The Unforgiving Minute: The homecoming

Let's set the stage first:

Nevertheless, Jeb is a Bush. And if Bushes are anything, they are a family of super-competitors. Ferociously so, across the board.

“At everything from tiddlywinks to backgammon,” says former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, a Bush family friend. They take their contests so seriously they give no quarter even to the youngest members of the family. Which George H.W. learned the hard way when he was just a small boy and his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, beat him mercilessly at tennis, “right-handed and left-handed,” Barbara says.

I have this picture in my head of the next Bush family get-together up in Kennebunkport. For Easter, maybe. Yeah, Easter. That'd be good.

The servants retire and the family sits down at the dinner table. On a signal from Poppy, he and Dubya put on their "41" and "43" caps. Barbara then scales a cap over the carved ham and into Jeb's lap. He picks it up and discovers it's a mate to his father's and brother's caps – except it has the number "0" stitched on the front.

"You want us to clap now?" smirks his brother.

"Or maybe we should see how you do in the Easter egg hunt first," chips in his dad, with his trademark crooked grin.

Minute's up.

No, Luke -- I am your father!

Digby has uncovered the best reason to keep Jeb Bush out of the White House.

It's this:

[W]hat does all this have to do with Jeb? Well, he happens to be the only Bush who was a card-carrying member of the PNAC. He was a neocon long before neocons were cool. In fact, one must suspect that his early defiance of his father and brother in this regard signals the act of a True Believer. He didn’t need to do it. He was Governor of Florida, not head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He must have really thought the cause was righteous.

Now he’s in the terrible position of having to distance himself from the reckless foreign policy mistakes of his brother — mistakes that were initiated by the neoconservative claque of which he is a charter member. He’s forced to pretend that he’s actually an adherent of his father’s foreign policy school when in fact he was among those who rejected it with disdain back in the 1990s, an act which led to his brother’s fateful decision to invade Iraq without good cause.

God save and protect the United States of America from another round of the Bush sons working out their daddy issues in the Oval Office.

Quote of the day: On elections and consequences

Here's Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog on the right and that whole democracy thing:

At the national level, this is the third presidency in a row that the right has approached on the assumption that elections should be only incidentally related to consequences.

The GOP: America's laboratory for recycling and welfare

(Updated below.)

This morning I fell into a pleasant discussion with friend and colleague from the Hoosier State about the thinly disguised (and scarcely justified) 2012 Presidential ambitions of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.

I have a feeling that the 2012 presidential race for the GOP is going to be a lot like 2008 was: The dominant voter impression will be of eight or nine unappealing white folks (mainly or exclusively men) milling around on stage trying to out tea-bag one another, advancing little in the way of new plans but eagerly jumping on the latest offhand remark by Obama or Biden like it signaled the end of the world. That will continue into the summer until, in the end, the GOP nomination won't go to the winner, but rather to the survivor, like McCain. (That might represent the best chance for someone like Daniels, in fact: a scenario in which all the somewhat better qualified candidates have destroyed one another other and he's somehow been left standing.)

So whoever gets the GOP nomination, he (or she) is apt not to command much enthusiasm or loyalty beyond their immediate base, although the amount of corporate money that will be sunk in that campaign could keep even a bale of new-mown hay from the banks of the Wabash polling at around 30% until well into October. And so, barring a catastrophic game-changer (or what we used to call an "October Surprise" before the Bush family got out of national politics), Obama could probably coast more or less handily to re-election in the most expensive and uninformative political campaign in the history of western civilization.

One important difference between the two parties is that presidential primaries are the only place where the GOP is enthusiastic about recycling. If you're a Democratic presidential candidate and you don't get elected, no one will go harder on you and your chances four years from now than your fellow Democrats (except maybe the mainstream political press). On the other hand, how many Republican presidential wannabes can you name from the last 35 years who ever went away just because it was obvious that almost no one would ever vote for him? Even Bob Dole, for whom Viagra became a political metaphor as well as a part of his pharmaceutical regimen, got two bites at the national-office apple.

Even Newt Gingrich, for heaven's sake -- a man whose meaningful political career ended in disgrace over a decade ago, a man with nothing to recommend himself as presidential material other than his apparent media omnipresence -- can get respectable people to treat his 2012 ambitions as a topic for serious conversation!

So if you're a Democratic presidential hopeful, you'd better make certain you win, because the odds are you'll only get one chance at it. If you're a Republican presidential hopeful, though, all you have to do is make it into the first round of playoffs to get on the presidential-hopeful gravy train for the rest of your working life.

If someone like Daniels can come in a surprising second or even third in a couple of early primaries/caucuses in 2012 before washing out because he can't raise enough money, he could still be on right-wing welfare until his dying day, as a think-tank member, FOX News contributor, strategic consultant, paid speaker, provider of "balance" on the Sunday morning talk shows, etc., and above all as an eternal hopeful, always waiting for the next primary season.

