2008 President

The U.S. Constitution is utterly silent on qualifications for members of the federal judiciary. Theoretically, a justice does not even have to be a lawyer, but, in practice, all 110 justices in the Supreme Court’s 220-year history have been attorneys. With no constitutionally mandated selection criteria, presidents have been free to determine the standards by which they choose nominees. Professor Henry Abraham, the nation’s leading Supreme Court expert, has identified four primary selection criteria that presidents have used in the appointment process: 1) merit, 2) ideology, 3) friendship, and 4) representation. Some observers argue that merit, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, but an objective definition would include keen intellect, superb education, effective communication skills, judicial temperament, impeccable moral character, and diligence. Ideally, merit should be at the top of every president’s list, and most of the justices in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history have possessed genuinely impressive qualifications. Those justices considered among the “greats” reflected these traits to the highest degree. John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, and Earl Warren are enshrined in the Court’s pantheon. The tribunal’s current members are considered the most intellectually gifted since the scholarly Roosevelt Court

Nobody in America believes the judicial confirmation system works. Not the senators who eat up precious questioning time with windy speeches about pet projects back home; not the interest groups who scour every sordid instant of a nominee’s background for evidence that they are unfit for the bench; and not the American public, whose experiences of constitutional interpretation and judicial philosophy are reduced in a few days on C-SPAN to bumper-sticker claims and counter claims. The first days of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the high court have been rather par for the course, by these measures. Senators have made speeches but said very little. The interest groups were orbiting around some alternate reality long before the nominee had even been named. And the American people found themselves forming opinions about Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy and constitutional fitness, based largely on whether her life story somehow resonated, and whether they felt good or bad about a single line from an eight page speech she gave in 2001. Now I am not snob enough to suggest that everyone in America should hunker down with the hundreds of judicial opinions Sotomayor has authored, and read them all instead of Dan Brown at the

It’s not a matter of “if.” It’s a matter of “when.” As in, when will all of the feel-good rhetoric about Democrats and Republicans joining hands to solve the nation’s problems come to an end and open partisan warfare resume in Washington? In fact, that time may already be here. Despite Barack Obama’s efforts to reach out to Republican leaders and conservative intellectuals since his election and his willingness to modify his economic stimulus package to accommodate Republicans’ desire for smaller spending increases and larger tax cuts, the President isn’t getting much love from the other side of the aisle. One day after Mr. Obama ventured to Capitol Hill to urge Republican lawmakers to support his $819 billion stimulus package, House Republicans voted 177-0 against the bill. And despite intense efforts to reach an agreement acceptable to moderates in both parties, only three Republicans ended up supporting the bill in the Senate–just one more than the bare minimum needed to avert a filibuster. Meanwhile, conservative pundits and talk-show hosts have been hammering the President’s plan as old-fashioned pork-barrel politics or socialism in disguise, and some former Bush Administration officials, including Dick Cheney, have been suggesting that his orders to close

Editor’s Note: Several weeks ago, the Crystal Ball published a 2008 election analysis by Prof. Larry Sabato, which concluded in part that Democrats were destined to win the presidential election, given prevailing conditions. Then Prof. Jim Campbell of The University at Buffalo took issue with that conclusion, arguing that the mid-September financial meltdown had derailed McCain. Now comes a third academic, Prof. Alan I. Abramowitz, a frequent Crystal Ball contributor and the Alben Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, to take issue with Prof. Campbell’s theory. We are delighted to present these diverse viewpoints in our forum. As always, our readers can make up their own minds about last year’s historic contest. According to James Campbell, the mid-September financial crisis hit the 2008 presidential election like a bolt out of the blue, transforming it from a horserace in which John McCain had a real chance of victory into a one-sided contest in which Barack Obama enjoyed a decisive advantage. Campbell’s claim is another version of the Wall Street meltdown theory that has been advanced by a number of conservative commentators since the November election. It is easy to understand why this explanation appeals to conservatives: it implies that

The 2008 election these days may seem long ago and far away. But it is worth remembering that while the Republicans had a bad time at the polls in November, they fared well in the array of contests that concluded the election cycle in December. The GOP scored two House wins last month in Louisiana, including the improbable upset of Democrat William Jefferson by a little-known Republican, Anh Cao. The latter became the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. And in Georgia, Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss scored a decisive victory in a runoff required by state law when he narrowly failed to win a majority of the vote in November. For symbolic value, Cao’s victory was a powerful tonic for a party that had run poorly among virtually all minority groups in 2008. But as a harbinger of the 2010 midterm elections, Chambliss’ Senate victory could have much greater import. Not only did the GOP incumbent expand a 3 percentage point lead over Democrat Jim Martin in the November general election balloting into a 15-point blowout in the early December runoff, but he did so with what was a midterm election-sized turnout. While nearly 4 million Georgians cast ballots in the presidential

