Presidential Character: Week Forty-Three, The Phantom President

This blog began during the George W. Bush tenure (back under a different name), so don't be too surprised if you go back through the archives to find some of the then-current complaints I had about someone I consider (present tense) the worst President ever (although I will need to update the Labels to have the tabs more search-friendly).

Any animosity I have towards John Tyler, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Charles Logan are tempered by the distance of time and the fact that Logan's fictional (and on a show I never watched, I had to Google the name).  For the likes of LBJ and Nixon I will grant the horrors of their tenures but still allow some sympathy for tortured souls, ambitious men who tried but were left wanting (and wrecked the nation in the process).

I have more sympathy for the likes of US Grant, Herbert Hoover, Martin Van Buren, James Madison, Jimmy Carter, and Millard Fillmore.  Good men stuck in jobs they were ill-suited to serve.

Also, don't talk any smack to me about Chester A. Arthur or Harry S. Truman, or I will have to take you out back and hurt you.  I know already you'd better not be talking smack about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.  Those badasses will rise up and smack you in response...

But here I am, having to give as unbiased a review of Bush the Lesser as possible, considering this is meant to be a review of the man's Presidential Character given in the vein of Prof. James David Barber (who died in 2004, right in the midst of Bush's two terms).

So for this I ought to do some honest research: refer to others as references and use their understanding and expertise to counter-balance any bias I may have of the sonofabitch former President.

Some external research looking for others who are of a mind to review Presidential Character pointed to John Dean, he of the Watergate era, writing a review of Mitt Romney and comparing him as an Active-Negative much like he viewed Bush the Lesser:

Barber's active/positive criteria requires a "relatively high self-esteem (with) … an emphasis on rational mastery," which is not Bush. Bush no doubt loves being head of state, enjoying the pomp of his high office, as well as the politics of the presidency. Yet there is no evidence he even likes being head of the government (for it involves far more intellectual rigor than Bush enjoys). In fact, Bush is like Nixon in that he gets out of the White House every chance he has to do so.

There is an abundance of evidence (from simply watching television coverage of the seldom smiling, often annoyed, forehead-wrinkled Bush) that demonstrates that Bush reaps a "relative(ly) low emotional reward" from the job -- to quote one of Barber's active/negative criteria.

Indeed, Bush clearly fits many of the traits that Barber relies upon to define his Active/Negative presidents. For example, Bush has a "compulsive quality, as if … trying to make up for something or escape from anxiety in hard work." Consider how he has immersed himself in continuous campaigning throughout his first term, while Cheney minds the store. (notice the underline I added, we'll get back to this point later)

Problem with that is that Bush's personal traits don't consistently align with an Active-Negative.  (I also noted Mitt wasn't so much Active-Negative as Passive-Negative running out of a sense of Duty, which is why I'm wary of Dean's evaluation here)  Dean noted how the close observers saw Bush "enjoying" the perks and activities of being President and with a brush-off disregard those observations, focusing more on Bush's obvious dislike of the workload of the Presidency itself.

What Dean also ignores is the case history: Bush's background leading up to the Presidency, the man's work history as a businessman and Texas Governor.  Barber himself at least delves into such details when he wrote his evaluations.  If we do the same for Bush the Lesser, what we can glean from those descriptives is a Bush that's not really that ambitious outside of proving himself to one man: his father, Bush the Elder.

George W. talked mostly about his dad, admiringly, of course. About how GHWB had been a World War II fighter pilot who, upon graduating from Yale, left the safety and comfort of the eastern establishment for Midland and the oil works. As an aside, we also talked about W., how he, too, had gone to Yale, learned to fly fighter jets, and moved to West Texas to make it in the oil biz. He wasn’t exactly bragging, but he was letting me know that he, too, was accomplished, although he seemed well aware that his life so far was one writ small compared with his dad... (Walt Harrington)

Stories abound regarding Bush the Lesser as a failed CEO: starting up Arbusto but getting hit by the 1979 Energy Crisis; getting bought out by one energy firm before getting bought out by another in Harken Energy, getting put on the board of directors as part of the deal; questionable loans and stock selling practices while at Harken; getting into an ownership group with the Texas Rangers that itself had questionable financial issues involving stadium deals; finally working up enough political credit to run for Texas governor in 1994 and garnering a win while his (more successful at business) younger brother Jeb failed the same campaign in Florida.  Throughout all of this was a man who, while showing some ambition, did not show the self-discipline and exacting drive that a lot of other A-N types - Hoover, Johnson, Nixon - displayed in their pre-political years.

