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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Thursday, February 26, 2015 | A15
OPINION
ou have to feel sorry for the
Democrats. In a world
warming to presidential
politics, what do they talk to each
other about? Nearly two years
from the election, they’ve already
got their launch vehicle in place,
former everything Hillary Clinton.
Fire and forget.
The one-time First Lady, U.S.
senator and Secretary of State
pumped up a political crowd in
Silicon Valley this week by vowing, presumably as president, to
“crack every last glass ceiling.” As
a political issue,
the “glass ceiling” dates back to
. . . 1984. It may
be older than “income inequality.”
But anywhere
WONDER
else two people
LAND
gather who aren’t
By Daniel
Democrats, you
Henninger
will fall into the
same intense political conversation with a oneword question: Whoduyalike?
Who do you like among the names
floating in GOP circles for the
2016 nomination? Walker, Bush,
Paul, Rubio, Jindal, Perry, Cruz,
Christie, Fiorina, Carson, Santorum, Pence. I kind of like . . .
Two significant meetings of conservative groups take place today
through Saturday, and some of
these people will pitch themselves
at both the CPAC conference just
outside Washington, and to the
Club for Growth in Palm Beach.
Mike Huckabee will preach on his
own behalf Thursday evening to
the National Religious Broadcasters
convention in Nashville.
It’s all great fun. But there’s
something a little off about the
Republican presidential conversation right now. It doesn’t come
close to reflecting the seriousness
of the task facing voters in 2016:
Elect a successor to the most cata-
Getty Images
Y
Captain America Won’t Save Us
Will this be the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2016?
strophic American presidency in
over 80 years. And it ain’t over yet.
Instead of offering an anxious
electorate a recognizable alternative to this status quo, the Republicans look like they’re obsessed
with discovering Captain America.
Their Captain America could be
named Rand, Scott, Jeb or Marco,
but the mere landing of this political superhero in the Oval Office
will turn the country around.
Really? That’s all it is going to
take?
It is hard to overstate what
one-man-shows these presidential
candidates have become—one guy,
some political pros they’ve hired,
their donors and whatever
thoughts are running through
their or their pollsters’ heads.
In normal times, it might not
matter much that a CPAC conference with its gauntlet of speeches
and straw polls looks a lot like the
NFL Scouting Combine. Chris
Christie has no vertical leap, but
man can he lift.
The task that Barack Obama is
dumping on the next U.S. president, of either party, is overwhelming.
Here’s the job description:
Needed, a U.S. president able to
confront a world in chaos, rebuild
shattered alliances, revive the
country’s demoralized intelligence
services and senior officer corps,
manage foreign and domestic
demands with a budget that will
be drained for years by fantastically expensive debt servicing,
and along the way restore public
faith in an array of deeply politicized federal bureaucracies—Justice, HHS, EPA, Labor, Internal
Revenue, the NLRB, FCC, EEOC,
even the Federal Reserve.
The U.S. just tried electing a
rookie president and had six years
of amateur hour. It doesn’t work.
And it won’t work again if the
next president, whether rookie or
former governor, shows up in the
Oval Office in January 2017 with
not much more than his victory
cape and some political pals.
Given the scale of the challenge,
the next U.S. president isn’t going
to have a six-month honeymoon to
figure out the policy details of
what he wants to do. Whoever
occupies the White House after the
Obama Terminator presidency
BOOKSHELF | By Edward Rothstein
stops will have to hit the ground
running from day one. Competent
Cabinet secretaries and their deputies aren’t something you can grab
off the shelf. The next president,
before the Inauguration, will have
to be someone who can attract
about 100 of the most skilled and
yes, experienced, people available
into government.
By the way, the Clinton brigades could stock a respectable
Democratic government overnight. Most of these Republican
presidential candidates couldn’t
name three people they’d bring
into an administration today. One
who could form a government?
Paul Ryan, but he’s out of it. Jeb
Bush, to his credit, has at least
offered a list of foreign-policy
advisers.
