The Meme That Will Never Die
With Webb on the ticket, it would be much tougher for McCain to convince Americans that Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are the product of inexperience and naiveté. ~Steve Kornacki
Why? Consider how this plays out. As it is, Obama stresses his superior judgement and ridicules the value of experience that leads to terrible policies such as the Iraq invasion, and then argues that there should be negotiations with various “rogue” governments, which McCain ridicules as naive and proof of inexperience. All that is necessary for this line of attack to work and persuade many voters to be wary of Obama is for the media to treat McCain’s criticism as somehow serious (which they always do), allow him to keep repeating it without any meaningful challenge (ditto) and treat the “experience gap” as something that Obama has to address (hence endless talking up of Jim Webb as VP). If you add Webb to the ticket, how does any of this change? Webb was prescient and right about Iraq, and in his way so was Obama, so then what is the real difference between Obama making a claim about ending the war in Iraq and Webb making that claim? Does Webb magically have more credibility because he served in Vietnam even though both made comparable arguments in their pre-war warnings against invading?
Arguably, if you put Webb on the ticket with his military service and Navy Secretary experience you re-emphasise Obama’s lack of those things, and furthermore, just as I have been saying all this week, you stress that these things that Obama doesn’t have are really important and, in fact, they are so important that Obama has to use Webb to deflect criticism against him along these lines. What you end up getting is not immunity from McCain’s attacks, but confirmation that McCain has a legitimate point that Obama is inexperienced and that this is a significant problem. But if it’s a significant problem, why won’t McCain’s attack work and why won’t it drive voters away from Obama? Because voters can rest assured that when the going gets tough, Jim Webb will be…second in command? How does that reassure voters about Obama‘s judgement and his decision-making? If he’s inexperienced, maybe he overrules Webb’s counsel and embarks on a misguided policy that Webb told him would be a bad idea; perhaps he will be reluctant to yield to Webb’s counsel if people begin suggesting that Webb is the one really running foreign policy, which could inspire him to push a bad policy to demonstrate that he is in charge. I can’t imagine why anyone who wants Obama to win would keep pushing VP selections that seem sure to trip him up down the line.
Isn’t the Obama-Webb pairing something like the idea circulated during the 2000 campaign, and regretted ever since, that Cheney would be the one guiding and advising the hapless Bush, which was why Bush’s inexperience shouldn’t trouble us too much? How did that work out? You can imagine McCain having fun with this, just as he did when he tore into Romney when the latter spoke about consulting lawyers and experts: “Unlike my opponent, I won’t need to rely on my Vice President to help me understand issues of national security, blah blah blah.” Obama overcame Clinton partly by flipping everything upside down and making her (vastly exaggerated) claim of experience into a liability that tied her to the “old politics” and the status quo, and yet when faced with a major decision Obama is supposed to embrace the expectations and standards that, had he followed them during the nomination fight, would have surely meant his defeat?
Update: James has come up with a devastating counterblast:
Voters simply may not care or be thinking that hard.
This is almost certainly right, and it is even more likely to be true with respect to Veep Madness. Meanwhile, Ross and Jim Henley have more, and Ross has a follow-up post as well. Ross adds that “for the symbolism of an Obama-Webb ticket to work, it would have to be wedded to something more tangible than what Webb has brought to the table in the Senate – some specific policy proposals, for instance, that would allow Webb to act like a heterodox figure, rather than a guy with a history of interesting views who’s sublimated them all in service to his party’s orthodoxy.”
But then you might have thought that for the symbolism of Obama’s hope-and-unity tour to work, he would have to have done more than co-sponsor a bill on securing loose nukes with Dick Lugar and have some evidence of his great powers of bipartisan leadership, yet so far people keep buying into it. It seems to me that many people, myself included, liked to think of Webb as being more “centrist” (even though on the war he was to the “left” of almost half of his current Democratic colleagues), but this was as misguided in its way as the tendency to label this or that politician a “maverick.” By and large, a pol achieves the status of a “maverick” because of the pose that he strikes or because of his personality. The reality that admirers don’t want to acknowledge is that if a politician votes like a left-liberal, he is for all intents and purposes a left-liberal, and the fact that he used to say interesting and provocative things that he could never get away with saying today as a Democrat is actually something of a depressing confirmation that there is no room in the ranks of that party for much of the past career of Jim Webb that people on the right talk about and find so intriguing.
