The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Some may not be aware of such a syndrome, and no wonder… I just invented it. But it’s worth thinking about briefly – particularly on foot of this piece in Slate. For as the traditional – and almost utterly pointless – press jamboree that is the selection of the Vice Presidential candidate for the two candidates has begun to reach stratospheric heights of re-treaded analysis in the past week or so. Jack Shafer argues that the media is utterly complicit, each outlet attempting to be the first to bring the news down from the mountain, to ’scoop’ the name, but I suspect that the political import of the selection which is more useless [indeed about as useful as the latest flurry over a Zogby poll which places McCain nationally 5 points ahead of Obama. Too soon to say.].

For example the New York Times suggests that:

Mr. Obama’s advisers said they wanted to time the announcement to get maximum publicity going into the convention, after a stretch in which Mr. Obama was on vacation in Hawaii and Mr. McCain made good use of having the political stage largely to himself. Vice-presidential announcements are one of a handful of moments when the presidential candidates are given a clear grab at the public spotlight, and both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have put much thought into the timing of their announcements.

So, this may mean we will know by the time this is posted on the CLR. But note that while…

…Mr. Obama is looking to build excitement going into the convention, Mr. McCain’s aides have looked to announcing his choice right after the Democratic convention, which ends Aug. 28, a Thursday, as a way of stepping on whatever bounce Mr. Obama enjoys from his nomination.

Who on earth could McCain announce that would have sufficient ‘wow’ factor to seriously impinge on whatever news comes out of the convention. Santa Claus?

And let’s note that the convention could be a little… fraught already [particularly depending on the roll call on the floor of the Democratic Convention in the next short while going Obama's way - which it will, but, hey, these are Clinton's we're talking about, and note the plural] so that the media may be so interested in poking the entrails of the Clinton candidacy one more time that the McCain announcement is left hanging. Which may not be good news for Obama, but…

Speaking of the Clinton candidacy – on a slight tangent – the latest reprise of that makes me wonder. What is the sense in bringing forward the divisive campaign yet again. I know that sections of her support base are looking for closure and catharsis, but… isn’t this a bit like re-running the process which caused the pain in the first place? Aversion therapy of sorts, perhaps. But not necessarily the wisest course.

Anyhow, returning to the present, as distinct from the past, reading that report in the NYT the following struck me as shamefully naive:

Democrats close to the process said the ability to turn up information on the Web had made it easier for Mr. Obama’s search team — Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general — to plumb the backgrounds of prospective running mates with relatively little notice. In addition, because so many of the candidates were senators, they were required to file annual financial disclosure reports.

They’re using the internet to check backgrounds? I really hope it goes a bit deeper than that. And I’m sure it does, so perhaps someone was taking the proverbial with the NYT.

Which brings me to Hoyt Boyd syndrome. Cast your mind back to the McGovern Presidential bid in 1972 where the Democratic nominee selected Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. For eighteen days.

Eighteen days?

Sure. For an intrepid reporter, Clark Hoyt working on a profile for Knight Ridder, discovered an unusual lead. In interview with the brilliant “On The Media” from NPR Hoyt recounted how…

An anonymous caller called The Detroit Free Press, one of our newspapers, and asked to speak to John S. Knight, who was the founding father of Knight Newspapers. The operator connected the caller to John S. Knight III, his grandson, who was an editorial writing intern at The Free Press.

The caller said that he knew that Senator Eagleton had suffered from depression and had been treated with electroshock therapy on more than one occasion. And this caller was sure that the Republicans would find this out and use it in some underhanded way during the political campaign, so the caller believed it should get out immediately.

He had already noted from earlier research (or as he said: Newspaper clips in the old-fashioned envelopes are really quite revealing things.) that there were certain gaps in the record of Eagleton’s activities. So, he…

…started looking for a doctor, whose name we got from the tipster. And this doctor was no longer in practice, so it was quite difficult initially to locate the person. But I did, and, in a very nervous voice, I said, I’m Clark Hoyt from Knight Newspapers in Washington, and I want to talk to you about the time in March of 1961 when Senator Eagleton was treated with electroshock therapy at Renard Hospital in St. Louis.

