Posted on 03/06/2002 4:21:19 PM PST by vannrox
There is not an MP in the House of Commons who would not give a small body part to swap their enfeebled existence for the glorious life of a United States senator. The senate is legislative heaven. There are six years between elections. You get a staff of dozens to do your bidding. The whips may plead; they can't threaten. You can summon the glitterati to give evidence, and hector them in the guise of interrogation: some days the corridors of the senate office buildings outshine the green room for the David Letterman Show.
You can read into the Congressional Record anything that takes your fancy short of the Manhattan telephone directory. Abundant graft and sex are optional extras. You even get the chance to influence human destiny by passing or blocking important legislation. Matthew Parris once said that being an MP did wonders for the vanity and wrecked the self-esteem. Being a senator massages both. Now, who would want to give up all that for the frustrations of being the mere president?
At the last count, seven of the 50 Democratic senators were at various stages of contemplating the matter, even though the polls suggest that running against George W Bush in 2004 could involve being buried under a ton of rubble. Political optimism as well as ambition is always boundless.
And they would be running against history. Although every senator who is not ancient or physically repulsive or entirely deranged gets mentioned occasionally as at least a vice-presidential candidate, only one man in the past 80 years has gone straight from the Senate to the Oval Office: John Kennedy. The five men in the 20th century who unhorsed sitting presidents - Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton - all built their power bases as state governors. This is not a coincidence. It is not easy to run against Washington fat-cattery while sitting there yourself, licking your chops.
Still, the contenders' pulses will be quickening this morning. The 2002 primary season began in earnest yesterday, and thus the next presidential campaign moved a step closer. At this stage, there is only one impossibility about 2004: the election of Al Gore. It is not clear whether he is going to work this out for himself, or whether he will be told the hard way by the voters of Iowa or New Hampshire. The unhappy truth is that everyone else in the Democratic party wants to move on. But where? There are a couple of governors, the deceptively cunning Gray Davis of California and maybe Roy Barnes of Georgia. There is the Democrats' leader in the House, Dick Gephardt, who has perhaps been around too long. The seven senators, in ascending order of probability, are Hillary Clinton (too soon), Russell Feingold (too pinko), Joe Biden (too eccentric), Joe Lieberman (possible, maybe too tainted by being Gore's running-mate), John Kerry, John Edwards and Tom Daschle.
Kerry is the crag-visaged senator from Massachussetts: an anti-war Vietnam veteran, which is good positioning, clever, liberal, rich (he married a Heinz), reputedly a bit frosty. Edwards is from North Carolina: a glib and pretty courtroom lawyer, also rich, a bit over-manufactured for refined tastes perhaps. The kind of people who talk about this kind of thing are all talking about Edwards, partly because southern Democrats are the only ones who seem to win. One senses it's a bubble waiting to be pricked.
That brings us to Daschle, the Senate majority leader, the small, gently-spoken figure who has come to embody whatever opposition now exists in the US. He has various political skills, rarely held in combination: he comes across well - fair-minded but steely - and his colleagues like him, which is the essence of being majority leader. He is also quite brave, having last week come close to suggesting that President Bush's war leadership has not, in every particular, encompassed the better qualities of Pericles and Churchill. He got savaged, for the umpteenth time, by a horde of ravening Republicans.
He says he will not decide about the presidency until after the November mid-term elections. There are two good reasons for that. Daschle's own Senate seat is not up this year but he is, in effect, fighting on two fronts. Firstly, the Democrats have to avoid losing control of the Senate. Secondly, there is a microcosmic surrogate battle in Daschle's own state of South Dakota involving his obscure Senate Democratic colleague, Tim Johnson.
A little money buys a lot of ads in South Dakota and the Republicans are already starting to hurl everything at the place to knock out Johnson. If they succeed, Daschle would be humiliated by proxy. It matters to the Bushies, because they are a little bit scared of him.
Warren Harding was elected president straight from the senate too, in 1920.
"Gray" Davis is Grey Davis.
Tom Daschle is an asshole.
Thank you, thank you very much...
In '66 Reagan beat Brown. In '02 Simon beats Grey (I know, I know -- it IS Gray -- but who cares!).
I just hope Simon ain't a west coast version of Bret Schundler. Now THAT would suck.
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