The stories also describe a George W. Bush being congenial, talkative, glad-handing, joke-making, back-slapping.  Harrington's article points out the various run-ins the writer had with the Bush family throughout both Bushes' administrations (and periods before-after), where Bush the Lesser's personality from the first meeting was "...friendly, funny, bantering, confident man, a regular guy. He was easy to like, and I liked him..." with few exceptions noted afterward.  This is not the mark of an Active-Negative (anyone calling Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon a back-slapping "life of the party" has had one drink too many, thankyouverymuch).  It is, in fact, much the mark of a Passive-Positive.

Molly Ivins - she of the hard liberal viewpoint of Texan and national politics, and someone I read from college onward (about 1992) - wrote a book during the 2000 campaign on Bush the Lesser titled Shrub: the Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.  While critical, Ivins and her co-writer Lou DuBose pointed out Bush himself had positives: he was comfortable working campaigns, having been involved in so many of his father's and that circle of friends since the 1970s; while hard Right on social issues wasn't personally hateful towards the usual targets, which made Bush successful with Hispanics and even Black voters (well, compared to other Republicans) in Texas; made friends in all the right places in Texas - corporate headquarters - and knew how to keep those friends.  That Bush the Lesser, on a personal level, was a likable guy: similar in traits to previous Pass-Pos types like Harding and Reagan.

Ivins and DuBose made note of the fact that in Texas, there's a lot more power to the state legislature than the governor's office: while Bush had an agenda - one that took care of his business and Christian allies - he had to defer often to the other branch of government.  Being a Passive-Positive makes that an easy task: he just uses his Congeniality traits to make his presence known and apply just the right kind of back-slap and handshake to make everything work.

What Ivins also noted was Bush the Lesser's utter lack of interest in actual governance: while personally active, almost hyperactive - something that got George Will to think Bush was Active-Positive, which again was a too-simplistic reading of Barber's charting system (Active doesn't mean active, it means "likes to govern") - Bush himself would get bored at meetings and did not take the time to keep up with paperwork.  While Active-Negatives may hate the job they're doing, they actually focus on that job due to their driven sense of "I Must", by using the power of the Presidency to achieve some self-resolution.  Bush never really did.

Bush's ambition for the Presidency was almost Passive-Negative out of a sense of Duty: it was what Bush the Elder did, so Bush the Lesser had to do it too.  But that single P-N instinct goes against everything else Bush demonstrates - P-Ns don't like politics at all, while Bush enjoyed and endured it - so it's clearly not his primary trait (Barber does allow for the fact that the Traits are not exclusive to one Character or another).  Passive-Positive, with that Congeniality - that obsession with being Well-Liked - is the only Presidential Character that makes the most sense.

So if Bush the Lesser was really a Passive-Positive at heart, something that Ivins points to, why was Dean so convinced that Bush was really an Active-Negative?

Because much of the Bush administration was a disaster of obsessive secrecy, reckless war-making, and abuse of powers that one regularly sees in an A-N administration.

Mind you, Passive-Positives preside over scandal-plagued tenures - Reagan's was chock-full, as was Harding's and Grant's - but for different reasons than an Active-Negative's such as Johnson or Nixon.  Pass-Pos' scandals are due more to the nature of such Presidents allowing their cronies free range to embezzle and indulge, whereas A-N's scandals stem from the President's own personal faults and obsessions.

Bush's tenure as President did include a lot of that indulging - through policy positions on massive tax cuts (not themselves scandalous as they were legal... just damaging to the federal budget because those tax cuts created massive deficits we've yet to pay off), hiring on people from his circle of friends to comfortable positions in government that they were fully unqualified to serve - but that administration also presided over such things as a secretive energy policy that never received public review, failed to work with a Congress that was even controlled by their own Party and at points outright lied to that Congress (or worse failed to testify at all), and pretty much lied to the Congress, the American People, and the world when it came to the reason for invading Iraq over "weapons of mass destruction" in dictator Saddam Hussein's "possession."

