by Cliston Brown | Feb 21, 2013 | Election Analysis, Political Commentary
I learned on MSNBC’s “The Cycle” today that the number of Americans between ages 18 and 30 is now 80 million—more than 1/3 of all current voting-age adults. As they get older, they are, statistics demonstrate that they are more likely to vote regularly than they are now.
And there are approximately 75 million Americans under 18.
In short, within 20 years, when most of the current plus-65 Americans are, statistically speaking, likelier than not to be dead, the millennials, and those younger than millennials, will make up somewhere in the ballpark of 60 percent (probably more) of all voters. And if Republicans don’t reverse the tide, and these current young people continue to skew progressive on social issues, Republicans will never be able to win a national election without getting upwards of two-thirds of the plus-50 vote. Considering that the 50-to-65 crowd, 20 years from now, will be comprised of the moderate-leaning 30-to-45 crowd of today—which first began voting during the Bill Clinton presidency—good luck to the GOP in getting two-thirds or more of that demographic.
Republicans can do this simple math just as easily as I can. They must know that if they don’t change, they are politically dead. Oh, they may win an election here and there, but it’ll be an increasingly rare occurrence—a death rattle. Yet, rather than making real changes, their actions seem to indicate an attempt to mitigate their decline rather than reverse it. One wonders if they are not just trying to stay alive long enough so that they can ensure their laws will survive after they are extinct.
Viewed in this light, it would seem the Republicans are fighting a rearguard, guerrilla-type political war. They are buying time to get their laws on the books (certainly at the state level, even if they can’t do so at the federal level). If they can get their laws on the books (backed by the numerous lifetime appointees to the federal benches they’ve made since 1981), no matter how badly they lose at the polls, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the eventual Democratic majorities to overturn them—at least, not for a very long time. For example: look at the union-busting measures recently enacted by Michigan Republicans. It is hard to see how they will not suffer at the polls for their actions—but if their chief concern is getting their laws on the books while they still can, then their course of action makes sense.
One would think that if Republicans were truly interested in future political viability, they’d start aligning at least some of their positions, particularly on social issues, with the millennials, who will be the dominant force in U.S. politics by 2030 (if not sooner). But the Republicans aren’t realigning on any of the issues. They are merely incessantly yammering about better messaging, but their problem is not primarily a messaging problem. The messaging difficulties merely are a symptom. Yes, their messaging is bad, but that’s largely because they’re selling a product that fewer and fewer people want to buy. If they think putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling house is going to change their fortunes, they are in for a rude awakening.
I am beginning to consider the possibility that the Republican Party is not, primarily, trying to survive. Perhaps not surprisingly for a party increasingly dominated by deeply religious people, it might simply be trying to ensure itself an afterlife.
by Cliston Brown | Feb 16, 2013 | Political Commentary
If I live to be 100, I will probably never forget my public-school sex-education experience.
That’s because it lasted about 50 minutes and taught me nothing I didn’t already know.
I went to a small junior/senior high school in Indiana, and our eighth-grade course schedule in 1985-86 was very basic. We were all required to take English, math, science, social studies and physical education each semester, and we were required to select one fine arts course, from a menu of art, choir and band.
We were also each required, regardless of gender, to take one semester of industrial arts and one semester of home economics, though we were allowed to decide which of those courses to take first. I opted to take home ec first, because I knew that most of the boys, and a handful of the more mechanically inclined girls, would opt for the shop course first. I had never been mechanically inclined, and I didn’t want my ineptitude on display for the other boys. Equally importantly, I knew that most of the girls—and primarily the best-looking ones—would take home ec first, and I would have the pleasure of their company, in competition with relatively few boys.
Most of my home-ec experience was what you would expect of a 12-year-old male with no particular homemaking skills. I learned the basics of a sewing machine (and created a pair of sweatpants with one leg significantly longer than the other and a large hole in the crotch). I burned spaghetti. And I really liked my teacher, Mrs. W., an extremely personable, funny, good-humored young woman who happened to be married to another one of my favorite teachers. I run into her once every few years, and I understand that she still tells her classes about my sweatpants, nearly 30 years later.
But there was one day that stood out: the day when I was called upon to teach the other boys in the class the basics of our male reproductive systems.
