Maybe some of you don’t know this, but the chief of staff to the president is, in some ways, a more powerful figure than the president himself. The chief of staff has control over what the president knows and who he sees. Some of the highest members of the cabinet can muscle their way in to to see the president, but that’s about it. I suppose the intelligence briefer can tell the president whatever they want. But the chief of staff exerts a tremendous amount of power. At no time was that more true than in the last year of President Reagan’s second term, when Reagan was truly suffering with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ken Duberstein was once (1988-89) one of the most powerful men on Earth. So, it’s significant that he came out today and endorsed Barack Obama.
Duberstein flat-out does not believe that Sarah Palin has the capability or that John McCain has the judgment to be president of the United States. And he’s concerned enough about that to endorse a candidate that has very little in common ideologically with the president that Duberstein served.
Duberstein’s not all that unique in thinking this. He’s actually a little late to party. There are some grown-ups (to use one of the Village’s favorite terms) in the Grand Old Party. There are conservatives that can see beyond ideology and truly put Country First. And it’s very important that so many of them are coming out and endorsing Obama and Biden because they are signaling that the new administration has legitimacy. They are putting the lie to all the noise about Obama being a radical or mysterious or an enigma, or worse.
What this means is that a really wide swath of contemporary political actors and thinkers are going to have no problem saluting the flag and following orders under the leadership of our nation’s first black president. A big part of Obama’s job of unifying the country has already been accomplished before we even hold the election.
It’s even more important that this is the case because of all the damage McCain and Palin have done in their long-shot effort to discredit and disqualify Obama. People have been badly misinformed and needlessly biased against our next president, and a lot of negative energy has been whipped up. I don’t really know what is going to become of the rank-and-file Republican Party. I do know that, if they don’t get their Palinites under control, the GOP Establishment isn’t going to be able to get a nominee in 2012 that is acceptable to the broader public.
I have never seen a major U.S. party crash and burn like this before. It will be both interesting and frightening to watch. Looking forward, though, the Democrat Party’s tent is stretching at the seams.
