At sixty, retired and living here in Hollywood, writing on current events and doing “serious” photography (you decide), it’s always a temptation to fall into consideration of the past – some days that’s all there is. Keeping up with geopolitical matters, following the way the country is being run – and trying to get the damned zeitgeist to reveal itself – can get old real fast. And there are those old movies on cable, the Beach Boys on the radio (still), and suddenly you’re nineteen again, a morose kid in Pittsburgh, worried about that first year of college and wondering about all those “beach blanket” movies and California. And there are all those years between then and now – college, grad school, teaching, the years in the business world “managing” this and that, the marriages, the divorces and all the rest, playing in bands in the Caribbean, the trips to Paris, rain in London and so on and so forth. The past can suck you down into a pleasant sort of mental quicksand. Like actual quicksand, the complex and detailed past is not particularly dangerous (that quicksand peril is only for the movies), but like real quicksand it’s messy and useless.
And then, to make things even more difficult, the past keeps coming up in non-personal ways, and somehow you cannot escape. Think of it as social-political quicksand – messy and useless, but you cannot free yourself from it. For example, over at Daily Kos – that evil left-wing website Bill O’Reilly warned you about – you’ll find an excerpt from a memoir of Watergate, written ten years after that had passed, in 1984, by journalist Walter Karp. And there you get this –
It also had been clear for many months that the thirty-seventh President of the United States did not feel bound by his constitutional duties. He insisted that the requirements of national security, as he and he alone saw fit to define it, released him from the most fundamental legal and constitutional constraints. In the name of “national security,” the President had created a secret band of private detectives, paid with private funds, to carry out political espionage at the urging of the White House. In the name of “national security,” the President had approved the warrantless wiretapping of news reporters. In the name of “national security,” he had approved a secret plan for massive, illegal surveillance of American citizens. He had encouraged his aides’ efforts to use the Internal Revenue Service to harass political “enemies” - prominent Americans who endangered “national security” by publicly criticizing the President’s Vietnam War policies.
The framers of the Constitution had provided one and only one remedy for such lawless abuse of power: impeachment in the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” There was absolutely no alternative. If Congress had not held President Nixon accountable for lawless conduct of his office, then Congress would have condoned a lawless Presidency. If Congress had not struck from the President’s hands the despot’s cudgel of “national security,” then Congress would have condoned a despotic Presidency.
That’s just depressing – save for “the despot’s cudgel of ‘national security,’” which is a little embarrassing (prose styles do change over time). It seems that the past persists. We’ve been here before. But Congress now will condone most anything. Of course it’s not as if they don’t remember the past – Watergate was a big deal and Nixon the only president to resign the office. Everyone remembers, even Congress. And one can learn from the past – but that hardly matters now. Congress has been outmaneuvered, or, alternatively, the past is useless – everything is always new.
But then the past really can be useful. You can use your own experiences and carefully assembled reputation to go far – Eisenhower, the solid general, became president. Kennedy rode PT-109 for years after the actual boat sank. John McCain made his years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam into something useful to us all, whether you agree with him on this position or that. You can build on a solid past. So you now you get the craving among Republicans to draft Peter Pace and other Bush-era generals to run for office. No, really.
And you get Matt Yglesias thinking this is a bit nuts –
Now of course there’s a long tradition of generals (but not, I think, admirals) entering politics in the United States, starting with George Washington. Contemporary conservatives, however, seem to be misunderstanding the tradition in crucial respects. The idea, normally, is to nominate flag officers who are associated with noteworthy victories - from Andrew Jackson to Wesley Clark - or else for a junior officer who showed noteworthy courage in battle (John Kerry, John Kennedy) to run for a lower office. Neither Franks, nor Petraeus, nor Pace is actually popular, probably because insofar as anyone knows who these guys are it’s from their association with a giant unpopular fiasco in Iraq.
Well, that is a problem. The past really does matter, not the rank. And the widely-read Digby offers these additional thoughts –
This is correct. But Republicans are suckers for Republicans in uniform. I don’t think they’d care if he [Pace] had been convicted of war crimes, they’d love him if he were GOP. (They’d actually love him more if he were convicted of war crimes.) The problem for Republicans is that there just aren’t as many of them as there used to be. And Independents and Democrats might have some objections to electing a Bush toady and Iraq war architect, no matter how much salad he has on his chest.
On the other hand, she says the campaigning would involve amazing spin –
Nonetheless, it would be a very tempting campaign for the right as they could work themselves into a full-on frenzy and start speaking in tongues and whirling around like dervishes if any Democrat even whispered that one of these men had not been fully competent in their jobs. (A congressional censure would certainly be in order if the opponents ran a negative ad or spoke in anything but the most reverential tones.) You can understand why the Republicans would be hot to do it - phony hypocritical hissy fits are their specialty. They would tie the opposition up in knots.
Winning would be beside the point, really. This is their idea of recreation.
So watch for it. Go to One Last Mission.org, dedicated to launching a Draft General Peter Pace movement.
Digby –
Draft him for what? To lose to Mark Warner in the Virginia senate race next fall, of course. What about the fact that he’s shown no inclination to run? Well, “It is, however, your reluctance to serve that suggests to us that you must serve.” Indeed.
You read it – “It is, however, your reluctance to serve that suggests to us that you must serve.” Some logic is missing there. General Pace’s reluctance to serve may suggest he knows better.
