Tom Keane

The Case For Patience In Naming A Successor For Scalia

Nowhere does the partisan divide seem more apparent than in the aftermath of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. A unified Republican party says it will do anything it can to stop any nomination from President Barack Obama. Given that the GOP controls the Senate, it seems likely it can make good on that pledge. Democrats in turn are in a fury, piously seeing themselves as upholding the Constitution while Republicans are abdicating their responsibilities and playing political games.

Does anyone doubt, though, that if the situation were reversed that it would be the Democrats pushing for a delay? If, hypothetically, a Republican were in his final year as president, the Supreme Court was narrowly divided, and the Democrats controlled the Senate, you can be certain Democrats would be as determined as the GOP is right now to delay a new Supreme Court pick. In other words, what we’re seeing is typical and predictable politics — with one twist: Maybe this is a battle where, by losing, the Democrats actually win.

This year there are a number of cases awaiting the Court’s decision that will — thanks to Scalia’s passing — probably break in Democrats’ favor. One is a California case challenging the right of public labor unions to collect dues from non-members. The union’s side was heading for an almost certain loss. Now, with a likely 4-4 tie vote, the lower court’s decision will be upheld — and that decision favored the unions. Another case is from those who disagree with the contraceptive provisions of Obamacare. Again, it looked as if those objectors would win 5-4. No longer.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Scalia’s vote would have supported Democrats’ positions in any of the hotly-disputed cases before the Court this term. Ties sometimes help and (given the way Scalia would have voted) they certainly won’t hurt. Too be sure, things may get confusing and messy, since the whole idea of the Court is to settle disputes. Still, for the time-being, Democrats are somewhat in the catbird’s seat.

Of course, if they had their druthers, Democrats would prefer to have a new justice more in tune with their ideology, which is why we’re seeing the push for Obama place a name in nomination. Practically speaking, however, Obama’s position is a weak one. If he were to have any hope at all of getting a candidate past the Republican-controlled Senate, he’d have no choice but to propose a moderate — or even one that on occasion leans rightwards. That’s why the names being bandied about include those such as Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (who, at 81, is two years older than the man he would replace) or Merrick Garland, who sits on the Court for Appeals of the District of Columbia. Hatch is widely respected (and was one of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s best friends) and Garland too is well-liked across the aisle. However, neither man — or others who might make it through the Senate gauntlet — would be a certain vote on issues about which Democrats care most.

So why not wait?

Most current polling suggests that a Democrat will win in November and, Bernie Sanders’s recent surge notwithstanding, that Democrat will likely be Hillary Clinton. Moreover, many Republicans fear that an extreme nominee such as Donald Trump or Ted Cruz might cause more moderate voters to also reject GOP House and Senatorial candidates, possibly shifting the balance of power in both bodies. With a freshly won election and the possibility of picking up some seats in the Senate, the new president would be in a strong position to nominate a candidate more in keeping with Democrats’ values. Indeed, the argument the Republicans are making — that the American people should have a voice in selecting the next Supreme Court justice — would now be turned against them. A President Clinton would have exactly such a mandate and the deference generally accorded a newly elected leader would help with any confirmation hearings.

Granted, it’s a calculated risk. The Democrats could lose in November, in which case we’d be back to a court that looks a lot like it did when Scalia was alive. That prospect, however, becomes one of the best arguments Democrats have this fall to make their case with voters and eventually get the Supreme Court justice they want.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on February 17, 2016

Inside The Mind Of Michael Bloomberg

You’re Michael Bloomberg, and right now your mind is a swirl of emotions: horror, anticipation, excitement.

The nation doesn’t necessarily follow New Hampshire’s lead, of course. There is nothing inevitable about Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton’s southern firewall may hold. Sanders’s Vermont politics may get little traction in more heterogeneous states. John Kasich (Democrats’ favorite Republican) or even Jeb Bush could surge as the rest of the GOP field culls itself. And there is always a sense that — even though his past gaffes amounted to nothing — Trump is just one sentence, one ill-timed curse, away from self-immolation.

No question, much of the game remains to be played. In this topsy-turvy year, anything can happen. Trump was dead after Iowa; now he’s some sort of immortal Lazarus. And as invincible as Sanders looks right now, pundits might be writing his epitaph in a couple of weeks.

Still, sports teams ahead in the first inning or first quarter win more often than not. Neither Sanders nor Trump would change places with their opponents. For both men, the prospects of a convention win seem tantalizingly possible.

You’re Michael Bloomberg and those prospects horrify. There is now a real chance that one nominee will be a lunatic while the other a socialist (and from your own point of view, the latter equates to the former). This, of course, is the fundamental insanity of 2016. On the right, a party that calls itself conservative appear poised to elect a man who personal disposition, temperament and politics are anything but. Trump brags about his sexual conquests, contemplating, even, whether he might date his daughter. He is a loud-mouthed, mean-spirited, crude, blustering bully. And his policy prescriptions, if one could even call them that, are grounded in little more than irrational rage. How will the Republicans ever live this down?

And Sanders might be worse. Democrats have spent years trying to persuade voters they buy into America’s free-market, entrepreneurial economic system. Their regulations and social programs weren’t a repudiation of that system, they would argue, but rather efforts to rein in the market’s excesses — a la Franklin Roosevelt, to save capitalism from itself.

