Your fellow citizens offer food for thought, Part 2

(Comments from Washingtonpost.com's politics blogs:)

On Hillary Clinton's claim that she encountered sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996.

The fact of the matter is, Bosnia WAS a war zone when she visited, she WAS the First Lady, and they would have employed extraordinary safety precautions because there WERE reports of sniper fire in the area, and she WOULD have been whisked from the high risk airport area to a safer place.
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And then she jumped out of the plane without a parachute and threw a hand grenade at them and killed all the bad guys and was awarded a Medal of Honor by the president.
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I think that we are all blaming the wrong person here. The gullibility of the American public swallowed the line from the wire services. Editors and reporters filtered information that was never questioned by the liberal or conservative elements in America.
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You know, she is looking like karl rove in a pantsuit---not good.I'm a so sick and tired of her manipulations and out right lies during this political process. HRC will squander the good of the country all because of her enormous ego and self-denial. And now she is a "agent of change"-- lady, please.
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Clinton has shown herself to be completely amateurish in using this Bosnia trip in her campaign, or else she is utterly deluded in thinking that shots actually were fired at her. Clinton ought to have known that people would pounce on her mis-characterizations, and she ought to have known that the First Lady's trip to a war-torn Bosnia would have a paper and video trail stretching into the sunset.
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Actually, Hillary was using the little Bosnian girl, Chelsea and the President of Bosnia as "human shields" against the sniper fire.

WHAT FUN!!!

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McCain also mislead the public, saying his visit to a Bagdad market was safe, when he was protected troops and helicopters as he spent 10 minutes buying a falafal.

Let the "gravitas-off" begin...

Senators struggling up the corporate ladder

Updated March 24

President number 44 will be unprecedented. Not because he might be African American. Not because she might be woman. Not because he might be the oldest president ever. Forty-four will be only the 16th senator to become president, and only the third senator to go straight from Congress to the White House.

Richard Nixon was our last senator-turned-president. He represented California in the Senate from 1950-53 before becoming Eisenhower's vice president. He didn't become president until 1969. Kennedy, who became president in 1961, was the last to hop directly from Independence and Constitution Avenues over to Pennsylvania.

Arguably, being a senator can instill a person with a wealth of knowledge on many of the biggest issues facing our nation. So why don't senators get elected president?

Three AU professors, Candice Nelson, academic director of the Campaign Management Institute, Brian Schaffner, professor of political science and Walter Oleszek of the Congressional Research Service offered their thoughts on why there haven’t been many high legislators in the White House.

Senators play Twister on a daily basis, having to spread themselves out to deal with several problems at once. All three professors began by pointing out that senators have taken firm stands on a wide variety of issues that could later be criticized. These votes were not always cast with the good of the entire country in mind, because each senator has a specific constituency.

Of course, multitasking and vote casting are their jobs, Nelson pointed out, but she said that fact doesn't make it any easier to defend themselves come election time. Every vote is potential fodder for the opposition.

"Just think of John Kerry being criticized for flip-flopping: 'I voted for it before I voted against it,'" said Oleszek.

Schaffner thinks this actually makes it a good time for Obama to be running for president. “He doesn't have a long list of Senate votes yet that he has to defend,” said Schaffner. “Clinton, on the other hand, has spent a lot of time defending the Iraq War vote.”

There is another small, nagging problem that senators can’t avoid: Americans don’t like Congress. “Approval of Congress tends to be lower than of any other branch,” said Schaffner. “When a senator touts his or her experience in that institution, the public may not necessarily view that as a good thing.”

What experience senators do have doesn’t seem to translate well to the executive branch in the eyes of many voters.

"A senator does not have executive experience, as governors do, because a senator is just one out of 100. That makes it hard to show what they have done," said Nelson.

"Voters seem to like this quality in candidates," Oleszek said of executive experience. "Senators only manage their offices, maybe a committee if they are chair, or their campaign organization."

“Mitt Romney actually made this point several times in the Republican primary, arguing that while he had been in charge of large businesses and an entire state government, John McCain had never been in charge of anything larger than his Senate staff,” said Schaffner.

There are also problems with the bipartisan atmosphere of Congress and the black-and-white, individual race a candidate must run to get elected president.

"Senators are in a legislative environment where compromises are essential if measures are to advance. They deal in grays in order to put together winning coalitions," said Oleszek.

In Congress, several lawmakers will be "winners" on an issue that goes through. On the campaign trail, there is only one winner.

Oleszek said the candidates need to paint in bright colors, because presidential campaigns deal in contrast politics. "Senators may have a hard time adjusting to this campaign requirement," he said.

The 2008 presidential elections will be unprecedented because the electorate will have to choose between two senators. But also interesting will be the nature of the national campaign. Will two senators going head to head cancel out these unique sets of baggage, or significantly highlight them?

Fortunately for the future leader of the free world, the news is not entirely bad.

“Senators tend to represent large diverse constituencies, which helps prepare them for running a national campaign,” said Schaffner. “Senators also have typically developed a large network of donors and their national experience may provide them with more gravitas relative to a governor.”

So in the words of comedian Stephen Colbert, the presidential election is promising to be a “gravitas-off.”

Where Have All the Issues Gone?

This week I’m pulling some interesting numbers from a Feb. 28 Pew poll on the candidates’ images. Polls can be overwhelming, and there are significant clusters of people who don’t believe in their accuracy, or simply consider them meaningless. What I find of interest, however, is the illustration of American fickleness that polls give us. Polls also give us things to lodge in the backs of our minds when reading news stories.

A majority of voters, 56 percent, say that Obama has not provided enough information about his policies and plans for the country. Only 28 percent of voters said the same for Clinton.

These are curious numbers. The Issues section of Obama’s website is very detailed. There are 20 specific issue sections that can be easily downloaded as the “Blueprint for Change.” For each of those 20 issues, Obama gives specific actions he would want to implement if elected. There are still plenty of vague statements and woe-is-America lines, but most of them are accompanied by details.

Clinton’s Issues section, on the other hand – which has 14 segments – is compiled of more ambiguous titles, so you aren’t entirely sure what you are going to get when you click on a heading. For example, “Restoring America’s Standing in the World,” leads you to some vague statements about peace and reform. Most sections give specific policy proposals, while the rest only offer her beliefs and references to past actions.

So, are they not talking, is the news not reporting, or are we not listening? Out of curiosity, although I don't know how relevant this is, I took a quick look back at Washington Post articles written about these candidates since Feb. 1st. I found specific (i.e. mentioned in headline) policy-related articles on the following:

For Obama: 6 stories on Iraq, 2 on foreign policy, 2 on the economy, 2 on NAFTA, 1 on Israel, 1 on parenting tips (ha), 1 on union aid, 1 on Cuba, 1 on bilingual education, 1 on the tax code and 1 on abortion.

For Clinton: 5 stories on Iraq, 4 on the economy, 2 on foreign policy, 2 on health care, 2 on NAFTA, 1 on poverty, 1 on Cuba and 1 on immigration

Don’t forget, some of these stories are details from the debates or are rebuttals to attacks from other candidates, while others are transcripts of Q&A sessions; very few are straight issue news stories.

It’s a vicious cycle. If candidates talk too much about specific issues, voters might get bored, tune out or just forget what was said. But it seems that they can talk about other things too much, too. The question is, if half of the electorate thinks Obama doesn’t discuss policies enough, what would they say he IS talking about?