Second Update: Jim Antle also responds and has an interesting post on reports that the Obama campaign is actually vetting Sam Nunn. To follow up on one of Jim’s objections to my earlier argument about Webb, it might seem that a Webb or Nunn pick would not exactly be engaging in a “bidding war over who is more militaristic and irresponsible in foreign policy,” since these two have been Iraq war opponents and have counseled the sort of responsible defense policy one once associated with Republicans (including such Republicans as Jim Webb). But in certain respects it would appear that way, since Webb is one of the true believers that Vietnam could have and therefore should have been won had it not been for nefarious Democrats at home (a view that is not all together popular on his side of the aisle) and Nunn was, as Jim notes, not a McGovernite in a party that was and, in parts, still is (and I don’t say that as a criticism). What I was trying to get at is that choosing a VP candidate to some extent because of his military service or past hawkishness appears to be an attempt to make the ticket seem more credible on national security, but this assumes that the one major candidate who got Iraq right doesn’t already have enormous credibility on national security, which means that everyone is still defining such “credibility” in the same way that they tend to define “seriousness” in foreign policy, which means maximal hawkishness and hegemonism. Today’s Democrats can try to outbid the GOP here, but they will always lose. Selecting a VP candidate to augment a supposed lack of national security credibility compels the Democrats to compete on that ground, because it accepts a conventional understanding of what it means to have credibility on national security, and that conventional understanding has been crafted by militarists and interventionists. It is the same understanding that compels Obama’s campaign and his supporters to tout his foolish position on launching strikes into Pakistan without Islamabad’s consent (a position that, as his supporters like to boast for some reason, he shares with President Bush), and it is folly.
16 Responses to “The Meme That Will Never Die”
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“Because voters can rest assured that when the going gets tough, Jim Webb will be…second in command?”
Exactly right. The VP selection only matters if you screw it up, and even then it may not matter at all (see Quayle, J. Danforth). The two things that Webb does bring to the ticket: 1. He gives added weight to the idea that those against the war are not all arugula eating flower children; some people who were “Born Fighting” thought that the Iraq War was the mother of all screwups, and did so from the very beginning. It still highlights Obama’s relative lack of experience, however, but the pluses may outweigh the minuses. 2. And makes a remote pickup in VA somewhat more likely, although I wasn’t alive the last time a VP pick indisuptably brought an additional state into the winning coalition.
I think the fascination with Webb goes right to the heart of American politics and the anxieties fo the Democratic party.
Democrats see Webb as “not one of us” but “one of them” and the “them” being most Americans…
It’s an admission that the country is to the right of the Democratic party politically and that to win, the Democrats have to abandon what they are: tribalist/multiculturalist/leftist…
They want to pick Webb because they don’t feel lilke the average American at heart… I’m not saying that’s true, but it is what they feel…
“It’s an admission that the country is to the right of the Democratic party politically and that to win, the Democrats have to abandon what they are: tribalist/multiculturalist/leftist…”
It’s an admission that the country is to the right of the Democratic party culturally, which is an important difference. Pick just about any economic issue: healthcare, Social Security privitization, minimum wage increase, expanded GI bill for Iraq/Afghanistan vets, S-CHIP, etc, and the majority of the population will be with the Democrats. Webb is a fairly partisan Democrat, and a reliable vote for Sen. Reid, much to my dismay.
Certainly we can agree that Democrats, especially presidential candidates need to resist the urge to play ameteur anthropologist about we gun-owning, church-going tribes of the Midwest.
Obama is supposed to embrace the expectations and standards that, had he followed them during the nomination fight, would have surely meant his defeat?
I think that Obama’s rationale was not that experience is meaningless, but rather that it is only any good if it’s combined with judgment. Webb, like Obama, and unlike McCain, was right about the invasion of Iraq.
I am not convinced about Webb, in part for the reasons KathyG laid out in her post the other day. But having a VP candidate who, like Obama, is willing to respond forcefully to GOP attacks could be useful during the campaign. That, to me, is a better reason to pick him than to balance out any perceived weakness on Obama’s part.
Benny One Six, that sounds to me like yesterday’s talking points. It might have been true in the past. But now, many more Americans identify as Democrats, and America hates the Republican Party. It’s Webb’s willingness to fight, I think, that gives him appeal to Democrats and even to tribalist Republicans. In this clip, he is one of us Dems, responding forcefully to the usual smears and distractions from the GOP.
Good points.
I’d just add that the Democrats have seized the economic issues only to the extent they’ve moved rightward to the center…
Great last sentence, The fact that they have to play anthropologist is why they lose national elections… I can’t imagine the Democrats playing amateur anthropologist about metrosexual, Ivy League knowledge workers…
Last post was directed to Adam…
Elvis, you have to admit that the Democrats have moved rightward in the past few decades and that co-incident with that they’ve done better nationally re: identification etc… That might jsut be correlation and not causation, but I doubt it…
And Webb, as reliable as his vote is, presents as the rightest of the Democrats. That’s why he has such appeal…
Good points regarding the lack of any real need to shore up Obama’s foreign policy or national security cred. However, there are areas where Obama is weak, and really does need to shore up support rather than try to deny the validity of the criticism. I’m thinking of the white working class vote. I’m guessing that’s why polling shows an Edwards VP pick has such a strong positive effect on the ticket. Edwards has cred with that block of voters and their concerns, and picking Edwards seems to allay their fears enough to vote for Obama. Which makes sense in that on domestic affairs a President has way more flexibility than on foreign policy, and an activist VP like Edwards is seen as having more influence. Whether that’s actually true or not, the perception seems real enough. Not saying Edwards is the only pick who could serve this function, but I’m not sure if there’s a better one.