The doctor looked at me in horror, and as she slammed the door in my face, she said, I can’t talk to you about that.

His bureau chief Robert S. Boyd worked on a memo which they took to the McGovern campaign. In an interesting display of – understandable – damage control the McGovern campaign strung them along until Eagleton presented himself at a press conference and announced that…

On three occasions in my life, I have voluntarily gone into hospitals as a result of nervous exhaustion and fatigue. As a younger man, I must say that I drove myself too far.

Bad enough perhaps in a context of general public incomprehension of depression, but worse in the sense of having to admit that he had shock therapy as part of his treatment.

Ironically Boyd and Hoyt had to share a car ride with Eagleton from the press conference to the airport:

Senator Eagleton was sitting in the back seat. I was next to him, asking him questions all the way to fill in the profile of him that I had originally been assigned to do. He was very gracious, answered every question, some quite uncomfortable questions. Throughout it, he chain-smoked the entire time. He was perspiring profusely. And by the end of the ride, I was soaking wet from him.

As regards the implications of their enquiries Hoyt was quite clear.

…we thought a lot about the consequences of our actions, and Bob Boyd and I have talked about it a number of times. And we always felt that it was a story that was appropriately in the public domain. We don’t know everything about Senator Eagleton’s medical history. He never released any records. He never authorized his doctors to talk publicly about his case.

But what we do know suggests that under great stress, or times right after great stress, he tended to shut down, and, on at least two occasions, he required hospitalization and the shock therapy.

It’s difficult to know whether this on the fly diagnosis was in any way fair, or accurate. Hoyt himself when asked whether Eagleton would have made a good Vice President noted that…

…I am convinced that he was a very good senator, and he was reelected twice after that. He could have been reelected from Missouri as many times as he wanted to be. He was a very effective senator. He was one of the leaders in the War Powers Act in the Vietnam era.

In private life, afterward, in St. Louis, he was a commanding figure in Missouri politics. He taught law at Washington University. He was obviously a man who had a very full and rich public career. He might have been a fine vice president, but the question really is, could he have been a good president?

The argument about him being fine as a senator, and I think it’s telling that he was re-elected twice after the Vice Presidential debacle, but not as a Vice President (or President) doesn’t really stand up, at least not to me. But surely more important again was a proper medical assessment? And perhaps in this Hoyt’s final point is sensible, because the detail was never released.

And I don’t think we really know the answer to that, because we don’t really know what the nature of his condition was, whether it was all ancient history or whether, under stress, it might have been repeated again. We just don’t know that.

Of course these days such an eventuality is most unlikely to happen, well, until I read that paragraph above from the NYT I was almost certain it was.

But, candidates are vetted exhaustively. Medical records are handed over and financial records probed. But it’s all much ado about nothing – assuming one picks a reasonably non-contentious figure with nothing untoward. Would Bill Richardson really make a huge difference to Obama, would Romney make a difference for McCain? I can think of a few names that might add a certain kudos, perhaps Al Gore. But who knows? Would he want the job again? Whereas Clinton probably does.

Mind you, if McCain was really really clever he’d pull an inverse of Putin and nominate George Bush as his running mate. Bush senior, that is. Senior.

And let’s leave it to a quote from the same piece in the NYT which actually makes perfect sense:

“Vice-presidential candidates can make a marginal difference,” said Matt Bennett, the co-director of Third Way, a Democratic advocacy group, “but they rarely matter in terms of winning a state or region — as Mike Dukakis and John Kerry found out. And a weak candidate doesn’t really drag the ticket into the drink — as George H. W. Bush found out.”

This is true. Unless the Vice Presidential candidate becomes the story.

They’ll be careful. They don’t want a November surprise. At least not in that sense.