It isn’t easy to run for President, or so my reading and what I have observed on television informs me. The primary candidates are in a grind that will get even worse when one of them gets the nomination. Each of them attend four of five meetings a day at civic auditoriums, as well as in living rooms and in diners, marching in local parades, chatting with as many voters as they can, Elizabeth Warren famous for taking selfies with all comers. And, at the same time, the candidates are getting briefed on the news of the day, which means, at the moment, what is being said at the House impeachment hearings, so that they can provide instant judgments on unfolding events, those required by the journalists who trail them, the candidates knowing that any word out of place will be interpreted in the worst possible way. Also, at the same time, the candidates have to keep in touch with their donors, their staff back at headquarters and, for their own sanity, with their own families. How to manage that? It takes a lot of determination as well as a bank of stamina which few healthy people in their younger years would lay claim to, much less septuagenarians, Maybe the staff of the candidates schedule time for a snooze just so the candidate from tiredness will not lapse into a gaffe. (I remember when the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1960, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was criticized for changing into pajamas for his naps). Maybe it is just that the candidates have been at campaigns for so long that the rigors of campaigning are second nature to them.
And so here they all go into the November Democratic debate. What could any of them say that was new, that would demarcate them from the other candidates or not merely be a repetition of what they have already claimed about themselves? There is a law of diminishing returns. You are more likely to say something that will cloud your picture than you are to say something that will solidify or enhance it. You have said what you want to say about the issues and certainly don’t want to go off script and get yourself out on a limb. Will any of them be drawn into commenting on the impending impeachment? To do so would be to distract from the election, but it is the elephant in the room. Will, this evening, other candidates go after Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All Plan? They need to bolster their own position in the race and because it is an issue on which Warren seems vulnerable, having modified her plan a number of times since she announced it, Bernie, for his part, having done the smart thing by refusing to amplify what he wants to do with health insurance any more than he already has. There is therefore a lot of drama in the expectation for where the debate will go, proving one more time that politics is never dull and that a mere mortal like myself does not know how it will turn out, as has been the case ever since I first started following politics in 1948, when I heard on the radio from H. V. Kaltenborn that Truman had lost the election to Dewey. Like Harry, I just went to bed, filled with disappointment that Henry Wallace was not even going to carry New York State.
The candidates did seem crisper on the issues than they had been in previous debates. Booker and Buttigieg honed down their criticism of Warren’s Medicare for All plan so that it didn’t take them long to get out that it was complicated and would take away from people the insurance coverage that they had and liked. Tulsi is Tulsi, running against the foreign policy establishment for reasons opportunistic or not but certainly very far from the foreign policy consensus embodied by the other candidates. One opportunity to say something fresh was missed. A question was raised about whether the shouts at various rallies to “Lock him up” was an inappropriate invocation of the “Lock her up” shouts launched at Trump rallies. I suppose the questioner was trying to get at whether such inflammatory rhetoric should be out of bounds. What Bernie Sanders said instead was that it was just people expressing their well founded anger against Trump. Biden said that he would leave it up to the Attorney General to decide whether to press charges against the no longer incumbent President; he would not tell the Attorney General what to do, which was different from the way Trump dealt with his Attorney General. I had hoped that someone would reach back and cite Ford’s pardon of Nixon as the appropriate model. In this country, we just do not put defeated, even impeached, presidents, into jail. That is not suitable in a democracy. But noone wanted to calm the anger of Democrats against Trump.
As usual, the debate featured a substantive exchange on a real policy issue. The candidates at least mentioned all the key terms for a discussion of housing, a topic at the center of Democratic debate ever since whether public housing should be racially integrated was an issue in the Forties, given that some argued that it was so important that people have access to housing projects that even the issue of racial integration had to be put aside so that people could feel comfortable in the places in which they would come to reside. The candidates mentioned, the other night. the need, for affordable housing, the dangers of gentrification, the practice of red-lining, and whether renters as well as homeowners should get a tax break.
What rang out in a viewer’s ears, however, was that there was too much well practiced patter rather than a passel of fresh thing said. That may be the result of the fact that the debate was on the evening of a day filled with impeachment testimony before the House Intelligence Committee and would be followed the next day by another full day of testimony by foreign policy professionals before the same committee. The tone of the two occasions were very different, offered a very different kind of drama, and for the moment the drama of impeachment is fresher than the drama of the primary debate, though that may swing back again when the impeachment does not lead to a conviction in the Senate, at which time the voting part of the primary season will be upon us.
