[NYTr] Rich: They Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Frank Rich in fulminating optimism, ignoring especially the bizarre
views of Huckabee, and seriously infected with the RFK aura Obama
projects so well. -NY Transfer]

sent by Ed Pearl


The New York Times - Jan 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06rich.html


They Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

By FRANK RICH

AFTER so many years of fear and loathing, we had almost forgotten what
it's like to feel good about our country. On Thursday night, that
long-dormant emotion came rushing back, like an old dream that pops out
of the deepest recesses of memory, suddenly as clear as light. "They
said this day would never come," said Barack Obama, and yet here, right
before us, was indisputable evidence that it had.

What felt good was not merely the improbable and historic political
triumph of an African-American candidate carrying a state with a black
population of under 3 percent. It was the palpable sense that our
history was turning a page whether or not Mr. Obama or his doppelgänger
in improbability, Mike Huckabee, end up in the White House. We could
allow ourselves a big what-if: What if we could have an election that
was not a referendum on either the Clinton or Bush presidencies? For
the first time, we found ourselves on that long-awaited bridge to the
21st century, the one that was blown up in the ninth month of the new
millennium's maiden year.

The former community organizer from Chicago and the former Baptist
preacher from Arkansas have little in common in terms of political
views. But as I wrote here a month ago, the author of "The Audacity of
Hope" and the new man from Hope, Ark., are flip sides of the same coin.
The slogan "change" - a brand now so broad and debased that both
Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney appropriated it for their own campaigns
- does not do justice to the fresh starts that Mr. Obama and Mr.
Huckabee represent.

The two men are the youngest candidates in the entire field, the least
angry and the least inclined to seek votes by saturation-bombing us
with the post-9/11 arsenal of fear. They both radiate the kind of wit
and joy (and, yes, hope) that can come only with self-confidence and a
comfort in their own skins. They don't run from Americans who are not
in their club. Mr. Obama had no problem winning over a conclave of
white Christian conservatives at Rick Warren's megachurch in Orange
County, Calif., even though he insisted on the necessity of condoms in
fighting AIDS. Unlike the top-tier candidates in the G.O.P.
presidential race, or the "compassionate conservative" president who
refused for years to meet with the N.A.A.C.P., Mr. Huckabee showed up
last fall for the PBS debate at the historically black Morgan State
University and aced it.

The "they" who did not see the cultural power of these men, of course,
includes not just the insular establishments of both their parties but
the equally cloistered echo chamber of our political journalism's
status quo. It would take a whole column to list all the much-repeated
Beltway story lines that collapsed on Thursday night.

But some are worth recounting because they prove nearly as instructive
as they are laughable. The Benazir Bhutto assassination was judged as a
boon for Mrs. Clinton because it would knock the silly voters to their
senses by reminding them it was no time to roll the dice with
foreign-policy novices. Oprah Winfrey's Obama rallies were largely
viewed as a routine celebrity endorsement, while Mr. Romney's address
on "Faith in America" was judged as momentous as "Mission
Accomplished." Only a week ago, Mr. Huckabee was literally laughed at
by reporters for his "Howard Dean meltdown" at a press conference where
he contradictorily exhibited and then disowned an attack ad on Mr.
Romney.

The final Des Moines Register poll - Mr. Huckabee up by six points and
Mr. Obama by seven - was greeted with near-universal skepticism. John
Edwards and John McCain, we were reliably informed by those "on the
ground," were surging in Iowa. Mr. Huckabee might have fatally insulted
voters by ditching Iowa on the eve of the caucus to appear with Jay
Leno. All those collegiate Obama enthusiasts, like the Dean brigades of
the last Iowa political insurgency, were just too flighty to actually
bother to caucus.

What was mostly forgotten in these errant narratives were the two
largest elephants in the room: Iraq and George W. Bush. The
conventional wisdom had it that both a tamped-down war and a lame-duck
president were exiting so quickly from center stage that they were
receding from the minds of voters. In truth, they were only receding
from the minds of those covering those voters.