(Note to NPR: How can Gingrich be staging a "comeback" -- as you call it in your interview title -- if you've never given him a sporting chance to go away?)


(Update: Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog says Daniels' 2012 chances are "toast," and not in the nice breakfasty way.)

FOX News: In Russia, old joke remembers you!

From childhood, I remember a joke about a foot race between a Russian and an American. The punchline: The American won, but the Russians announced that the Russian came in second while the American came in next-to-last.

I was reminded of that joke by this joke from FOX News:

Study: Obama's Early Popularity Only Average Among Predecessors

President Obama is just average.

At least by the standard of approval ratings.

Though Obama's job approval score is strong and has been since he took office, historical polling data shows Obama's popularity during his first 100 days is right in the middle of the scores other new presidents received from the public over the past 60 years.

Obama's 63 percent average, according to a study released by Gallup last month, is the highest for a new president since Jimmy Carter (he clocked in at 69 percent during his first 100 days).

But John F. Kennedy bested Obama by more than 10 points, with 74 percent. Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed a 71 percent rating early on.

Even Richard Nixon averaged a 62 percent approval rating, just 1 point shy of Obama's.

Overall, Obama's average for the first three months matched the historical average of 63 percent for presidents since Eisenhower.

When you include presidents who took the oath mid-term -- after the death or resignation of a president -- Obama's 63 percent looks paltry.

Harry Truman enjoyed 87 percent approval, while Lyndon Johnson enjoyed 76 percent.

Obama might have benefited, too, from the unpopularity of his predecessor.

Even after the contested 2000 election, though, George W. Bush averaged 58 percent in his first 100 days, according to the study.

Ronald Reagan averaged 60 percent, George H.W. Bush averaged 57 percent and Bill Clinton averaged 55 percent.

So let's see: The post-WWII presidents whose approval numbers after their first 100 days in office (still a a silly yardstick) exceeded Obama's 63% were Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.

Notice anything about that list?

Me too.

Let's try rephrasing those same Gallup results like this:

If the post-World War II presidents were ranked by their approval ratings after their first 100 days in office, every Republican president (with one exception) would be ranked lower than even the lowest-ranked Democratic president.

Nixon, Ford (presumably, although FOX News doesn't even deign to mention him), Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush were all rated lower than Obama at this early point in their presidencies.

That one exception was Dwight Eisenhower, a popular war hero and two-term Republican president from a now-extinct branch of the GOP, who left office almost 50 years ago. Eisenhower's approvals after his first 100 days were higher than Obama's--and he wouldn't have even a snowball's chance in hell with his own party if he returned from the grave to enter the 2012 GOP primaries.

Or, to put it still another way:

Barack Obama has the lowest approval ratings in his first 100 days of any post-war president (as long as we don't count all those Republican presidents who were less popular than him).

Kind of sad, really.

The unforgiving minute

Reflection on Bush's final TV address:

George Bush is fond of telling interviewers that history will be the final judge of his administration.

Here's what I think:

If the world survives long enough, a day will come when everyone will remember there were two George Bushes who were president, in an asterisk-in-the-index, Trivial Pursuits kind of way--two Adamses, two Harrisons, two Bushes. But almost nobody will remember which one was which--one had two middle initials and the other had one, but which was the doofy one-termer who doesn't seem as bad now as people thought at the time, and which was the idiot who drove the country into the ground?

Like Dick York and Dick Sargent, or Tom Bosley and David Doyle. Or Jackie Cooper and Barry Nelson.

There's a legacy, for the father who hoped to found a dynasty and the son who thought he could finally outdo the father.

Minute's up.

Reading: "God kinda goes, No, I really don’t think so."

Reading Vanity Fair's oral history of the Bush White House is a necessary act of political masochism, in a "those who don't are doomed to repeat it" way.

The experience feels like having stitches removed by pulling them knot-side through, and it's curiously silent on the outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame as political payback in 2003, but otherwise it's compelling. Once you start reading, you won't be able to stop until you reach the end.

You'll be relieved that in 20 days Bush and his cronies will finally be out of the White House; and you'll be angered all over again at the damage to our nation already done and the damage yet to show itself--and the fact that they'll emerge largely beyond the reach of the law for their long list of offenses.

"Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House" is going on the Readings list in the sidebar.

The GOP jobs program

You aren't too smart, are you? I like that in a man.

Matty Walker, Body Heat (1981)

It's fairly easy to document that Republican administrations aren't worried about improving employment statistics.

After all, let's connect the dots: People get jobs, and right away they start wanting fair wages, workplace safety, benefits . . . suddenly it all becomes "me, me, me." Why even start down that slippery slope in the first place?