Mrs. W. opened class that day by telling all of us that we would be learning about our systems. And she had all four boys in the class sit at one table, apart from the girls. Knowing Mrs. W. as I do, I have to assume that this arrangement was prescribed; I am certain she would have done it differently, and much better, had she been left to her own devices.
She then distributed to the four of us boys a photocopied diagram of our male parts. I was a precocious child and already well-acquainted with these basics from my many hours of absorbing every bit of information about sex I could get my hands on. I was also a cocky know-it-all in 1985, and I boasted, upon receiving the diagram, that I could name all the parts (which was quite true; I knew all the girl parts, too).
Mrs. W. smiled enthusiastically and—possibly with an eye toward curing me of my boundless enthusiasm for displaying my own brilliance, which had made me the bane of her husband’s existence in my seventh-grade geography class the previous year—informed me that I could instruct the other boys while she went and talked to the girls about their feminine parts.
Well, you can imagine what happened next—which is to say nothing happened, because I was 12 years old and far too embarrassed to take on the role of sex-education instructor. (If you’ve ever seen the delightful cinematic classic Porky’s, think of when the principal stumblingly attempted to discuss “p-p-private par- par- parts” and ultimately settled on “tallywhacker” because “‘p-p-penis’ is so … p-p-personal.”) I don’t recall if Mrs. W. eventually filled in the boys on the requisite information. All I can tell you for sure is that we never had another day of instruction on anything resembling sex for the remainder of our years of formal education.
In short: twelve years of education in my public school district, and our entire sex-education experience came down to one, 50-minute class period in eighth grade in which we were taught what our parts were, but nothing about how to use them responsibly, or even how they interacted with those of our female counterparts.
I was reminded of this experience today when I read a story on Facebook about a woman whose sister had a sex-education lecture in one of her public high school classes recently—delivered by a Catholic nun, who informed them that birth-control pills would give them cancer and render them infertile, and that condoms did nothing to prevent the passage of disease! (I don’t know if she got to the part about how boys will go blind and grow hair on their palms if they engage in “self abuse.” But maybe she left that old chestnut out, because I think it’s well-understood that if this were true, there would be about 150 million blind American men with very furry handshakes.)
That story reminded me once again that, just as foreseen in Orwell’s 1984, sex really is political. It sure as hell shouldn’t be, but it is. And just like seemingly everything else these days, the responsible teaching of sexual education to young people who are, statistically speaking, probably going to need it before they leave high school is being held hostage by conservatives who, it seems, want to repeal the entire 20th century. They demand that we teach youngsters nothing about sex except that it is bad, bad, bad; that preventive measures don’t prevent pregnancy or disease (despite mountains of statistical evidence to the contrary); and they should never, ever do it until they marry.
The utter lack of reality here should be obvious to anyone who has attended high school. In short, whether we adults like it or not, teenagers have a funny way of deciding for themselves about getting it on. On average, most Americans first have intercourse sometime between the ages of 16 and 18—which, for most people, means their junior or senior year in high school. Our choice, as adults, is either to arm them with as much information as possible to keep them from getting an unwanted disease or pregnancy—or bury our heads in the sand and pretend that if we just don’t talk about it, why, surely, they just won’t do it. (Because, yeah, that works. Ask any pregnant teenager.)
Whoever invited the nun to discuss sex with high-school students had to know what they were getting. She’s a Catholic nun—it’s a pretty good bet she’s not going to endorse contraception, and may even lie about it, as happened in the aforementioned case. In short, whoever made that call made a decision in line with the conservative political agenda, which, in a word, boils down to this: NO.
But “NO” doesn’t help when teenagers have been saying “YES, YES, YES!” from the dawn of time. Sex between unmarried teenagers didn’t just start with the sexual revolution and the onset of widely accessible contraception or abortion services. How many girls in the 1950s went to “live with their aunt and uncle in the country” for a year?
This blog post has been coming on for some time. I first considered writing on this topic a few months ago, when I went to a nearby drug store to procure condoms, and I had to search the entire store before finally stumbling on them, tucked away, unmarked, I suppose so they would give nobody any unnecessary offense. And it struck me that we, as a society, are so uneasy about discussing sex and contraception that some drug stores won’t even put up decent signage directing people to the euphemistically styled “family planning” section. It’s ridiculous and, frankly, childish. What’s next—an over-the-counter gel treatment for cooties?
