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Obama’s Quirks March 13th, 2009 | 3 Comments | Posted in Barack Obama, Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard

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What we’ve learned about our new president.

By: Fred Barnes

Now that Barack Obama has been president for seven weeks, we’ve learned a few more things about him. Like every president, Obama has quirks. Or maybe we should call them characteristics or tendencies that we hadn’t expected. Here are a five of them:

1. Delegate and duck. Who’d have thought the fellow famous for his brains and tough-minded leadership would hand over much of his agenda to Democrats in Congress? Not I. This practice began with Obama’s first piece of legislation, the economic “stimulus” package. It was mostly put together by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who touted it as an economic game-changer. The actual result? A wave of fear it won’t work. Even economists friendly to Democrats told Pelosi this week that the measure won’t come close to meeting Obama’s goal of saving or creating up to 4 million jobs. Pelosi is now talking up a second stimulus package.

Given that experience, you might think Obama would be leery of giving congressional Democrats the more important job of drafting a massive health care reform bill. Not so. He’s given them exactly that assignment. True, there may be a clever strategy behind his habit of delegating. If Democrats draft a bill, they’re likely to pass it. Or perhaps Obama is just afraid of crossing Pelosi.

They’ll have trouble, however, with a touchy moral issue Obama ducked when he lifted the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. That issue: cloning of embryos for research, so-called therapeutic cloning. Obama also ducked the matter of where to stash unrepentant terrorists once the prison at Guantanamo is shut down on his orders next year. And he’s letting a task force determine what’s proper in interrogating terrorists.

2. Doing the opposite. Obama insists he’s not in favor of big government, then proposes a 10-year budget with vast amounts of new spending and a vastly expanded role for government. He denounces distractions that keep everyone from focusing on significant issues, but his White House aides cause a huge controversy by calling Rush Limbaugh the leader of the Republican party. He promises bipartisanship but doesn’t practice it. He’s against earmarks but refuses to call on Congress to strip them from the “omnibus” spending bill. He’s the enemy of “business as usual” in Washington, but the way he conducts his presidency is business as usual. He’s for making “tough choices,” but doesn’t make many. He’s for “fiscal responsibility” but . . . well, you get the drift.

3. Loose ship. Obama ran the most spectacularly well organized and brilliantly managed presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. And his transition was rightly praised for its orderliness. I don’t offer that praise lightly. But once he arrived in the White House, Obama has operated anything but a tight ship. He hasn’t filled major posts at the Treasury Department, allowing Secretary Tim Geithner to be cast by the media as a lonely and forlorn figure. He inadvertently treated British prime minister Gordon Brown as if he’s the leader of Sri Lanka or Surinam, causing Brown deep embarrassment at home and damaging the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and America. His high-level nominees–some of them–continue to be folks with unpaid taxes. His vice president, Joe Biden, can’t stop uttering dubious statements, the latest being his claim that 70 percent of Taliban forces are in it for the money. Did Gallup poll them?

4. Blame game. This is one of the rituals of Washington that Obama was going to halt. Instead, he’s indulged. After an interview with the New York Times last week, he called back to respond further to a question about whether he’s a socialist. “It was hard for me to believe that you were serious about that socialist question,” he said, then went on to lay the blame for expanding government on President Bush. “It wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks,” Obama noted. “And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescription drug plan without a source of funding.” Obama didn’t mention that he supports the bank bailout and his party backed a more expensive version of the drug plan.

5. Straw man. Obama has been criticized for using this rhetorical device. But he can’t stop himself. He’s often declared he won’t deal with those, presumably congressional Republicans, who would do nothing at all to boost the economy. But Republicans would do something, just not what he has. When he made his stem cell announcement, Obama said he was protecting scientists from “manipulation or coercion,” listening to them “even when it’s inconvenient,” making sure “scientific data is never distorted or concealed,” and basing “scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Whew! But who was doing all those things? Nobody, though Obama seemed to be suggesting the Bush administration had.

Okay, these quirks are nothing to brag about. And Obama has some admirable characteristics as well. But I don’t need to cite them. The mainstream media has beaten me to the punch, spreading word of Obama’s fine points to the far ends of the globe.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

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Rusty

Romney Is McCain’s Best VP Option March 15th, 2008 | 27 Comments | Posted in 2008 Election, Fred Barnes, John McCain, Mitt Romney, VP, Vice President

(Weekly Standard) This column was written by Fred Barnes.

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When John McCain begins his search for a vice presidential running mate, he’ll quickly come upon a sad fact. He wants a candidate who will be seen as a plausible president. That’s criterion number one. He also wants someone who won’t subtract from his campaign in any serious way. That’s criterion number two. The unfortunate truth is that few Republicans meet these simple criteria. McCain doesn’t have much of a pool to choose from.

But his selection matters enormously, all the more because of his age. McCain will turn 72 on the eve of the Republican convention this summer. Choosing a running mate is the first major decision that a presidential nominee makes. And the nominee is judged by the quality of his pick and even by the smoothness of his selection process. So McCain had better choose well.