Normally, none of these issues
of presidential competence or the
details of post-election intent
matter much this early in the
selection process. With the hand
the country and the world has
been dealt, they matter a lot. And
the anxious American electorate
knows it. But the way the Republican nomination is developing
doesn’t reflect that urgency. What
one sees is mainly money and
marketing. When does that stop
and something identifiably presidential begin?
Given the new realities of politics, the only group that can press
these candidates for more substance about how they would
actually run or create a postObama government are the big
donors. If they don’t do it, these
candidates will deliver fundraising boilerplate—Control the borders! Replace ObamaCare! Restore
respect for America!—from now
til the final presidential debate.
Winning matters. But just winning this time isn’t going to be
enough.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
Republicans Could Be In for a Wild 2016 Ride
By Karl Rove
T
o better understand the 2016
GOP presidential race, let’s
consider some history. At a
comparable point during the last
nine Republican presidential primary contests, four had a frontrunner with a double-digit lead in a
national poll, and in five the leader
was ahead by single digits.
In the contests with a clear
front-runner, New York Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller led Arizona Sen. Barry
Goldwater by 26 points in a March
1963 Gallup poll; Kansas Sen. Bob
Dole was ahead of Texas Sen. Phil
Gramm by 47 points in a March
1995 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll;
Texas Gov. George W. Bush led
Elizabeth Dole by 35 points in a
March 1999 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll; and New York Mayor Rudy
Giuliani was ahead of Arizona Sen.
John McCain in a March 2007 CNN
survey by 16 points. The front-runner went on to win the nomination
in two of four contests.
In the five races where someone
had a narrow lead, Michigan Gov.
George Romney led Vice President
Richard Nixon by three points in a
February 1967 Gallup poll; President Gerald Ford was in front of
California Gov. Ronald Reagan by
one point in a March 1975 Gallup
poll; Mr. Reagan led Mr. Ford by
one point in a February 1979
Gallup poll; Vice President George
H.W. Bush was ahead of Mr. Dole
by six points in March 1987 ABC/
Washington Post survey, and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was
ahead of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt
Romney by four points in a February 2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal
poll. In these cases, the front-runner won three of the five contests.
Combining the two sets, the
front-runner—regardless of their
lead’s size—won five out of nine
times. If the front-runner actually
ran, he became the GOP nominee
New primary rules make
the choice of a nominee
far more uncertain than
in the past half century.
in five of seven contests. So a lead
now, even a small one, is something of an advantage.
Structural changes imposed by
the Republican National Committee may make 2016 a different
story. Only four states will have
primaries in February—Iowa, New
Hampshire, South Carolina and
Nevada. States holding primaries
in the first half of March 2016
must award delegates proportionally. States in the second half of
March can be winner-take-all.
Assume different candidates
win each of the first four contests,
which is historically the case. No
one locks up the nomination in
February, but the field narrows to
three-to-five plausible candidates.
March’s proportional primaries
further winnow the field, with the
late March and early April winnertake-all primaries settling the contest. In this scenario, the quality of
each candidate’s message is likely
to be the most important element
in determining the outcome.
But more so than in the past,
momentum in early March, strong
organizations in the March states,
and sufficient money to spend
effectively could seal the nomination.
Another scenario: The field is
so jumbled following the February
contests that the late March/early
April primaries narrow the field
but don’t produce a winner. The
race continues through the spring,
probably involving two candidates
locked in fierce struggle.
In this scenario, if minor candidates win enough delegates in the
February and early March proportional contests (which could
happen given this field’s quality),
no candidate might win a delegate
majority before the convention.
State laws and party rules would
require delegates pledged to
minor candidates to support them
for at least a ballot or two at the
July 2016 convention in Cleveland.
Candidates would then wheel-anddeal to arrive at a majority, as
often happened at conventions
before 1952.
