There’s something in the water, if not the Scotch and bourbon, at the House Ways and Means Committee, and a procession of chairmen just couldn’t resist taking deep draughts of whatever it is. It’s entertaining for the rest of us, but expensive.
Rep. Charles Rangel, who has been in Congress longer than almost anyone, spent Thursday vainly trying to cut a deal with the House Ethics Committee over his presumed capital indiscretions with the tax man. Charlie is a master craftsman of congressional bonhomie and like most of his colleagues he imagines that rules, most of which Congress writes, apply only to the peasants. Charlie wants most of all to keep his seat in the House. He thinks a public trial, which looks like what he’ll get, would be embarrassing, though it’s hard to imagine how a member of Congress could any longer be humiliated by anything.
Mark Twain, who lived in a more innocent age, gilded or not, famously observed that Congress is our only native criminal class. What could he think of several recent chairmen of the once-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, where taxes originate. The most recent miscreants are Democrats, but that’s only because Democrats preside over the House more often than Republicans.
Is this how a presidency falls apart, not with a resounding thud but with a whine, a snivel, and a whimper?
Repossession of homes proceeds at a record pace. The Federal Reserve projects only weaker growth and higher unemployment. The sheepish Europeans cool their schoolgirl crush on Barack Obama. Ditto the Muslims, who had expected Mr. Obama to lead wholesale conversions to Islam, with conversion of St. Patrick’s and National Cathedrals to mosques soon to follow (even bigger than the monster mosque at Ground Zero). The Pentagon warns that it can’t pay its bills. The war in Afghanistan, no longer on George W.’s watch, looks headed toward Kaput City. Everybody is as angry as ever about the health-care reform, the wasteful and ineffective stimulus (and Son of Stimulus) and Al Gore’s scheme to require that naughty old sun to change its spots. Bill Clinton is called back to the White House and told to arrive with a big bottle of his magic “feeling your pain” pills.
There’s serious talk of a presidential primary challenge to Barack Obama by Hillary Clinton. The last time a Democratic challenger tried this Teddy Kennedy took on Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter famously predicted that “I’ll whip his ass,” and did, leaving Teddy as the only man who ever got his nether cheeks whipped by Jimmy Carter, who is rumored to still be alive. Together they gave us Ronald Reagan.
Politicians are not often burdened with convictions. They can always borrow some when survival is at stake. Each party has an archive of convictions that have worked in the past, and a governor or a senator in trouble can always get a little help from temps.
Temporary convictions are available on-line and a governor, senator, mayor or even an alderman need only to dial in to party headquarters to download a useful dump, pre-tested by the pollsters.
Panic in election years is an occupational hazard for politicians. The Obama administration, for example, is suing Arizona for its sheer effrontery of trying to do what the federal government has a responsibility to do but won’t. The Arizona law makes it a crime to be an illegal alien in the state, enabling police officers to ask someone they stop for speeding or running a stop sign for proof of his immigration status if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of violation of federal immigration law.
Barack Obama, who only yesterday was the student prince everybody was swooning over, is fast becoming Rodney Dangerfield: "He don't get no respect."
Suddenly, he's all thumbs, and every time he swings the presidential hammer he takes out another fingernail. The Muslims to whom he pays court like a cow-eyed teenager in pursuit of the homecoming queen have gone spectacularly sour on him. Fair or not, the Gulf oil spill is widely regarded as a government screw-up, and some Democrats are talking darkly of screwing up the screw-up. Bill Clinton wants the Navy "to go down there and blow up that well." Some of the president's economists are talking about another recession when we still haven't used up the one we've got, and it's hard to see how he could persuade even Michelle that a new recession would be George W.'s fault.
Not so long ago, the United States dominated the Group of 20 sessions, where the leaders of the big, prosperous nations of the world meet to chat and chew, accompanied by fracas, tumult and the noise of riot, uproar and other street entertainments. But who listens to Barack Obama?
Barack Obama isn't the only Democrat who's flailing about in a swamp of unexpected incompetence and irresolution. He's got company in South Carolina, Arkansas, Nevada and other places where voters aren't acting like they're supposed to, and we're not even through with June.
The president was back on the Gulf Coast again Monday, looking for a plug to stuff into that hole in the bottom of the sea (or at least the hole in his approval ratings). He can't find a plug, so he plugs on with his vilification of hapless BP. This is satisfying, in the way of chunking rocks at a vicious dog, but it doesn't plug a hole, and the oil gushes on. The president threatens to get "tough" with Big Oil, but it's not clear what the feds can do about the risks and imperfections of technology beyond churning up more hysteria. His only remaining option is a congressional resolution demanding that the Gulf quit gushing.
Harry Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats, has his own problems at home, trying to avoid having to look for a real job after the November elections. He's hotly pursued by a lady who takes no prisoners, so he can only imagine what happens when she catches him. Sharron Angle, who won the Republican nomination to oppose him, threatens to make the kind of senator who turns other senators into quivering potbellies of lemon-lime Jell-O. When she was only a state legislator, she used her own money to sue her colleagues when they imposed an enormous tax increase by a simple majority instead of the two-thirds majority required by the state constitution. She won, and the state Supreme Court reversed its earlier approval and reinstated the constitutional two-thirds requirement. As a member of the State Assembly, she voted against greedy consensus in the 42-member body so often that such votes usually were described as "41-to-Angle."
When Barack Obama says he wants to "kick somebody's ass" over the Gulf oil spill we presume he may be willing to settle for a mule, since mules are easier to find than asses and provide bigger targets. But he has to be careful whose ass to kick. Pick the wrong one and he'll get a swift kick in return.