Some political analysts have interpreted the 2008 presidential election as an ordinary retrospective election. With a very unpopular Republican incumbent presiding over unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a weak economy, 2008 appeared to be a Democratic year. As the often insightful Larry Sabato put it in his recent essay, “any mainstream Democratic candidate was destined to win in 2008.” He rejects the alternative interpretation that “the election’s key event was the mid-September financial meltdown; that somehow had this never happened McCain might have been able to win or at least keep the election very close.” According to Professor Sabato, “This is poppycock. Except for a brief honeymoon period for McCain after the GOP convention, Obama consistently led the polls from early summer onwards. The evidence of severe economic slowdown was everywhere from the spring to the fall, and Americans already believed that we were in a serious recession.” Poppycock? Balderdash. The Republicans did carry substantial political baggage into the 2008 election; but despite these considerable disadvantages, the open seat election was shaping up as a very close contest in the weeks before the national conventions and McCain took the lead after the conventions, only to plummet in the

Almost every American recognizes January 20, 2009 as a red-letter date in U.S. history. No one who witnessed the swearing-in of President Barack Obama will ever forget it, and rarely has so much emotion been wrapped up in an inauguration. The good feelings that have been generated cannot hurt at a time when the country faces a deep recession and other significant challenges. The uplifting part is over. The heavy lifting begins. We have been asked many questions about Obama’s upcoming year, so let’s try and answer several central ones in this essay. How long will Obama’s honeymoon last? Every President gets one, but sometimes it’s over before he takes office. The shortest honeymoon in modern times was for Bill Clinton. His transition was something of a disorganized mess; he indicated he was going to lift the ban on gays in the military without adequate preparation of the general public and the military; a couple of his nominees for Attorney General were non-starters; and so on. His electoral base of 43% was flimsy to begin with. After the disputed, overtime election of 2000, George W. Bush wasn’t in much better shape. Losing the popular vote, having a truncated transition, and

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House. The book, which features several frequent Crystal Ball contributors as well as other journalists and scholars, will be published by Pearson Longman in March 2009. –The Editors Some readers will be very surprised by our title. The last outcome they would have expected from Election Year 2008 was the elevation of Barack Obama to the White House. And Obama’s swift rise was certainly a surprise. Yet fundamentally, the November 4th outcome was completely predictable, and in fact we predicted it right here on the Crystal Ball many months prior to the election. Elections are often over-analyzed, and perhaps we have just committed that venial sin here on The Crystal Ball website. The welter of data and circumstance can overwhelm students of history, when the simple, straight-forward explanations are often the most compelling. The truth is this: Any mainstream Democratic candidate was destined to win in 2008, when the age-old slogan, “It’s Time for a Change,” had powerful new meaning. The electoral conditions–the fundamentals I often call “the north stars of politics”–could not have been more clear or bright in the

Rituals matter in any society, but in a democracy they are especially significant. Most authoritarian regimes are stable for long periods of time; the barrel of a gun ensures it. Democratic societies can change rapidly with public opinion, and a new administration is frequently the polar opposite of its predecessor. How best to balance the need for change with the assurance of continuity? Ceremony. Of all our national rites of passage, none has more significance than the inauguration of a President. The simple oath of office, stretching back 220 years, links Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, and Founders in an unbroken line. Now there’s a security blanket for an anxious citizenry, especially those who didn’t vote for the new President. We have added many pieces to the straightforward oath. Massive crowds, prayers and choirs, poems and salutations galore, 19-gun salutes and vast inaugural parades and balls–all of these are considered de rigueur for a new President. The tiniest ceremonial part can generate controversy, as we have just seen with Barack Obama’s selection of evangelical Christian preacher Rick Warren to deliver the invocation. Americans expect to see the new and old Presidents together in a show of unity, however forced or phony.

