2008 Presidential race

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Copyright by John T. Reed

The media is currently (1/8/08) consumed with the presidential race. Here are some of my thoughts on it.

Not that big of a deal
Political office challengers always say we are in a crisis. That’s usually a lie. If we were really in a crisis, like a war that posed a real threat to us (e.g., World War II), no politician would need to tell us that. If a crisis has to be pointed out by a politician, it’s not really a crisis.

Although there are some current crises like Social Security funding that are real but ignored by the public. However, crises that are ignored by the public are also ignored by politicians. To his credit, President George W. Bush tried to do something about Social Security after the 2004 election and both the public and his fellow office holders said, “We’re not interested.” As with Iraq, Bush took on Social Security because he thought it was the right thing to do. The Clintons would not have done either without focus groups and polling telling them it would be good for them.

A Bush-Derangement Syndrome victim told me Congress did not pass Bush’s Social Security reform because it was all wrong. I do not recall the details or that anyone really cared what they were. But there is no question that Social Security was a stitch-in-time-saves-nine situation and that the longer we wait to fix it, the harder it will be. Bush was unable to get the votes needed not because his ideas on how to do so were not as good as the alternatives proposed by Democrats. The Democrat position, as judged by their actions, is to do nothing. He failed to get the votes from Republicans or Democrats because no one else in Washington had the political courage to address the issue at all.

Lest anyone think I am a Bush fan, I never voted for him or his Democratic opponents. I am appalled that he would behave like a wise-guy, Texas frat boy as president, including ever-present cowboy boots, acccent, and smirk. I call him the second Draft Dodger in Chief (after Clinton) for his national guard “service” during Vietnam. (I am a Vietnam vet.) Bush, Bill Clinton, and I are all college class of 1968 (Yale, Georgetown, and West Point respectively) and both Bush and I are Harvard MBAs. He is class of ’75. I am Class of ’77. My wife is Class of ’78. I thought it would be good to have a Harvard MBA in that office when he was elected. The other night at the 100th birthday celebration for Harvard Business School I commented to a professor that Bush had never shown the slightest indication that he went there.

Political candidates also claim they will make dramatic changes for the better to your life if they are elected. That is also a lie unless you work for the Administration or, perhaps, in the military.

The media goes along with both the crisis lie and the dramatic changes lie because they want ratings and attention.

In other words, the presidential race is always hyped to high heaven and it starts earlier every election cycle.

If you are in the military, the new president may either get you killed in some military action he orders or save you by stopping a military action that a prior president ordered. I almost died twice in Vietnam. President Nixon sent me there. Hubert Humphrey, the Democrat Nixon defeated, probably would not have sent me there.

How presidents affected my life
Here is how the various presidents have affected me (I was born in 1946—same as Clinton and George W. Bush). How they affected me is not important to anyone but me, however, I do it to get you to do the same thing with regard to how past presidents have affected you.

As you can see, the main effect on me stemmed from my going to West Point in 1964 and having to be an Army officer until 1972 as a result. Also, I owned apartments from 1969 to 1992 and it happened that Reagan signed a couple of laws that had a devastating effect on rental property owners.

Democrats better for real estate in spite of rhetoric
That brings up another point. I wrote an article for my newsletter, Real Estate Investor’s Monthly, about how the various presidents have affected real estate investors. Their rhetoric notwithstanding, the presidents that were good for real estate investors were generally Democrats. Kennedy lowered tax rates. Carter presided over a run-up in property values. Clinton signed a couple of very beneficial tax laws. The worst president in memory for real estate investors was clearly Reagan because of those two laws he signed. So dumb is the public that many real estate investors would swear that Reagan was the best.

Just as many Baby Boomers still swear that Kennedy was God. Kennedy, like Obama, was very young and good at making inspiring speeches, but the salient features of his presidency were the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was a stupid disaster, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he won, but probably also invited by making a weak impression on Soviet Premier Khrushchev in a prior summit meeting. Kennedy also started the Peace Corps which is nice but changed little.

In other words, Kennedy talked a far better game than he played, but because he got assassinated and because he talked so well, he was canonized by the Baby Boomers. I expect a president Obama would be about the same. Because of his youth and inexperience, he would probably inadvertently invite some sort of aggression against our interests and then react God knows how to it.

Reagan told the religious right what they wanted to hear but he never pushed their agenda when it came to action.

In other words, people pay too much attention to what politicians say and too little to what they actually do.