The Secret Service would shoot the offending ass and ask later whose it was. But still, it's undignified for a president of the United States to suffer an ass-kicking. The president is an elegant Ivy Leaguer, after all, equally at home at a student seminar or a Sunday brunch with the Georgetown elites. He's not just a vulgar dude off the street, brawling in south-side Chicago.
Some of the president's friends, obsessed as usual with race, accuse certain reporters of dissing the president by reporting his use of what they, always looking for a gaffe, regard as the language of the street. A writer in Time magazine accuses the Drudge Report of playing to the "bigotry" of its readers (who include just about everybody in America) with a "racist" headline.
Art Linkletter, who died the other day at 97 after an illustrious career as a radio and television interviewer, discovered to his considerable profit that "kids say the darndest things." He knew better than to confine himself to politicians, who only say the dumbest things. Kids are often cute, politicians never.
Sometimes politicians suffer for it, but not often enough. The lucky ones acquire an immunity, and can say outrageous things and live a long life. Joe Biden, for example, has acquired such immunity. He regularly says things ranging from goofy to merely silly to outrageous, but the passage of the years has made him a lovable old uncle that nobody any longer takes seriously, which is what every president wants for his vice president. But not everybody can be good ol' Joe.
Campaigning in 2008, good ol' Joe was trying to ingratiate himself with the folks listening to a speech in Virginia, and reminded them that he was from Delaware, which was one of the four slave states that remained loyal to the Union in "the late unpleasantness." There was a strong implication, or inference anyway, that old slavers should stick together. Since slave-owning went out of fashion in Virginia like everywhere else, good ol' Joe's appeal to shared tradition fell to the floor with a thud heard from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. Barack Obama (who has slave-owning ancestors himself) took good ol' Joe as his bumbling mate, anyway.
Sometimes we can steal a good idea even from the Europeans. What we need, which many other countries already have, is a ceremonial president. He could make speeches and lay wreaths and attend funerals, leaving a real president to attend the important stuff, like making war, a budget and dealing with crises.
Barack Obama would make a perfect ceremonial president. He reads a teleprompter well, gives good speech in the style of an eloquent preacher, entertains championship basketball teams and can even draw up a respectable bracket for the national college basketball tournament. A ceremonial president would never arouse anger beyond the Beltway or stir up the ticks, ants and chiggers in the grass roots. Almost anyone can learn to lay a wreath, and a ceremonial president would even have time to shoot a few hoops. A ceremonial president might occasionally bump into the vice president, but they could learn to split their duties and stay civil with each other.
There's a similarity between a ceremonial president and a community activist; neither is responsible for very much beyond saying pretty things. The ceremonial president could even have his own airplane; maybe not a Boeing 747, but something about the size and speed of a DC-3. Mr. Obama would no doubt prefer to have a something built in Europe, but hundreds of Douglas DC-3s survived World War II and, unlike the economy, they're slow and hard to crash. We would want him to feel safe and comfortable on his way to cut the ribbon at the opening of a sauna in Stockholm or making the keynote address at the dedication of that monstrous Saudi Arabian mosque to be built at ground zero in Lower Manhattan.
With Arlen Specter now retired to the Republic of Oblivia, the land of humiliated incumbents, attention focuses on Blanche Lincoln, who must enjoy attention while she can. She, too, seems en route to the province of the memorably forgotten.
She was forced into a June 8 runoff, and if she survives that she will become the No. 1 target of the Republicans in November, when she will be the most vulnerable of all Democratic incumbents. Ms. Lincoln - or "Miss Blank," as critics here call her for her lack of strong convictions - is holding on, barely, against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, a flyweight creature of his own ambition, George Soros' money, and the national labor unions. Mr. Halter was propelled into contention by an unlikely ephemeral coalition of good ol' boys, eager to vote for anybody but Miss Blank, and down-home liberals armed with Yankee money.
From the outside, it's difficult to find much to separate the two candidates. The difference is only a matter of degree. The national unions see in Mr. Halter a vote for their "card-check" legislation that would eliminate the secret ballot in elections to determine whether workers want to be represented by a union. Mzz Lincoln was for card-check before she was against it, and Mr. Halter is believed to be for it but won't say exactly, though nobody here believes that George Soros, MoveOn.org and the unions are taking Mr. Halter's eventual support on faith.
Buyer's remorse has become a chronic disease of the democracies. Candidates who look good in winter turn out not to taste so good in summer. We can expect to see a new outbreak in Britain sometime after this weekend.
The oily goo of Barack Obama's hopey-changey slick has inevitably spread across the Atlantic, like the spill off Louisiana, only writ larger. David Cameron, who expects to become the prime minister despite falling just short of an indecisive parliamentary majority, had tried to tie himself to Mr. Obama's game of bait-and-switch, of extravagant promises made and never redeemed. The Sun, one of London's irreverent tabloids, even appropriated the famous Obama campaign poster for its election-day front page, emblazoned "Our Only Hope." This was presumably not meant as irony. Alas, we knew Britain was in sad shape, but nobody knew things were that bad.
Mr. Cameron hit it off with the president — "bonded," in the ripe wet cliche of current fashion — months ago when he braved the briny to take his own measure of Washington. He quickly adopted the president's campaign mantra of hopey-changey, and hired Anita Dunn, who was Mr. Obama's communications director before she left the White House to become a political consultant, to give him advice on how to copy the Obama presidential campaign. Some of his friends in London now worry that once he actually becomes the prime minister Mr. Cameron will try to emulate the messiah of South Side Chicago rather than channel the robust ghosts of Churchill, Thatcher and Reagan as he settles in as prime minister.
This is Disorientation Week in Washington. From the White House to the Hill, the Democrats are trying (but not trying too hard) to come to terms with a new reality. Attitude-adjustment hour is sometimes no fun at all.
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