This scenario isn’t likely. The
large number of candidates and
the RNC’s determination to have a
small number of debates may
combine to deny some contenders
the exposure they need to break
through. It’s also hard to build
organizations to qualify everywhere, especially in big states like
New York, and to compete in all
the caucus states.
Then there are super PACs. One
major benefactor can keep a candidate going longer than they
might otherwise, but if most big
donors unite behind a candidate, it
could prove decisive, if the money
is spent well.
There is also a question of who
the front-runner is now. There are
more surveys this election than in
the past. So while Wednesday’s
Real Clear Politics average had
Jeb Bush at 14.5%, Wisconsin Gov.
Scott Walker at 13% and Mike
Huckabee at 11.8%, each man has
led in a national poll in the past
four weeks.
Republicans prize orderliness,
so it’s unlikely the GOP will return
to smoke-filled rooms, and deals
over platform planks or cabinet
posts to pick their candidate.
Unlikely but not impossible. So
there is still hope for political
junkies who dream of drama and
disarray.
Mr. Rove, a former deputy chief
of staff to President George W.
Bush, helped organize the political-action committee American
Crossroads.
When Obama’s Diplomacy Takes a Divot
Malaysia’s prime
minister played golf with
the president, then jailed
an opposition leader.
In the early 1980s, President
Reagan granted the South Korean
dictator Chun Doo-Hwan the
unusual courtesy of an official
visit. In return, the South Korean
regime freed opposition leader
Kim Dae-jung, who was in prison
under a death sentence. Reagan
kept the deal quiet for years,
though he was heavily criticized
for “coddling dictators.” Any hope
that President Obama’s golf outing
might have been part of a similar
deal was extinguished when Mr.
Najib’s government put away Mr.
Anwar for a five-year prison term,
further banning him from politics
for five years once his sentence
ends.
Mr. Obama says correctly that
we should support modern, tolerant Muslim leaders. Mr. Anwar is
one such leader, a liberal Muslim
Composite
O
ne of President Obama’s
golfing buddies has embarrassed him badly, and not
because of a few bogeys. That golfing partner is Najib Razak, the
prime minister of Malaysia, who
joined President Obama for a round
in Honolulu over Christmas. Mr.
Najib’s government recently jailed
the popular Malaysian opposition
leader Anwar Ibrahim on trumpedup charges of violating Malaysia’s
archaic sodomy laws. Although Mr.
Anwar was initially acquitted in
2012, the government appealed
that acquittal to a higher court,
which reversed it. On Feb. 10, Mr.
Anwar lost his final appeal and was
immediately taken to jail.
During his visit to Malaysia last
year President Obama refused to
meet with Mr. Anwar, even though
the popular opposition leader was
facing a politically motivated jail
sentence. Instead, Mr. Anwar was
relegated to a group meeting with
National Security Adviser Susan
Rice, despite the fact that his
powerful, multireligious opposition coalition had managed to win
53% of the popular vote in the 2013
elections—against a government
with a monopoly on the media.
To make matters worse, Mr.
Obama then praised Mr. Najib as a
“reformer” during a joint news
conference, standing silently while
Mr. Najib claimed that “under the
eyes of the law, even if you’re a
small man or a big man, you have
equal justice.” Ironic, given that
Mr. Najib’s government appealed
Mr. Anwar’s initial acquittal and
then appointed a leading member
of the ruling party to pursue the
case. In the 78 years since the
sodomy law was introduced by the
British colonial administration, Mr.
Anwar is one of the few people
ever prosecuted under it. So much
for “equal justice.”
who defends the rights of the
Christian minority and quotes the
Quran alongside Tocqueville,
Locke and Jefferson. Now his
voice for a tolerant, modern and
peaceful Islam will be silenced.
Malaysia may not seem important, but with one of the highest
per capita incomes of any Muslimmajority country, a relatively welleducated population and large
religious minorities, it has potential to become a thriving Muslim
democracy—and a useful example
for the world. But Malaysia is
being held back by the increasingly
dysfunctional and sclerotic rule of
a single party that has institutionalized corruption and favoritism.
