It hardly seems likely, but the veep's not ruling himself out... yet.
And, you know, it's never too early to start thinking about future presidential elections. Well, sure, it can be, but what's interesting is how many top-name Republicans seem to be staying out of the race for 2012 while keeping their options open for 2016.
Think about it. Obama looks pretty formidable. Were he to win, 2016 would be an open race in both parties. There's no natural successor to Obama other than Hillary or Biden, though either one, and especially Hillary, would be a strong contender in a field that could include the likes of Kaine, Warner, and Cuomo.
But whoever's in the Democratic field, Republicans will likely have a much better shot of winning than against Obama. And so while the 2012 Republican field is pathetically weak, the 2016 field could include the likes of Ryan, Rubio, Jeb Bush, Jindal, and any number of other up-and-coming or established stars.
Sure, some of the explanation for this year's weak Republican field is generational. After McCain, there was no natural successor in the GOP, excapt maybe Jeb, and some of the young stars, like Rubio and Ryan, just aren't ready for a presidential run. But I really do think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Obama -- who, let us not forget, looked vulnerable not so long ago -- has weathered the Republican storm and emerged as a potent political force with solid approval ratings and a campaign all set to recover the successes of 2008.
For some, like Romney and Pawlenty, this may be the only shot ever to win the nomination. For many others, though, running would mean a grinding primary campaign and, for the winner, a likely loss next November. It makes much more sense, it would seem, to wait for 2016, when the Democratic opponent will be much more beatable (and when the GOP may be a bit more willing to accept a less extremist nominee, perhaps if the Tea Party loses some of its influence).
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
The Bay State's senior senator is running an unofficial campaign to become the next secretary of state. For once, he looks artful, as well as ambitious.
His recent opinion piece in the New York Times said what President Obama couldn't or wouldn't: Mubarak must go.
Kerry's conclusion was elegant, but unequivocal: "President Hosni Mubarak must accept that the stability of his country hinges on his willingness to step aside gracefully to make way for a new political structure."
Of course, one has a certain freedom as a senator that one does not have as secretary of state -- or even as president -- and so Kerry can be direct in a way that Obama and Clinton cannot. Still, his strong position on the situation in Egypt is admirable, and while picking Hillary to be secretary of state made sense for Obama after the tough primary battle they waged, a "team of rivals" to unite the Democratic Party, it makes sense to turn to Kerry next, whenever Hillary leaves her post, perhaps after the 2012 election should Obama win.
I have defended Obama's handling of the situation, from the American perspective, but I agree to a certain extent with Vennochi that his administration generally "looked unprepared and off-balance when Egyptians took to the streets of Cairo." I don't necessarily fault Obama for this, as the situation and its likely outcome was unclear and he needed to walk a fine line with Mubarak, if only not to alienate him (and endanger U.S. interests) in the event he remained in power, but I do wish Obama would respond with greater moral clarity for once instead of equivocating (and, in this case it would seem, dismissing the pro-democracy movement and supporting, even if just as a "transition," yet more tyranny).
I'm not sure Kerry would bring such moral clarity to Foggy Bottom, and, even if he did, he wouldn't really be in a position to articulate it as formal U.S. policy unless authorized to do so, but he would be a smart, refreshing addition to Obama's team.
I think President Obama has done an extremely good job so far handling the situation in Egypt, walking the fine line between supporting Mubarak, a close U.S. ally in the region, and embracing Mohamed ElBaradei and the admirable reform movement that has taken to the streets. Yes, of course, I know that the U.S. has supported an authoritarian regime, that the U.S. has helped prop up Mubarak over the years, that oppression has been central to the perpetuation of that regime, but the situation isn't black-and-white, the forces of liberty struggling against a tyrannical foe, and the U.S. needs to be careful, not least because the outcome of the uprising isn't yet known.
Now, I agree with ElBaradei that the U.S. needs to "let go of Mubarak," and certainly the U.S., and Obama in particular, can't be seen as pro-Mubarak in the event Mubarak's regime falls. Alternatively, the U.S. can't be seen as explicitly pro-reform if reform turns out to be Islamist rule, as in Iran after the 1979 revolution, or, generally, something unstable and in opposition to U.S. interests in the region, or if Mubarak ends up staying in power. That's just how it works. It's called being realistic. You need to keep your options open.
I'm hardly an expert on Egyptian politics, but it doesn't appear to me, from what I can tell, that the country is about to turn into another Iran or, generally, that post-Mubarak Egypt would be fundamentally anti-American. More likely, it would experience the growing pangs of youthful democracy as it transitions away from authoritarianism. Sure, the Muslim Brotherhood would be part of that, in some way, but, contrary to conservative propaganda, it would not necessarily dominate the political landscape and turn the country Islamist. Egypt has a long history of being a secular, modern Muslim state, and there are forces there, ElBaradei among them, who do not want it to move in that direction and who will do everything they can to build a sustainable democratic system.
While Obama is being necessarily cautious, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has articulated a significantly more ambitious pro-reform position, and it's one I think should be the main U.S. response to the current crisis:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday urged Egyptians to take up a national dialogue that would lead to free and fair elections this fall and, while not explicitly distancing the United States from the embattled President Hosni Mubarak, said that the United States stood "ready to help with the kind of transition that will lead to greater political and economic freedom."
She issued a strong endorsement of key groups working to exert their influence on the chaotic Egyptian protests – the military, civil society groups and, perhaps most importantly, the nation's people – but carefully avoided any specific commitment to Mr. Mubarak.
Her phrasing seemed to imply an eventual end to Mr. Mubarak's 30 years in power. But when asked whether the United States was backing away from Mr. Mubarak and whether he could survive the protests, the secretary chose her words carefully. His political future, she said, "is going to be up to the Egyptian people."
