I want to take a moment to thank you for your continued interest in my political commentary and analysis. June was a banner month for NHPoliticalCapital.com, with a record number of visits to the website. I hope you will stay with me through the general election in November and beyond, as we have so much to discuss, and the best is yet to come (including a few surprises). Keep your emails, comment postings, and website feedback coming, as I always appreciate hearing from you, even when we disagree.

 

In the meantime, I will be away from the website for a few days, in order to celebrate the holiday with family, and will return on Tuesday, July 8^th with new content for you. Have a safe and happy Fourth of July weekend. - Dean

On Monday morning, I will be a guest on New Hampshire Public Radio’s The Exchange, in order to do some political handicapping of potential Democratic and Republican vice presidential nominees, a favorite summer pastime of political junkies everywhere. You can listen to the show live at 9 a.m. here (lower left).

Several people have asked me whether Friday’s rally in Unity, New Hampshire increases the likelihood that Barack Obama will choose Hillary Clinton to be his running mate later this summer. Taking up this very same issue on Saturday, New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin made the case that Clinton’s vice presidential stock is now on the rise as a result of the event. It is true that in the weeks since her infamous non-concession speech, Clinton has seemed genuinely gracious in her willingness to cede the nomination spotlight to Obama, and both she and Obama appeared quite comfortable with each other at the Unity event. But my sense is that ultimately it won’t have a big impact on the Obama campaign’s calculus for selecting the vice presidential nominee.

 

Given the divisiveness of the primary contest between Clinton and Obama, the Obama campaign must be quite pleased by the speed with which the Democratic Party has unified around its nominee. With polling data showing women moving to support Obama more quickly than expected, and Obama holding solid leads over McCain in battleground states previously dominated by Clinton, the Obama campaign really does not have any more incentive to offer the spot to Clinton now than it did when her supporters were demanding it much more loudly in early June. As Goodwin notes in his piece, all of this could quickly change, but the Obama campaign seems quite comfortable for the moment in charting its own course for the general election.

Whenever political observers talk about potential Republican vice presidential picks, one of the first names to roll off of their tongues is Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. His Midwestern working-class roots, personal connection to the evangelical community, and long-standing loyalty to John McCain, have made him a frequent object of vice presidential speculation. So I was excited to get a close look at him on Sunday, during his guest appearance as a McCain surrogate on This Week (video: Which candidate is walking the walk?). My overall reaction to his performance is that Pawlenty would be a good option for McCain, but is not necessarily a must-pick candidate. Pawlenty did a solid job of defending McCain as someone who has been willing to take strong stands on the issues, even when it was politically unpopular to do so, while also depicting Barack Obama as being unwilling to buck the liberal wing of is party.

 

But Pawlenty had the misfortune of being paired on the show with former Clinton aide and current Illinois Congressman Rahm Emmanuel. If you are unfamiliar with Emmanuel, he has been variously described as pugilistic, unrelenting, and eviscerating, and as someone who practices a take-no-prisoners style of politics. And Emmanuel did not disappoint on Sunday, professing his longtime friendship for Pawlenty, while simultaneously noting how poor Minnesota's economic performance has been in recent years. Once Emmanuel got on a roll, Pawlenty seemed curiously passive, which is not a helpful trait given the attack dog role traditionally reserved for the vice presidential nominee. In 2000, Joe Lieberman was famously criticized for being too friendly with Dick Cheney, during their vice presidential debate. If Governor Pawlenty wants to have a shot at joining the Republican ticket, he will need to show that he is one soft-spoken Midwesterner who also packs a good counterpunch.

You can catch me this Sunday morning as a guest on WMUR-TV’s Close Up (10 a.m., Ch. 9). I will be joining a roundtable discussion of the impact that campaign ads are likely to have on several key races this fall.

In a post last week, I suggested that John McCain might find it difficult to balance his long-standing identity as a maverick politician with his new role as leader of the Republican Party. While his reformist message resonated with many New Hampshire voters in the 2000 and 2008 presidential primaries, McCain now faces a countervailing pressure to rally his party’s conservative base behind his nomination. Viewed from the perspective of national strategy, there may be some logic to the idea of a rightward shift by McCain, especially in light of new data indicating that he still has some work to do with core partisans. Given the reports of McCain’s meeting with prominent social conservatives yesterday, the presumptive nominee appears to be moving to address this concern.

 

It is true that close elections can come down to a competitive mobilization of core partisan bases, but they can also rest on an ability to attract the support of moderate partisans and independent voters clustered in the center of the ideological spectrum. While it is always difficult to predict which dynamic will dominate a particular election cycle, if 2008 turns out to be about the middle, then John McCain may wish he spent less time demonstrating he is a social conservative and more time showing he is still the straight-talking iconoclast who has won not one, but two New Hampshire Primaries.

This morning I participated in a lively hour of discussion on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show. I joined host Kerri Miller and guest Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, for a conversation about what the imminent rapprochement between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Unity, New Hampshire tomorrow might mean for the Democratic Party and its women voters in the general election. You can listen to the show here, by clicking on the audio link in the upper right corner of the webpage.

While Hillary Clinton now seems firmly committed to the idea of campaigning for Barack Obama, we are still waiting to see what role Bill Clinton will play in the general election. The precise nature of his involvement may depend on whether Senator Clinton is offered the vice presidential slot on the Democratic ticket, but the brief statement of support recently issued by President Clinton’s spokesman was sufficiently vague to keep political observers guessing. With the question still hanging out there, Senator Clinton felt compelled today to further underscore her husband’s willingness to work for Obama’s election.

