There are ironies in history, and Nick Calio is one of them. Mr. Calio was the Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs for George Herbert Walker Bush before he held the same position for the son. After his stint in Poppy’s administration he did what all self-respecting former assistants to the president do…he opened his own lobbying firm: O’Brien Calio. By 1998, he was listed as one of the ten most powerful lobbyists in Washington DC. It was in 1998, in the midst of the l’affaire Lewinsky, that Calio sat down for an interview with Elizabeth Drew. Ms. Drew was working on her book, The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why, which was about the breakdown of campaign finance laws and, with it, civility and competence in the nation’s capital. Elizabeth Drew is a fine author with a distinguished career, but she is in many ways the female version of David Broder. She values civility very, very highly. She asked Calio about what was happening in Washington. How had it come to this?
Calio had a couple of insights.
“The biggest changes in Washington are fundamental in the way business is done here. Certain Members of Congress don’t know that people could fight all day and go have drinks together at night. People liked each other more, they trusted each other more, and, frankly, they were able to get more done.” He said that some of the Republican members “are surprised that I have Democratic friends, which is really absurd.”
Calio was discussing cultural changes that had occurred in Washington between the late 1980’s and the present (which was the height of the Lewinsky scandal). But, what really changed was who controlled Congress. Calio makes that clear here:
Nick Calio, a Republican lobbyist, says that the Class of ’94 has mellowed “somewhat,” but “it needs to go further.” He added, “By and large the class of ninety-four needs to have a more practical understanding of how far its leadership can go within the confines of the constitutional system. And directly related to that, the class of ninety-four needs to understand what constitutes a victory in legislative and principled terms. There’s a point of view that if you just stake out your position and say it loud enough and long enough things will come your way.”
It was sound advice, as far as it went. They impeached the president but they came nowhere near removing him from office. As for Nick Calio, he would get a second chance at the job of Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs in the second Bush administration. He’d also become a member of the infamous White House Iraq Group that sold the world false intelligence prior to the invasion of Iraq. Don’t worry about Nicky, though, because he is currently “Citigroup’s Executive Vice-President for Global Government Affairs..responsible for government relations for Citigroup and all of its subsidiaries.”
Setting Calio’s career aside, his point about the nature of the Class of ’94 rings very, very true when we look at it in retrospect. That is because once they had a Republican president they, and he, set about straining “the confines of the constitutional system” and demonstrating the validity of their “point of view that if you just stake out your position and say it loud enough and long enough things will come your way.”
Take a look around today. Just in the week and a half since John McCain announced that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would be his running mate, the McCain campaign has told nineteen separate lies about Gov. Palin’s alleged opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere. It’s the neverending fib. Gov. Palin repeated the lie today during a campaign stop and they are even running political ads touting her fake opposition to the bridge in battleground states. The press keeps calling them on it, the Obama campaign keeps calling them on it, but they just don’t care.
They have a “point of view that if you just stake out your position and say it loud enough and long enough things will come your way.” And that, in a nutshell, is the kernel of truth about the Republican tactics that we’ve been facing ever since Newt Gingrich led his shock troops to victory in November of 1994. Since that time, the Republican nature has been to say whatever they want and to ignore all criticism and all fact-checking. The McCain campaign is running ads that say that Obama is going to raise everyone’s taxes. It’s not true and they don’t care.
It’s important to understand this about Republicans. We don’t have to copy their tactics to beat them, but we do have to take them into account. They will literally say anything. And they will never allow themselves to be held accountable to anything until you’ve placed them behind bars.
Since the media doesn’t do a strong enough job of calling out Republicans for their lies, and because Dems don’t have enough money to combat every lie with TV ads, it leaves us at a serious disadvantage in the structure of modern campaigns. Republicans lie and get away with it, all under the umbrella of “politics as usual”.
But there is one area where this method of campaigning can bite you in the ass — it’s called the debates.
This election is eerily similar to the 2004 election. Republicans using fear & smear, Democrats using truth and issues. In 2004 Bush was on his way to a 10 point victory until the first debate happened. At which point he had a meltdown broadcast to 60 million homes, and his poll numbers dropped about 5 points overnight and never recovered. He still won the election, Kerry could never quite catch up, but it was a lot closer as a result.
Guess what — it’s not so easy to lie about your opponent’s record when the opponent is standing across from you. It’s not so easy to distort reality when there is someone to call you on it. It’s not so easy to inflate you own record when your opponent is right there to accuse you of dishonesty.
McCain and Palin are having a great time telling lies about Obama, telling lies about their own “mavericky” records. But the debates will be a serious reality check. A SERIOUS reality check.
I don’t think this is like 1980, where Obama will get a 10 point bounce for proving himself in the debates. But I do think it will be like 2004, where he can get a nice 5 point bounce. Considering that the race will be tied when the first debate happens, that’s a pretty good thing.