Impressions of the current candidates
Barack Hussein Obama (Americans are fond of using president’s middle names. I used them above to remind you that we know almost all the president’s middle names. Obama has an unfortunate middle name for the 21st Century.) When he was running for U.S. Senate in 2006, he was asked if he would run for president. He laughed out loud and said something to the effect that he had not done anything yet. He was right and it’s still the case. But if you listen to his campaign speeches, the guy who, by his own admission, hasn’t done anything, is now promising to do everything.

Not only is he too young, he has done less than most accomplished people his age with his life vis a vis preparing to be President of the United States. Wikipedia says he was a community organizer, university lecturer, and civil rights lawyer, period. That’s it. No military service. No private enterprise. No federal government experience. No experience managing subordinates. He is Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, only with a couple of Ivy League degrees.

The community he organized was the black community and the civil rights he was lawyering were those of blacks. His résumé bears more resemblance to those of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton than to any president. He seems to have prepared to be president of the NAACP, not President of the U.S. And I doubt he would even win that if the competition were by résumé only. See my article about his trying to pass as black in spite of his ancestry and background.

He has never had any success at anything in his life other than graduating from a couple of Ivy League Universities and getting elected to the state and U.S. Senates. He has also never failed at anything in his life primarily because he has never tried to do anything, other than running for election, where failure was possible. (He lost a race for Congressman.) Failure is as educational, if not more so, as success. Furthermore, he reportedly did not have a snowball’s chance in Havana of winning his current U.S. Senate seat until someone revealed that the Republican candidate Jack Ryan had pressured his TV star ex-wife Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager) to have sex with him in public at a club that encouraged such things.

Obama says he is the candidate of change. In fact, he has never changed anything in his 47 years. The only thing he is guaranteed to change if elected President is the age and complexion of the office holder. Neither is substantive. He is unlikely to be able to change much else because it’s president, not king. He needs Congressional allies to actually get any laws passed. I am not aware that he has any. He is one of the most junior senators in the Congress with only two years experience plus he’s been out on the campaign trail most of the time since he was elected, not working at the Senate. John F. Kennedy was far more experienced when he took office and he was unable to get much accomplished other than a tax cut and his Peace Corps.

His cocaine use and lame excuses for it ought to disqualify him on the grounds that there are plenty of candidates who do not have such an appalling judgment lapse on their resume.

A recent editorial cartoon depicted an older man putting down Obama as a tall, skinny, Illinois guy who only had two years of national office experience. A young woman notes that also described Abe Lincoln.

A couple of points in response to that. Lincoln worked as a flat boat crewman on the Mississippi River and served in the military where his troops elected him their captain. He ran a store briefly. He was a successful mainstream civil and criminal lawyer with over 5,000 cases who appeared before the Illinois Supreme Court hundreds of times and thereby set important, often-cited legal precedents; four-term Illinois legislator; and elected leader of his party in that state. He famously engaged in a series of substantive, legendary, should-America-allow-slavery debates with Stephen Douglas—as opposed to bickering over whether Hillary Clinton was on the board of Wal-Mart. Lincoln’s political career seemed to end when he took a principled stand against the popular-in-his-district Mexican-American war. Lincoln was one of the founders of the national Republican Party.

Lincoln was 51 when he ran for president. Obama’s election-day age will be 47. Lincoln accomplished a hell of a lot more and what he accomplished was a hell of a lot more substantive, in spite of an impoverished childhood and a lack of any formal education, than Obama, who grew up privileged and who has degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Lincoln made a substantial difference to his community, state, and party starting in his early twenties. Obama is 100% a creature of public relations and personality.

Hillary Rodham Clinton She says she represents experience. That’s a two-way street. We Americans have already experienced Bill and Hillary for too many years. Her husband seemed to be interested in the office only because its a great way to meet chicks and for the ego trip. Hillary seems only interested in the ego trip. She and her husband are in favor of nothing but their own ambitions. Both of them will do or say anything to get and keep power. Clinton signed a welfare reform bill that Democrats hated. Hillary has changed her personality and even her name whenever her husband or she loses an election. She went from Yale to Arkansas and informed the voters there that her name was Hillary Rodham, even though she was married to their attorney general Bill Clinton. He lost reelection. She then announced her name was Hillary Clinton. After trailing Obama in the polls in Iowa, she was handing out stuff that described her as “Mrs. Clinton” and talking about something she never showed when her husband was humiliating her with one infidelity after another: feelings.

Since Obama’s surge (if he will pardon the expression), I have been astonished at the apparent willingness of both Bill and Hillary to simple walk the plank without a fight. Seems like the Bill and Hillary of old would have long since unleashed the politics of personal destruction that they hurled at all their prior opponents including special prosecutor Judge Ken Starr. Who are the people currently inhabiting Bill and Hillary and what have they done with the real do-anything-to-get-and-hold-power Clintons.