But Sanders, you know, is no real Democrat: He’s a socialist and, the illusions of the Facebook generation notwithstanding, that’s not simply a word for someone who wants us all to be connected. Socialists reject capitalism, they reject markets, they reject entrepreneurs. It’s the state — not individuals — who they think should own and control the means of production. As Glenn Beck once taunted, but with Sanders now looks increasingly true, “There is no difference between a progressive and a socialist.” How will the Democrats ever live that down?

You’re Michael Bloomberg and the prospects from both parties appall. In an election where there are only two choices, both of them awful, the nation seems headed for disaster.

You’re Michael Bloomberg and the anticipation builds. You know you aren’t alone in your qualms. People are calling. There are cries for a new paradigm, an independent candidate who can appeal to the anti-establishment voters whose anger succors Sanders and Trump. And they all believe that new paradigm can be found in you, the man from Medford, Mass.

You’re Michael Bloomberg and you know you can do it. You offer one thing neither Trump nor Sanders possess: A sturdy and rational approach to making government work. Your years running New York were a management consultant’s dream. You brought in top-notch staff. Your office was the “bullpen,” a freewheeling open space of transparency, fairness and creativity. You weren’t partisan; you were a problem solver. Sure, you had your issues — Big Soda, guns — but they weren’t ideologically grounded. They were just practical attempts to fix things.

You’re Michael Bloomberg and you’re excited. You know the history, you know the data.  Third party candidacies have been fool’s games. But things have been getting dull of late. It’s not enough to have made multiple billions. It’s not enough to have been three-term mayor. But the presidency, and with it the chance to save America from these two clowns? Like a siren song, the thrill of being the nation’s hero beckons.

You’re Michael Bloomberg, and it’s decision time.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on February 11, 2016

The Clinton Way

Before the Iowa returns were even final, Hillary Clinton took to the stage and declared victory. It was an audacious move, one that infuriated supporters of Bernie Sanders and got some pundits huffing about “spiking the ball on the five-yard line” (that from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe“). It was also politically brilliant. And if it seems somewhat familiar, it should: it comes straight out of the Clinton political playbook circa 1992 — and it’s a ploy we may well see again come next Tuesday.

In 1992, Hillary’s husband, Bill, was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, desperate for a win in New Hampshire that would let him stand out in a corded field. Early polls looked good. A mid-January survey conducted by the Boston Globe, for example, put Clinton at 29 percent while Paul Tsongas, the former U.S. senator from neighboring Massachusetts, was at just 17 percent, nearly tied with the 16 percent going to Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey.

But then came the so-called “bimbo eruptions.” Stories about Clinton’s numerous alleged extramarital affairs surfaced. His numbers plummeted. The Clintons — husband and wife — desperately fought back, including an agonizing and embarrassing appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” immediately following the Super Bowl.

It was to no avail. Tsongas surged ahead and won New Hampshire with 33 percent of the vote. Clinton was far behind, at just 25 percent.

Clinton’s run for the nomination should have been over at that point, but in an extraordinary display of hubris, he took to the airwaves and — under the logic that he didn’t lose by as much as he might have — declared himself “the comeback kid.” By the time Tsongas finally made an appearance, the storyline had been set: Clinton had somehow pulled off an upset. The rest, as they say, is history (although not a smooth history; Clinton didn’t clinch the nomination until the June 2nd primary in California).

What Hillary Clinton did in Iowa was a replay of 1992. In truth, it was Sanders who “won” on Monday. In the months leading up to the caucuses, Clinton had been well ahead in Iowa. At the beginning of this year, for example, she was besting Sanders 50 percent to 38 percent, according to Real Clear Politics’ averaging of polls. Even in the closing days before voting began, Clinton still had a lead of 4 points. The final result — Clinton had a margin of just 0.3 — was basically a tie. Sanders was right when he said he had been successful in taking “on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America.” The caucus results were an enormous comeuppance for Clinton, an humiliation even.

But with her claim of victory — not tie — Clinton was rewriting the narrative. As the Clintons know well, politics is about intangibles such as momentum, expectations, perceptions and morale. By getting out in front of the story, Clinton was turning the lemons of Iowa into some sort of lemonade.

It will be interesting to see how that lemonade goes down in the Granite State.

There’s little question that Clinton will lose the popular vote in New Hampshire to Sanders. The real question is, by how much? A UMass Lowell/7 News polls conducted at the end of January showed Sanders with an overwhelming lead of 33 over Clinton. If the numbers on Tuesday match that prediction, then there’s probably little that the Clinton camp can do to put lipstick on the pig. They’ll declare the results meaningless, chalking up Sanders results as home-field advantage (since Vermont is adjacent to New Hampshire) and pointing out — quite correctly — that the white liberal demographics of the state’s Democrats hardly reflect the demographics of the nation. Bill Belichick-like, they’ll resolutely turn their eyes to the next contest: “We’re on to South Carolina.”

But should Clinton lose by less than 33 points? Don’t be surprised to see her on-screen, just in time for the 11 o’clock news, claiming that this time she’s the “comeback kid” or some variant thereof. Yes, Sanders will have tied her in Iowa and beaten her in New Hampshire, meaning that he’s the one with the most delegates. But Hillary will claim momentum nonetheless and roar on into Super Tuesday. Will it work? Most likely. It’s the Clinton way, tested and true.

This column was first published by Cognoscenti on February 4, 2016