The Upside of Dodd as Obama’s VP

Douglas Burns of the Iowa Independent has posted his list of the ten people Barack Obama should consider as his pick for vice president. Atop the list: Senator Chris Dodd. Burns argues:

1. Chris Dodd. I have had the theory that Dodd would make a strong running mate for Obama should the Illinois senator get the Democratic nomination — even though this would run counter to conventional wisdom about picking a vice presidenntial candidate from a key state (Florida or Ohio) or going with a Southerner or Latino.

As I reported earlier, Dr. Steven Kraus of Carroll observed something several weeks ago at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner: Dodd, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, and Obama clearly have respect for each other.

Dodd is simply a classy senator who can answer questions with reliable competency. Yes, the Southwest likely will determine the 2008 election, and sure, a Richardson vice presidential nomination makes sense because of this. But Dodd is fluent in Spanish as I saw firsthand when Lorena Lopez of La Prensa and I conducted a joint interview with him. If Obama gets the nomination Dodd complements him in a number of ways as a running mate — including his ability to campaign in Spanish.

Dodd won’t make mistakes out there and with his reassuring white hair, the elder statesman would be a nice balance for Obama. Youth and wisdom. Age and experience.

I worked for Chris Dodd because I thought he was the best person to be President, so it’s not surprising that I think Dodd should be on the short list for Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. I think Burns raises some very good points about Dodd’s upside for Obama, but I’ll make a few more.

I’ll start with a pre-buttal of the apparent downside of Dodd for Obama. The natural hit from the Beltway punditocracy on Obama picking Dodd will be that in picking an experienced Senator, Obama has drawn attention to his inexperience. But this argument only holds if you presume that no one – not the press, not the GOP, not off-message surrogates – will highlight Obama’s relative inexperience in Washington politics and use that as a line of critique. Of course, we know that Obama qua nominee will face a heavy line of criticism for his short tenure in the Senate. Nothing he can do, including his VP pick, will change that.

Even if he were to pick a younger, more transformational VP to go along with his message of change (Kathleen Sebelius or John Edwards come to mind), you know the Beltway set will criticize his pick for not adding the “needed” balance of experience – his own Dick Cheney – to the Democratic ticket. And trust me, they won’t just be putting Obama through this wringer – any Democratic nominee will face intense scrutiny that seeks the most negative side of any decision from both the GOP and the Beltway press.

Leaving the foreseeable bunk flinging aside, here’s why I think Dodd is a good pick for Obama.

Dodd’s experience would be a tremendous asset for any of our nominees. From two and a half decades on the Foreign Relations Committee and extensive work negotiating ends to wars in Latin America and Northern Ireland, to one of the longest resumes of landmark domestic legislation with his name on it, to longtime experience monitoring the financial sector, Dodd brings tangible experience as a guy who gets things done in Washington. If a large part of Obama’s critique of DC partisanship preventing our government from getting substantive results for the good of the country, Dodd stands clearly as an example of someone who has been able to build bipartisan consensus around progressive Democratic principles. That strikes me as valuable.

A post-Cheney VP will have to redefine the role of the office (as well as reaffirm its existence as part of the executive branch). But that doesn’t mean that we need to regress to Dan Quayle contradicting school children on the spelling of “potato.” I don’t see inherent harm in structuring an administration in such a way that the other elected member of the executive branch plays a formative role in governance outside the halls of the Senate.

If I were Barack Obama, I would establish the role of his VP in advance of being elected and use it as a hammering point on the campaign trail. In the case of Dodd, the natural role would be as the person tasked with bottom lining the success of Obama’s legislative agenda. Obama and his policy team should pick what they want to get done in his first term and then hand the ball off to Vice President Dodd to get it done. Be up front about it: Dodd will quarterback Obama’s legislative agenda and he will get it done.

