Importance of Having Great Candidates

----from National Review

Tonight, the Democratic National Convention's keynote address will be given by San Antonio mayor Julian Castro. Shortly after the announcement I took a look at Castro's meager record -- he's been mayor for three years -- and concluded:

 

A) Violent crime in San Antonio is pretty darn bad, and it hasn't gotten much better since Castro became mayor.

 

B) The schools in San Antonio are pretty troubled, and judging by the state test scores, they haven't gotten any better since Castro became mayor. In response to the article, a couple of locals wrote in, pointing out that the city's school board is quite independent and that the mayor is quite limited in his ability to shape education policy in his city. That may be true enough, but for what it's worth, Castro made the city's schools -- particularly preschool education -- the centerpiece of his state-of-the-city address.

 

C) The economy of San Antonio is doing pretty darn well, but that's largely due to outside forces rather than any particular innovative city policy under Castro -- the city has plenty of military bases and hospitals, it never had much of a manufacturing base to lose, and it's booming because of the fracking and shale deposits in the surrounding counties.

 

One of the reasons Julian Castro fascinates me is that he's clearly being groomed for bigger things by both the Democratic powers that be (note the plum keynote slot this week) and the media (count the glowing profiles you encounter this week). By the time he speaks tonight, at least one talking head, and probably several, will be touting him as "the Hispanic Obama" or something like that.

 

The Right unknowingly made a major error in the middle of the past decade when they failed to provide then-state-senator Barack Obama any serious challenger in 2004. (You've heard me go on about the Chicago media's sudden hell-bent determination to open sealed divorce records for Republican nominee Jack Ryan.) Fairly fundamental to Obama's rise was the fact that he waltzed into the Senate unscathed, dealing only the mosquito-like annoyance provided by Alan Keyes, campaigning on the theme that Vice President Cheney's daughter was a "selfish hedonist." He first appeared on the cover of Newsweekbefore he took the oath of office for the Senate, in the magazine's end-of-year "The man for Purple America" -- even though there was little or nothing in Barack Obama's brief state-legislative career to indicate he would have anything to offer the right half of America's electorate.

 

If Obama had a serious challenger in 2004, that rival would at least brought up some of the issues that those on the Right deemed disqualifying in 2008 -- Jeremiah Wright's sermons, the shady land deal with slumlord Tony Rezko (Hillary's term for him, not the Right's), the longtime relationship with the likes of bomb-makers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. It might not have derailed Obama's Senate bid, nor his presidential bid in 2008. But remember how much of Obama's appeal was that he was this cleaner-than-clean, messianic figure. He successfully posed as a reformer when he had been acceptable to the Chicago/Daley Political Machine from day one. (David Freddoso wrote a whole book about this phenomenon.)

 

You know who is responsible for the Obama presidency? Mike Ditka. For about 24 hours after Jack Ryan's sudden withdrawal from the race, there wasserious buzz that the Illinois Republican party was reaching out to the former Chicago Bears coach to run for Senate. Senator Ditka would have brought his own challenges -- picture him chewing gum and then chewing out, say, Senator Franken -- but he would have presented Obama a strikingly difficult task: a rival he couldn't go have his allies destroy through negative attacks without serious damage to his own image.

 

But so much for alternate history. Either way, any time you see some rising star in a party you oppose, start digging. Start looking for the parts of their record that aren't so shining, the topics they're strangely quiet about, the financial arrangements that emit a bit of an odor, and the other aspects of their record that don't quite add up. We're not in the messiah business in American politics; we're in the business of hiring somebody to do a job for us. As America's most famous chair salesman said, "It's not politicians owning [this country]; politicians are employees of ours."

 

If we couldn't stop the election of this aspiring messiah, we can derail the next one.

Posted via email from Global Politics