 

While some reporting suggests that the two men have a few issues to settle before President Clinton gets fully onboard, my guess is that he will eventually warm to the idea. It would be hard for President Clinton to pass up an opportunity to get back out on the campaign trail, and the distinct partisan differences between Obama and John McCain on the issues would make his freewheeling oratorical style a bit less perilous for both him and the nominee than it was in the primaries. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the former president use an encore on the stump as an opportunity to spin his past conflicts with the Obama campaign as largely a media creation, and to smooth over some of the internal party friction he helped generate during the primaries. Those two moves in combination would be the surest sign that President Clinton has finally joined the elect Obama enterprise.

You may have noticed that in the coverage of McCain adviser Charlie Black’s recent controversial comments that a terrorist strike in the United States this fall would benefit his candidate, reporters have frequently made reference to the writer Michael Kinsley, when characterizing Black’s remarks as a Washington-style gaffe. To provide you with some background, let me briefly take you back to the origins of the Kinsley reference, as I remember thinking that he was on to a very clever idea at the time.

 

In an article for Slate during the 2000 presidential contest, Kinsley popularized the idea that in Washington, a gaffe occurs when a politician unintentionally reveals what he or she actually believes to be true. The article is an entertaining piece on Al Gore, Dick Cheney, and the art of telling lies in a presidential campaign. While Kinsley may have floated the concept before, I believe this article is the one that introduced his ownership of the idea into the conventional wisdom, courtesy of Slate’s early high profile as a webzine. Note that in the last paragraph, Kinsley does not take credit for this definition of gaffe, but instead suggests that it is an old political saw that has been around for years. That may be true, but he is certainly getting ownership of the concept in the current election cycle.

 

Viewed in this context, the problem for Charlie Black is that his comments publicly confirmed what political observers already privately suspected was true, that the McCain campaign believes its strongest suit against Obama is the security issue, and that a sudden terrorist attack sometime in the next 4 months would serve to dramatically underscore McCain’s superior preparation and experience for responding to such a crisis. Even if we accept that this is an accurate assessment by the McCain campaign, characterizing (even hypothetically) another national tragedy as an opportunity for political gain will most certainly get you mentioned in the same sentence with Michael Kinsley.

I came across an interesting article in The New York Times over the weekend that raised the provocative question of whether John McCain or Barack Obama would be willing as president to reverse the significant expansion of executive power undertaken by President Bush. During my years as a political science professor, I spent a lot of time studying the growth of institutional authority in the American presidency, and my guess is that the answer to this question for either candidate is probably not, although neither would ever say so directly.

 

Rare is the example of a president who is willing to part with the increased latitude to act afforded to him by new grants of executive power. Presidents typically accrue this kind of enhanced institutional authority on an emergency basis during times of war or domestic crisis, and gradually weave it into the permanent constitutional and bureaucratic fabric of the office over time. While Congress and the courts have occasion to check the growth of executive power, they are more likely to focus on remedying the specific outcome of a presidential decision, rather than challenge the underlying expansion of institutional authority used to justify it. So, you may see President McCain or President Obama move to reverse certain controversial actions taken by President Bush on terrorism and homeland security, but don’t expect to see either of them sign any executive orders reversing the broad grants of executive power that facilitated those decisions in the first place.

A couple of New Hampshire-related items have popped up in the national press today to provide us with a little food for thought over the weekend. E.J. Dionne writes in The Washington Post about what he sees as a jump ball contest between Barack Obama and John McCain for the Granite State’s four electoral votes. Over at The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder switches his prognostication on New Hampshire from leaning Obama to a toss-up, noting that he is, “getting the sense from some NH Dems that the big liberal wave has crested there.” Even with a new ARG poll showing Obama leading in New Hampshire by 12 points, the feeling persists among some political professionals that McCain’s special relationship with New Hampshire voters will ultimately provide him with enough electoral juice to pull off a third win here in November.

 

I have suggested previously that McCain’s ability to win in New Hampshire this fall will depend in part on whether his new role as the head of a large national political organization undercuts his ability to run the sort of insurgent campaign that characterized his previous victories in the state. McCain faces a difficult challenge in being the presumptive nominee of his party, while also trying to maintain his winning identity as a maverick politician. In particular, McCain should be careful that a desire to rally his party’s conservative base does not push him too far afield of the reform message that resonated so strongly with independent (undeclared) voters here in 2000 and 2008. Such a move might improve McCain's chances in some other states, but it would probably hurt him in New Hampshire.

I was not surprised to read this morning that Barack Obama will forgo a publicly financed general election campaign. The announcement came a bit earlier than expected, but most political observers (myself included) correctly assumed that the Obama campaign would find the potential for a $300 million private fundraising haul (as opposed to $84 million directly from the U.S. Treasury) just too tempting to pass up. My guess is that the Obama campaign decided to announce the decision now, in order to get the inevitable pounding by critics for what looks like a pretty clear flip-flop on the issue out of the way as soon as possible.

 

There may be some truth to the Obama campaign's argument that the level of citizen participation in its grassroots fundraising network actually better captures the spirit of public financing than does the broken federal system. But Obama’s decision to affix primary blame for the move to the McCain campaign, RNC fundraising activities, and the potential for mischief by Republican 527 groups, strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Especially since subsequent reporting suggests that the Obama campaign didn’t exactly beat down the McCain campaign’s door to negotiate (as promised) a bi-partisan agreement between the two camps on public financing. So, while this may very well turn out to be a smart strategic move for the Obama campaign, it should at least be honest about the fact that the lure of a 3-to-1 spending advantage over the McCain campaign was simply too strong to ignore.

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