And that's not even going into the lies about the start of a torture regime during the War on Terror against Afghani, Iraqi, and other Muslim/Asian peoples.

These are the kind of crimes an Active-Negative - angry, self-serving, self-destructive, illegal - would inflict on themselves or others.  Not necessarily something in Bush the Lesser's demeanor (he would rail about the media's attacks on his father during the Elder's troubled administration, but that was not really self-serving nor self-destructive: at the end of the day Bush would deal with that same media).  Bush prided himself on being a "uniter, not a divider" and in public and in policy would act that way.

It might help to understand that a Passive-Positive President is by nature too trusting of his allies and cronies: Harding is a perfect example.  It's often noted in a Pass-Pos administration the tenor of the office defined more by an underling or group of underlings (much like Franklin Pierce's seemed more dictated by his Southern Democrat allies, and Reagan's with regards to the Iran-Contra scandal).  With that consideration, also note that during Bush the Lesser administration we had the most politically-powerful VICE President our nation ever saw in Dick Cheney.

As noted elsewhere, Vice Presidents are usually ill-remembered and isolated from the Presidencies they serve under.  They're also usually political disasters when ill-considered and the President dies/leaves office to their charge.  Before the 20th Century, the Veep's office was where political careers went to die (and a good number of Veeps did die in office, but that's another story).  Most Vice Presidents were barely involved in their President's administrations (Presidents favored their Cabinets more often): the only noteworthy Veep (before the 25th Amendment and the Cold War that conjoined it) that did work with his boss was McKinley's first Vice President Garret Hobart.  Everyone else was hidden away and only let out in times of Senatorial deadlock.

Even with the advent of the Cold War, and the necessity of a Vice President being more involved and more informed, the man working as Veep had to subsume his political ambitions and personality traits in order to work with the more dominant President.  Bush the Elder a perfect example: even with Reagan being a Passive-Positive, Bush respected the chain of command well enough to work within the administration rather than pursue his own Active-Positive interests (outside of whatever role he had in Iran-Contra).

Cheney was different.  Cheney seemed to dominate Bush the Lesser's administration the minute he was given any authority by Bush, and that even began during the 2000 campaign.  Entrusted as a family friend of his father's, Bush put Cheney in charge of finding his Vice Presidential ticket balancer.  There seemed to have been a review process but in the end the selection was... Cheney himself, which puzzled people then but makes more sense when you look at Cheney more closely.

Cheney's biography and personality fits so neatly into an Active-Negative character: aggressive, secretive, driven.  That he was there at the end of Nixon's administration highlights the influence that event had to have on Cheney's political world-view.  As Nixon believed, so too did Cheney in the idea of a "unitary executive theory" that a President must be all-powerful, all-controlling (this was also a Wilsonian stance, so you might notice an A-N trend by now) and never in the wrong (that when the President does it, it's not illegal).

This was a man who was perfectly willing to tell a fellow politician on the floor of the Senate to "go fuck yourself."  Granted, this wasn't a full-on assault with a walking cane, but certain rules of decorum apply (you're supposed to save that for the parking lot).  This was a guy who told a fellow Secretary of Treasury that "deficits don't matter (regarding more massive tax cuts that even the Secretary felt were unneeded).  This is our due."

This was a man who chaired the secretive energy policy meetings.  This was a Vice President who had his office and had his friends in the Defense Department set up a competing "investigative office" to undercut CIA intelligence that didn't fit their "Iraq Has WMDs" narrative.  This was a Veep whose Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby was indicted for his role in revealing the classified identity of a CIA agent whose husband had publicly questioned the WMD story.

This was a Vice President who used his unprecedented level of authority to ignore standard procedures on a regular basis.  When confronted by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office - the ones who handle and store classified materials on a daily basis, mind you - about refusing to turn over materials starting from 2003 into 2007, Cheney did his best to eliminate that part of the National Archives altogether.  Cheney's argument?  As Vice President serving both Executive and Legislative duties (as President of the Senate), he was exempt (the "Fourth Branch" of government argument).  Basically claiming he didn't have to answer to anybody.  Not even to the President.

What Cheney did as Vice President is one of the reasons I'm very keen on the idea of getting rid of the Vice President's office.