When President Obama spoke
to the Clinton Global Initiative
last year, he said it is “our job to
shine a spotlight” on governments
that abuse the human rights of
their citizens and that “when they
try to wall you off from the world
. . . or silence you, we want to
amplify your voice.”
Now Mr. Anwar has been
walled off from the world. He has
rejected many appeals to spare
himself the agony of prison by going into exile. Going into exile, he
said, would betray the cause for
which he has dedicated so much
of his life. For this cause, he was
nearly beaten to death in jail 10
years ago by the chief of the National Police after an earlier—also
manufactured—sodomy charge.
Malaysian government officials
have promised that Mr. Anwar
will get no special treatment in
prison, meaning, among other
things, that he may only be
allowed 45 minutes of visitation a
month.
The White House managed to
issue only a relatively anodyne
statement expressing “serious
concerns” about Mr. Anwar’s conviction after the court ruling was
announced earlier this month,
while at the same time praising
America’s “comprehensive partnership” with Malaysia and committing to “expanding our cooperation on shared economic and
security challenges affecting our
countries’ interests in Asia and
globally.” House Ways and Means
Chairman Paul Ryan was more
direct, saying on a recent visit to
Malaysia with a congressional
trade delegation that “episodes
like this should not arise in developed democracies.”
Prime Minister Najib is hoping
for a visit to the White House
sometime this year. The White
House should demand a high
price, not less than what President Reagan asked from Chun
Doo-Hwan. Absent a substantial
change in Mr. Anwar’s situation,
such a visit would be a further
endorsement of abusive behavior.
President Obama should withhold
him that honor and publicly ask
for Mr. Anwar’s release.
Mr. Wolfowitz, a scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, has
served as deputy U.S. secretary of
defense and U.S. ambassador to
Indonesia.
Why Not Say What Happened
By Morris Dickstein
(Liveright, 301 pages, $27.95)
W
hen a teacher at an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva in
the 1950s yanked a volume of the Talmud from
the hands of a teenage Morris Dickstein, expecting to discover a comic book hidden behind it, he found
instead a copy of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” It was,
Mr. Dickstein insists, a thoroughly appropriate choice for
rebellious reading. The play is “about leaving the city and
the court behind to find passion and regeneration in more
natural surroundings”—a theme that resonated with his
own yearnings for liberation.
Similar desires have recurred throughout Mr. Dickstein’s life, with varying consequences. Teaching the great
books of Western culture to undergraduates at Columbia
University in 1968, he was so intoxicated by the counterculture’s energies
that he suggested
adding “The Story of
O,” that “piece of
high-toned literary
pornography,” to the
core curriculum. It is
as if “As You Like It”
were yanked aside in
turn, to reveal a book
giving even more attention to “passion and
regeneration.”
Since then, of course,
academic studies have
proceeded far beyond Mr.
Dickstein’s first imaginings. And reading his
memoir of his youth and education, “Why Not Say What Happened,” one
begins to wonder what the distinguished critic and cultural historian makes of more recent transformations.
What does he see now, when rebellious and liberatory
impulses have become commonplace if not obligatory?
The memoir is at once insightful, self-mocking, precious
and unsettling. It can get tedious with its dutiful roster of
characters; the reader might even feel jostled about by its
jumpy timeline. But descriptions can glint with illumination, and Mr. Dickstein is charmingly self-effacing as he
tries to comprehend his life’s unfolding.
The memoir is subtitled “A Sentimental Education,”
partly because it recounts an education in sentiments: Mr.
Dickstein chronicles the feelings that derailed him, guided
him and perplexed him. But he also means to invoke
Flaubert’s novel of the same name, with its protagonist
enmeshed in another feverishly utopian era (1848 France).
