Tag Archives: mccain

Russert Tribute

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“Our issues this Sunday…”

About four years ago, I started watching “Meet the Press” every Sunday morning. I hadn’t always done so, but after I got a TiVo I decided to record it every week, and I became a regular viewer. Since then it’s been a ritual to turn on the TV every Sunday and hear that agitated John Williams music, followed by Tim Russert’s portentous introduction to the past week’s events. And MSNBC was my network of choice during this primary season, so I’d often hear Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews turn for analysis to “NBC News Washington Bureau Chief and Moderator of Meet the Press Tim Russert,” as Homeric an epithet as “wine-dark sea” or “rosy-fingered dawn.”

It’s weird to think that he’s gone. It’s weird to think that he won’t be here for the rest of this election season. He won’t be there to analyze the vice-presidential picks, or the conventions, or the debates, or the results on election night. Never again will he grill a politician about whether he’s going to run for president even though he’s already said no four times, never again will he awkwardly read a newspaper excerpt that takes up four screens’ worth of text, screwing up every tenth word. Never again will he interview John McCain or Doris Kearns Goodwin or James Carville or Gwen Ifill. He’s just… gone.

I didn’t always like Tim Russert, but I usually did, and I always admired him. I was off from work today and watched MSNBC most of the afternoon, and commentators kept coming back to his work ethic. Saturday nights were off-limits for him, as he always had to prepare for Sunday morning. He loved what he did and was good at it, and he cared about other people. These are all qualities I want to better cultivate in myself.

Here’s part of a transcript from an SNL skit a few years ago in which Tim Russert (played by Darrell Hammond) interrogates John McCain (played by John McCain) on whether he’ll run for president in 2004.

Tim Russert: Alright. Senator, I want to read you a quote… from the Washington Post… October 2nd, 1999: “I am a candidate for President of the United States.” Your word, Senator.

Sen. John McCain: Well, Tim, that’s from the last election, when I was a candidate.

Tim Russert: So, you’re flip-flopping?

Sen. John McCain: I’m not flip-flopping, Tim.

Tim Russert: So, you’re a candidate? We can definitively say, on this show, that John McCain–

Sen. John McCain: I was a candidate in 2000. I am not in 2004. I will not challenge President Bush as a leader of my party.

Tim Russert: What if President Bush does not run?

Sen. John McCain: I don’t see any reason–

Tim Russert: What if he forgets to run?

Sen. John McCain: Alright, Tim… alright, Tim…

Tim Russert: The President forgets to run for re-election… and the Republicans are without a candidate. Does John McCain then step in to fill that void?

Sen. John McCain: I would call the President, and remind him to run.

Tim Russert: So, you’re running?

Sen. John McCain: No!

I’ll miss that ol’ pumpkinhead.

One Good Thing

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There’s one good thing that has come out of the prolonged Obama-Clinton race.

There seems to be a big chunk of Clinton voters who say they’re dead-set against voting for Obama. They’ll vote for McCain before they vote for Obama. Basically, their order of preference was: (1) Clinton, (2) McCain, (3) Obama.

The thing is, had Clinton not stayed in the race, we’d never know who these people are. Those Clinton voters who say they’ll never vote for Obama would have been indistinguishable from voters who would vote for John McCain over any Democrat whatsoever.

But because Clinton stayed in the race, we know who they are. We know they’re receptive to Democratic arguments, since they voted for Clinton. It will be easier to convince them to vote Democratic than it will be to convince die-hard Republicans to do so. Just convince them that Obama holds the same positions on the issues that Clinton does.

It may or may not work, depending on whether you see Clinton as the centrist and Obama as the liberal (Clinton and guns, Obama and his bad bowling), or Obama as the centrist and Clinton as the liberal (see universal health care). But it’s a thought.

The Obama Upset

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Chris Cillizza writes about the remarkable nature of Obama’s impending nomination victory:

The facts are thus: Clinton came into the nomination fight heavily favored to be the nominee. Not only did she have the backing of the most potential political machine in the country — due in large part to her husband’s eight years in the White House — but she had also built a vaunted fundraising operation of her own and surrounded herself with some of the best and brightest aides in Democratic politics.

Obama, on the other hand, had served for two years in the U.S. Senate after doing a stint in the Illinois state Senate. He has toured the country for Democratic candidates during the 2006 election cycle and had begun to build a national organization through his Hopefund political action committee. (In fact, Obama often referred to himself as a “skinny kid with a funny name.”)

There seems little dispute that Obama over Clinton deserves a place in the conversation of great political upsets.

Whether it makes you happy or sad, it’s pretty amazing. Clinton was supposed to be the nominee. People had talked about it for years. She was the wife of a popular two-term Democratic ex-president, and she had money and loyalty. The Clinton machine was intimidatingly unbeatable.

And then Obama happened.

Despite the talk of racism hurting Obama among whites, there’s a good argument for the notion that his race helped him as much as his hurt him.

[E]very four years, the candidate who is the new politics, new left darling, whether it’s Howard Dean or whether it’s Bill Bradley or whether it’s Gene McCarthy, has historically fallen on the shoals of the white working-class vote… And that candidate would always make a big splash early in the contest and there would be a lot of media attention… [but] ultimately what would happen is working-class whites and working-class nonwhites would align behind another candidate. …

[I]f you think of the Democratic Party as working-class whites, working-class blacks… and then the elite class, whatever that is, the cappuccino, latte class… and trichotomize the Democratic Party coalition as those three things, if you can get two of the three you’re probably going to be the nominee.

If you see Obama as a black Bill Bradley or Howard Dean, then the reason he did so well is that in addition to the “elite”-type voters, he also got the black voters — unlike Bradley or Dean, who only got the “elites,” while the more mainstream candidate got everyone else. The argument is basically that if Obama had been white, he would have gone the way of his “new politics” predecessors and faded away. Also, by this argument, a large chunk of the white population voted against him not because he’s black, but because he’s the “elitist” candidate. Just as they supposedly wouldn’t support Bradley or Dean, they wouldn’t support Obama, either.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t racism going on as well. Or at least some sort of quasi-xenophobia. As David Brooks writes today:

These independent voters were intrigued by Obama’s “change” message, but they knew almost nothing about him except that he used to go to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. It’s as if they can’t hang Obama’s life onto anything from their own immediate experiences and, as a result, he is an abstraction.

Basically, Obama is just too weird an idea for some people.

Now that he’ll be able to run a race without one hand tied behind his back, he needs to spend some time focusing on his personal narrative.

And Clinton needs to campaign full-steam for him so we can get a Democrat back in the White House. She needs to hammer away at McCain and convince her supporters that she does *not* want them to vote for him. Whether she can do this, I don’t know. But unless she wants McCain to get elected and appoint a couple more Supreme Court justices, she’d damn well better work her ass off for the ticket.