He has the right idea in mind. McCain thinks three vice presidential picks from the recent past were wise: Republican Dick Cheney in 2000 and Democrats Joe Lieberman in 2000 and Al Gore in 1992. They were nationally known political heavyweights who passed the most important test. They were accepted almost instantly as ready to replace the president if necessary. And they had no significant drawbacks.

The list of plausible presidents is short. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Tom Ridge, and Joe Lieberman qualify. That’s about it. There are a number of popular Republican governors - Charlie Crist of Florida, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Haley Barbour of Mississippi - but they fall short of Cheney-Lieberman-Gore stature. It’s not their fault, but it’s nonetheless true.

So how about Lieberman in 2008? He’s a pal of McCain, a brave backer of the war in Iraq, and now the most prominent Democratic supporter of McCain’s presidential bid. He would surely enhance McCain’s appeal to independents and moderate Democrats. He’s a political adult.

But he’s no Zell Miller. Lieberman is a liberal on domestic issues, including abortion. McCain already has trouble with conservatives and picking a Democrat would make things worse. Lieberman would probably subtract more votes from the McCain ticket than he’d add.

So would Giuliani and Ridge. True, Giuliani was a hero of 9/11 as mayor of New York, and Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor, was President Bush’s first homeland security chief. But both are pro-choice on abortion and would horrify social conservatives, an indispensable part of the Republican coalition. Giuliani or Ridge might prompt a third party pro-life presidential challenger.

Fred Thompson, the ex-senator from Tennessee and now a TV actor, is also a close friend of McCain. If he’d run a more spirited presidential campaign of his own this year, he’d be the obvious pick for running mate. But his campaign was dreary and disappointing. McCain needs someone more vibrant and upbeat.

That leads to Romney. He has run a vigorous national campaign and been vetted by the press and his opponents for the Republican nomination. These are very strong pluses. A pick who produces unhelpful surprises, as Geraldine Ferraro did in 1984 (her husband’s business deals) and Dan Quayle did in 1988 (his National Guard duty), is exactly what McCain doesn’t need. Romney is a known quantity.

Romney has three other add-ons. He’s acceptable to conservatives and especially to social conservatives, who disproportionately volunteer as ground troops in Republican presidential campaigns. He’s unflappable in debates. With the downturn worsening, the economy may surpass national security as the top issue of the campaign. And after years of success as a big time player in the global economy, Romney understands how markets work. He could shore up McCain’s admitted weakness on economic issues.

Romney has allies in the Bush wing of the Republican party. President Bush favors him as McCain’s veep. Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, preferred Romney over McCain in the primaries, but never endorsed him publicly. Karl Rove, the president’s political strategist, has hinted that he considers Romney to be McCain’s best running mate.

Is there a downside to Romney? Possibly. It’s not his Mormonism. He lost the nomination to McCain, but religion wasn’t the reason. As a corporate turnaround artist, he rescued companies, sometimes by laying off workers. When he ran for the Senate from Massachusetts in 1994, the incumbent, Teddy Kennedy, raised the layoff issue with punishing effect. No doubt Democrats would use it again, and it might have resonance if a recession hits and unemployment is increasing.

Mike Huckabee’s name is bound to come up in the veepstakes, since he’s now run nationally and been vetted. According to Rove, he would “double” McCain’s trouble with conservatives. Both foreign policy and economic conservatives would scream bloody murder if McCain chose the Huckster.

Presidential nominees once tried to balance their ticket with someone who’d helped win a state they might otherwise lose. This hasn’t entirely gone out of fashion. Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota is often mentioned in this regard. Former House member John Kasich and ex-trade representative and budget director Rob Portman, both from Ohio, are too.

McCain has also been advised, at least by the media, to pick a much younger person for vice president. Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri, 37, and a handful of others have had their names trotted out. Some of them have impressive credentials. Blunt, for example, is an Annapolis graduate and a Naval Reservist called to active duty after 9/11.

But I don’t believe the option of choosing a running mate for purely political reasons is open to McCain - not during wartime, anyway. His strong suit against Barack Obama, his likeliest Democratic opponent, or even against Hillary Clinton, is experience. In fact, Clinton has set up Obama to be attacked by McCain on this front.

Her TV ad raising doubts about Obama’s readiness to be president was critical to her victories last week in the Ohio and Texas primaries. She also said in a campaign appearance: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign. I will bring a lifetime of experience [to the White House] and Senator Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002. I think that is a significant difference.” In Obama’s 2002 speech, he opposed the invasion of Iraq. One can envision her comment in a McCain TV ad zinging Obama.

McCain would throw away the experience issue if he named a much younger running mate or someone without national stature or a background in world affairs. Obama’s response could be devastating: “If experience is so important, why did you pick a running mate who has so little, indeed less than I do?”

Romney thus appears to have the best ratio of virtues to drawbacks. But there’s just one problem: McCain doesn’t like him. Just how important compatibility is — that is something McCain will have to decide.

By Fred Barnes
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