For Obama, It's Public Character That Counts: Margaret Carlson
For Obama, It's Public Character That Counts: Margaret Carlson
By Margaret Carlson
Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The snows of New Hampshire and Iowa had barely turned a slushy brown with the footprints of presidential aspirants before a front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post raised the question of cocaine use by one of them.
What took so long, you ask? In his first book more than a decade ago, Senator Barack Obama was open about trying drugs as a teenager. ``Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,'' Obama wrote, as he tried to ``push questions of who I was out of my mind.''
Those are questions asked and answered in Obama's two books. The Illinois Democrat is calm and deliberative, poised and warm. He couldn't have gotten there without facing the dilemmas posed by being the son of a Kenyan father who vanished when he was 2 and a white woman from Kansas who raised him.
During his Senate campaign, he said he offered those revelations so young people in far more difficult straits would ``know that you can make mistakes and still recover.'' It's up to voters, he said, to decide whether to judge him by ``dumb things'' he did as a teenager or ``the work that I've done since that time.''
The tempest over dumb things must have every candidate asking: Should anything personally unflattering come out about me, will I be given a free pass like George Bush or hounded like Bill Clinton?
Republican or Democrat?
It depends. Are you a Republican or Democrat? Republicans can be suspected of driving under the influence (Bush), have two wives (Senator John McCain) or three (Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani), or have affairs too many to list and not be pilloried.
Part of this comes from a tradition of sin, repentance and redemption among Republicans' most steadfast supporters. Fundamentalist Christians wept over reports that megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, who had advised the White House on issues like gay marriage, had paid for sex with a male escort and bought crystal meth. Bush shrugged off his own debauchery as acting ``young and irresponsible when I was young and irresponsible.'' His version of life begins at 40.
By contrast, Al Gore was punished because Clinton took a tumble for a girl baring a thong while bearing a pizza, although everyone knew Gore himself was too busy charting global warming to order a large pie with pepperoni, much less notice who delivered it. Back then, extracurricular sex trumped drugs in the pantheon of personal demons, even if you weren't the one having sex.
Hillary
Which brings us to Senator Hillary Clinton. She benefited from the sex her husband had with someone else, with her popularity rising from the lows of Hillarycare to the highs of standing-by-her-man during impeachment. Without Monica Lewinsky, it's doubtful she could have left the White House a year early to seek and win a Senate seat in a state she had only visited as a tourist.
If she runs for the presidency, will her husband's behavior come back to haunt her? Will she be tormented like the Clinton she is, or has the electorate moved on to other issues, such as the prospect of a decades-long religious war in the Middle East?
The U.S. congressional elections in November suggest the public may be moving away from issues of personal character to ones of public character. Negative ads worked when they compared records and didn't distort them. Really vicious ones making opponents out to be thugs consorting with felons in back rooms or soft on child predators backfired.
Bush Unbothered
While Representative Harold Ford lost his Senate race in Tennessee after the airing of a TV commercial featuring a come- hither blonde asking him to ``call me,'' it didn't diminish him. He remains a formidable national figure.
The midterms also produced another marker. If voters are prepared to forgive politicians for multiple wives and for having affairs, they're not prepared to forgive one whose 29- year-old mistress called 911 from the bathroom to tell police she was being choked. Her accusation against the four-term Republican Congressman, Don Sherwood, didn't bother Bush. He went to Pennsylvania to campaign for him. Sherwood lost anyway.
If Bush made youthful drinking seem all right and was willing to turn a blind eye to allegations of mistress-battery for the sake of a fellow Republican, has he at least given inexperience a bad name?
The answer to the charge that Junior had little conversance with world affairs was that he would have mature advisers from his father's administration to handle matters above his previous pay grade. All he got was a crowd bent on shooting first and asking questions later, along with a war he doesn't know what to do with.
`Bring It On'
While Bush was doing his imitation of Clint Eastwood taunting the terrorists to ``bring it on'' and vowing to catch Osama bin Laden ``dead or alive,'' Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were seeing to the manufacture of bad intelligence to justify a war to which they would send too few troops without enough armor.
Even if the country's experience with Bush makes inexperience the cardinal fault next time around, Obama, a mere state legislator in 2002, was dead-on correct about the seminal issue of our time. He had no illusions about the brutal butcher Saddam Hussein but said he could be contained until, like ``all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.''
Obama predicted that ``even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.'' He said it could also ``fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst ... impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.''
It's quite a speech and prepared without old Washington hands. Lucky for us, Cheney and Rumsfeld never worked for Obama's Dad. It could be lucky for us, too, if we don't get diverted from Middle East terrorism and looming domestic crises. The private lives that interest us now are our own.
