain's decision about a running mate.

Aside from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who may actually turn out to be the choice, the longish short list is all over the identity-politics lot:

Mitt Romney, a super-rich Mormon the candidate clearly despises, and holder of the Olympic record for flip-flopping on social issues;

Joe Lieberman, a McCain personal favorite, with the slight handicap of having run for VP as a Democrat, to say nothing of being a pro-choice Orthodox Jew, the prospect of whose presence on the ticket unsettles even the strong stomach of Karl Rove;

Tom Ridge, a pro-choice former governor with an undistinguished record as the first Homeland Security head, whose current work is sitting on the boards of Home Depot and Hershey;

Two business executives (Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina) with no political experience whatsoever but whose gender might appeal to diehard Hillary Clinton dissidents;

And even Colin Powell, who would bring racial balance and a respected military career but whose most recent public service involved helping George W. Bush lie us into Iraq and is a septuagenarian only a few months younger than McCain.

After Bush-Cheney, it's understandably complicated to figure out what enlightened Republicanism should involve this year, a problem with which McCain himself apparently wrestled after being sandbagged by Rove in 2000 when he considered switching parties himself.

If some voters have a problem wrapping their minds around the idea of Obama in the Oval Office, they may be equally bewitched, bothered and bewildered by whoever McCain chooses to be an elderly heartbeat away.

Clinton's Three Speeches in One

Last night, she knitted together soaring rhetoric from an acceptance speech as presidential nominee, some attack-dog sound bites expected of a running mate and finally a plea for party unity behind Barack Obama.

But behind the virtuoso performance was the impression that the former First Lady's heart still belongs, less to her passionately professed love of Democratic Party ideals, than to the doomed candidacy that brought her thisclose to making history.

The emphasis on mothers, daughters and granddaughters only deepened the sense that Hillary Clinton still sees her loss not as the failure of a flawed campaign based on a glaring sense of entitlement but as a blow against womankind.

With the unspoken premise of Obama's victory as an insult to an entire gender, Clinton gave him full-throated support as a generic candidate but failed to offset with specificity a whole season of her attacks on him as inexperienced and unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

Despite the burblings of Keith Olbermann and other cable pundits about the speech as "a grand slam," it looked more like a safety squeeze to score without risk or all-out effort.

Testing the Power of "Just Words"

Until the ugliness started this month, race and gender were benign issues, at least on the surface, of the Democratic contest as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama congratulated themselves and each other for breaking through barriers of prejudice in American life.

But centuries of oppression, hatred and anger are not so easily wiped out by symbolic candidacies, and Obama is making the speech of his political life today to repair the damage to his campaign by the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who wears dashikis and does not speak softly.

In his first response last week, Obama invoked Robert Kennedy's plea for racial unity after the murder of Martin Luther King, as he no doubt will again today, under the influence of Ted Sorensen, who saw first-hand the violence of the 1960s and emerged as a soft-spoken liberal corporate lawyer.

But Wright and Sorensen reflect more than Obama's mixed racial heritage and the generational gap between their lives and his own. Below the surface of race (and gender) are internal strains of economic class and culture that are not easily resolved.

In the 1960s, Black Power advocates and the Black Panthers were pitted against Dr. King's message of non-violence and reconciliation, just as the Women's Movement was riven by a divide between radical Feminists, college-educated and privileged, and working women who resented "Women's Lib," even as they benefited from the political consciousness it raised. The victims of prejudice are no more monolithic than those who practice and profit from it.

Obama will try to bridge those gaps and more as he is put to the severe test of reaching beyond rhetoric into the hearts of voters with both hopes and fears about the change he represents. At the very least, the results will show how much "just words" matter in American life.

White Men Can't Jump?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are bringing to the fore the most neglected demographic in more than half a century of empowerment of minorities.

In trying to explain why the surge for Obama failed to become a tidal wave on Super Tuesday, the pundits are honing in on the behavior of the largest silent segment of society--white men.

In parsing the results, Adam Nagourney of the New York Times concludes that 2008 has "cleaved the party neatly in two: the Clinton Democrats and the Obama Democrats. Age, race and gender have become the dividing lines; nothing comes close to mattering as much.

"The Obama Democratic Party is made up of younger voters (under 44), blacks, white men (to a more limited extent) and independents...The Clinton Democratic Party is the party of women, older voters, Hispanics and also some white men."

From this point of view, of all the demographic armies marching in lockstep, only white men have failed to jump into the ranks on one side or another and stay there.

According to the Times, "Mr. Obama split the white male vote nationally with Mrs. Clinton, but there was an important geographical disparity there: White men in California voted for Mr. Obama but white men in Southern states like Alabama did not. The question is what white men in Ohio will do next month, during what is shaping up as a critical showdown for Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton."

May an aging member of this indecisive species suggest the trendiness of identity politics is going too far? If there is a split in the Democratic Party, it is more attitudinal than demographic.

Those who see the world as a set of problems to be dissected, analyzed and solved are more likely to be drawn to Mrs. Clinton. Those who believe that hearts are as important as minds in shaping the future may rally around Obama.

There is much to be said for both points of view and, if voters don't let themselves get stampeded into categories, they can make their individual decisions about what matters most to them.

After all these years of Bush mindlessness and heartlessness, they can't go too far wrong.

Ghosts of '08: JFK, Reagan and Bubba

As the Presidential campaign clarifies down to McCain vs. Clinton or Obama, there are echoes of the past in the appeal of each to today's voters.

With the Kennedys' endorsement, Barack Obama is JFK's clear heir, and his success with the young in the primaries so far confirms the comparison.

Hillary Clinton, like the Wizard of Oz, is trying to persuade voters not to pay attention to that man behind the screen (barely) but is at the same time riding on the residue of good feeling from his prosperous, warless 1990s.

John McCain is morphing into another, albeit testier, version of Reagan--a plain-spoken, optimistic patriot who will try to charm Americans into not, as RR put it, holding his opponents' comparative youth and inexperience against them.

Beyond gender, race and ideology, this generational undercurrent of the young for Obama, the middle-aged for Clinton and the elderly for McCain will be part of the contest for the hearts and minds of Americans of all ages as they try to mature beyond the Bush era.

It should be a vintage election year.

Barack and the Beanstalk

The fable of the giant-killer was alive and well in South Carolina--a young man climbing into the castle of a behemoth called Blunderbore and his wife and stealing their prizes.

Barack Obama summed it up in his victory speech: "After four great contests in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans that we've seen in a long, long time."

The Clintons are still huge as they lumber toward Super Tuesday, but Obama has lost narrowly in New Hampshire and Nevada, won handily in Iowa and now by a country mile in South Carolina. His beanstalk is looking sturdier with each contest.

After all the blather about race and gender, it was Bill Clinton shadowing the landscape that made the difference between what might have been a close contest and a runaway. The voters were not charmed by his "Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell the blood of a journeyman!"

In the exit polls, South Carolina voters clearly said they were turned off by the sight and, from here on, to push the fairy tale to its limit, the Clintons will have to find another goose to lay their golden eggs.