She was the First Lady, or as I called her at the time, the First Woman. Then she was revealed to also be the First Cuckold or whatever the word is for a female version of a cuckold. We have 300 million people in this country. Can’t we find a good woman without all this baggage to be our first female president. How about Gina Davis who played the first female president in the TV series Commander in Chief? Elizabeth Dole? Diane Feinstein? Cokie Roberts? Condoleeza Rice? Diane Sawyer? None of them let their husband humiliate them internationally with serial infidelity. None of them “made” a $100,000 “profit” on the first commodities trade of their life then never did another one. None of them ever lied about their net worth on a mortgage application like the Clintons did in Whitewater. None of them ever ran for Senate in a state where they had never lived and claimed to be a fan of a baseball team in a state where they had never lived.

Seems like our first female president ought to be, and could be, one of our best women, not just some “Stand by my political-meal-ticket man no matter what he does,” blindly-ambitious woman with high name recognition.

Many feel Clinton’s leftist leanings would result in leftist legislation. Actually, I think her leftist leanings are way down the list of her motives. She wants power. She will lean whichever direction she thinks will get votes. She voted for the War in Iraq because she feared not doing so might be unpopular with her New York constituents or future presidential voters. Want her to be tough? See her performance on 60 Minutes denying her husband had an affair with Gennifer Flowers (he did). Want her to be soft? See her performance in NH choking up and talking about her hurt feelings. Want to know where she learned that? See her husband’s performance laughing at the funeral of his cabinet member Ron Brown, until he spotted a TV camera, at which point he sobered up, put his head down, and pretended to wipe a tear from the eye on the other side of his nose from the camera.

After the chocke-up act won NH for her, Hillary said she had found her voice. She has since tried about 20 other voices. She reminds me of the saying that teenagers try on personalities like a person trying on clothes. She’s proud to be in tho same stage as Obama one day and angrily denouncing him the next. As Obama approaches the number of delagets needed to win the nomination, Hillary has become a serially flashing kaleidoscope chameleon—frantically trying one personality or canned line after another in an attempt to stop Obama.

The woman is not a leader. She is a policy wonk. If New Yorkers have no one better, she can do her thing in the Senate from now on. She can’t be vice president because she brings with her her famous negatives and her more famous eager-for-his-third-term-and-unable-to-stay-in-the-background husband. Hillary has the political instincts of Al Gore or Walter Mondale. That is, she is a wooden indian. When he speeches are played right before or after a tape of an Obama speech, she looks awful.

Bill Clinton was actually rather friendly toward business. He would not admit it, but actions speak louder than words. Apparently he recognized that re-election turned mainly on the economy and listened to and followed the advice of his Wall Street Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin. I expect Hillary would do the same, which would be good.

As far as being First Lady is concerned, Hillary has less impressive experience than Laura Bush. Hillary was First Woman back in the 20th Century—the 1990s. Remember them? The Era of the Dot.com boom. Military adventures in Somalia and Haiti. Saddam Hussein was president. Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts were known. That’s when Hillary got her “foreign policy experience” traveling around foreign countries as the wife of the President—schmoozing with the foreign First Lady while Bill met with the heads of state and foreign cabinet equivalents.

Laura Bush did the same, only in the 21st Century, after 9/11. Some would say Hillary was more involved in policy. Apparently she tried to be. She had the first, and last, “West Wing of the White House” office for a First Lady. All the others have been in the East Wing which is not policy oriented. She got Bill to put her in charge of health care reform, which she botched disastrously because of her tin ear for people and political ineptitude, treating the project like a college term paper instead of a massive change in the lives of most Americans. After that, she went back to traditional First Lady stuff, not policy. If she was involved in policy in any substantive way, she was out of line. She held no elective or appointive office.

Now that Obama has succeeded with a message of change, she says she has been effecting change for 35 years. Name some.

I believe she was part of getting education policy changed somewhat in Arkansas. (According to the National Education Association—the teachers union—Arkansas still ranked 49th among states in per capita expenditures per student.) What else? No doubt, she has cast some votes in the Senate—like authorizing the Iraq war. What other change is she responsible for? I am not aware of any. She couldn’t change her husband’s skirt-chasing ways when he was president. One would think that was the prime test of the influence of a First Lady.