That Cheney was able to get away with this had a lot to do with the Passive-Positive nature of Bush the Lesser.  When other Pass-Pos types served, they rarely had an Active-Negative on Cheney's scale of ambition before.  You can discount the 19th Century Pass-Positives since during that century the VP role was disconnected from their administrations from the get-go.  Harding's Veep was a Passive-Negative (Coolidge).  Reagan's was an Active-Positive who may have wanted the authority but respected the political system to ever over-reach like that (Bush the Elder, who later on publicly questioned his old friend Cheney's arrogant behavior).  Other Active-Negatives serving as Vice President (Johnson and Nixon) served under constraining Presidents: for Nixon it was under a Passive-Negative Eisenhower whose dislike of politics would have limited the White House's powers; for Johnson it was under an Active-Positive like Kennedy who had confidence in his own administrative powers and preferred the advice of others that Johnson loathed (little brother Bobby Kennedy, for example).

Cheney's Active-Negative traits flourished because he knew in a way he'd have all the powers of the Presidency without any of the accountability (which would fall to his boss George W. Bush).

To this shadow Presidency a good amount of Bush the Lesser's woes can be laid.  While Bush himself remains complicit in a lot of the crimes committed under his administration - signing off on an unnecessary war and occupation of Iraq, signing off on a torture regime, signing off on a tax-cutting program that induced massive government deficits, allowing an alarming number of incompetent players within the Republican ranks to gain too much authority and influence that taints the party to this day - Cheney had his hands all over a lot of those programs and disasters to begin with.

The dark heart at the center of Bush the Lesser's failures is Cheney.

Next up: Gonna steal this from Sullivan:  Meep.  Meep.

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Presidential Character: Week Seventeen, A Vice President That Never Should Have Been Tapped In the First Place...

...except for the fact that President Lincoln and the Republican Party wanted to present a Union ticket in the midst of the Civil War, and so tapped a Senator in Andrew Johnson from a rebelling state (Tennessee) to fill the not-so-important job of backup pitcher Vice President.

Which, as history is so fond of pointing out, is never a good idea.  Picking a Vice President not on merit but on ticket balancing always comes back to bite ya in the ass (and rarely is that ever a good thing.  Maybe once in our history has it worked well to the nation's benefit).

I've railed against this before, in my talks about Vice Presidents being both a redundancy AND a headache in the worst of circumstances.  What happened here - with Lincoln dying on the eve of victory over the Confederacy, and Johnson promoted to the Oval Office at the beginning of a serious Reconstruction moment - should always be used as Exhibit A on getting rid Veeps and replacing them with a more Senate-oriented office.  It should certainly makes parties and Presidential candidates go with Best-Possible-Choice as Veep with regards to getting someone who complements (not contradicts, which is what most ticket-balancers are) the head of the ticket and the party.

Whereas Lincoln was "liberal" in the small-L sense - pro-government, for one thing - Andrew Johnson was more conservative.  Whereas Lincoln showed a propensity for deal-making, compromising, and maneuverability, Johnson was upfront and bull-headed.  Where Lincoln was Active-Positive, Johnson showed every trait of being Active-Negative.

That A-N trait was easy to spot: Johnson had a habit during his congressional career of making himself disliked and advocating for positions that were popular among the gentry - he supported direct election of Senators, which at the time was a radical anti-state party position - but not among the elites.  As President he quickly developed an Uncompromising reputation, which at first the Republicans in Congress thought would mean Johnson being harsh towards the rebel South.

The problem was that the Northern Republicans mis-interpreted Johnson's hatred of the Southern political machinery.  Johnson hated the oligarchs - the landed slave-owners - but not his fellow Southern whites that made up Johnson's voting base.  Worse, Johnson sought to re-secure that power base by appealing to those Southern white voters... which meant Johnson wanted the Southern state governments back up and running and also meant Johnson didn't give a rat's ass about the newly freed Blacks.

Gotta read Eric Foner's Reconstruction, a review of this era, to get more understanding of the damage Johnson did to post-Civil War American history.  Johnson during the post-war period vetoed against any federal efforts to improve freedmen rights.  He openly campaigned against financial or educational aid, claiming it would make Blacks "indolent".  He argued that aid to the Blacks meant punishing the Whites.  Rather than see the benefits of having a newly emerged voting bloc - freed Blacks - as part of a voting base that would have included moderate Whites, Johnson decided to throw all in against Blacks... basically creating a campaign method the Deep South would utilize for another 100 years (and in some parts even longer).

His veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the break with the Republican Party that had brought him into the Union ticket.  Congress overrode that veto: the first time a vetoed bill had been overridden (other veto overrides were negotiated into compromised deals).  From then on they were in full opposition... and Johnson's mishandling of the political stage - his A-N view made him arrogant enough to think he had more support across the nation than he did - led to massive Republican gains in the midterms, creating an environment where a hostile President and hostile Congress were at political war.

That Johnson was impeached should not come as a surprise: when you have an A-N President - habitually conservative by nature - opposing a technically liberal Congress - the Radical Republicans of that era were Leftist (albeit pro-business: unions were not a vogue thing for liberals yet) rather than Far Right of this era - the urge to remove the A-N President is pretty high (and given how liberal/left have pro-government leanings, relying on government rules to fix a problem is a basic instinct).  That Johnson really wasn't a Republican (echoes of Tyler) while Congress was made up of Republicans added to the likelihood.  Problem was Johnson may have been a pain-in-the-ass and a g-ddamn racist, but he wasn't as corrupt as some of the other impeachable A-Ns tend to be.  So Congress created a law they knew Johnson would break - the Tenure of Office Act - and basically dared him to break it.

Never dare an A-N President to do anything, because he will do it despite the trap.  Using the moment to get rid of a Cabinet troublemaker - Secretary of War Stanton - Johnson fired a member of his administration without getting Congressional approval.  Arguing that since the Senate had to approve Presidential nominees, the Republicans claimed they needed approval of firings as well, a right never spelled out in the Constitution.      With their excuse in place, the House voted to impeach Johnson, the first impeachment vote to pass against a President.  It then went to the Senate for what most Republicans saw as a fait accompli.

That Johnson survived the impeachment by one vote remains a major surprise in American history.  What happened were a series of other factors: Johnson's lawyers were able to argue - rather correctly - that the Tenure of Office's wording meant that Johnson could not fire his own nominated Cabinet members, and since Stanton wasn't (he was held over from Lincoln's) the law did not apply; Johnson, facing his own political demise, finally offered up concessions to the moderate Republicans that wavered their vote; and given the nature of politics (then and sadly now) there were reports of bribery (never proven).  It also helped Johnson that the potential replacement - at the time, new Vice Presidents were not installed as they would be under the 25th Amendment, it would have been the Senator Pro Tem (oldest member of the majority party) - was such a Radical Republican (Benjamin Wade was on record supporting Women's suffrage which horrified even the Radicals who supported the right of voting for Black (men)) that the moderates preferred Johnson over Wade.  One other fear that had to have been in the backs of many a Republican Senator's mind was that a successful impeachment would have broken the independence of the Executive branch: from then on any President would have been terrified of getting impeached if he didn't do what Congress - even controlled by his own party - asked.  While impeachment is a legitimate mechanism for removing from office someone who could abuse the office, there has to be a legitimate reason for doing so.  And the Tenure of Office Act wasn't legitimate (future Supreme Court rulings confirmed the law was Unconstitutional).

Johnson's remaining tenure after the impeachment was brief and relatively uneventful, due to it being an election year.  As for his impact on the nation, Johnson left a lasting legacy of racial politics that could have ended in 1865 instead of perpetuating until 1965.

Next week: A Really Bad President... But NOT for the Reasons His Critics Argued for a Century

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Changing the Senate AND Changing the Veep

I mentioned earlier I had some ideas about fixing the Senate, especially when we consider how undemocratic that body of legislature is today.  What had been a balancing force between states and regional politics has altered into a logjam of political ideology, because the number of states have grown and the population difference between large states and small now unwieldy.

At the same time, I've had some issues regarding the Vice President, that it is for all intents an archaic office with only three functions: being the tie-breaking vote for the Senate (as President of the Senate), service as replacement/back-up to the sitting President, and of course protecting the space-time continuum.