The other point about an Edwards pick is that he’s a man. I know the CW is that Obama needs a woman on the ticket to pick up the bitter Hillary women, but the fact is that traditionally women are the Dems strong point, and there’s every reason to think that women will come around by fall. Men, on the other hand, traditionally vote Republican, and Edwards seems to give them more reason to go with the Dem ticket, in that they trust men more than women. Sexist, yes, but it seems to be the facts. So you get more independents and crossovers with a man like Edwards.
“I’d just add that the Democrats have seized the economic issues only to the extent they’ve moved rightward to the center…:”
Interesting, except that Obama is further left than Kerry, who was further left than Gore, who was further left than Clinton…notice a pattern? Obama is certainly the most forthrightly liberal candidate since McGovern, yet he pretty consistently leads McCain by any measure you could pick. He does not lead by the decisive margin that you would expect from such a strongly Democratic year, but it has pretty consistent for several months now.
conradg,
If Obama is past the need to “balance” the ticket on foreign policy or national security cred (and I think he almost certainly is) I’m not really sure what Edwards brings to the ticket in terms of those white working class voters. If you are a blue collar worker in, say, WV, KY, OH, or PA, and there is something about Obama that you just don’t like, does having John Edwards as second banana really move that many voters? I think it was pretty clear that those demographis were voting against Obama more than for Clinton, Besides, Edwards moved exactly no votes as VP pick in 2004, not even in his own home state.
Interesting, except that Obama is further left than Kerry, who was further left than Gore, who was further left than Clinton…notice a pattern?
Yeah, that they keep losing…
Benny One Six,
Dude, Clinton won. Twice.
On a separate but equally fun topic:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4007#more
Dude, Clinton won. Twice
Exactly!
Adam01,
“If you are a blue collar worker in, say, WV, KY, OH, or PA, and there is something about Obama that you just don’t like, does having John Edwards as second banana really move that many voters?”
I would have thought the same, and then I saw some polls which compared various VP picks for Obama and McCain in various swing states, and surprisingly it was Edwards who far and away helps the ticket the most (whereas Romney helps McCain the least). WV and KY are probably hopeless, but in PA and OH Edwards definitely made a huge difference. He was even better in PA than the governer and Hillary supporter Ed Rendell. All the female VP picks are virtually useless, and even Webb doesn’t help nearly as much as Edwards. It only goes to show that Edwards really does have cred with that demographic, and that probably makes him the best pick overall.
conradg,
Interesting. I suppose I’m just skeptical that any VP pick moves that many votes, polls 5 plus months before the election aside, and given that Kerry came to very much regret picking Edwards over Gephardt in 04, I’d be surprised that he got the call again.
On the same topic, Ross Douthat has good thoughts on Webb as VP:
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/the_case_against_webb.php
Adam01,
I’m not sure if these current polls mean something in the fall, but they certainly suggest that Edwards helps heal the rift in the Dem party. I’m reminded of the fact that even before Edwards dropped out, he outpolled both Obama and Hillary against McCain and other Republicans. So it may just be that Edwards is exceptionally popular among the swing voters who make a difference, whereas Obama and Hillary have the support of the base.
His experience with Kerry was negative for both. Kerry’s people tried to control him and minimize his strength, which is charismatic campaigning, because it made Kerry look uncharismatic and unappealing in comparison. Edwards felt understandably frustrated and unused. Obama wouldn’t have those kinds of concerns, because Obama is even more charismatic and as strong a campainger as Edwards. They are much more alike than different in most respects, which reminds me more of the Clinton/Gore pairing in 1992 that worked so well. But it’s true that Obama may not pick him because of the losing 2004 experience, even if it wasn’t Edwards’ fault. I’m not boosting Edwards by any personal preference for him, btw. I’m happy on a personal level with Webb and most of the others being mentioned. But in terms of who helps him win the most, and who seems most politically compatible, it looks like Edwards ought to be the guy. I’m not sure why no one seems to be mentioning him much.
[...] While Webb had made his sentiments perfectly clear some time ago, he made his refusal to be a VP candidate official today. (Hat tip: Jim Antle) This is good news for Virginia and for the Senate Democrats, and it’s probably good for Obama for reasons I have stated before. This is also good news for the country, because Webb will be much more effective in advancing both foreign policy realist and economic populist causes in the Senate than he ever would have been able to do as Vice President. [...]