We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time. - Vince Lombardi

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

So what does this say about someone like Hillary?

Carter gets judged on his persona, both on the campaign trail and in office; Reagan gets judged half on persona, half on policy; Clinton and Bush, meanwhile, get judged on their approach to management and organization. To see how weak this sort of argument is, consider that one need only rearrange the qualities that are being judged to reach precisely the opposite conclusion - that Presidents’ campaigns are a poor guide to how they’ll govern. After all, Reagan’s ‘80 campaign was badly mismanaged - he fired nearly all his senior staff after losing the Iowa caucuses, remember - yet once in office he was able to run circles around the Congressional Democrats, and match the canny Gorbachev at brinksmanship. George H.W. Bush won the Presidency by playing the hard-nosed partisan on the campaign trail, but he ended up alienating GOP true believers by cutting deals with Democrats from the White House. Bill Clinton ran as a centrist New Democrat in 1992 but tried to govern as a liberal (gays in the military, Hillarycare), before the ‘94 debacle forced him back to the middle. And George W. Bush ran two campaigns that were notable for their ruthless competence - yet competence of any sort has been strikingly absent from his administration’s governance.

Now, an Obama presidency might actually be competent whereas a McCain presidency might be mediocre. Clinton seems to embody the worst of both worlds-an astonishingly bad campaign combined with the arrogance of a George W. Bush. Carter, for all his suckiness, was probably the last real “Outsider” we had as President and was at least honest, if hopelessly naive. Bush talked like an outsider in 2000 but became the ultimate Man in the Bubble. Presidencies are defined more by the personalities of those in office than by their campaigning, in which case either way I fear we could be disappointed once again.