If we want our society’s young people to behave with sexual responsibility, it might help if American adults can stop acting like embarrassed, nervously giggling children when it comes to sex. We need to put a stop to a harmful, politically driven abstinence agenda that’s about as realistic as Santa Claus mating with the Easter Bunny. And most of all, we need to get over this silly discomfort over having mature discussions about the proper, responsible usage of vaginas and penises.
I’m sorry—I meant “p-p-private par- par- parts.”
by Cliston Brown | Feb 11, 2013 | Political Commentary
So, there are going to be two responses to President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday. One, the official Republican Party response, will be delivered by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), also known (at least to this blogger) as the only Republican with a strong chance to win the presidency in 2016.
The second response could foreshadow the reason why Rubio might not be the next president. That response, on behalf of the supposedly defanged and doomed-to-irrelevancy Tea Party, will be given by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).
Let’s put aside, for a moment, this question: How is it that the opposition gets to make two televised responses to the president’s remarks on the State of the Union? And instead, let us consider what these dueling rebuttals say about the state of the opposition.
In short, there is such a cleavage, at this point, between establishment Republicans and the conservapopulists, that they can’t even get together on a single response to a president that they all despise. This does not bode well for their prospects for unity in upcoming elections.
One of the things that worked against the Republicans in 2012 was the fact that the Kamikaze wing of the party—disaffected Tea Partiers and other assorted fringe kooks— couldn’t get behind Mitt Romney until his nomination became inevitable. One after another, the assembled collection of third-rate goofballs (such as Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum) rose to challenge him and finally succumbed to his monetary and institutional advantages. But the months-long spectacle severely damaged the party’s brand among moderate voters and ultimately, it could be argued, helped sink Romney’s chances by forcing him to pander to the wingnuts, thereby losing him the middle—and the election.
The establishment is now trying to fight back, but having set this mess in motion, the Republican leadership is now finding out how difficult it is to put the goofpaste back into the tube. That’s why the Republicans will have dueling rebuttals tomorrow night.
The bottom line is this: the fact that Sen. Paul is giving a Tea Party speech is a clear signal that the conservapopulists are not going to go gently into the good night which Karl Rove and his colleagues have all planned out for them. You see, Rove and other intelligent Republicans have learned the lesson of the 2012 election—that the spectacle of a Republican Party full of nutballs like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock scared the crap out of centrist voters and drove them, grudgingly, into the arms of the Democrats.
But the Tea Party folks don’t share that view.
In Ayn Rand Paul World, Mitt Romney and the Republicans lost in 2012 because they weren’t conservative enough, and heroes such as Akin and Mourdock were viciously slandered and taken down by the evil liberal, “lamestream” media.
The reason the Tea Party types believe this ridiculous tripe—although most objective observers see it, rightly, as delusional—is because, for the most part, Tea Partiers only talk politics with other Tea Partiers. They reinforce to each other their collective delusion that a majority of Americans think the same way they do—and because they don’t talk very much with anyone who doesn’t think that way, they’re shocked when the electorate rejects their ideas, and they assume that the Democrats must have stolen the election.
The Republican Party has created quite the dilemma for itself. Having invited the kook wing into the party, in a grab for the low-hanging fruit of its votes, the Republican Party has alienated moderates and made itself dependent on the Tea Party. Having seen moderates alienated by the Tea Party, the Republicans can’t compete if the Tea Partiers stay on the sideline. But without the middle, which the Tea Party has alienated, the Republicans also cannot win.
The smarter move, better in the long term, is to kick the Tea Party out of the tent and try to get some moderates back into it. It’s a far better growth strategy, as Rove and other establishment Republicans clearly recognize. But the Tea Party isn’t going along with the plan. It not only likes being inside the tent—it believes it built the tent, with its one-time electoral triumph in 2010, and it is entitled not just to be inside the tent but to run it.
I believe it was Lyndon Johnson who said that it was better to have a troublesome faction inside the tent, pissing out, than to have it outside the tent, pissing in. The trouble for the Republicans is that the Tea Party, wild and undisciplined, is inside the tent and pissing everywhere—outward onto moderate voters, and inward all over establishment Republicans who would actually like to win another election in their lifetimes. The GOP has created a monster that it can no longer control, and it is now in the unenviable position where it loses if the Tea Party stays or leaves.
