Noble marine insurance
Reason Magazine - Contributors
- Can Anyone Win This Thing?
Every Christmas morning is a shimmering promise of surprise and delight. You never know what it will bring, and you might just get your heart's fondest desire. But in reality, surprises are not the rule. If you want to know what you'll get this Christmas, your best guide is what you got last Christmas.
Likewise for presidential elections. Every campaign raises a host of possibilities, particularly in the imagination of candidates. They may be forgiven for ignoring all evidence that is unfavorable to their dreams, which is usually abundant. History suggests there are mysterious but inflexible constraints on the outcome of these contests.
We already know it's almost impossible to elect people from certain places—like Massachusetts, which hasn't produced a president (or even a vice president) since John Kennedy in 1960. Ted Kennedy, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry might want to break the news to Mitt Romney.
Americans also don't elect candidates from New York, even though it has a horde of electoral votes. We used to find presidents there quite often, including Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland and both Roosevelts. But not since 1944 has someone from the Empire State (Franklin Roosevelt) been elected. The last New Yorker to make a plausible run for his party's nomination was Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, and he didn't come very close.
That's bad news for Rudy Giuliani, who has something else working against him: He used to be a mayor. Only two former mayors have ever reached the White House—Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge. But both of them went on to serve as governors before seeking the presidency, a step Giuliani has skipped.
Hillary Clinton can take consolation that she's neither a mayor nor, really, a New Yorker. But history holds other ill tidings for her. Every morning, 100 senators see a future president in the bathroom mirror—and invariably it's a mirage. Americans rarely regard sitting senators as presidential timber.
The last person to go directly from the Senate to the Oval Office was Kennedy, and prior to that, Warren Harding in 1920. Kerry was nominated but lost, and dozens if not thousands of senators have foundered in Iowa or New Hampshire or some other primary state.
The good news for Clinton is that if sitting senators can't win, she can stop worrying about Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and John McCain, all of whom are fated to turn into pumpkins. What about Fred Thompson? He's not a sitting senator, but the exclusion seems to apply to former ones as well (except those who become vice president). We have also never elected a comatose candidate, as Thompson appears to be.
Things are even tougher for House members, such as Ron Paul. His patron saint is James Garfield, the last congressman to jump straight to the presidency, back before the invention of the wheel.
Bill Richardson has the distinct advantage of being a governor, like four of the last five presidents. But he has the misfortune of being a former Cabinet secretary, which is the political equivalent of concrete overshoes. No former Cabinet secretary has made the ascent to the Oval Office since Herbert Hoover in 1928, and he didn't leave anyone yearning for more.
John Edwards lacks that drawback, but he has the handicap of being a former senator, and he has created another for himself: He's running a populist campaign in a country where populists are all glitter and no gold.
Every four years or so, someone emerges with a fiery pitch about helping the little guy and humbling the evil corporate interests. And every time, he's the one who gets a lesson in humility, from Fred Harris (1976) to Dick Gephardt (1988 and 2004) to Pat Buchanan (1992 and 1996) to Al Gore (2000). Perhaps the premier populist in American history, William Jennings Bryan was also the premier loser—nominated three times for president by the Democratic Party without ever winning.
Recent history suggests that to win the presidency, you have to be a white male from the South or West, preferably with experience as a governor. That description fits only one candidate in the race—Mike Huckabee. So by examining the portents of history, we find that he's the only person who can possibly be elected next year.
Unless 2008 is one of those years that confirm what Henry Ford insisted: History is bunk.Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for The Chicago Tribune.
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.Discuss this article online.
Subscribe to reason-"a kick-ass, no-holds-barred political magazine" that refuses "to carry water for either Democrats or Republicans"--now for just $19.97.
- 2007: The Year in Thugs
For a few years in the 1980s and 1990s, the world was changing for the better and seemingly destined to keep doing so indefinitely. Back then, freedom resembled justice as described in the Bible—rolling down like waters. But in the last few years various governments have managed to dam it up, and in some cases, like the engineers who manipulated the Chicago River in 1900, even reverse the flow.
Between 1990 and 1997, the number of democracies in the world rose from 69 to 118, according to the human rights group Freedom House. In the past decade, though, the number has crept up by just five. Worse yet, in some places where democracy emerged back then, it has survived only in name.
This year, Russia noted the death of Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected ruler in its long history. The second, Vladimir Putin, sees no pressing need for a third. His party won a parliamentary election in which opposition activists were arrested and beaten and foreign election monitors were so restricted that they left long before the polls opened.
Meanwhile, Putin planned to get around the two-term limit on his power by installing a handpicked successor and becoming prime minister. "It's not even a third term; it's eternal," one former adviser told The Wall Street Journal.
Many of the former Soviet republics also proved inhospitable to rule by the people. One exception is Ukraine, which experienced an "orange revolution" in 2004 and held an election in September that The Economist magazine pronounced "a thoroughly democratic and unpredictable affair."
Unpredictability is not a condition favored by the rulers of China, where President Hu Jintao promised the expansion of "socialist democracy" in a country that is neither. Some 40 high school students in Tibet, some as young as 14, were arrested for allegedly writing pro-independence slogans on buildings.
In Myanmar, Buddhist monks in an anti-government demonstration carried a banner reading, "Love and kindness must win over everything." Maybe so, but not right away: The government killed at least 20 people in crushing the protests, according to Human Rights Watch, and arrested hundreds.
Cuban police detained dozens of young people for wearing white wristbands decorated with a single word: (SET ITAL) cambio (END ITAL), or change. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who takes Fidel Castro as his model, suffered two sound rebukes -- one from King Juan Carlos of Spain, who said, "Why don't you shut up?" and one from his people, who voted down measures designed to keep him in power permanently.
Authoritarian rule, the exception in South America, remains the norm in Africa. The Human Rights Forum in Harare reported that human rights violations in Zimbabwe nearly doubled in the first half of 2007. But at a summit meeting of leaders from Europe and Africa in Lisbon, African leaders united in refusing to criticize President Robert Mugabe—under whose rule average life expectancy has dropped from 62 years to 37.
Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor went on trial in The Hague for allegedly helping rebels who killed and maimed thousands of civilians during Sierra Leone's civil war. He pleaded not guilty, but one of his former soldiers said, "If you start prosecuting war crimes, you'll prosecute every Liberian."
Nigeria had its first peaceful transfer of power from one civilian government to another, after an election with so much vote-rigging that the winner's victory margin, according to The Washington Post, "surprised even supporters of the ruling party."
Iraq's parliament took a month-long vacation in August even as U.S. troops were surging in an effort to provide lawmakers the security they needed to overcome their political stalemate. In Saudi Arabia, a young woman raped by seven men was sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes for her crime—being in a car with a male who was not her relative. King Abdullah, under international pressure, granted a pardon.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf forgot a lesson most people learn young: Don't antagonize lawyers. His sacking of the country's chief justice sparked protests by attorneys, eventually moving the president to impose a state of emergency. Musharraf allowed opposition leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to return from exile abroad, but when asked when he would step down, he replied, unenco