As long as we never rely on debates, I agree with you. The McCain-Palin strategy needs to pivot very strongly soon, because the way they are setting it up now will be humiliating in the debates. But we should never hope that winning a debate is really winning. Bush lost every debate he participated in in 2000 and 2004, yet his polls went up after most of them.
That’s a sick, sick thing. Does poorly, makes an ass of himself, but poll numbers go up. WTF? Is this purely because of ass-kissing by the MSM pundits? Are Americans really that disengaged from reality that they LIKE the lies, bumbling and (now with Palin) T&A?
well, basically the majority of people hate anyone that can win a debate. So, winning a debate is generally a bad political move unless you can show that your opponent is truly unreliable.
Well, when the Right wins, they’re smart. When the Left wins, they’re elitist.
And on the rare occasions when the media does its job and calls out a GOPer, they’re “liberal” so it must be an attack. So when the GOP lies, they either get a pass or they get a pass.
The game is rigged.
I want to take my ball and go home.
I agree that Bush lost all of his debates, but I think the poll reactions were different in the two elections. Gore’s “changing persona” became a SNL joke in 2000, the pundits mocked him for being a smartypants, and as a result he lost much of the lead he had coming out of his convention.
In 2004, however, Bush’s numbers did NOT go up after the first two debates. In fact, after the first debate in particular, they went down. The debate performance was so bad that even Republicans had to admit it.
Bush lost the next two debates, but he won the spin war on the third one when Kerry foolishly mentioned Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter, giving the Cheney family the opening to go apeshit and call him a “bad man”. It was ridiculous, but was a lesson about avoiding any mention of someone’s family.
Obama, in his prep for the debates, should be sure not to fall into the Saddleback trap on social issues, where he sounds wishy-washy. In fact in all of his answers he should sound firm and clear, as Kerry was in the first debate. And he should also spend a few days mastering McCain’s voting record and past statements, so that he can call him out on his lies and inconsistencies. If there’s anything that will upset McCain and throw him off, it’s being called out for his dishonesty.
Are Americans really that disengaged from reality that they LIKE the lies, bumbling and (now with Palin) T&A?
It’s not so much that as it is a lot of people don’t vote on issues. They don’t sit down and make a list of the things that are affecting them and which candidate is going to do the better job of handling those things. Mostly because, well, the folks doing the voting don’t really have a clear idea of whose ideas are actually better.
Seriously – even college educated folks have problems understanding economics. And the Republicans have done, frankly, an amazing job of convincing folks that the “government isn’t solution, the government is the problem.” It’s an embedded knee-jerk response that “smaller government is good” and “low taxes are good”. It’s tough to get over that hump at all.
So during debates and stump speeches what these folks are really looking for is something else. Some glimmer that says “I should vote for that guy”. And that’s tough to pull off – I think for a lot of voters post Reagan and post Carter, the default is to vote for the Republican, so the Dem has to do the yeoman’s work to convince them otherwise.
I wouldn’t take too much away from the 2000 election, though – the 2000 election was an odd one in my experience. Times were good, there wasn’t a lot of danger, and the Republicans were running a purposely vapid campaign that really only worked because times were so good that folks could focus on the trivialities instead of anything else. They spooked Gore out of running on the Clinton record, and they lowered expectations for Bush to the point of ridiculousness.
is that it has lowered expectations for Obama and raised them for McCain. Because McCain sounded more firm, Obama had more nuance.
Now, that could also play against Obama if he doesn’t prepare properly for the debates. If he comes out sounding too nuanced, it will play into the preconceived narrative that he isn’t firm enough. McCain’s answers will all be braggadocio and soundbites, so Obama has to match him stylistically.
Obama should rewatch his debates vs. Alan Keyes, where he was quite good, very confident, humorous. If he does his homework he can crush McCain, but it’s not a sure thing.
Political campaigns have become battlefields in cultural wars between the right and the left. Only, the left doesn’t seem to realize it yet. If they don’t wake up to what is happening, they will lose the White House once again. Imagine the McCain-Palin team dealing with a resurgent Russia madder than hell at the steady encroachment of NATO on its western, northern, and southern flanks. Perhaps, it really is time to finish off that old fallout shelter.
Imagine also, the above team dealing with the problem of America in depression. Their continuous lies and character assassinations will not help in solving this economic puzzle. Brain power, creativity, persistence, analysis will be vital. I don’t see many of these qualities in the Republican camp.
Maybe, the American masses have to go through a crucible of deep suffering before they realize, once again, what the Republican party is all about: undiluted and undiminished selfishness. Its mantra is simple. Me, Me, Me. Money is the true God, and truth can be readily sacrificed. Can the United States survive such a mean and nasty philosophy. I doubt it very much.