And if the Republican Party can’t get control of this situation, tomorrow night’s Rubio-Paul split could be an ominous preview of things to come—perhaps a divisive GOP presidential primary in 2016, or maybe even a shattering of the party that could see both men in the general election, splitting conservative votes, and both getting squashed by the Democratic nominee, a la 1912. Get your popcorn ready.
by Cliston Brown | Dec 31, 2012 | Political Commentary
As we appear to be headed over the so-called “fiscal cliff” tomorrow, barring a last-minute deal, I’ve got to say that I think it’s a lot of ado over very little. What the “fiscal cliff” entails, if we go over it, is largely a return to the Clinton-era tax rates for everyone, which will be inconvenient but not debilitating. I’m not looking forward to paying more in taxes, but I’m happy to cough it up if it will help balance the budget and pay our nation’s bills.
Going over the so-called cliff also results in steep cuts to defense spending, and frankly, we are long overdue to become more efficient in our military spending. We’ve been making billionaires of defense contractors for far too long, buying high-priced hardware that the military itself doesn’t want and isn’t asking for. We already have more and newer military hardware than just about the rest of the world put together; unless we’re expecting to every other country in the world to get together and invade our shores, we’re spending way too much on defense.
I recognize there are other concerns, and my biggest concern is the significant scaling back of federal unemployment benefits. I would hope we could address that separately, along with targeted tax cuts for people who actually need to buy food and clothes rather than another yacht.
But has it crossed anybody’s mind that the reason this thing has turned into such a big deal is because we have overhyped it so much? I keep hearing about how it’s going to tank the economy, but I’m not convinced of that. We had these tax rates in place in the 1990s, and the economy boomed, and that was largely because we were finally behaving responsibly — we were taking in more in revenue than we were spending, which convinced investors to invest in America and its economy.
At this point, the thing I’m most worried about is that President Obama and the Democrats will agree to a bad deal rather than waiting a few more days and cutting a better deal from a position of strength. I agree entirely with the comments of Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who was quoted by the Associated Press this morning as saying the following:
“No deal is better than a bad deal. And this looks like a very bad deal the way this is shaping up,” said Harkin.
He suggested instead letting tax rates revert to the higher levels that existed when the economy was strong under President Bill Clinton, adding, “I ask, what’s so bad about that?”
I’m with Senator Harkin on this one.
by Cliston Brown | Dec 15, 2012 | Political Commentary
I wrote a post on the gun issue (“Our Deadly Love Affair With Guns“) less than two weeks ago, after a professional football player killed his girlfriend and himself in Kansas City. I’m not going to repeat the same arguments now; if you want to see what I think about America’s problem with guns, that post sums it up very well.
But in the wake of yesterday’s horrific, senseless massacre of 20 children between the ages of 5 and 10, as well as seven adults, today I just want to deal with some of the absolutely idiotic excuses, analogies and talking points I have encountered in the last 24 hours on this issue.
I was talking with a friend around lunchtime yesterday, and we started throwing out some of the ridiculous things we expected to hear from the gun apologists. The first one we came up with was this: “Well, if the teachers/the principal/the janitors would have had guns, this never would have happened (or fewer kids would have been killed).” Naturally, I’ve seen that argument quite a bit since yesterday. It was completely predictable, because that’s what the gun apologists always say after the occurrence one of these increasingly frequent gun massacres in a public place. OK, sure, it’s possible that an armed teacher might have killed the killer before he got off more than a few rounds. It’s also possible that said teacher, possibly scared to death and perhaps not a gun enthusiast, would have done more harm than good, and that a bunch of kids may have been caught in the crossfire. A grade school should not be the Wild West; the answer to gun violence is not more guns. The answer is to ensure that there are fewer guns and that they are not easily accessible to lunatics.