So, like all mad scientists, I figure why not solve both problems with one solution?  (either that or create a giant monster, but for that I need a government grant)

First off, let's look at the office of the Veep: why does it exist, really?  Back in the beginning of the Constitution's formation, the Vice President was the second-place runner-up for the Presidency.  The Roman concept of co-consulships had appealed to the Founders, but they figured a true executive had to be in one person, so to the winner..  The consolation prize for getting second place was getting the President of the Senate, a body that was designed for even-number membership no matter what, meaning the need for a tie-breaker vote.  The Vice-Presidency was there to establish a chain of succession in case of emergency (which would get tested by 1841), and to grant the Senate body a slightly better rank of value over the House (and the Speaker of that body).

However, party formation f-cked that idea up by 1800.  The Founders didn't count on party factions trying to run on two-person tickets to secure both the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, creating a major constitutional crisis that had to be fixed with the Twelfth Amendment.  Now, the runner-up didn't get the Senate tie-breaker seat: the President got a loadstone around his neck in the form of a Veep who had no constitutional office within his own administration while the Senate got someone who answered more to the White House than the Capitol.

The thing is, a Vice President isn't really needed.  In terms of creating a succession chain, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment already establishes the means of determining who can replace the President if death, illness, impeachment and/or criminal prosecution happens.  And it can be tweaked as needed (for example, there is an ongoing push to revamp the succession among Cabinet members to have more national-security type offices - such as the newest one Homeland Security - get priority over other Secretaries such as Education or Housing/Urban Development).  What IS needed even if a VP is no longer part of the Executive branch is a tie-breaking vote for the Senate.

What's also needed for the Senate is a means to counter the unbalanced power that the smaller populated states - such as Wyoming or Montana or Delaware - have over the larger populated states - California and Texas and New York et al.  A handful of senators from enough small states can thwart the political will of senators from larger ones: in essence, a minority of the population can completely stymie the interests of the vast majority.  While the rights of the political minorities ought to be protected, that shouldn't come at the expense of the majority... EVERY... FREAKING... TIME.

More senators elected from the larger states might help counter that: it's been suggested before, so hello Professor Larry Sabato.  Another suggestion was to make ex-Presidents into permanent standing senators representing the whole nation: while it gives former Prezes something to do, it's not exactly a democratic answer (and having a Senator Dubya or Senator Jimmy Carter doesn't look too helpful, ya)... but the idea of nationally elected senators is more promising.

Nationally-elected senators would have the appeal and support of the nation's majority of voters (meaning those residing or sharing in the values of the larger states), providing a counterbalance to those senators from smaller (or more partisan-leaning) states.  Creating these new offices would also provide a start-point for those politicians tempted to run for higher national office (ahem, President) who may not be able to appeal at their residential state's level but at the national level (for example, a moderate Republican residing in Alabama able to run, or a centrist Democrat from Vermont).

Ergo, we can do this:

• Drop the Vice President office.  Presidential campaigns are now free to pursue a life of political fulfillment without juggling the demands of party factions.
• Create electable offices for the U.S. Senate for nationwide representation.  Make it an odd-then-even number of open offices to be filled for each of the Senate election cycles: three open seats for the first cycle, two (or four) open seats for the second, and then two (or four) open seats for the third.  You end up with seven (or eleven) National Senators.
• Have it so that the incoming Senate body votes between the incoming National Senators (who will not vote, as they are the candidates) for the office of Senate President (what the VP is supposed to be).  This is where the odd total number works: the appointed Senate President does not sit on committees but presides over the body, enforces decorum, and casts any tie-breaking votes as needed.  This might also provide wacky hijinks if say the Senate body is mostly one party but the national senators from another: trying to see who gets picked as Senate leader would be fuuuuunnnny (or of course create another constitutional crisis, but then again every action has its own unplanned consequence).
• Every new incoming Senate gets to vote on the Senate President.  It's possible for that person to just serve the two years: it all depends on that person's performance and/or the makeup of the new Senate.
• Insert the Senate President into the chain of succession as part of the Twenty-fifth.  Placed below the President and above the Speaker of the House, where the VP currently has the spot.  This means whoever gets chosen by the Senate to serve as Senate President has to fulfill the office requirements (over 35, resident of the nation 14+ years, must be a natural-born citizen).
• The remaining nationally elected Senators get to sit on committees and vote as regular members of the Senate.

Viola!  The National Senators replace the office of Vice President, and nothing gets lost.  The President no longer has to worry about a Vice President that could serve as a loose cannon or represent an inter-factional force against her (or his) own interests.  The Senate gets to choose their own Senate President who got elected on his/her own terms.  And the interests of the nation's majority has a better chance of getting heard and resolved.

