Category: The Dish

Quote For The Day

"The Amnesty Committee took only a few days to determine what we have been saying for two years. Bilal Hussein must be freed immediately," – Tom Curley, the AP’s president. What will smear-artist Michelle Malkin say? This:

There is more to this story, believe me. Amnesty does not equal absolution.

I didn’t realize she was a priest.

Campaigning And Governing

Ross’s point is well-taken:

Reagan’s ’80 campaign was badly mismanaged – he fired nearly all his senior staff after losing the Iowa caucuses, remember – yet once in office he was able to run circles around the Congressional Democrats, and match the canny Gorbachev at brinksmanship. George H.W. Bush won the Presidency by playing the hard-nosed partisan on the campaign trail, but he ended up alienating GOP true believers by cutting deals with Democrats from the White House. Bill Clinton ran as a centrist New Democrat in 1992 but tried to govern as a liberal (gays in the military, Hillarycare), before the ’94 debacle forced him back to the middle. And George W. Bush ran two campaigns that were notable for their ruthless competence – yet competence of any sort has been strikingly absent from his administration’s governance.

Still … Reagan saw excessive delegation come back to haunt him in Iran-Contra. The first Bush doesn’t count – he ran against Dukakis as Reagan’s heir, and his pick of veep was an omen of his lack of popular touch. Clinton’s campaign was as disorganized and as fly-by-night as his administration – made good by his prodigious talent. W is indeed the counter-example. His campaigns were crude but very efficient. If Cheney had turned out to be for policy what Rove was to gutter politics, it may have worked out well. But Cheney turned out more turd than blossom, didn’t he? Delegation depends on the judgment of the delegated-to.

Can She Run Anything?

The Clinton campaign’s chaotic, poorly planned, ill-managed organization suggests the Clintons have learned nothing since the structural chaos of their first two terms:

Clinton has overseen two major staff shake-ups in two months. She has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors and had to loan her own campaign $5 million to keep it afloat in January. Her campaign badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday. It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling — if she hadn’t made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign.

I think I’m behind on the Clinton compliments, aren’t I?

Andrea Scores

Too right:

This campaign, right now, is not the greatest example of why women should rule the world.

I would dearly love to see a woman president. I hope to see one soon. And Clinton has many qualities – extraordinary intelligence, remarkable stamina, policy mastery and the kind of ambition men and women need to succeed in politics. But she lost her soul somewhere along the way, has become consumed with process rather than principle, and has forgotten the difference between truth and falsehood. If she were the only option, I still couldn’t bring myself to back the Clintons. But I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who did. But when you have a transformative option with the talent and timing of Obama, you go with the best candidate. Here’s hoping for an American Thatcher – a woman who wins the presidency whose husband did not precede her and who has forged her own path in her own way. But not this woman. Not now.