So, from Trite Talking Point #1, let’s move on to our first Really Bad Analogy (which also doubles as Trite Talking Point #2). In a Facebook discussion, some fellow chimed in on a friend’s thread by saying that people die in car accidents, so you can’t single out guns, because people using cars sometimes get killed too. Well, no. The purpose of a car is to transport one or more individuals from place to place. If somebody dies in a car, it is almost always accidental. Very few people ever take it into their heads to use a car as a weapon. Guns, on the other hand, are designed to cause physical harm; that is the purpose of a gun. A person who procures a gun does not do so for any other purpose but to shoot it. And guns, being a bit smaller than a car, and able (unlike vehicles) to hurl bullets at a distance, are more easily hidden, can get into more places, and are easier to kill people with. Even if some nutjob decides to start killing the USA in his Chevrolet, he can’t take a car into a school, a church, a supermarket or an office building. It won’t fit through the door. To kill, intentionally, with a car, almost never happens and isn’t nearly as easy as killing intentionally with a gun.
And by the way, there is one other area where this ridiculous analogy does not hold: car usage is heavily regulated. There are laws governing how a car is used, and people who violate those laws risk losing their driving privileges. Unsafe or unwise usage of a gun does not necessarily result in a person facing any legal sanction at all, unless somebody ends up injured or dead. You want to drink and drive? If you are caught, you’ll be arrested and possibly lose your license—just for being drunk behind the wheel. When was the last time somebody got arrested for handling a gun while drunk (without, of course, killing or wounding somebody first)?
Let’s go now to Trite Talking Point #3, which is also our first Stupid Excuse: more gun regulation won’t make any difference; killers will just use other weapons. This excuse for inaction is ridiculous, and I’ll demonstrate why.
Let’s say the psycho who shot up all those kids in Connecticut yesterday had entered the school with a knife instead of a gun. What are the differences between the two weapons? Well, first of all, if you have a gun, you can kill from a distance. If the killer stands in the door of a classroom, he can start plugging people from there, and nobody will be able to get past him without getting shot. But if he goes in with a knife, he first has to get close enough to a victim to actually use the knife; it also takes more time than shooting (which is very fast) and makes the assailant more vulnerable to being tackled or otherwise impeded by the other adult in the room. Additionally, and this is very important: with a knife, an attacker can only attack one victim at a time. He may get one victim, maybe even several, but the others are going to run, and since the knife-wielder has no gun, and can’t kill at a distance, he can’t possibly stop all of them.
I keep hearing, from the gun apologists, about the 22 kids in China who got stabbed a few days ago. But you know what? Those 22 kids all lived. Every one of them is alive. Their parents will get to see them grow up. There’s a reason why the fictional Sgt. Jimmy Malone, in his famous speech in The Untouchables, says “They pull a knife; you pull a gun … ” That’s because it’s easier and more efficient to kill with a gun than it is to kill with a knife. For any individuals to whom this isn’t obvious, all I can say is any such people are lucky that breathing is an involuntary exercise. If they had to think about it, they’d suffocate.
OK, let’s plow forward and deal with Bad Analogy #2. One argument that gun-control advocates make is that other comparable countries have far fewer gun deaths than the United States, which in a typical year has about 10,000 deaths related to guns. Sometimes it’s around 9,000, other years closer to 11,000 or 12,000, but it’s usually right around that 10,000 mark. Other western democracies, such as Britain or Canada, usually have anywhere from 50 to a couple hundred gun deaths in a given year.
Of course, yesterday, a gun apologist on Facebook countered that argument with this: most of these countries are smaller than Texas, so the comparison is invalid. Well, no, that’s actually a really bad analogy, because the point isn’t that a country like Britain, with one-fifth of the U.S population (but many more people than Texas, by the way) has fewer gun deaths; that is to be expected. The point is that if you compare apples to apples and look at it on a per-capita basis (number of gun deaths per 100,000 people), the U.S. total is off the charts. Britain, with 60 million people, has about 50 gun deaths in a given year. The United States, with slightly more than 300 million people, has about 10,000. All things being equal, either Britain should have 2,000 gun deaths a year, or the United States should have about 250. On an apples-to-apples basis, we have about 40 times more gun deaths per capita than Britain every year. Do we have 40 times as many evil or crazy people, per capita, than the United Kingdom has? No. But we do have 280 million guns.
Well, that’s a pretty good sampling, but I’m going to close here with Stupid Excuse #2: we can’t do anything about guns because the Second Amendment guarantees everyone’s right to a gun.
