Obama on the Man He Defeated

From President Obama's eulogy for Senator John McCain:

We didn't advertise it, but every so often over the course of my presidency, John would come over to the White House and we'd just sit and talk in the Oval Office, just the two of us. We would talk about policy, and we'd talk about family and we'd talk about the state of our politics. And our disagreements didn't go away during these private conversations -- those were real and they were often deep. But we enjoyed the time we shared away from the bright lights.

And we laughed with each other, and we learned from each other. And we never doubted the other man's sincerity or the other man's patriotism, or that when all was said and done, we were on the same team. We never doubted we were on the same team. For all of our differences, we shared a fidelity to the ideals for which generations of Americans have marched and fought and sacrificed and given their lives. We considered our political battles a privilege, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those ideals at home and do our best to advance them around the world.

We saw this country as a place where anything is possible. And citizenship as an obligation to ensure it forever remains that way. More than once during his career John drew comparisons to Teddy Roosevelt. I am sure it has been noted that Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" seems tailored to John. Most of you know it, Roosevelt speaks of those who strive, who dare to do great things, who sometimes win and sometimes come up short but always relish a good fight. A contrast to those cold, timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Isn't that the spirit we celebrate this week? That striving to be better, to do better, to be worthy of the great inheritance that our founders bestowed.

 So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It's a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but in fact is born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that. Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that will ever come can depend on what you do today. What better way to honor John McCain's life of service than as best we can follow his example to this country. To prove that the willingness to get in the arena and fight for this country is not reserved for the few, it is open to all of us, and in fact it is demanded of all of us as citizens of this great republic.

McCain Farewell

From the late Senator John McCain:

"My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans,

"Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.

"I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I have loved my life, all of it. I have had experiences, adventures and friendships enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else's.

"I owe that satisfaction to the love of my family. No man ever had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America's causes – liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people – brings happiness more sublime than life's fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

"'Fellow Americans' – that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.

"We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

"We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.

"Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening.

"I feel it powerfully still.'

"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.

"Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America."

Former Rivals on McCain

Our statement on the passing of Senator John McCain: pic.twitter.com/3GBjNYxoj5

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 26, 2018

Heavy hearts with the loss of a great friend. pic.twitter.com/dU6kDtScU4

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) August 26, 2018

"Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled. John McCain was a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order.” [...] Full statement by President George W. Bush https://t.co/FQVYWIUyGL pic.twitter.com/W8LCxJXRLi

— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) August 26, 2018

The Draft and National Service

Aaron Blake at WP:

After a week in which President Trump endured not-so-veiled criticisms from his two predecessors as president and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), McCain delivered another broadside that seems clearly aimed at Trump — in the most personal terms yet.

McCain, whose status as a war hero Trump publicly and controversially doubted as a 2016 presidential candidate, appeared to retaliate in kind against the president in a C-SPAN interview about the Vietnam War airing Sunday night. In the interview, McCain pointed to wealthy Americans who were able to get out of being drafted into service in the conflict in which he spent years as a prisoner of war. And he pointed to a very specific type of deferment which Trump just happened to use.

“One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest-income level of America, and the highest-income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur,” McCain said. “That is wrong. That is wrong. If we are going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.”

Lloyd Green at Fox:

Sadly, with the exceptions of Vermont and Maine, military service has morphed into the province of Red State America, while the chasm in the ethos and demographics of our nation’s service academies on the one hand, and our elite universities on the other, grows ever larger. As retired General Dennis Laich and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson recently observed, military “deployment burden” crystalizes the “urban/suburban vs. rural divide.”

Let’s be real. Scarsdale isn’t sending their best and brightest to West Point, while there aren’t too many kids from Havre, Montana, roaming the Ivy League. To quote Abraham Lincoln and Jesus, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Practically speaking, national service would mean that once again Americans from all walks of life would get to know each other, North, South, the Coasts, the Great Plains, and the Mississippi Delta. As the tectonic shifts of diversity bring their own political challenges, national service could yield a badly needed common experience. It would also remind us that we all are part of America at a time when political rancor is the rule, and the word “secession” gets bandied about as a threat or an applause line.