And political campaigning can be a rather awful business. Think back, go into the past. Consider the Karl Rove tactics in the 2000 primary in South Carolina. John McCain had pulled off an upset and won the New Hampshire primary earlier, and if George Bush lost South Carolina to him it was all over for young George. So there was that push poll about John McCain’s illegitimate black baby, the calls to potential white voters in South Carolina about the rumor (see Bush’s Brain or this in Newsweek at the time), and the mention that his years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam might have unhinged him, rendering him quite mad.
Fast-forward to South Carolina today. What about Barack Obama’s radical Muslim upbringing? The Politico is reporting this –
Rather than vanish, the whispered smear campaign appears to have gone underground, and in its purest form: Obama himself, according to a pair of widely circulated anonymous e-mails, is a Muslim.
“Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background,” warns an e-mail titled “Who Is Barack Obama,” that was circulating in South Carolina political circles this summer and sent to Politico by a South Carolina Democrat.
“The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out; what better way to start than at the highest level?”
… There are at least two indications that the whispers are being heard. First, “barack obama muslim” is the third most popular Google search for the presidential candidate’s name, behind “barack obama” and “barack obama biography,” according to Google Suggest, which tracks the frequency of word searches. Second, a CBS News poll in August found that, in response to an open-ended question about Obama’s faith, 7 percent of Americans identified him as a Muslim – more than any other response. The right answer, Protestant, was second at 6 percent. (Most didn’t know or wouldn’t say.)
Kevin Drum – “What is it about South Carolina, anyway?”
Someone down there knows what works. Congress may have forgotten the lesions of Watergate. The South Carolina Republicans remember the lessons of Karl Rove. The past can be instructive.
And the past can be politically useful. Rudolph Giuliani knows that, and sensing he be may overdoing the 9/11 stuff – people are making fun of him – the New York Times here notes Giuliani has a new “story of his past” that that’s less absurd than his claim to be the one true hero of 9/11 or some such thing. He’s the one that made New York City what it is today –
He invokes the Time magazine cover headline in 1990 that most New York City residents would just as soon forget – “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” And Mr. Giuliani recalls the days when, as he remembers them, a New Yorker couldn’t walk up Third Avenue without being on the lookout for muggers, of the blocks of dirty book stores and prostitutes, of public urination and pot-smoking.
But then, Matthew Yglesias, someone who knows the city is flummoxed –
I’ve been known to remark on how formerly no-good spots like Avenue B have become hip, but I can’t ever remember a time when 3rd Avenue was particularly dangerous.
More seriously, contemplating the main thing that one might give Giuliani credit for - New York City’s larger-than-average crime drop in the 1990s - just makes you realize that no matter how much credit you think he deserves for it, it has nothing to do with running for president. The president can’t reform local departments’ policing procedures. Meanwhile, crime is down and has lost a lot of salience as a political issue. Bill Bratton, having been fired by Giuliani for getting too much credit for the good job he was doing, seems to be doing a good job in LA. Maybe Rudy should go back to giving speeches, but mix some stuff in about how more cities should use Compstat and put more cops on the beat along with his corporate gigs. But make him president? No way.
Well, yes, Bratton, our police chief here in LA, is working wonders, or so says the prominent professor of Public Policy at UCLA – and Bratton is using Compstat, the systems tool he invented to rationalize police work. Giuliani fired Bratton because the damned guy was upstaging him.
Well, maybe that is presidential these days, but you do need to be careful with the past. And don’t even think about Bernard Kerik – the driver for Giuliani who Giuliani later named police commissioner and then had Bush nominate to be head of Homeland Security, now the subject of a federal bribery probe. Oops. The past is not exactly a safe place, is it?
Well, some of the past is safe. Monday, October 15, 2007, at the National Review’s real-time site, The Corner, the discussion was “Settling Soviet Hash” – whether we should have continued WWII by turning around after we took Berlin and mounting a massive assault on the Soviet Union. We didn’t. We could have – but we didn’t.
Kevin Drum – “I guess they must have temporarily run out of current wars to promote. Tomorrow’s topic: Should Britain have invaded Argentina after regaining the Falklands?”
But over there Mark Steyn offers this –
Choosing to “contain” the Soviet Empire over four decades did enormous damage not just in terms of the vassel populations and the millions of ruined lives (”stability” looks a lot better from the western side of the Iron Curtain than if you’re stuck on the eastern side) and the difficulties those societies are having in recovering (not least demographically) from half-a-century as a prison state, but also in the enervation of the free world and its decay into relativist mush. That’s one reason our “victory” in the Cold War is not felt as a victory by the populations of almost every NATO member state, although technically they “won” it. And it’s part of the reason why we’re disinclined to rouse ourselves for what the Administration calls another “long war.”
Yglesias offers the best response –
This is preposterous. Of course Cold War stability looks better from west of the Berlin wall than east of it. But the prospect of a massive war between the United States and the Soviet Union likewise looks a lot better from Mark Steyn’s armchair than it would have to anyone who would have been asked to fight in such a thing, or have his hometown turned into a battleground for it.
The implication that the population of Eastern Europe just spent those decades praying for a snap American invasion is insane, but also reflective of the sort of mentality in which one needs to bother pointing out that few Iranians want the United States to attack their country.
In regard to that last comment, see this – there is an argument out there, circulating among these folks, thatn as with the Iraqis, if you listened to Chalabi, the Iranians, if you listen to their current dissidents in America, really do want us to attack Iran now, and the sooner the better. After all, the population of Eastern Europe did spend those decades praying for a snap American invasion – same thing.
Damn, maybe there is something very risky in contemplating the past – it’s not just the realm of pleasant reveries. Maybe the past is quicksand, and more dangerous than anyone thought.