Add this to the other proposal of increasing the number of senators elected from the ten or fifteen most-populated states (Sabato argues for 2 additional, but I feel 1 addition fits within the election cycle), and we reduce the damage that can be done by a small-population Senator even more.

This is a do-able amendment idea that can fix a lot of what's wrong with the U.S. Senate: the other fix - getting rid of Secrets Holds and weakening if not eliminating the filibuster altogether - has to be done by the Senators themselves.

To quote the wise man: What do you think, sirs?

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Three Problems With Paul Ryan As GOP Veep

Lo and behold, post about veep selections and ye shall receive.

Mitt Romney goes and selects Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) to be his Vice Presidential ticket balance.

Why this is a problem for the Republicans in three easy observations:

1) Ryan is coming from a state that is currently polling well for Obama, with no guarantee that Ryan's selection will turn the tide.  Not to mention that Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes isn't much of a prize compared to larger electoral states like Florida, Ohio, or Pennsylvania which are considered toss-up states (although currently polling well for Obama again) and from which Romney could have tabbed more voter-friendly partners.
2) Ryan is coming from a U.S. Congress (112th on record) that is generally recognized as one of the worst Congresses in American history.  It is certainly the least popular Congress ever.  Everything people hate about Congress will reflect on the people who lead it.  And Ryan is one of the key leaders of the Republican party leadership in charge of the 112th Congress: He is chair of the House Budget Committee, responsible for pushing annual budget plans that hew closely to the party ideology (tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to social programs and education, and vague unprovable justifications that it will all create budget-balancing revenues which ten years of Bush the Lesser Economics have proven impossible).  He's been touted since 2004 as the Idea Wonk Guy for the House GOP.  You can't separate him from the Republicans' economic platform.  To put him on the main ticket this election cycle - rather than keep him in a safe Congressional seat run (which he can still do under election laws) - puts him and his economic ideas front and center for the whole party.  Which leads to...
3) Ryan's budget proposals - especially his proposals to turn Medicare into a voucher program, privatize Social Security, and cut Medicaid into little pieces - are massively unpopular, and nearly everybody who pays attention knows it.  Obama's campaign is already on the attack, and the evidence is pretty solid that a lot of populations that rely on all three major social safety net programs - the elderly, the poor, the middle class families struggling to care for their own - are going to turn against such ideas and the party backing them in a big damn hurry.  There's a reason why Romney's campaign was quick to claim that Ryan's budget plan will NOT be Romney's budget plan...  But Ryan's budget plan - and the slavish worship the wingnut base had towards both the person and the plan - was what made him Romney's pick for the Veep spot!  You can't have it both ways, people.

I'd throw in the fourth reason why Ryan is a problem pick - he's a fanboy of Ayn Rand - but that's more of a personal peeve I have towards Objectivist utopian hacks.  But you never know, a majority of Americans can come to feel the same way about Objectivism being a destructive political-economic ideology...

I'd like to think this will make it easier for voters nationwide to reject the Republicans and their tax-cut, kill-government ways.  But then there's the problem of voter suppression efforts in key swing states, and the fact that in our Citizens United world of unlimited campaign money the wealthy wingnut crowd can possibly buy this election cycle outright...  I'm still worried that Romney/Ryan could win.  And then it will be the Bush the Lesser years all over again.

For the Love of God, people.  Don't Vote Republican.

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Probably Should Get The Veep Distraction Out of the Way

There's a couple of things I want to write about Romney's floundering Presidential campaign, the one of least value ought to go first and be done with it.  Romney's quest for a Vice Presidential co-campaigner.

My earlier viewpoint about the unnecessary Veep selection process - the need of a Vice President really isn't there anymore - still stands: we have a succession process in place if anything should happen, and the Vice President in theory/practice - save for the anomaly that was the Dick Cheney regime - is pretty much a useless cog in the Executive Branch's system.  The only value of a Vice President - tie-breaker vote in the Senate - could be altered with a simple Constitutional amendment re-working the makeup of the Senate (different blog post to go in greater detail later).

But for now we're stuck with it, and so the media speculation about whom Romney should pick for "balancing the ticket" is getting into a fever pitch with the Tampa convention mere weeks away.