Still, there's one job category for which modern Republican presidencies have always amounted to a latter-day Works Project Administration. I refer to the jobs of the people whose daily chore it is to follow along behind the chief executive and say, "Uhm, what the President meant to say was . . . "

It's for another time to wonder why it is that the modern Republican Party, like Matty Walker, is drawn to the candidate who can't explain himself without help. But the pattern is hard to ignore: Since 1981 (the same year Matty made her appearance--coincidence?), only Bush the Elder didn't need to have handlers whose job was to explain that the latest mindless thing the President said was taken out of context, or blown out of proportion, or actually fiendishly clever in a "psych!" sort of way. True, Number 41 had a somewhat dodgy relationship with grammar and syntax, but he remains the poster-boy for mental acuity compared to the Republican presidents who came before and after him.

All of which brings us to Republican presidential candidate John McCain's latest outburst, in which he seemed not to recognize the name of NATO ally Spain's president, or indeed to be clear on which continent Spain occupied.

Quick as a bunny, McCain neocon advisor Randy Scheunemann (who's made a foreign policy career out of insisting that the improbable isn't) leapt into the fray:

The Washington Post has gotten hold of McCain's Spain goof. And McCain advisor Randy Scheunemann has sent the Post an email suggesting that McCain knew exactly who Zapatero was and was simply repeating the neocon anti-Zapatero line.

In other words, McCain didn't forget who Zapatero was; this was his way of signaling a reversal of his previous position (and current American policy) of working with Zapatero. Psyche!

Being the Presidential Explainer--it's not only steady work in good times, it's virtually recession-proof, for reasons that this week must seem all to obvious.

Yet I can't help wondering: Wouldn't it better serve the conservative gods of efficiency and smaller government if, instead of hiring a phalanx of cleaners to trail their presidents with push brooms, they simply recruited candidates who had a better idea of what they were doing in the first place?

(Street sweeper image via Ponsonby Britt.)

The GOP's prop-gag politics

Perhaps, after three years, Republicans are finally learning that, when Stephen Colbert's conservative-manqué character takes up one of their ideas and gleefully runs with it, it's time to re-evaluate:

Now the McCain campaign appears to be stepping back from one of its more childish school-yard taunts:

Republican John McCain appeared to back down on Tuesday in his dispute with his opponent Barack Obama over tire pressure.

Last week in St. Louis, Obama told an audience that steps such as inflating tires to the correct levels could make a difference when it comes to conserving fuel.

Cue gleeful mockery from McCain. Obama was naive, inexperienced and not talking straight to the American people about energy, he said.

His campaign went further, distributing to reporters tire gauges engraved with the words “Obama’s energy plan.”

Predictably, Obama hit back calling McCain’s mockery “ignorant,” arguing his plans were being misrepresented and saying that experts backed his call over tire pressure. Equally predictably, McCain’s camp hit back.

The surprise came during a telephone town hall meeting McCain held on Tuesday with voters in Pennsylvania.

“Obama said a couple of days ago says we all should inflate our tires. I don’t disagree with that. The American Automobile Association strongly recommends it,” McCain said.

But he kept up his broad criticism of Obama on energy: “I … don’t think that that (inflating tires) is a way to become energy independent.”

(The fact that Obama's claim was uncontroversially true, and that the Washington press corps knew it as well as any drivers education student, didn't stop the big media from treating this foolishness as "news" for several days. Republicans learned the effectiveness of purile ploys like this, and likelihood of the press's willing participation, with the "purple heart" Band-Aids mocking Kerry's war service in 2004.)

That being said, now that the bottom seems to be dropping out of the Obama Tire Gauge market, I want one for my car. If anyone reading this has the right connections to the GOP and can bag one for me, please let me know.

For reasons I can't explain, the modern GOP goes for these prop gag-driven gimmicks like it was the Party of Carrot Top--tire gauges, Band-aids, "flip-flop" beach sandals, jelly beans, and on and on. And there's one other, on which a favorite family story hangs:

In 1989, my uncle and aunt, both staunch Republicans and the aunt related to the Quayle family by marriage, were thrilled to be invited to the Bush/Quayle inaugural celebrations. One nighttime event gathered everyone on the Mall to celebrate Peggy Noonan's campaign slogan "a thousand points of light" (each point of light was theorized to represent one of the private or nonprofit entities that would step forward to pick up the slack caused by a decade of Republican domestic budget slashing).

At the culmination of the ceremony, when Bush uttered the tag line, each guest was to light and hold aloft one of the 40,000 commemorative Maglight flashlights donated by the manufacturer, each engraved with Bush and Quayle's names, the date, and "A Thousand Points of Light" (the flashlights were the points of light--get it?).

Think of it as a "Goodbye Norma Jean" moment for the non-Elton crowd.