(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net .
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aROtpC6GRn1U
By Margaret Carlson
Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The snows of New Hampshire and Iowa had barely turned a slushy brown with the footprints of presidential aspirants before a front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post raised the question of cocaine use by one of them.
What took so long, you ask? In his first book more than a decade ago, Senator Barack Obama was open about trying drugs as a teenager. ``Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,'' Obama wrote, as he tried to ``push questions of who I was out of my mind.''
Those are questions asked and answered in Obama's two books. The Illinois Democrat is calm and deliberative, poised and warm. He couldn't have gotten there without facing the dilemmas posed by being the son of a Kenyan father who vanished when he was 2 and a white woman from Kansas who raised him.
During his Senate campaign, he said he offered those revelations so young people in far more difficult straits would ``know that you can make mistakes and still recover.'' It's up to voters, he said, to decide whether to judge him by ``dumb things'' he did as a teenager or ``the work that I've done since that time.''
The tempest over dumb things must have every candidate asking: Should anything personally unflattering come out about me, will I be given a free pass like George Bush or hounded like Bill Clinton?
Republican or Democrat?
It depends. Are you a Republican or Democrat? Republicans can be suspected of driving under the influence (Bush), have two wives (Senator John McCain) or three (Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani), or have affairs too many to list and not be pilloried.
Part of this comes from a tradition of sin, repentance and redemption among Republicans' most steadfast supporters. Fundamentalist Christians wept over reports that megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, who had advised the White House on issues like gay marriage, had paid for sex with a male escort and bought crystal meth. Bush shrugged off his own debauchery as acting ``young and irresponsible when I was young and irresponsible.'' His version of life begins at 40.
By contrast, Al Gore was punished because Clinton took a tumble for a girl baring a thong while bearing a pizza, although everyone knew Gore himself was too busy charting global warming to order a large pie with pepperoni, much less notice who delivered it. Back then, extracurricular sex trumped drugs in the pantheon of personal demons, even if you weren't the one having sex.
Hillary
Which brings us to Senator Hillary Clinton. She benefited from the sex her husband had with someone else, with her popularity rising from the lows of Hillarycare to the highs of standing-by-her-man during impeachment. Without Monica Lewinsky, it's doubtful she could have left the White House a year early to seek and win a Senate seat in a state she had only visited as a tourist.
If she runs for the presidency, will her husband's behavior come back to haunt her? Will she be tormented like the Clinton she is, or has the electorate moved on to other issues, such as the prospect of a decades-long religious war in the Middle East?
The U.S. congressional elections in November suggest the public may be moving away from issues of personal character to ones of public character. Negative ads worked when they compared records and didn't distort them. Really vicious ones making opponents out to be thugs consorting with felons in back rooms or soft on child predators backfired.
Bush Unbothered
While Representative Harold Ford lost his Senate race in Tennessee after the airing of a TV commercial featuring a come- hither blonde asking him to ``call me,'' it didn't diminish him. He remains a formidable national figure.
The midterms also produced another marker. If voters are prepared to forgive politicians for multiple wives and for having affairs, they're not prepared to forgive one whose 29- year-old mistress called 911 from the bathroom to tell police she was being choked. Her accusation against the four-term Republican Congressman, Don Sherwood, didn't bother Bush. He went to Pennsylvania to campaign for him. Sherwood lost anyway.
If Bush made youthful drinking seem all right and was willing to turn a blind eye to allegations of mistress-battery for the sake of a fellow Republican, has he at least given inexperience a bad name?
The answer to the charge that Junior had little conversance with world affairs was that he would have mature advisers from his father's administration to handle matters above his previous pay grade. All he got was a crowd bent on shooting first and asking questions later, along with a war he doesn't know what to do with.
`Bring It On'
While Bush was doing his imitation of Clint Eastwood taunting the terrorists to ``bring it on'' and vowing to catch Osama bin Laden ``dead or alive,'' Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were seeing to the manufacture of bad intelligence to justify a war to which they would send too few troops without enough armor.
Even if the country's experience with Bush makes inexperience the cardinal fault next time around, Obama, a mere state legislator in 2002, was dead-on correct about the seminal issue of our time. He had no illusions about the brutal butcher Saddam Hussein but said he could be contained until, like ``all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.''
Obama predicted that ``even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.'' He said it could also ``fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst ... impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.''
It's quite a speech and prepared without old Washington hands. Lucky for us, Cheney and Rumsfeld never worked for Obama's Dad. It could be lucky for us, too, if we don't get diverted from Middle East terrorism and looming domestic crises. The private lives that interest us now are our own.
(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net .
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aROtpC6GRn1U
posted by presgore19 at 7:14 AM
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