She has never held an executive position of any kind. Now she seeks the greatest executive position in the world where we must assume she intends to learn how to manage subordinates other than a tiny staff, on the job, for the first time. Hillary’s main claimed qualification for President of the U.S.—First Lady experience—most closely resembles Evita (“Don’t cry for me Argentina”) Perón’s qualifications for succeeding her husband Juan Perón as President of Argentina or Alabama First Lady Lurleen Wallace’s qualifications for succeeding George Wallace as governor of that state in 1966.

She keeps saying that she is ready on day one to be commander in chief. By virtue of what? Being married to the Draft-dodger in Chief from 1992 to 2000? She first came to national attention in a Life magazine story in 1969 when she delivered an anti-war address at commencement exercises for Wellesley College. A military officer complained in 1993 when he was working in the new Clinton White House that a member of Hillary Clinton’s First Lady staff refused to speak to him on the grounds that she did not talk to military people! If you get a transcript of every word Hillary has ever written or spoken about military matters, I’ll bet the vast majority of it would be anti. She may arguably be ready to negotiate with Congress after a term and a half there as a senator. But commander in chief!? Talk about unfit for the position!

Mitt Romney He was the most experienced, successful manager and getter of things done of the bunch. He has no foreign policy experience, and that’s scary because as John Kennedy once said, domestic policy mistakes hurt your pocket book. Foreign policy mistakes can get you killed. But on the other hand, Romney has as much foreign policy experience as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had when they took office and would probably figure it out and consult good people to deal with that.

Like the Clintons, Romney seems willing to say or do almost anything to get elected. I doubt he would renounce his Mormon religion. The Clintons would, if necessary to get votes. But on all other positions, Romney seems willing to flip 180 degrees shamelessly. Unlike Reagan, he seems not to have any core values other than ambition.

Rudy Giuliani He is the second most experienced, successful getter of things done. I wish he had more business experience. His experience is almost all government. But then the President runs the government. He has probably the best claim to being a change agent with what he did to New York City. I am less impressed with his 9/11 conduct. Granted, he struck the perfect pitch note in his public statements at the time. But that is Obama-like. Just talking. True, talking is often an important part of the President’s job. But it’s not the only part. I see no reason to hold 9/11 against him. But neither was his performance then proof he would be a great president in the war-on-terror era. It just showed he was a good mayor for the clean-up and funeral phase of 9/11 in New York City.

His personal life is a mess. But nowhere near as bad as the Clintons. And it never seemed to affect his ability to get things done whether prosecuting John Gotti or turning around New York City.

John McCain Main claim to fame is that he was a prisoner of war. He, himself, said he did not think getting shot down made you a hero. I agree. His conduct in captivity, including refusing to sign a confession that would cause him to be sent home because the U.S. military Code of Conduct says POWs must be released according to seniority as POWs, was super. He has been a prominent and effective moderate senator. Like Giuliani, he cheated on his wife, the one who waited for him while he was a POW. Not super.

Seems to have some real principles other than in the marital fidelity realm, but he falls off the “straight talk express” moral wagon regularly. Was appropriately against corn-based ethanol (which makes no sense as energy policy) before this year, then claimed to be in favor of it because Iowa is a big corn state. Not super. See my longer article about him.

Mike Huckabee Former Baptist minister, candidate of the religious right. Actually, that’s redundant. There is no religious left. Got points for seeming less scripted than Romney. (Who isn’t other than Hillary?) Seems more like a real person than most politicians, but still seems like a politician. Has executive experience as governor of Arkansas like Bill Clinton. Former Pizza the Hut.

Another no-foreign-policy-experience guy. Actually, no one in the race has any foreign policy experience compared to a guy like the first President Bush who had fought in World War II, was head of the CIA, first U.S. “ambassador” to China in the Cold War, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and Vice-President of the U.S. for eight years before he ran for President.

Obviously, only running for McCain’s vice-president or in the hopes that McCain will say something fatal or just have a stroke or drop dead.

All others No serious contenders. Walter Mittys. Harold Stassens. Let me know when they have a real shot and I’ll think about them.

Here is an email I got about one of them and my answer:

“Hi John - just read your column on the candidates - was wondering what your thoughts on John Edwards were - especially since he seemed to outshine the other two democrats at the debate on Monday night.” From a guy whose email address ends in harvard.edu

Reed response: Amoral ambulance chaser who describes the current U.S. as if it were Dickensian England. He came off better in a debate because he was irrelevant and the others ignored him. If he had a chance, they would have slimed him and he probably would have slimed back which would have ended his outshining.

For most people most of the time, who the president is does not matter. The checks and balances of our Constitution prevent any one person from doing much. Don’t let the candidates or the media stampede you into forgetting that.

I appreciate informed, well-thought-out constructive criticism and suggestions.

John T. Reed