Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

David S. Broder
Washington Post
November 22, 2007

Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster whose firm has interviewed thousands of voters this year, says the attributes most of them desire in a president for 2008 can be summed up in three words: transparency, authenticity and unity.

I needed help from him in understanding the first word. But when he said it meant honesty, openness, forthrightness in expressing views, and clarity about the sources of the candidate’s support, I said that sounded right.

The other two traits were easily understandable. Authenticity means comfort in one’s own skin, a minimum of pretense or artificiality, and especially consistency and predictability on matters of principle.

The hankering for unity is also palpable and reflects the conspicuous absence of agreement – and excess of partisanship – in the contemporary political scene. I have been saying for months that voters care less whether the next president is a Democrat or a Republican than that the person moving into the Oval Office be someone who can pull the country together to face its challenges.

That is also the theme of an excellent new book by Ron Brownstein, the able political reporter who recently left the staff of the Los Angeles Times to become political director of the Atlantic Media Company, publishers of The Atlantic magazine, National Journal and The Hotline.

The book – “The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America” – is a guide to a dysfunctional political environment that has poisoned relationships between the executive and legislative branches and made this session of Congress notably acrimonious and unproductive.

Brownstein traces the problem back to the “sorting-out” process, which shuffled both parties’ membership starting in the 1960s. Congressional districts in the South that once elected conservative Democrats began electing Republicans. States bordering Canada that once elected moderate or progressive Republicans started electing Democrats.

Where each party used to have an ideological mixture, each is now more clearly defined – in opposition to the other. The result is a Republican Party that is far more universally (and stridently) conservative; and a Democratic Party whose center of gravity has moved equally far to the left.

The center has become lightly populated, and the penalties for politicians who communicate, let alone consort, across party lines have become much stiffer. The incentives are almost all to hunker down and fight, not to compromise and settle.

The congressional divisions have been heightened by President Bush’s strategic decision to govern almost entirely within his own party’s relatively narrow political base. He courted mainly core Republicans to power his two trips to the White House and he has relied almost exclusively on Republican votes in the House and Senate to sustain his program.

While giving him some notable victories, this strategy also solidified the opposition and stiffened the Democrats’ determination to oppose him at every opportunity – whatever the consequences.

But, as Brownstein notes, there has been no comparable increase in partisanship among the voters, who cling stubbornly to a common-sense, moderate conservative view – and simply want the practical problems that bother them addressed. The things the public worries about – the Iraq War, health care, energy, immigration – are not partisan problems, but national challenges.

That is why Hart puts unity up there with the other two principal desires in his distillation of the most-wanted presidential qualities.

The current field of presidential candidates does not offer much hope of finding that ideal. But Brownstein has a suggestion that could help the eventual winner: Consider a collaborative or what he calls an “interactive” approach to the presidency.

“On health care,” he writes, “a president could ask the heads of General Motors and Wal-Mart to sit with the leaders of the major health care unions and consumer groups to explore areas of agreement, and to pinpoint their remaining disagreements. On energy issues, oil and utility executives could be brought together with environmentalists and climate scientists. Such a convening style of leadership would tap the energy of voters and interest groups alike exhausted by the warfare in Washington.”

Indeed, it would. And what a cause for Thanksgiving that would be.

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
November 21, 2007

“So,” the woman asked, “how do we beat the bitch?” And Sen. John McCain laughed.

It was, he said, an “excellent” question. Yes, he went on to express respect for Hillary Clinton, to whom the woman referred. But not once while answering that question at a campaign stop in South Carolina recently did he suggest that it wasn’t appropriate to call Clinton a “bitch.”

Can you imagine if the Democratic front-runner were Sen. Joe Lieberman and the woman said, “So, how do we beat this Hebe?”

Can you imagine if it were Gov. Bill Richardson and the woman said, “So, how do we beat this spic?”

Can you imagine if it were Sen. Barack Obama and the woman said, “So, how do we beat this coon?”

I guarantee you, McCain would not have laughed and if he had, we would now be writing his political epitaph. But the woman asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” and McCain did laugh and now shrugs off any suggestion that he should have done more.

He’s wrong.

I get that many people don’t like Clinton. I don’t like her much myself, and my reasons echo the consensus. She seems cold, calculated, brittle.

Here’s the thing, though. I find that I can’t name a single female national political figure I do like – not respect, not agree with, but “like.” Oh, I can name you many men who, their politics aside, strike me as likable: McCain, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, even cranky old Bob Dole.

But women? Not so much. Nancy Pelosi, Janet Reno, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright … I cannot see myself – we are speaking metaphorically here – cuddling up to any of them. They all seem formidable, off-putting, cold.

Which suggests the problem here is not so much them as me. And, if I may be so bold, we. As in, we seem unable to synthesize the idea that a woman can be smart, businesslike, demanding, capable, in charge, and yet also, warm.

Consider one of the many anti-Hillary smears now circulating online. It purports to be a compendium of profane, ill-tempered tirades she has unleashed upon subordinates. Your first thought is, what an unlikable person. Your second is, or should be, wait a minute. Does George Bush never use potty language? Was Bill Clinton never brusque? Does Dick Cheney always say thank you and please?

But it’s different, isn’t it, because she’s a woman? With the men, toughness reads as leadership, authority, getting things done. With her it reads as “bitch.” There is a sense – and even women buy into this – that a woman who climbs too high in male-dominated spheres violates something fundamental to our understanding of what it means to be a woman. Indeed, that she gives up any claim upon femininity itself.

Nor is that assessment only perception. To the contrary, it has been quantified in a number of scholarly studies and papers. For example, in “Formal and Informal Discrimination Against Women At Work: The Role of Gender Stereotypes,” a research paper published this year, authors Brian Welle and Madeline E. Heilman report that the woman who succeeds at what has traditionally been men’s work – and what is a presidential campaign if not that? – risks being seen as “hostile, abrasive, pushy, manipulative and generally unlikeable.”

Sound like anyone you know?

We demand certain “feminine” traits from women – nurturing, caring, submission – and the woman in whom those traits are either not present or subordinated to her drive, ambition and competence will pay a social price.

“How do we beat the bitch?” the woman asks. She asked it without blinking, without a second thought, righteously. And John McCain laughed.

That’s telling. The ostensible purpose of a campaign is to reveal the candidate. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it seems, is revealing a whole lot more.