Mr. Dickstein describes it as a “disenchanted political
novel” that is “almost a parody of a coming-of-age story.”
He aspires to something similar.
As in many such tales, the hero is a young man from
the provinces—here, a child of immigrants with a “warm,
slightly suffocating family life,” living first on the Lower
East Side and then in Flushing, Queens, where Mr. Dickstein’s father opened a “dry goods emporium.” The young
Dickstein is ambitious, accomplished: “I must have been a
nerdy kid,” he writes, “perhaps insufferable.”
So intoxicated in 1968 by the counterculture’s
energies, Dickstein suggests adding ‘The
Story of O’ to Columbia’s core curriculum.
Frustrated by restrictions of ritual, lured by literature
and seeking wider horizons, he heads to the big city,
where he finds Columbia University’s courses “life-altering experiences.” He also studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, does graduate work at Yale and caps it off
with a year at Cambridge. Along the way he encounters
some of the imposing literature teachers of the late 1950s
and early ’60s (Lionel Trilling, Jacob Taubes, F.R. Leavis)
as well as younger scholars who later achieved renown
(Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom).
We hear of Mr. Dickstein’s evolving literary tastes (including an “exhilarating” immersion in Dickens, whose
narratives “sometimes seemed closer to hallucination
than to conventional storytelling”) and of pungent literary
encounters (“As far as we’re concerned,” pronounces
Leavis’s wife, Queenie, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous
novel, “Gatsby is just a thug, just a thug.”)
There are also anxieties, stomach disorders and panic
attacks. Mr. Dickstein finds solace in the love of a woman
and in the powers of art; they coincide during a summer’s
grand tour of Europe, taken on a student budget, recalled
in detail and certain to stir envy. Then Mr. Dickstein begins teaching at Columbia in 1966, just as the counterculture goes mainstream; he departs the university in 1971,
denied tenure and wrestling with his past and future.
The main part of the narrative follows a trajectory
taken by the older New York Intellectuals—children of
immigrants who became sharp-tongued arbiters of culture
and politics, such as Alfred Kazin, Irving Kristol, Irving
Howe and Norman Podhoretz. Their memoirs overlap with
similar themes and encounters (as well as profound disagreements). But that loosely associated community had
splintered by the late 1960s, and few in earlier generations
were so attracted to the counterculture as Mr. Dickstein.
His approach to memoir is different in another way, too.
Though he asserts a strong interest in politics, apart from
countercultural references, there is little sense here of a
wider world. We generally don’t know what issues were
debated, what the stakes were and which arguments were
made. The emphasis here is personal, almost therapeutic.
Throughout, Mr. Dickstein is haunted by opposing impulses. On the one hand there is his strict upbringing, his
“moral restraint” and his tendency toward “a methodical
cast of mind”; on the other hand there is “raging desire,”
a yearning for an “ecstatic breakthrough” and an entrancement with the “limitless range of human possibilities” found in literature. It is like the contrasts he found
long ago between the Talmud and Shakespeare.
By the late 1960s, the latter impulses are triumphant.
“The scent of emancipation was in the air, and I wanted
like hell to be part of it,” Mr. Dickstein writes. He also
associates the counterculture with the Romantic literature
he loves. And he recalls his conviction that the student
takeover of Columbia’s administration buildings in 1968
resembled Paris in 1790 or St. Petersburg in 1917.
There are signs that the mature Mr. Dickstein is a bit
wary of such ecstatic overreach. At one point, he almost
seems regretful that, after devoting himself to “seminal
works that stood the test of time,” he had been “caught up
in the toxic atmosphere.” But if it was toxic, then in what
ways? Mr. Dickstein is reluctant to explore his disenchantment. He is more comfortable explaining the lure of liberation than in examining the opposite pole. So we are left
not with clarity but with uncertainty. And the sentimental
education ends in sentimental ambivalence.
Mr. Rothstein is a critic at large for the Journal.
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By Paul Wolfowitz
Lured
By Literature
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