Body Language on the Senate Floor

David Dayen reports at The Intercept:

SOMETHING VERY UNUSUAL happened in the U.S. Senate today: a vote scheduled by the majority leader failed. The legislation would have repealed an Obama-era rule designed to prevent methane emissions from leaking out of drilling operations on public lands. Brought up under the Congressional Review Act, the resolution only needed 50 votes to pass the Senate, after already passing the House along party lines. But it failed 49-51.

McCain cast the decisive nay vote, perhaps a protest against the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

McCain’s conduct during the Senate vote also raises red flags. In the C-SPAN video of the vote, McCain can be seen in heated discussion with John Cornyn, R-Texas, the number two man in the Senate leadership, along with John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and an unidentified senator with his back to the camera. After yelling at them for close to a minute, McCain goes over to the Senate clerks and gives a thumbs down to record his vote. He then storms out of the chamber, as Cornyn raises his arms in mild protest.

McCain has a reputation for being a little, shall we say, vindictive. It’s not out of the question at all that he would torpedo this vote, regardless of his ideological preferences, because of a fit of pique about the FBI director he admires getting unceremoniously dumped.

The video (h/t CH):

West's Familiar Misquotations

Many posts have discussed spurious quotations. The Palm Beach Post reports:

Former Rep. Allen West outlines his political philosophy, warrior code and experiences as a black conservative in a new book that’s peppered with quotations attributed to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and other famous figures.

Several of the quotes in West’s “Guardian of the Republic” — including one that’s also been used by President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain — have a familiar ring from frequent repetition, but have been flagged by historians as erroneous.

“Thomas Jefferson said it first: ‘A government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it away,’” West writes.

The quotation doesn’t appear in Jefferson’s writings, according to researchers at the Charlottesville, Va.-based Thomas Jefferson Foundation. But variations of it have appeared on coffee mugs and T-shirts with Jefferson’s name and have ricocheted around the Internet enough that the foundation included it in a “Spurious Quotations” list of popular sayings misattributed to the Declaration of Independence drafter and third president.

...
Obama (as a senator in 2005) and McCain (as a 2008 presidential candidate) are among those who have quoted George Washington as saying that “the willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by our nation.”

West includes that quote in his book. But the words aren’t Washington’s, according to Mary V. Thompson, a research historian with the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington.

... 

West’s book quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century French observer of America, as saying democracy “can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result being that a democracy collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

Tocqueville did see danger in big government, but the quote in West’s book “certainly” is spurious, said Harvard historian Harvey Mansfield, who translated a 2000 edition of Tocqueville’s seminal “Democracy In America.”

During the 1996 campaign, H. Ross Perot attributed the line to Scottish historian Alexander Tytler.  But as I wrote at the time, Tytler didn't say it, either.

Romney and Republican History

The GOP is a conservative party, but yesterday it nominated a former "Massachusetts moderate" whose conservative clothes still have the tags on them. Mitt Romney is no anomaly, however. He is following a well-worn path.

Of the Republican presidential nominees of the past half-century, only two (Goldwater and Reagan) have had deep roots in the conservative movement. The rest have won the nomination by accommodating conservatives. They might not have been the movement's first choice, but they moved just enough to the right to overcome or co-opt conservative challenges.

Richard Nixon set the pattern in 1968. Although he had once voiced misgivings about "Buckleyites," he courted them in the campaign, winning William Buckley's endorsement. (Goldwater also preferred Nixon to Reagan.) In his fight for the nomination, he sought the support of conservative Southerners, most notably Strom Thurmond. At least some of his rhetoric took a rightward turn: in addition to liberal Ray Price, he hired conservative speechwriters Pat Buchanan and Bill Gavin.

After Nixon's fall, Gerald Ford seemed to shift left by naming former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. But that choice was so unpopular within the party that he effectively dumped Rockefeller. Bowing to conservative critiques of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ford also acceded to platform language critical of detente.