All well and good--until my kinfolk discovered to their outrage that they were expected to shell out close to twenty bucks for their Maglight. Like all good Reagan Republicans, they were foursquare behind the whole thousand-points-of-light thing as long as it was clearly understood that it wasn't going to involve any outlay on their part. Out of affection and tact, the Democrats in our family only teased them about this story a little.

The unforgiving minute

Spencer Ackerman makes the point that when David Broder and his ilk return again and again to the subject of Obama's "articulateness," it's code-word racism: It's talking about Obama, says Ackerman, "in a way he would never talk about a white candidate."

Well, yes, but I think there's something more revealing going on here: For Republicans, "articulateness" has become a tainted word (or else why would they use it to put the needle to Obama?).

Whatever problem Republicans had with Bill Clinton as president, it certainly wasn't that he was inarticulate. More often it was the opposite: If anything, they still rage at his Jesuitical "depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" line; they roll their eyes at his reputation for droning on about policy details; they think of him as being too clever by half.

On the other hand, for the last 30 years, Republicans have been drawn to presidents who become laughable for their unreliability when it comes to putting a coherent sentence together--think not only of Bush II, but also Bush I, Reagan, and Ford. The last articulate president the Republicans put up was Richard Nixon.

That didn't work out well, I'll grant you, but at least he wasn't inarticulate.

Minute's up.

Happy thought for the day

Judicial underachiever and self-loathing quota beneficiary Clarence Thomas doesn't enjoy his work:

"There's not much that entices about the job," Thomas said, answering questions from the public that provided a rare glimpse of the man behind the office. "There's no money in it, no privacy, no big houses, and from an ego standpoint, it does nothing for me."

Thomas, 59, said the position is satisfying because he feels he's serving the public, and he's honored by it, "but I wouldn't say I like it."

"I like sports," Thomas said. "I like to drive a motor home."

Thomas, part of the 5-4 majority in Bush v. Gore, added this image (although whether with irony or not is difficult to say):

Thomas said sometimes he will just sit and read the Constitution to admire it as a document.

Clarence Thomas, unhappy that he's a Supreme Court Justice.

Good.

(Hat tip to ThinkProgress.)

I'm sure Tiberius felt the same way about Caligula sometimes

A sad report this morning from the House of Bush:

There are times in the life of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States and father of the 43rd, that people, perfect strangers, come up to him and say the harshest things — words intended to comfort but words that wind up only causing pain.

“I love you, sir, but your son’s way off base here,” they might say, according to Ron Kaufman, a longtime adviser to Mr. Bush, who has witnessed any number of such encounters — perhaps at a political fund-raiser, or a restaurant dinner, a chance meeting on the streets of Houston or Kennebunkport, Me. They are, he says, just one way the presidency of the son has taken a toll on the father.

“It wears on his heart,” Mr. Kaufman said, “and his soul.”

The article compares Bush the Elder to the Little League father who can't resist yelling at the umpire when his son gets a bad call, which is an unbelievably generous rendering of the situation.

I've long suspected that the definitive account of the second Bush administration would probably be written by clinical psychiatrists rather than historians. Read the rest of the article and see what you think.

But certainly, the irony for Bush the Elder must be painful: His own reputation, tarnished at the end of his single term in the White House, is actually floating upward these days, largely through comparison to his son's spectacular failures. Whatever dynastic dreams he once had--George W., like Fredo, was never supposed to take over the family business--are facing a cold morning light. It's possible that Jeb still has a shot at the White House some day, but no one other than Poppy seems to hold much interest in the idea these days.

Yes, and the workers who built the Panama Canal were only suffering from "a little mosquito fatigue"

On Larry King last night, former President George H.W. Bush showed a father's natural unwillingness to face the idea that his son had, in six years, pissed away the future of a political dynasty that GHWB and patriarch Prescott Bush had spent over sixty years working to establish.

Former President George Bush told CNN's Larry King Monday that the electorate may be experiencing "Bush fatigue."

And it may be the reason his son, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is sitting out the 2008 presidential election, the 41st president said.

"There's something to that -- there might be a little Bush fatigue now," former President Bush told CNN's Larry King when asked if he agreed with a recent assessment from GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney that Jeb Bush would currently be a frontrunner for the Republican party's presidential nomination if his last name wasn't Bush.

But the former president predicted his youngest son may enter politics again in the future.

"I hope that Jeb, who left office looking good, is not through with politics," the elder Bush said. " I think he's a good man, most other people think that, a man of principle. And I think he's got a future."

Sure he does. If he changes his name to Schickelgruber.

Memo to GHWB: We feel your pain

Reuters reports:

President George W. Bush's father accused the news media of "personal animosity" toward his son and said he found the criticism so unrelenting he sometimes talked back to his television set.

Mr. Bush:

For years now, we've been shouting back at our TV every time your son was on.

Welcome to our world.