04:30 pm
The Ivory Soap Doctrine: Purity and the Vice Presidency
I think Yglesias nails the veepstakes question:
I have a hard time getting quite as worked up about [the different VP candidates]. If I were the presidential candidate, or a key adviser to the candidate, it would be crucial to me to actually sit down and talk with some of these folks about some elements of their record. Certainly with Biden, his record on issues related to credit card companies is something you’d want to talk about. With Evan Bayh, you’d want to get a general sense of how he envisioned his role as a Democrat in a very conservative state. With anyone from a farm state, I’d want to know how genuinely emotionally and intellectually invested they were in status quo farm policies. . . .
That’s not to say that people don’t deserve criticism for bad-on-the-merits votes cast as a sop to home state interests — on the contrary, it’s crucial that they receive criticism for it and that pressure exists for them to walk away from that record if they want to step into roles of national leadership — but it is worth keeping in perspective and recalling that it’ll be hard to find anyone who isn’t compromised in this regard.
The reality is that nobody out there could pass a 100 percent purity standard. The key questions, then are who a) would make the best President should something happen to Obama; b) who complements Obama’s strengths best; and c) who can achieve a and b without compromising Obama’s core principles?
In my book, the best answer right now is Sebelius. But given the latest round of frenzied speculation, I doubt that she will get it. Among those reportedly still on the list, I think Biden comes closest, despite his vote on the bankruptcy bill.
What we should keep in mind is that the Vice Presidency is just the beginning. If he wins, Obama will have to undertake similar vetting processes for other key positions. When that happens, I think it will be important to remember the challenges and pitfalls of requiring every candidate to pass the Ivory Soap “100 percent pure” standard.
The problem is that everybody supporting Obama has that one issue on which they won’t compromise — and that everyone has a different idea of what that one issue is. If Obama tries to satisfy everyone, no candidate for any position will pass. As Yglesias notes, there isn’t a politician who hasn’t compromised himself or herself in some way at some point. To that list I’d add every person who has ever served in a previous Democratic administration. That, after all, is the nature of politics.
For some, that means that Obama should go outside the usual Washington circles and choose new blood — someone who hasn’t Sold Out to The Man.
If that’s your perspective, I have two words for you: Henry Kissinger. He was the last person named to a key foreign policy position who had not previously served in a senior government post. And for those with short memories, Kissinger was, at the time of his appointment by Nixon, considered a liberal Republican and surrogate of Nelson Rockefeller.
So outsider doesn’t necessarily mean better.
I support Obama for a variety of reasons. One of the most important, however, is that he’s far more pragmatic than he is ideological. For some, that’s a weakness, and I can understand why they think that way. And some will regard my attitude as a function of my supposed Washington insider status.
But if the past eight years have taught us anything, it’s that thoughtless dogmatism almost always leads to policy disasters. Call it the Ivory Soap Doctrine: purity isn’t the same thing as cleanliness.
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