The Intelligent Conversationalist
Page 19
CASE STUDY 3. MONEY AND POWER
Of course, American political scandals have not all just been about the sex factor. One of the worst presidencies, corruptionwise, was that of the eighteenth president, Republican Ulysses S. Grant. Its 1867 Crédit Mobilier Scandal—dodgy stocks and railroads—was the first significant post–Civil War display of depravity. The administration then followed it up with the Whiskey Ring scandal, in which it emerged that cabinet members were up to tax evasion and bribery.
In modern times, the benchmark every transgression is measured against is Watergate. The suffix gate is added onto incidents on a regular basis. Indeed, if we had a dollar for every time Fox News compared something Obama had done as being the most disgraceful event “since Watergate,” we could all retire.
It is thus worth reiterating that Watergate so far has been the modern political pinnacle of deceit. Perhaps interesting to remind ourselves that Republican president Nixon didn’t actually start it himself. Five members of his reelection campaign team broke into the Democratic headquarters inside Washington, DC’s Watergate Hotel. However, in a classic case of the cover-up being worse than the crime, Nixon discovered the scandal and did everything he could to hide it. It broke him—and was the big break for many a media career. Hollywood has even immortalized the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward along with their source Deep Throat for their work uncovering the story, and also David Frost, the late, great British broadcaster who later interviewed the disgraced president.
TIP 4
Monica Lewinsky attempted to hide at the Watergate Hotel for a time at the height of her scandal. Possibly the place to go if you’re trying to make a statement, not disappear, no?
That said, the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra foray was pretty jaw-dropping. It was secretly selling arms to Iran and using the profits to fund, expressly against Congress’s wishes, the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Fourteen people faced criminal charges for the situation, including Lt. Colonel Oliver North. He was initially convicted on three felony counts in 1989, but they were to all intents and purposes overturned the following year.
This is where one bows down in admiration to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. For the separation of powers and the freedom of the press, which will be needed more than ever to keep an eye on the evolution of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA. Introduced by Democratic senator Ted Kennedy in 1977, the way it has been used by both a Republican and a Democratic president since 9/11 should cause eyebrows to be raised. Politicians across the political spectrum have to be checked and balanced.
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WISE WORDS
It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.
—Montesquieu
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SOCIAL SURVIVAL STRATEGY
Argument: “The cover-up IS always worse than the crime.”
Lob this one into a chat about someone’s naughty behavior and nobody will be able to disagree—all that’s left for you to do is take an elaborate sip of your beverage and look wise.
Crisp Fact: “It amazes me how people in glass houses are always throwing stones. Remember the big Bill Clinton critic Larry Craig, the veteran senator from Idaho, who was allegedly found up to George Michael shenanigans in an airport bathroom in 2007?”
If someone in the public eye is being attacked by the baying media mob, inevitably if any of those doing the criticizing looked in the mirror, perfection wouldn’t be gazing back. Appear sophisticated with your measured criticism; hysterical heckling is beneath you.
Pivot: “Sometimes I think sex scandals exist to keep tabloid headline writers happy. What’s your preferred news source nowadays? Still get papers, or is it all about the tablet?”
A little technology talk normally distracts anyone, since it impacts everyone. Safe terrain and also useful in helping anyone left out of a conversation back in.
CHEAT SHEET 21—ELECTIONS
BACKGROUND BRIEFING
“Government by the people” was initially a euphemistic term—when the Constitution was penned, only 10 to 16 percent of the US population got the vote. You had to be white and male and own property. Things did improve in the early 1800s. By 1810, all religious prerequisites for voting had been dropped, and by 1850, property ownership and tax requirements had been eliminated.
However, despite all this, the states do have a long history of disenfranchisement shenanigans, which you should bring up whenever someone starts talking about voter ID laws.
First, we saw literacy tests for voting to discriminate against those nontraditional Americans known as Irish-Catholic immigrants, in 1855 in Connecticut, followed by Massachusetts in 1857. Take note, Bill “Fox News” O’Reilly. Of course the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, giving former slaves the right to vote and protecting the voting rights of all adult males, really put the cat among the pigeons amongst the “traditional” fans. Cue segregation and the Jim Crow laws in the southern states of the former Confederacy, which continued all the way until Dr. Martin Luther King’s fight for civil rights and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many an institutional roadblock had appeared to prevent African-Americans from voting. There was the 1890 Mississippi literacy test, which inadvertently impacted whites too, so “grandfather” clauses were added—descendants of those who could vote before 1870 got to vote, no questions asked. Eventually SCOTUS ruled the grandfather clauses were against the Fifteenth Amendment.