So who's on the short list for Romney's ticket?  And how much trouble is each possible choice?

For starters, there are a few people - Jeb Bush and Condi Rice are the most mentioned - who have very direct ties to the George W. Bush administration: Jeb as Dubya's brother, and Condi as one of Dubya's biggest personal allies.  Here's the problem: George W. Bush is still a very unpopular ex-President, and a solid majority of voters still blame Bush the Lesser for the weak economy.  If Romney picks anyone from Bush the Lesser's administration or anyone from the Bush clan, he is directly linking himself to that previous ruined regime.  Not a good idea, ergo don't expect it to happen.

Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida, gets name-dropped on a regular basis for a lot of reasons: the hope he can flip Florida from "Leans Obama" to "Leans Romney"; as a prominent Hispanic Republican, he could keep enough conservative Hispanic voters from fleeing an otherwise hostile party towards "illegals" (which keeps coming across as anti-Hispanic ranting); he's popular with the Far Right base, which doesn't like Romney (still); and he's young for a party whose leadership is visibly aging and needs someone like him to be a standard bearer by 2016.  But even Rubio has problems: he's not as popular in Florida as the GOP would hope - polling on the possibility shows no change in voter trends, so he's not going to swing this state to Mitt - and Rubio's lack of national political experience makes it harder for the Republicans to argue about Obama being "inexperienced" and "not properly vetted yet".

There's been arguments made that Romney wants to do the exact opposite of what McCain did back in 2008 when Sarah Palin was selected as Veep.  Which means two things: not taking a woman, but taking a staid white guy who is not a major boat-rocker.  Which pretty much covers a lot of Republican elected officials at the moment but pretty much narrowed down to the likes of Tim Pawlenty, Senator Rob Portman, Senator Jon Kyl, Senator John Thune, Gov. Bob McConnell, and (insert bland Congressperson from key swing state here).  Big problems with any of these choices: they won't boost the ticket with any enthusiasm, and they represent either small electoral states or states already heavily favoring Republicans (save for Portman from the key state of Ohio, which is why he's got a better chance than most).

Alternatively, there's the argument that Romney HAS to take a woman candidate to blunt the trend of women voting for Obama and the Democrats (as well as change the image of the Republicans as a bunch of stuffy old white men eager to make contraception/birth control illegal, pushing female income inequality, destroying cheaper access to health care, and other well-documented sexist actions).  That brings to the list the likes of Michele Bachmann (crazy evangelical currently spewing anti-Arab sentiment) or Jan Brewer (crazy anti-immigrant from Arizona that's giving whacked-out wingnut places like Florida and Texas a run for Teh Craziest State In America title).

Which brings up the other list of potentials: the wingnut celebrities of the GOP.  While Romney has the Republican nomination locked up, his unfavorables even within the GOP itself are too high.  That has to do with the fact that most of the Teabagger Far Right wingnuts still do not trust Romney (being a habitual flip-flopping liar is a big reason why).  The odds that Romney will have to add to his ticket someone pleasing to the Far Right - which goes against common sense as Romney NEEDS moderate/independent voters in November - are pretty high.  Which is why Bachmann, Brewer, budget-killer Paul Ryan, Rick "Do Not Google" Santorum, Herman "Mike Tyson Did a Damn Good Impersonation" Cain, Nikki "Does the GOP Really Want to Run a Candidate From an Openly Pro-Confederate State" Haley, and Chris "Anger Management" Christie are on the list.  Hell, even Donald "Bankruptcy Court" Trump and Newt "Divorce" Gingrich are possibilities at this point.

To be honest, this might be a good time for the Republican Party to start arguing the need to trade out the Vice President spot for changing the Senate make-up to have the tie-breaker vote handled by a separately elected National Senator.  Ah, SPOILERS for that constitutional amendment idea (TBD), retroactively...

Seriously, I expect Portman to be the sensible common-sense pick.  However, VP selections RARELY go the way people predict (did anyone have Dan Quayle on their radars back in 1988?  Geraldine Ferraro in 1984?  Or Spiro Agnew in 1968?) so don't be surprised if a completely-out-of-the-blue name gets selected (if it's a wingnut celebrity, start laughing and vote Democrat).

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