There\u2019s a new country that didn\u2019t exist last week, all the worry and wonder about post-Castro Cuba is now in the present tense (Linguification! It\u2019s actually in the present imperfect! No, wait, it\u2019s in the same tense that it was originally written in. In which it was written. In. Which. That. Mood. Voice. Whatev\u2019s), and a crazy military dictator has completely failed to rig a presumptively phony election in South Asia. Since anything YHB would have to say about the specifics of those events would be at best useless, I\u2019ll steer the direction into a different one, about one of YHB\u2019s pet peeves Presidential campaigns. But there is a connection, really there is.
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In the 2004 campaign, when I expressed a certain ambivalence about the candidates, liking many of them for different reasons, several people pointed me to one of the sites that asked a series of questions about policy preferences and lined up the candidates in a sort of spectrum of near-to-far from my own platform. I hate those. They came back for this campaign, and I hate them all over again. I know, I know<\/i> which candidates are to the left and which to the right. It\u2019s not a secret. It also is not how I would pick a candidate.
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And I\u2019m not just talking about electability. I do take electability into account, but that\u2019s a separate issue. I\u2019m talking about the fact that candidates are not position papers, and that we elect a person to govern, not a platform. To paraphrase Mark Schmitt, which I\u2019ve probably done a lot here, it\u2019s not what the candidate says about the issues, it\u2019s what the issues say about the candidate.
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Or more than that. Sticking for the moment with policies, if Gov. Jones has a policy that is absolutely perfect on revising intellectual property law (and wouldn\u2019t that be nice) but a crap policy on climate change preparation, and Sen. Robinson has a crap policy on IP but a fairly good policy on climate change, then Sen. Robinson wins on policy grounds because climate change is important and IP law is not<\/i>. Particularly for the President, who is not in the Legislature<\/i>. So those questionnaires that try to line people up with their policy-preference candidates would need to take into account which policies I actually care about (because some other voter may think that IP law is the more important one). And then they have to take into account which policies the candidate<\/i> actually cares about, because there\u2019s a big difference between putting out a position paper and spending political capital. When the President tells the Minority Leader that he\u2019ll put one issue on the back burner if they can get together on the other, I want it to be IP law on the back burner, not climate change.
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More important than all of those policies, though, are abilities. When the President tells the Minority Leader about this possible deal, I want that President to command the Minority Leader\u2019s attention, her sympathy, her loyalty and her respect. I don\u2019t want that President to get rolled. And when the Minority Leader can\u2019t agree to that deal, despite all that attention and respect and whatnot, I want a President who can make a better deal, a clever deal, one that doesn\u2019t<\/i> give away the store but that the Minority Leader can take back to caucus claiming some sort of victory. And then, if that doesn\u2019t work, I want a President that can ram the deal down her throat anyway.
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Does that show up in the questionnaire?
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I want a President who can seize a moment of instability to both avoid disaster and to sow the seeds of new growth. I want a President who will not necessarily be bound by her position papers, either. I want someone in the White House who can think on his feet. I want someone who has the knowledge to make judgments, and the judgment to make good ones. Also, good advisors. And the sense to take their advice. And the judgment (and knowledge) to spot the times when the advice is crap, too.
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Is that all about character? Yes, it is all about character. It\u2019s not about honesty, or authenticity, or marital fidelity, or who I would want to have a beer with if I started drinking beer with Senators and Governors. But it is about character. And we make guesses about the characters of the candidates by their actions in the past. We gauge their abilities, their priorities, and their advisors. And we come to different conclusions, which is how it is.
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Don\u2019t get me wrong. It\u2019s also important to get things right. A candidate who has great ability to implement bad policy would not get my vote. Sometimes there is a real and substantial difference between the policies of the candidates within a party, and if you think that\u2019s the case this year, and make your decision based on those policies, then that\u2019s fine. But there\u2019s more to it than that. You are not voting for a policy platform. Nobody\u2019s health care plan will be passed in the form it is on the campaign web site. Do you know what Barack Obama\u2019s Pakistan policy is? Whatever it was last week, it\u2019s worthless now. So is Hillary Clinton\u2019s. Most of their policies will be like that, come events.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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