It took until 1920 for women and 1924 for Native Americans to get the vote. This was all for people over the age of twenty-one, mind. It was only when American teens were being shipped off to Vietnam to die that the voting age was brought down to eighteen in 1971 with the Twenty-sixth Amendment.
At last everyone could have a stake in picking the president, who has to be an American citizen over thirty-five, resident for fourteen years within the USA, who hasn’t been elected to the Oval Office twice before. Of course, via the Constitution, American voters vote via the Electoral College.
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KEY TERM: ELECTORAL COLLEGE
• The Electoral College is a Founding Fathers compromise between Congress’s voting for the president and every “qualified” citizen voting for the president.
• Every state (and the District of Columbia) has an allocated number of Electoral College members, aka electors. There is one elector for each senator (which means two, as there are always two senators) and one for each representative (which is determined by the census’s population count).
• There is a minimum of three members, in states such as Alaska and Montana, and a maximum of fifty-four members in California.
• To win the American presidency today requires 270 votes or more, out of 538.
• You can win the electoral contest and lose the popular vote—as experienced by Al Gore in 2000. The last person that had happened to was Grover Cleveland in 1888, who lost the presidency to Benjamin Harrison.
• If no candidate gets to 270, in steps the Twelfth Amendment. The president is decided by a ballot of the House of Representatives—and for this, each state gets one vote. Although it has happened only in 1800 and 1824, pundits can get VERY excited about the possibility during campaign season. The Senate chooses the vice-president, although it has done this only once, in 1836.
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WHY IT MATTERS TODAY
Well, we are talking about the leader of the free world here. Grateful cable news producers owe millions of hours of programming to the fact that identifying him or her is such a lengthy process. But do keep this in mind: A fundamental political truth is that almost everything that “strategists” do or say doesn’t count. Most voters are not remotely impacted by political strategy—the campaigns, the speeches, the events, the punditry. Especially the punditry. One network I appeared on was always calling me a political strategist in my introduction. Of what, precisely? How to get to the nearest bar after my segme
nt was over? Elections are won because of basics such as the economy and the political cycle and whether you’d be willing to sit down and have a beer with the politician, as he or she is “authentic.”
So actually maybe the strategist label was the right one for me after all.
That being said, you will undoubtedly be dragged into a political chat. Although the presidential election is every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November—set around harvest, weather, and worship schedules—the whole process basically takes two long years.
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NOTEWORTHY NUGGET: SECRETARIES OF STATE AND THE PRESIDENCY
Serving as secretary of state between 1801 and 1841 meant you’d probably end up president—five of the six had been. This has happened only once since then, with James Buchanan in 1856.
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About two years before an election, a would-be president forms an exploratory committee. If all goes well, a candidacy is declared and the candidate campaigns in key states. Summer through to the end of the preelection year, there are primary and caucus debates. January through June of election year is primary season, in which candidates fight for the Republican or Democratic nomination. Some states have primaries; others have caucuses (a local meeting system); some have both.
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NOTEWORTHY NUGGETS: REPUBLICAN TICKETS
• The last time the Republicans won a presidential election without a Bush or a Nixon on the ticket was 1928.
• Worth noting that George H. W. Bush, aka Bush I, was one of the most qualified men to be president. Ever. Not just because he had been veep to Reagan, but because prior to that he had been DCI, director of Central Intelligence. That is to say, Bush I had been head of the CIA, had coordinated intelligence activities between all the US intelligence agencies, and had been the main intelligence advisor to the president and National Security Council.
• I have observed that half of America appears to believe that Bush II was the opposite of his father on many levels.
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Historically Iowa holds the first caucus and New Hampshire the first primary, which is why we hear about them All the Time. This means that although they are tiny, they have more influence than a larger state such as California, whose primary is later. Some pundits have even gone as far to label Iowa akin to one of the UK’s “rotten boroughs”—constituencies with tiny electorates that had disproportionate power. These were stopped by the Brits with their 1832 Reform Act. Not so by Americans yet, but there have been mutterings that ultraconservatives in Iowa may drive more mainstream candidates away, thus diminishing its impact.
Rules vary state by state, but basically if you win a state primary, the state party delegates will be on your side at the national party convention held in the summer. There are some technicalities involving unpledged delegates, or superdelegates, that some commentators get their knickers in a twist about, but normally we know who has the party’s nomination by then.
Candidates finally square up against each other, the high (or low) points of which are the much hyped and talked about debates between late September and October.
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KEY TERM: OCTOBER SURPRISE
• A news event late in a political campaign that can influence an election.