I think it’s an easy sell (but then again, I’m something of a partisan). In Obama’s narrative, change is a means to secure results. The Dodd campaign was largely framed around his career of getting results, so he could slot in on the back-end of the Obama message with relative ease while not taking away from the primacy of Obama’s change candidacy. In this scenario, Dodd is Obama’s answer to how he will ensure that an Obama presidency can bring change. Obama will be able to answer questions of his ability to get results in DC with extreme confidence, “What, are you kidding me? Dodd’s my guy – together we’ll get it done. I trust him and he’s extremely well respected on both sides of the aisle in DC. If you don’t think VP Dodd will get it done, you don’t know a one thing about Washington.”

In short, I agree with Burns that Dodd probably adds a tremendous amount to an Obama ticket. I’m not going to go into the comparative merits of Dodd over any other Democrat out there (though I cringe at Burns’ list including two prominent Republicans, Dick Lugar and Bobby Jindal). This is an exercise in pure political speculation.

And to preempt whatever questioning may come about my knowledge of Dodd’s future plans, I do not know if he would pursue or accept a request to be on anyone’s ticket as vice president. I do not know if he will endorse anyone or who he would endorse. I’m speaking solely for myself here.

,

Candidate Jokes

Candidates on the campaign stump regularly take shots at their opponents. Most of it’s topical and much of it is joking. It’s part of the way that you get to see how a candidate thinks about their position in a race without necessarily including the trappings of media consultants and rigid messaging. That’s not to say it doesn’t include that, but something like this from Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton and John Edwards with regard to their self-identified weaknesses is probably pretty free of David Axelrod and David Plouffe’s editing.

So I said, ‘Well, I don’t handle paper that well. You know, my desk is a mess. I need somebody to help me file and stuff all the time.’ So the other two they say uh, they say well my biggest weakness is ‘I’m just too passionate about helping poor people. I am just too impatient to bring about change in America.

If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. I could have said, ‘Well you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’

Let me put this a different way. Candidates will develop their own critiques of the race separate from the one(s) their staff and advisers want them to make. And sometimes they get in front of an audience and make them.

Given that Obama prefaced those lines with a clear indication that the anecdote was meant to be funny, ““Folks, they don’t tell you what they mean,” I’m going to guess that he was out on his own today. But who knows, it might just be that I find these remarks so genuinely funny that I don’t want to credit his advisers with cooking it up. So, has anyone seen Obama use this critique elsewhere since Monday night?

Obama, Romney, and This Progressive Moment

I’m just getting back to a mindset where I’m capable of blogging following the Dodd campaign. One of the issues that’s piqued my interest the last two days is Barack Obama’s effectively pro-Reagan comments during an editorial board meeting. Matt Stoller at Open Left has a rundown of links discussing Obama’s comments on Reagan, so I’m not going to go through them all here. One of the biggest problems that I have with Obama’s comments on Reagan is that he’s putting himself in line with the modern Republican Party’s historical canon, the media elite that bought pro-Reagan revisionism from the day he left office, and, ironically, the entire Republican presidential field.

For example, Mitt Romney was last seen tying himself closely to the legacy of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush following his victory in Michigan’s open primary (while avoiding mention of the current President Bush). He did so because Reagan presents the kind of image that Republican pols use to win over Republican base voters. Reagan is the sine qua non of contemporary Republican image making.

I tend to agree with Digby about why siddling up to Reagan is not a good thing for any Democrat, let alone the ostensibly more progressive of our two front-running presidential candidates, to do:

Reagan ran explicitly against the left(and in the process normalized the kind of indecent talk that made Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter millionaires.) Because he won big in 1984, leaders in both parties accepted this omnipotent Reagan myth and have run against liberalism ever since — and have ended up, through both commission and omission, advancing the destructive conservative policies that brought us to a place where we are debating things like torture. It would be helpful if ending the era of Democrats running against the liberal base could be part of this new progressive “trajectory.”

This is not to say that there aren’t lots of Sensible People who will look back on the Reagan era, forget all the things that made Reagan’s presidency horrible for America, and say, “Gee, Obama and Romney are right – we do need a President who will bring us together like Reagan did.” Just because they can say it about Reagan doesn’t make it true. Just because Reagan brought some people together doesn’t mean he did so in a positive way on admirable grounds.

