Michael Patrick Carroll's blog

McCain announce his intention to appoint real judges, and both teh Times and the Journal muff the story.

Discussing the vacuity of Barack Obama’s rhetoric, I find myself taken to task for ignoring the substance allegedly underlying it. Far from it. My initial post merely pointed out that Obama’s speeches convey essentially none of that substance. But don’t take my word for it; Hillary Clinton, too, laments the utter absence of specifics in her adversary’s public pronouncements. (She disagrees only incrementally with the policies Obama endorses) "I could make a big, ol’ speech ..." she mocks.

OK, so political rhetoric often lacks a certain intellectual pizzazz. Politicians – properly – speak to the electorate, and not to the faculty at Harvard. And what campaign wants for a fluffy, harmless sound-bite theme: "Morning in America"? Nothing wrong with that, either.

But what happens when rhetoric and sound-bites utterly supplant substance? When a campaign is based completely on fluff? Or, as herein relevant, upon "hope".

Alton Parker. John W. Davis. Wendell Wilkie. Hillary Cinton/Barack Obama.

In 1904, the Democrats, concerned about the radicalism of William Jennings Bryan, cast about for a more reasonable candidate, finally settling on Alton Parker, a non-entity whose entire public service consisted of serving in the New York Judiciary. Parker was so unimpressive and anonymous that one source reports that he stands alone as the only major party presidential nominee never honored with a biography.

I confess to a significant degree of puzzlement over (some) conservative attitudes toward John McCain. Who would ever have thought that a staunch pro-lifer who understands the need for unequivocal victory over our enemies in war and who strongly supports Second Amendment rights would ever secure the blessing of The New York Times and the enmity of so many conservative commentators? Alice, please call your office; it’s through the looking glass time.

After many years of solid growth, produced, in no small measure, by George Bush’s tax cuts, the economy burped, in part due to foolish borrowing practices. Comes now the President, in conjunction with the Democratic Congressional leadership, to propose a "solution": borrowing another $150 billion to "cut taxes", despite the fact that for tens of millions of the beneficiaries of this largesse, they paid no taxes to cut.

Sherlock Holmes often cautioned against the sin of hypothesizing in the absence of data. Hence, heretofore, many of us, kept in the dark about of the details of the Governor’s "super secret asset monetization program", while expressing doubts about the likelihood of a meritorious plan, refrained from a full-throated assault.

Politicians often find it difficult to avoid pandering: catering to the lowest desires or weaknesses of their constituents. Seeking votes, candidates often tell the electorate that which it wishes to hear. Most perniciously, politicians devise ways of showering their constituencies with goodies at the expense of other folks.

Dante postulated a Hell with nine circles, each more appalling and excruciating than the one above. The last level, that in which the worst sinners suffer most horribly, Dante reserved for traitors.

Returning to the theme of my previous post, one cannot read ante-bellum American history without astonishment at the rhetoric of the slaveholders. As a British observer put it, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negros"? Slaveholders asserted that their liberty depended upon the Black slavery. Incredibly, they rarely appreciated the inconsistency; they simply defined people as "property" and none of their flowery language about freedom for people applied to their "property".