We have reached the end of another election cycle, but this has been no ordinary campaign. The marathon of presidential politics was everyone’s focus, and the unforgettable cast of characters was long, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side to John McCain and Sarah Palin on the Republican. These people were fascinating, but events were in the saddle. The economy melted down into the slag of near-depression. Wall Street’s “greed-is-good” manipulators became everyone’s favorite pinata, though we had an odd way of poking at them–shoveling $700 billion in taxpayer dollars their way, a bailout backed by top leaders in both parties. A deeply unpopular war cost over 4,100 American lives, wounded 30,000 more, and ran up bills that most experts believe will easily top $1.5 trillion before a projected troop withdrawal in 2010. The announced purpose was to capture Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that apparently did not exist. The unintended consequence of the war was to produce a Democratic presidential nominee unlike any other. An exceptionally disliked incumbent president became King Midas’s polar opposite: Everything he touched turned not to gold but to (bleep). Speaking of bleeping, a certain Democratic governor of Illinois reminded us at

Decades ago, a merry band of pranksters took to the streets of a state’s capital city a few days after an election for governor. Riding in the van of a defeated candidate, the vehicle still much decorated with the slogans and banners of the electorally deceased nominee, the newly unemployed campaign workers took turns on the public address system, exhorting passersby to remember to vote. Startled looks were the norm among the pedestrians, with one anguished woman blurting out, “But it’s over!” Granted, the 2008 election is not like 2000: it’s mainly over. But parts of it are not, and ballots are still being counted and recounted in various parts of the United States. One open-seat House race in Ohio is still a toss-up. In the Fifteenth district, Republican Steve Stivers is leading Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy by 594 votes, with about 28,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted or rejected. In California’s Fourth district, another seat without an incumbent running, Republican Tom McClintock has probably defeated Democrat Charlie Brown; at present, McClintock leads Brown by 1,666 votes. A third House contest in Virginia’s Fifth district is scheduled for a recount this month, with Democrat Thomas Perriello the apparent winner

Here’s the worst kept secret in politics: Presidential campaigning never ends. For periods of time it becomes quieter–a little subtler–but it never stops. Every morning 100 senators, 50 governors, quite a few grandees in the House of Representatives, and an assortment of corporate titans all hear their Rice Krispies shouting “2012!” “FORM A PRESIDENTIAL EXPLORATORY COMMITTEE!” and “RUN … YOU’RE THE ONE!” Democrats will shush Snap, Crackle, and Pop, pleading with them to instead say, “2016!” Republicans on the other hand, will pour another bowl, and ask the three sirens of Battle Creek, Michigan, to repeat what they just said. Need proof of the 2012 jockeying taking place behind the scenes? Since November 4, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has chatted up any person with professional-grade video equipment (it’s called image reform, folks). Louisiana’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, has already booked a flight to Iowa (he will appear before the Iowa Family Policy Center’s “Celebrating the Family” banquet this Saturday). And Barack Obama placed Hillary Clinton at the top of his list for the job of secretary of state (Obama knows sitting presidents who face significant nomination challenges for re-election don’t fare well–I’m looking at you Presidents Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson,

As routine as elections may seem, they are the seminal events in the life of a democracy. Campaigns and elections not only set the direction of the Republic, they also shed light on America’s political health. Every November we have the opportunity to take stock of what we did at the polls, and what that says about the status of the 232-year-old American experiment. The historical significance of what happened on November 4th is immediately obvious to all. The election of the first President of African-American descent is breathtaking, given what had come before in the nation and Virginia. But Barack Obama grasped the White House so deceptively easily in the Electoral College, including the thirteen votes of the New Dominion, that four centuries of often bitter race relations were obscured. Slavery was an accepted, legally enshrined practice throughout much of America until the end of the Civil War. The economic underpinnings of what author Lawrence Goldstone called the United States’ constitutional “dark bargain” enforced a brutality so awful that young people today cringe when told the truth. Profits obliterated humanity. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued more to win the war for the North than for the right reasons, yielded little

Every day since Nov. 4, the scope of Democrat Barack Obama’s victory has grown more impressive. His electoral vote total of 364 is the highest for any presidential winner since Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996. His 53 percent share of the total popular vote is the largest since George H.W. Bush won a comparable proportion in 1988. And Obama’s popular vote margin of 8 and a quarter million votes (and counting) is the widest since Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. It is hard to imagine that barely 20 years ago, it was fashionable to talk of a Republican ‘lock’–a GOP dominance of the electoral map so strong that it appeared to guarantee the party possession of the White House for years to come. But, as is often said: That was then and this is now. Then, the Republicans had the three “S’s” on their side–the South, the suburbs and small-town America. Now, many of the suburbs have defected to the Democrats, the South is no longer an exclusively GOP preserve, and small-town America does not have the votes to keep the Republicans consistently competitive in national politics. In their presidential heyday of the 1970s and