Making the rounds of the Sunday television talk shows, Mrs. Clinton urged the government in Cairo to respond in a "clear, unambiguous way" to the people's demands and to do so "immediately" by initiating a national dialogue. At the same time, she was supportive of the Egyptian military, calling it "a respected institution in Egyptian society, and we know they have delicate line to walk."
This is realism with a pro-democratic core. The U.S. has been closely involved with Mubarak, but it cannot now appear to be overly interventionist. And so Clinton is right that while reform is needed, and desirable, the Egyptian people themselves need to be the engine of meaningful change.
Mubarak may very well be done, and I hope he is, but the future is cloudy. The U.S. will have a role to play, and it can help in the transition to "real democracy," but for now it must advance its interests, and its support for reform, with care.
But it can also help not just by calling for a national dialogue but by signalling, as Clinton did, that it stands for something other than realpolitik, that it stands with the reform movement and the people of Egypt, and that it stands by its own principles and ideals.
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You can watch Clinton on ABC's This Weekhere. Here's part of the interview:
I need to digest some of what he said yesterday, but Arlen Specter left a flaming bag of poop on the Senate doorstep:
Partisanship, a quest for ideological purity, and the "abuse" of procedural rules have bled collegiality from the U.S. Senate and mired "the world's greatest deliberative body" in gridlock, Specter said.
This was not the usual flowery goodbye and trip down memory lane.
There's some merit to his point of view, and Specter lays out his case like the prosecutor he was, but is it correct? Is too partisan a bad thing?
Forget the chicken-egg argument. It really doesn't matter who started the partisanship ball rolling. We can track echoes of it back to the McCarthy hearings, to Watergate, to any number of incidents that brought us incrementally to where we are.
Is the legislative process compromised when, well, there is no compromise?
My first observation is that Harry Reid finally seems to have grown a set. So much legislation has been passed in the last few weeks, it's hard to keep track of it all, including the showcase piece, the repeal of DADT. Why he squandered this forcefulness over the past two years will go down in history as one of the greatest blunders a Senate majority leader could ever make.
(Side note: Imagine if Hillary Clinton had not accepted the secretary of state post, instead focusing on rallying the troops for the 2006 election and then lobbying for the Senate majority leadership job...)
In the next Senate, Reid will have to contend with a Republican House that will have a large element of combativeness in its arsenal. Reid squeaked out a win this year against a nutcase who put her foot in her mouth more times than a yogi with a toe fetish. Reid's Senate may not be so lucky next time around if Reid doesn't carefully extract the good from his dilemma while shirking the bad off onto someone else.
A formidable job even for a deft politician with muscle. For Reid, a real challenge.
The twin questions of ideological purity and abuse of procedural rules seem to go hand in hand, in my opinion, and I delineate them differently from simple party line distinctions. Voting along party lines is expected, which is why I'm not sure the last Congress, or even the Congresses under Bush, were "too partisan."
The difference, noticeable over the past twenty years, but in particular a problem during the Clinton administration, has been the severe punishments proferred to a maverick. It has gone from shunnings over minor quibbles, to outright hostility. I've never seen so many incumbents face primary challenges in which fellow Senators and other national party figures have actively campaigned to remove a fellow party incumbent.
This, in my view, is unhealthy, and guess what? For every Lisa Murkowski in the Republican ranks, we have a Joe Lieberman in the Democratic camp. It's not a right-wing problem only. There's a bubbling undercurrent in this pressure cooker that threatens to explode the entire process, causing entropy at best and chaos at worst, but of much more impact will be the quiet before the storm. The attempt to keep a lid on it.
It started in the 1990s, of course, when the GOP leadership suddenly decided to put a thumb on the scale of negotiation and compromise, forcing their Senators to toe a party line first, and only clear compromises second. It was aided and abetted by the right wing blast fax/talk radio Golem, which spewed venom left and right... ok, mostly left... and forced legislators to either deal with the voters (and others outside their districts) or deal with the leadership. The only way to keep things quiet was to memorize talking points, spew them on cue, and vote Republican only.
That wasn't enough, even though Republicans were generally pretty successful with this strategy. As the Congress did nothing through the first Bush administration, and people watched their savings and jobs drift away on this tide or that, Democrats started to put together two and two and actually come up with five when it came to winning an election or two.
The clamps in the GOP tightened. In response, clamps were applied in the Democratic Party as well. The Fifty State Strategy of Howard Dean's DNC tenure really had two effects: it welcomed moderates and even conservatives while at the same time tried to get them to come to some consensus on issues so that Democrats could present a unified front on issues that people wouldn't be too embarassed by in Wyoming or Utah.
This pissed off everyone, from conservative Blue Dog Dems to us liberals.
In Congress, procedural rules became a weapon, rather than a tool. The use of the filibuster is the most notable, and both sides have gone to that trough healthily. I include, however, reconciliation votes in this. It was used to shove Bush's tax cuts down our throats, and some aspects of healthcare reform also utilized this. Here, a bill is deemed passed already for purposes of making cosmetic budgetary amendments to it, which only require a 51 vote majority and no filibusters allowed.
I'm sure in caucus, worse abuses of procedures occured.
Specter comes off as a bit of a whiner in his speech, but he does point out the signal changes in protocol and custom over the past thirty years, mourning the loss.
But things change, Arlen. One can't expect the world to freeze just because you're in the Senate. And one might point out that there were plenty of moments when you could have shown great courage, opting instead to hew to the party line.
But among his "why mes?" he has made several very cogent and valid points. Go read his speech.