Apparently, though, the co-opting of opposing party memes is not something only being done by Obama. Romney’s doing it too. Romney is now preaching a change for results message that Noah at The Right’s Field thinks may cause audiences to confuse him with none other than Barack Obama. Here’s Romney:

During a media availability, Romney told reporters Washington needs a leader who “will fight to make sure we resolve the issues rather than continuously look for partisan opportunities for score settling and for opportunities to link closer to lobbyists,” he said. “I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign.”

Noah notes that Romney “has recently been seen at rallies where his supporters hold up signs that say “Change Begins With Us.”

I think this is an attempt by Romney to appeal to the same collection of Sensible People who want shiny, happy politics where words don’t connect to policies and sound bites have no substantive recourse to history. “Change” is a buzz word unless it is met by substance to go along with it. I don’t trust Mitt Romney to offer one iota to of change from his Republican predecessors – even if he were competent he would not realize the sort of change he is preaching. On the other side, Obama has offered a great deal of substantive policy plans, but it would be hard for anyone to say with a straight face that these policy papers constitute substantive change from the politics engendered by any American President or political party over the last half century. I know many smart, savvy political minds that love Obama for the policy work his campaign is putting forward. Bully for Obama for winning them over on substantive grounds and for them looking to the beef of the Obama campaign and past its branding.

To circle back to Obama and Reagan, like Digby I don’t think this whole episode is a signifier that Obama is a Reaganite or a DLCer. Rather, this simply reveals him as someone who is at least occasionally out of touch with the realities of modern American politics vis a vis what our country needs and how it can be delivered.

In an email on the takeaways from the Obama/Reagan kerfuffle, HTML Mencken of Sadly, No! writes:

I reject any candidate or platform which does not explicitly rebel against current position of the Overton Window. A decent national politics rejects Reagan and Reaganism tout court; just because the Sensible Liberals in the 80s or their heirs in the DLC in the 90s didn’t do the right thing doesn’t mean that a candidate in 08 ought to be allowed to continue their tradition. The zeitgeist demands a Leftwing ascendence; the only way to do it correctly — to not waste an historical opportunity — is to proceed with a ‘bipartisanship is date-rape’ mentality; the only way to pop bubbles like Reagan’s is to stop shielding them at the same time with triangulations. Obama’s ‘postpartisan’ schtick has always struck me as rarified triangulation.

I think he’s right that we need Democrats to stand up for progressive movement values and recognize that because we are right, our leaders must stand up and steer our country. This is not the time to hold out a hand to any Republicans or independents and offer to move forward from the Bush years hand-in-hand towards a post-historical bipartisan bliss. Republicans have set the policies that have wrecked our country – from Iraq to a disastrous economy to gutted social services, Republicans are the authors of failed governance. There are culpable Democrats no doubt, but I’m less concerned about how progressive movementarians work with centrist and right-leaning Democrats than I am about ostensibly progressive Democrats rushing to embrace people who do not share their values. Now we need proud Democrats and the more proud, the better.

There is a vibrant, vital progressive movement that has arisen from the damage of the Bush years; a significant portion of that movement is taking place online. This movement can be a tremendous source of power for Democratic politicians who embrace it. To wit, Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign was sustained in the 4th quarter in large part because of the small dollar donations coming from the netroots following his committed leadership in standing against retroactive immunity for telecoms.

Just as a Republican President like George W. Bush has the ability to take a healthy, prosperous country and run it aground through endless war and class warfare via tax cuts, any Democratic President has the potential to do tremendously good things for our country because Democrats are right. When Barack Obama praises Reagan’s political skills, he misses the presence of the movement of people that will support him taking a progressive tack on governance. The country is ready and in sore need of proud Democratic leadership. It would be a crying shame if Obama failed to recognize this fact.