• Label appeared in 1972 with the announcement that peace was at hand in Vietnam. Helped the already favorite incumbent Nixon take every state but Massachusetts.
• A famous example is 1980 over the Iran hostage crisis. The GOP worried throughout the fall that Jimmy Carter would sort out a last-minute deal and it would give him a bump to defeat Reagan.
• Wrong to label Hurricane Sandy in 2012 an October Surprise (supposedly helped Obama as he looked presidential and Chris Christie hugged him, while Romney, well, looked out of it/touch), as it wasn’t man-made. Well, it probably was indirectly through climate change, but you know what I mean.
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In practice, not all votes are created equal and not every vote counts. Because of the Electoral College, it all depends on swing states, aka purple states, aka battleground states. Politicians basically move there on the campaign trail unless they’re going to raise money in a stinking rich state to spend on an interminable round of ads in purple-land.
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NOTEWORTHY NUGGETS: OHIO IN 2012
• “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” Ohio has the seventh most electoral votes of all states, and since 1964, it has always voted the way of the winning president. The only swing states that have more electoral votes than the Buckeye State are Pennsylvania and Florida, and they don’t have its track record.
• 219,414 political ads were run.
• Romney visited fifty-one times, Obama twenty-two.
• Final Ohio vote split: Obama 50.1 percent versus 48.2 percent for Romney.
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And then finally, thankfully, especially if you live in a swing state, the election.
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NOTEWORTHY NUGGETS: VOTES
• Russia—the candidate who receives the most votes (lately if your name’s Putin or he has your approval) wins.
• Florida’s famous disputed vote came down to 537 votes, or 0.01 percent.
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You may think that the American presidential election is a long process, but it has sped up. It used to take so long to sort out who actually had won the presidential election that up to 1937 presidents were sworn in on March 4. Now it’s noon on January 20. Which is so much warmer for an outdoor event in the Northeast.
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KEY TERM: GERRYMANDERING
• When electoral districts are set so one party has the advantage. Term has its roots from the 1812 redistricting antics of Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry and the word “salamander.”
• In 2012, Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin.
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TALKING POINTS
• Throwing in the following phrases will get you through the campaign season. As will playing drinking games every time you watch the news and a pundit utters one of them:
British Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase “A week is a long time in politics.” Utilize this regularly, as it’s so true—anything can happen to derail a politician.
“All politics are local.”
“The electorates are different in off-year cycles.” (Voters are older, whiter, and thus more Republican leaning.)
“On some levels we get the politicians we deserve.”
“Enlightened self-interest is a powerful motivator.”
“You can’t beat something with nothing. It must be about proposition, not opposition.”
“A plague on all their houses.”
“You don’t win campaigns by playing defense.”
“It’s easier to campaign than govern.”
“Wall Street likes certainty.”
“The biggest threat to the economy is Washington.”
The get-out-of-jail-free card if you want to change the subject? “Wake me up on November [the day after the presidential/midterm election]” and switch the chat to something else.
• For everyone but a second-term president, one campaign ends and the raising money and jockeying for next nominations begin.
• Americans get the worst political campaigns that money can buy.
The total amount of money spent on the 2012 elections was $7.3 billion, and 2014’s midterms were the most expensive in history, with $4 billion splurged. Politicians have to raise that money and it will have a corrosive influence. One politician’s loophole to close becomes another’s constituent’s special interest to defend.
—During the Obamacare debate, over 3,300 lobbyists registered to work on the issue. There are only 535 members of Congress. That’s six lobbyists for each member.
—Say “There is a revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street” (where the fancy lobbyists are based). Also note sagely, “Follow the money.”
• The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed “Super PACs.” Corporations and unions can spend unlimited cash on a political action committee that aims to influence voting.
• If a party’s candidates are having a competitive primary season, always proclaim:
1. The other party’s front-runner is the winner of whichever primary has just occurred. So during the 2012 election where Romney was fighting it out with Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, et al., the winner of each Republican primary was always Obama.
2. Winning a primary is completely different from winning a presidency. Candidates have to go to the extreme to win primaries and then retreat to the center, where national elections are always won.
• In general, Americans are more moderate than both Republicans and Democrats would have us believe—around 40 percent identify themselves as independents. Come election time, America’s basically a 51/49 percent country—thus the tendency for results to always be for divided government. Means gridlock? Yes, but it does prevent extremism, which is a big tribute to the Founding Fathers.
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TOPIC FOR DEBATE
• Are the Republicans in a “demographic death spiral”? In the six presidential elections since 1988, Republicans have won a majority of the vote exactly once, in 2004.
• Romney would have won the 2012 election with 501 electoral votes and 45 states … if only white men voted.