The dynamics of these two forms of drama are very different. In a debate, each of the candidates is out to establish distinctiveness and does so by becoming self righteous about an issue of choice, whether that is impeachment or a health plan or an ability to appeal to minority voters that had been earned, so Biden says, from his many years of support from the minority community for causes he has championed, or by Corey Booker, who must have practiced the line, that he had himself been a black voter since he was eighteen. The idea is to have short, catchy phrases to sum up an argument. May the most glib and the most ernest win the race. So viewers and commentators will strain to pick up who has been most successful at doing that job and so ingratiating his or her self with the public. The drama is that of competition. It can’t help but be a horse race with winners and losers, the commentators trying to keep score on which of the candidates seemed to shine even a little bit more. Underlying the competition, though, is their largely unspoken unanimity: they all disparage Trump, Kamala Harris picking the word “criminal” to describe him because that might seem most outspoken and also what she would come up with because she was a prosecutor. I prefer to think of him as mean and stupid, which is a lethal combination that goes far beyond any particular issue. The candidates are also unanimous in thinking that the Black vote is key to their success when i would remind them that Blacks make up less than a fifth of the nation’s population and that while Black women vote, Black turnout was low in 2016, and so not to be relied on as the margin of victory.
The drama of the impeachment hearings is quite different. The viewer is not out to judge an antagonistic competition but, to use Simmel’s distinction, to see how people perform against a common metric. It is the difference between a football game, where there is a winner who beats the other side, and a foot race, where all the competitors are racing against time. In the case of the impeachment hearing, the question is who gets us closer to the truth, the Republicans or the Democrats, each side claiming to tell the real story with more accuracy, and so we the viewers are caught up in whether Sondland was correct in saying that everybody was in on the fact that weapons were to be bartered for the announcement of an investigation into Burisma, or whether the President, as he claims, was just asking Zelensky to do the right thing and open an investigation into corruption because he knew it was the right thing to do. Evidence for one side is that there would have been nothing wrong about investigating corruption, while evidence for the other side is that the only object of corruption contemplated was the Bidens. The facts seem to be against the President and so the failure to recognize that makes the Republicans seem willfully obtuse, but that may be enough to allow the Senate to find the President not guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, Senators in our time being primarily politicians out to save their seats rather than statesmen with an eye on their legacies. The audience to the proceedings is a set of jurors trying to find the true story behind the facts presented to them rather than a set of fans each out to advocate for the candidate who one or another of the fans decide to support.
The stars of the hearings have been the witnesses, notably two women, Maria Yuvonovich and Fiona Hill. Yuvonovich was notable for not being cynical about Trump’s motives, merely wondering why, on the road to dismissing her, which she acknowledged that he had the right to do, it was necessary to smear her reputation. She was knowledgeable and cool headed, as was Hill, whose face was on the front page of the New York Times today, the coal miner’s daughter who had immigrated from the north of England and so was, as she designated herself, “a voluntary American”. Hill was outspoken about politicians not being taken in by a Russian disinformation campaign that said foreign interference in the 2016 American election stemmed from Ukraine rather than Russia, which is where the American intelligence agencies had placed it. What was clear and impressive about all the professional diplomats who appeared is that they are well trained in the ways of political science: tremendously knowledgeable about the places about which they are expert, and unwilling to make generalizations except of the safest sort, as when they would say only the blandest of things, such as that the United States wishes to further democracy in an erstwhile European country like Ukraine. They are soft spoken and firm, as women in politics have tended to be since the days of Frances Perkins, when she was Secretary of Labor under FDR, the first woman cabinet officer.
The foreign policy experts did not go into the political theory issues about why Ukraine belongs in the Western or European sphere of influence rather than in the Russian orbit, of which it had been a part for so long. Foreign service officers do not sound Machaevelian even if they are aware of the extent to which Wendy Sherman and other American envoys in the Hillary Clinton State Department had played a role in ousting the Russian backed strong man in Ukraine. It is no wonder that Putin did not want Hillary Clinton elected President. He had a grudge against her and was sure that she would be a tough adversary.
But the history of Ukrainian-American relations is neither here nor there. The takeaway from the impeachment hearings is that there are serious people among us, the foreign service officers, who are far more formidable than most of the congress people who can get away with pontificating because they take their jobs as representatives of the people far less seriously than do the people who are appointed to carry on the continuing job of diplomacy. What was to be hoped for was that congress people would take on some of their gravitas.