I don’t expect that Obama will ever agree with HTML Mencken about adopting a “bipartisanship is date rape” mentality. I don’t think that’s the worst thing in the world, because there can be types of bipartisanship that work. I have no problem with Republican legislators signing up to help pass progressive Democratic legislation. And that isn’t meant to be facetious. Pardon a second reference to the virtues of my previous employer, but Chris Dodd has made a career of bringing conservative Republicans to his side to turn progressive principles into law. The Family & Medical Leave Act, child care legislation, voting rights protections, and protecting investors form corporate malfeasance come to mind. The key in making those things happen, though, was Dodd being committed to solving a problem with a Democratic mindset.

So perhaps rather than citing Ronald Reagan, Obama should turn to his colleagues in the Senate like Dodd, Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy who have made a career of bringing Republicans over to the Democratic side of issues to build consensus in our direction and do work that actually succeeds at shifting the Overton Window to enable future legislative efforts from an increasingly progressive standpoint.

,

FISA and Attack Ads

In a post on Open Left, my colleague from the Dodd campaign, Tim Tagaris, writes about the coming FISA fight in the Senate. Tim points out the structural opposition Senator Dodd will face from Democrats within the caucus that do not agree with his opposition to FISA and do not want to see him standing up on this critically important issue. Tim wrote:

Harry Reid did a fine job in round one of the FISA fight. Maybe even a perfect job, if you consider that his job as Majority Leader is to make his “constituents” happy — in this case, those constituents are a weak-kneed caucus afraid to protect the Constitution for fear they will see their vote in a 30 second advertisement.

Via Glenn Greenwald, we learn that The Politico thinks that Dems should be scared of what Karl Rove will think of their actions on FISA. It syncs well with the quote from Wellstone I’ve included below. You can be sure that Clinton and Obama’s top strategists are having this conversation, as are Harry Reid’s, Chuck Schumer’s, Dick Durbin’s, and every other Election Before Principle Democrat. It is why we lose legislative fights. It is why we lose elections. And it is why Dan Froomkin can make a convincing case that the US Congress has not existed during the Bush years.

Both Tim’s comments and The Politico story made me think of a passage from Paul Wellstone’s The Conscience of a Liberal:

In the Senate, we come to “the well” to call out our votes, “yea” or “nay.” I could write another book about the conversations that take place in the well. One frequent topic is television attack ads. Senators are acutely aware that communications technology has become the main weapon in electoral conflict. A typical refrain is “Can you imagine what the attack ad would look like on this vote?” Quite often, this is another way of saying, “I hate voting this way, but I have no choice if I don’t want to lose my next election.” [pg. 132]

One of the things that I hope the Dodd campaign, particularly our efforts on FISA and using the Congressional power of the purse to end the war in Iraq, impressed upon people is that leadership means not worrying what the other side will say about how our Senators vote. The Republicans will always attack Democrats. They will always call us weak on defense and allies to terrorists. They will always question our patriotism. And they will always be wrong. There is no way around it.

For Democrats to worry about the next election’s attack ads is to surrender their principles now. It is to fail to do their job.

We may not have succeeded in getting Chris Dodd elected President, Tim, but I think he helped show our Party what leadership looks like – doing your job and standing up for one’s progressive principles. That should continue during next week’s expected FISA fight

Disclosure: While I was proud to work for Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign, I currently have no ties to Senator Dodd.

About This Blog

Hold Fast is a blog by Matt Browner Hamlin.

I am a progressive Movementarian — an activist, a writer, and an organizer. I was proud to work on Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign, blogging and doing netroots outreach. I now do political consulting for progressive politicians and organizations. Prior to joining the Dodd campaign, I worked for Students for a Free Tibet.

My work can also be found at Emboldened, The Right’s Field, My Left Nutmeg, The Huffington Post, and Tibet Will Be Free.

The views expressed on this site are my own and should not be construed as representative of any of my clients. Also, I no longer have any connection to Senator Dodd or any of his campaign organizations.