George H.W. Bush worked hard to shore up his right flank. He went to great lengths to woo religious conservatives, winning over such figures as Jerry Falwell. That support was crucial in containing a strong challenge from Pat Robertson. He also took up economic conservatism ("Read my lips:  no new taxes.") and used the tax issue to attack Robert Dole from the right. Dole learned his lesson, and in the 1996 race, he famously said: "I'm willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that's what you want." The younger Bush also grasped the Reagan mantle, talking more about the Gipper than his own father. And four years ago, John McCain shifted ground on issues such as immigration.

For conservatives, of course, this history is sobering. Nixon and both Presidents Bush disappointed them in major ways. Would Romney be different?  And will the next nominee be an establishment Republican who gets some conservative support -- or a conservative who wins some establishment support?

Rick Warren Cancels Forum

The first edition of our textbook includes a photograph of Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren at an event with Senators John McCain and Barack Obama.  The second edition won't have an equivalent photo for 2012, as The Orange County Register explains:

Rick Warren, Saddleback Church's pastor, announced Wednesday that a civil forum planned with President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney at the church has been canceled because of what Warren saw as uncivil discourse between the two campaigns.

The forum, planned for this week, would have been two hours long, with each candidate speaking with Warren for 50 minutes. The event would have fallen during the same week when four years ago Warren hosted the first such presidential campaign forum, between then-Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. Warren said it was the 2008 forum's success among critics and pundits that led him to consider the idea again this year.

...

In an interview with the Register, Warren gave a few more details on his recent decision.

Q. You said you canceled the presidential civil forum because of the negativity and a larger issue. What is that?

A. It is the crumbling of our constitution's first guaranteed freedom: the freedom of religion. This issue is more significant and has far greater implications for America's future. People have forgotten that America was founded by people who came here to escape religious persecution. Freedom of religion is the first freedom mentioned in the Bill of Rights - before freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, and every other freedom.

And yet today, at the city, the state, and the federal levels, government bureaucrats are daily trying to limit that freedom, impose restrictions, and stifle expressions of faith on campuses, in hospitals, and in businesses. There are widespread attempts to redefine the First Amendment to simply mean "You are free to believe anything at your place of worship but you are not free to practice your conscience elsewhere."

The constitution doesn't just guarantee your freedom to worship; it guarantees you freedom from government intervention in you daily living out what you believe. That's why we've chosen to host a civil forum on religious freedom in September instead of the presidential forum. It's a fight for the constitution, not a personality.

Not the Nastiest Campaign

At Buzzfeed, Blake Zeff has some very sensible things to say about the oft-repeated claim that 2012 is the most negative campaign ever.

The truth? Not only is this not the most negative campaign ever — it’s not the most negative campaign of your lifetime, unless you happen to be three years old.

Back in 2008, when I was an Obama spokesman in the general election, and worked in the Clinton war room during the primary, we were dogged by the same cries. The Obama and McCain camps were chastised by the late David Broder for our “personal bitterness and negativism.” Cindy McCain told us we were waging the “dirtiest campaign in American history.” And John McCain was running such a “fiercely negative” campaign, we were told, that his fellow Republicans were allegedly very worried about it.

The primary was no different. People forget now, but back then the Clinton campaign was accused of mud-slinging and dividing the party so often that we started a short-lived web site called AttackTimeline.com to chronicle the incoming negative charges we constantly received from our opponents. The purpose: to prove that we, too, were victims of all this negativity, so don’t put the blame squarely on us. And this was a primary.

As noted before, the negativity of 2012 is minor compared with the Adams-Jefferson race of 1800.  Here are mock attack ads based on actual statements from the campaign:

More Politicians in the Movies

Here is a followup on an earlier post.

John McCain appeared (with Clinton strategist James Carville) in Wedding Crashers (2005):

h/t to TK

And in 2003, CNN reported on Gods and Generals:

When the movie "Gods and Generals" opened Friday, a few lawmakers had more than a passing interest in the Civil War film: They're in it.

Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, George Allen, R-Virginia and Reps. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts and Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, as well as former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, are history buffs and they were eager to leave the political stage, if only briefly, for the hot lights of Hollywood.

None of the men are likely to give stars Robert Duvall or Stephen Lang any competition, but they enjoyed their cameo roles.

"This was an opportunity to participate in making history come alive," said Byrd, a political orator who likes to sprinkle his speeches on the Senate floor with historical anecdotes and references.

Byrd appeared as a Confederate general, Allen a Confederate officer and Gramm, a Virginia delegate to the 1861 succession convention. Markey and Rohrabacher portrayed Union officers.

Here is Robert Byrd in costume, with visiting Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and director Robert Maxwell:

Religion and the Obama-Romney Contest

Gallup reports:

Mormon registered voters overwhelmingly support the candidacy of the first major-party presidential candidate of the Mormon faith, with 84% saying they would vote for Mitt Romney, compared with 13% who prefer Barack Obama. Obama, meanwhile, enjoys solid support from Jewish voters, 64% to 29%.

Gallup previously analyzed the preferences of the major religious groups in the United States. Currently, Protestants favor Romney by 52% to 40%, nonreligious voters favor Obama by 65% to 25%, and Catholics are evenly divided between the two (46% Obama, 45% Romney).

Roughly 2% of Americans identify their religious faith as Mormon, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Two percent also identify their religion as Jewish. Though relatively small in number, Jews and Mormons represent the next-largest religious faiths in the United States after Protestants (including those who identify simply as Christian) and Catholics.

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In 2008, Mormons preferred McCain to Obama by 75% to 19%. Romney's current 84% share of the Mormon vote is thus nine points better than McCain's, and five points better than the average shift from McCain to Romney among all registered voters.

Among Jews, Obama's current 64% to 29% advantage compares with a 74% to 23% advantage before the election in 2008. Thus, he is running 10 points lower among Jewish registered voters than in 2008, which is five points worse than his decline among all registered voters compared with 2008.

From the Jewish Virtual Library:




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What Oppo Looks Like

At Buzzfeed, Andrew Kaczynski reports:

A document found online by BuzzFeed appears to be John McCain's entire, 200-page opposition research file — or “book” — on Mitt Romney from 2008, the year they were bitter rivals. Segments of the book have been posted on RedState.com, but this the first time the document has been shared for public consumption in its entirety.

The Daily Caller has posted the file as a pdf.  Here is a snippet:

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post reports:

But the book doesn't quite match the thoroughness of the 500-pager on Gov. Rick Perry obtained by The Huffington Post. The Texas-sized tome was furnished by the super PAC Texans for America's Future and created by Texas Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Rotkoff.

 Who knows? It might be useful again one day.

It was originally made by Link Strategies for Perry's 2010 gubernatorial opponent Bill White (D). The book amounts to a deep dive on the governor's tenure. Its authors were prescient in their focus, providing thorough forensics of his Perry's job creation record and his personal wealth accrued through shady land deals, both of which have become notable issues in the 2012 campaign.

Some of this is old news. HuffPost has covered the land deals, and the job-creation record. And before Perry started talking about "vulture capitalism," there were stories on HuffPost -- and elsewhere -- on the governor's crony capitalism. But the book is worth a read as the best, obviously-slanted, document of the governor's decade in office. 

Rick Perry Opposition Research Book

Clergy and Campaign Money

In a number of places in our book, we mention the role of clergy as issue advocates (e.g., Martin Luther King) and elected officials (e.g., President James A. Garfield). CQ reports another political role: campaign contributor:

Like other previously untapped fundraising sources, Obama’s small-dollar juggernaut in the last election cycle also successfully passed its online collection plate among the country’s clerical class, raising $691,000 — or more than 10 percent of the past 30 years’ total — from ordained ministers, rabbis and other members of the clergy. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama also outraised GOP nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona by more than 5-to-1 among religious leaders.