It's Hard to be President, even on West Wing

BLOG, FEBRUARY 13, 2008
Am I the only one who had noticed the strange coincidence and eerie similarity between the situation we are facing now and the final two seasons of West Wing, which essentially the campaign to replace Bartlett as president.
In the West Wing plot, a generally moderate, McCain-like liberal Republican from a Western State (California) who is getting on in years comes out of nowhere effectively to win the nomination after being not spoken of as a candidate. In the Democrat case, a visible minority candidate comes out of nowhere and pulls of a stunning victory after a hung convention over more conventional, traditional and powerful candidates who split each other’s votes. Does this all sound familiar? Isn’t it rather haunting? The only question is will it go down the same way the original West Wing went down where the McCain figure finally ends up losing because of a nuclear reactor blow. I certainly hope that won’t be the case for McCain, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
An interesting reversal, however, it was the Democrat in the West Wing plot that at one point blatantly uses his military service and background to advance his campaign rather than the Republican. He was a pilot too.
It’s too bad McCain missed an opportunity to show he was a different politician and straight talker by voting for this stimulus package. Had he voted against it, in a stroke he would have shown himself to be far more of a conservative than anyone had thought and he would have almost certainly done a better job of showing he was a conservative in any number of flowery, high-blown speeches about how he knew Reagan when he was in diapers would have ever done to improve his credibility with conservatives. He would have railed against the Washington convention. We all thought it had been thrown out a long time ago, that Keynesian bumph that we know doesn’t work, and has never worked.
My wife says she’s never seen someone run so hard to be vice-president as Huckabee. Pickett’s, or Huckabee’s, Charge continues.
One of the saddest scenes was John King showing the blue tarps over the roofs of many houses in New Orleans, which indicates that they are still flooded out, two-and-a-half years later.
Barack Obama – "Nothing anywhere in this country that was any good has ever happened without some hope." He is also, by the way, in favour of a version of a national service idea similar to the one that the American Interest talked about.
I’d like to be ageist and say that our time is the most important time of all. Goodness knows we do live in interesting times and there are challenges and problems and issues and I hope we do rise to them. Perhaps it’s because I’m sitting here in Canada where things are relatively better at least on a fiscal level than they are in the US, but David Gergen, who just continues to astound me with his flourishes, was on AC360 on CNN with Fareed Sakaria, which shows you the wide breadth of discussion of "extreme challenges", proved to me that he is really losing it. He said that in his opinion the president in the next term was facing bigger challenges than any president since FDR. Roosevelt, who had 30% unemployment, an economy that had shrunk by about one quarter and was still shrinking, tyrannies and dictatorships of the worse sort that were killing tens of millions of their on the horizon and being led by the biggest enemies of freedom and democracy that we have ever seen with some of the most dangerous militaries that were ever arrayed. All of these things were faced by FDR. Forget about the 70’s. The Cold War. The severe recessions. The overwhelming consensus to support the worse sorts of economic ideas and panacea.