Well, let’s start with the text of that amendment:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
You’ll notice, if you read that 27-word sentence carefully, that its mandate (” … the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”) is conditional; the right to keep and bear arms is predicated on, and justified by, the security needs of the state. In the 18th century, when the founders adopted this amendment, there was no large, standing army; average citizens could be called upon at any time to defend their country or community. I could make a very strong case here that the current strength and structure of the United States armed forces obviates the need for every American to be armed and ready to fight off an invasion or insurrection.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has chosen to interpret this amendment much more loosely than I do, and my point, although I consider it to be correct, is also moot. So let’s move on to another argument that might hold up a little better:
Every Constitutional right has limits.
For example, let’s look at an amendment to the bill of rights that most Americans hold absolutely sacred: the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Does anyone care to argue that this amendment, and the rights contained within, are not limited? Then I’d like to ask you to do a series of experiments:
1) First, strip naked at the corner of Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago while chanting verses from your religious text of choice.
2) Then, put your clothes back on (please) and catch a cab to the nearest theater. Buy a ticket, walk in, and halfway through whatever Harold and Kumar are doing at White Castle, start screaming that the theater is on fire.
3) Next, assuming you have not yet been arrested, go home and start blogging about how you’ve got a great plan to shoot the president, and while you’re at it, go ahead and post that the local school board leader likes to have sex with 12-year-olds.
4) After you’ve finished with these contributions to the world of journalism, go out into the middle of the street with a picket sign and block traffic.
Oh, wait—you mean you can’t legally do any of these things? But the First Amendment is clear, isn’t it? Congress cannot make any law that prevents free exercise of religion, speech, press or assembly, right?
Yes it can, as the Supreme Court has previously ruled—if, and only if, the free exercise of those rights creates a clear and present danger to others. If you shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, and people get hurt, you have broken the law and can be prosecuted, as you can if you threaten the life of the president, libel somebody, or obstruct vehicular traffic, for example. Can anyone seriously argue that the potential misuse of a gun does not also create a clear and present danger to others? If we can limit the First Amendment, generally considered the most sacred of them all, on grounds of basic common sense and public safety, why are we prevented from using common sense and public safety to limit the Second?
I go back to what I wrote on December 3rd: America has a gun problem. What are we going to do about it? Will the horrifying school shooting in Connecticut and the tragic deaths of so many young children wake us up? If it doesn’t, what exactly will it take? Do we have to come to the point where some nutcase takes a gun into a maternity ward and starts killing newborns? Or are we going to strike a blow for common sense and public safety now?
by Cliston Brown | Dec 13, 2012 | Political Commentary
United Nations ambassador Susan Rice took one for the team today, formally withdrawing from consideration to be Secretary of State after weeks of unending attacks by a swarm of Republican Senators led by John McCain (R-Arizona), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire).
The criticism of Ambassador Rice, based on what I can see, was completely unwarranted and unjustified. The statement she made after the Benghazi tragedy was based on what the intelligence services gave her to work with. Perhaps she can take some small comfort in knowing that this really had nothing to do with her. This was strictly about politics. Unable to turn the tragedy in Libya into electoral defeat for President Barack Obama last month, the Republicans went after Rice in part so they wouldn’t come away completely empty-handed; they wanted a scalp, and they got one.
But this is also about ensuring that Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) becomes the next Secretary of State, so that his Senate seat can be opened up for a special election, possibly helping Sen. Scott Brown (R) return after his decisive loss to incoming Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D).
As much as I respect and admire Sen. Kerry, a great public servant and true American hero, I almost hope the president picks someone else, just to demonstrate that these kinds of antics by McCain and his fellow travelers will not produce the results they want. It would be terribly unfair to Kerry, whose qualifications for the job are unquestionable, but then, what’s happened here has been terribly unfair to Susan Rice, too.
Wouldn’t McCain, Graham, Ayotte and every Republican in Washington be taken completely by surprise if President Obama nominated outgoing Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) as the next Secretary of State? It is hard to imagine Lugar wouldn’t be unanimously approved, and nobody in America is better qualified for the job. He also has a history of working together with President Obama, who spent a great deal of time as a Senator accompanying Lugar on overseas trips to help lock down loose nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.
We’d get a terrific Secretary of State who would inevitably be confirmed with the support of both Republicans and Democrats; there would be no chance that the Republican tactics would be rewarded with the return Scott Brown to the Senate; and Obama would send a message to the Republicans that he cannot be played.
Well, it’s just a thought.
Recent Comments