It is hard to believe that a dozen years have passed since we had a really interesting presidential election. 2008, in retrospect, was a picnic in the sense that a passel of Democrats brought good ideas to the table and now, eight years later, we can claim they've mostly been implemented. Republicans, on the other hand, managed, most likely because of ill-timing, to mess everything up. That is, because the timing of their "October surprise," the financial crash was off, or because Barack Obama jumped into the kerfuffle with both feet, what was supposed to be a threat effectively dispatched by John McCain, had to be converted into an on-going crisis to discredit the Democrat in the White House. After all, Congress had voted out all kinds of legislation with the expectation that it was all going to be repealed. A veto in the White House had not entered into their calculations.
But, it cannot be denied: in 2008 Democrats had it together. Nobody was in it for the purpose of splitting tickets. Nobody was talking stalking horse in 2008, as they had in 2003, when Wesley Clark was perceived as perhaps not entirely serious about his candidacy. (His failure to pay his lunch tab did not go over well in New Hampshire).
What's a "stalking horse"? Slate magazine explained:
In early 16th-century England, a "stalking horse" was one trained to conceal the hunter walking behind it; the practice allowed human predators to sneak up on their prey without attracting suspicion. But by 1594 the term had also evolved into a metaphor for underhanded political dealing, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,was used to describe rulers who adopted Catholicism "as of a Maske and stalking horse" to hide their hopes of "usurping the kingdoms of other Princes."
In modern politics, the practice has been refined and, as I said, is quite often found in one party states where primaries decide elections, though it sometimes takes run-offs to secure the necessary majority.
In modern political applications of the phrase, a stalking horse is either a candidate used to divert attention from someone else's candidacy, or a candidate who splits the vote of a serious contender, perhaps unwittingly, and thus benefits a third, better-positioned candidate.
Perhaps what's most interesting about the stalking horse is that it was something pundits were writing about in September of 2003. That was before Howard Dean peaked too early. In other words, mid-summer is a time for idle talk. This time the rising star would seem to be Bernie Sanders. He, like Howard Dean, has to work on name recognition, but peaking too early has to be a concern. Hillary Clinton being less energetic in her interactions with supporters is prudent, since she's definitely not looking for name recognition.
O'Malley is, but he doesn't seem to know how to get it. That there are already four candidates on the Democratic side comes as a bit of a surprise. Jim Webb hardly makes a ripple.
And then there's the natural candidate, the person who's helped forge the Obama agenda and get it passed into law, Joe Biden.
Today, the National Journal says it would be a good idea.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/...
A draft Biden group put out an ad:
http://youtu.be/...
and from Rochester, New York we hear:
“I went to school down the road in Syracuse, and an awful lot of my friends in Syracuse grew up in Rochester, and almost every single one of them came from a family that worked for Kodak or Bausch + Lomb or Xerox,” he said. “It was the most, how can I say it, stable middle-class and upper-middle-class city in America. ... You were hit very hard — I don’t need to tell all of you those days are gone. But in place of the three giants, there are now hundreds of innovative businesses that are continuing this city’s legacy in optics and making it the optics capital of the world. You’ve gone from making Brownie cameras to the lenses that are now mapping the far side of Pluto.”
Positives!!!!
Perhaps because I've been prejudiced all along, looking for a Biden/Obama ticket, Hillary Clinton has struck me as playing the stalking horse admirably -- keeping the press hounds entertained, while Obama and Biden put the finishing touches on the Iran agreement, Guantanamo and increasing wages for the working class, the people who spend, rather than speculate and calculate their hoard.
Workers putting our currency to work. That's what we need. Even after a decade the velocity of the dollar is continuing to slow from a trickle to a drip.