The continued political import of Iraq could be found in three different
polls in the past six weeks - Pew, ABC News-Washington Post and Wall
Street Journal-NBC News. They all showed the same phenomenon: the
percentage of Americans who believe that the war is going well has
risen strikingly in tandem with the diminution of violence - from 30
percent in February to 48 percent in November, for instance, in the Pew
survey. Even so, these same polls show no change at all in the public's
verdict on this misadventure or in President Bush's dismal overall
approval rating. By the same margins as before (sometimes even slightly
larger), a majority of Americans favor withdrawal no matter what
happened during the "surge." In another poll (Gallup), a majority still
call the war a mistake, a finding that has varied little since February
2006.

It's safe to assume that these same voters did not forget that Mrs.
Clinton and Mr. Edwards enabled the Iraq fiasco. Or that Mr. Obama
publicly opposed it. When Mrs. Clinton attacked Mr. Obama for his
supposedly "irresponsible and frankly naïve" foreign policy ideas -
seeking talks with enemies like Iran - she didn't diminish him so much
as remind voters of her own irresponsibility and naïveté about Mr.
Bush's Iraq scam in 2002.

In the Republican field, no candidate has less association with Iraq
than Mr. Huckabee, a politically lucky and unintended consequence of his
spectacular ignorance about foreign policy in general. When he finally
did speak up in a newly published essay in Foreign Affairs, he
condemned the Bush administration for its "arrogant bunker mentality"
in its execution of the war. Mr. Romney, sensing an opening among the
party faithful, loudly demanded that Mr. Huckabee "apologize to the
president" for this insult. But Mr. Huckabee had the political savvy
not to retreat, and in Iowa's final hours even Mr. Romney desperately
reversed himself to slam Mr. Bush's mismanagement of Iraq.

Among the Republican candidates, Mr. Huckabee is also as culturally
un-Bush as you can get. He constantly reminds voters that he did not go
to an Ivy League school and that his plain values derived from a bona
fide blue-collar upbringing, as opposed to, say, clearing brush on a
vacation "ranch" bought with oil money attained with family
connections. "People are looking for a presidential candidate who
reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that
laid them off," he told Mr. Leno, in a nifty reminder of Mr. Romney's
corporate history as a Bush-style, Harvard-minted M.B.A.

It's such populist Huckabee sentiments that are already driving the
Republican empire to strike back. The party that has milked religious
conservatives for votes for two decades is traumatized by the prospect
that one of that ilk might actually become its standard-bearer.
Especially if the candidate in question is a preacher who bashes Wall
Street and hedge-fund managers and threatens to take a Christian
attitude toward those too poor to benefit from the Bush tax cuts.

No wonder the long list of party mandarins eager to take down Mr.
Huckabee includes Rush Limbaugh, Robert Novak, the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and National Review. Dan Bartlett, the former close Bush
adviser, has snickered at Mr. Huckabee's presumably low-rent last name.
Fred Barnes was reduced to incoherent babbling when a noticeably gloomy
Fox News announced Mr. Huckabee's victory Thursday night.

But if, as the new narrative has it, Mr. McCain will ride to the party's
rescue, the Republicans' relief may be short-lived. He is their most
experienced and principled horse, but he's also the oldest and the most
encumbered by Bush and Iraq baggage. The NBC News analyst Chuck Todd
may be on to something when he half-jokingly suggested last week that
there was a 5 percent chance that the G.O.P. may have to find a nominee
not yet in the race.

Mr. Obama is in a far better position in his more-or-less ideologically
united party than Mr. Huckabee is among Republicans, but, of course, he
could lose for a myriad of reasons. Mr. Obama could make some
world-class mistakes; the Clinton machine could land some attacks more
devastating than its withering critique of his kindergarten paper.

But if Clinton operatives know how to go negative, they don't have the
positive balance of a 21st-century message. Iowa confirmed that the
message the campaign has used to date - experience - is D.O.A. in
post-Bush America. It was fascinating to watch that realization sink in
on Thursday night. In her concession speech, Mrs. Clinton had her
husband, the most tangible totem of her experience, standing right
beside her, yet she didn't mention him or so much as acknowledge him.

Even before that tableau was swept away by the sight of the Obama
family all but dancing across the stage in celebration, it looked like
the passing of an era.