Halt the political hara-kiri

In this, the most fascinating and longest-running Democratic primary process of our time, we were presented with a silly moment that unfortunately is all too reflective of modern American culture. Consider the case of one Samantha Power.

Ms Power, a Pulitzer prize-winning author, professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, was forced to resign after she referred to Hillary Clinton (whom I admire and am supporting) as a “monster”. She tried to retract her statement but, being unable to declare something off the record ex post facto (do the Scots even have journalism rules?), her words were printed.

What is becoming a shamefully predictable brouhaha ensued. To prevent her candidate from further embarrassment, Ms Power performed the ritual act of American political hara-kiri and resigned. The problem is that calls for resignation are becoming cries of “wolf” in US politics today. Every time one campaign’s surrogate says something mildly offensive about the other candidate, resignation calls are swift.

As if this utter silliness was not enough, Tom Daschle, former Senate majority leader and an honourable man, went into an absurd resignation frenzy by demanding that Howard Wolfson, Mrs Clinton’s communications director, resign for comparing the tactics of the Obama campaign to Ken Starr, the former independent counsel.

This sort of hyper-sensitivity diminishes everyone who engages in it, both the candidates and the media. Politics is a rough and tumble business, and yet there seems to be an effort by the commentariat to sanitise American politics to some type of high-level Victorian debating society.

The number one advocate and proponent of this idiocy is the editorial page of The New York Times which accused Mrs Clinton of racism when she pointed out (correctly, I might add) that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1965. Have we really reached the point where you cannot call your opponent a monster (even if you think her one), and are no longer allowed to cite facts of US history?

It is not the attacks that are unprecedented; it is the shocked reaction to them. I think back to the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, in which I played a role. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, Paul Begala, my colleague, began belittling the victory of Senator Paul Tsongas by arguing that Mr Clinton’s comeback was a much bigger story. In doing so, Mr Begala called Mr Tsongas a “son of a bitch”. Mr Clinton asked him to write an apology note but also requested that it not affect his aggressiveness. The story lasted one day.

Later in the campaign, my then girlfriend and now wife Mary Matalin called my client “a philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger”. Naturally, someone made a perfunctory call for her to resign which got nowhere, and we all got a good laugh and moved on.

Near the end of that campaign, George H.W. Bush, the president, boldly asserted of Mr Clinton and Al Gore that “my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos”. Thank God nobody asked Mr Bush to resign. Life as we knew it went along quite nicely because it was all part of that entertaining, rough and tumble endeavour we know as politics.

It has always been that way. In the late 1950s, Earl Long, the then governor of my home state of Louisiana and in my view its most courageous politician since the second world war, referred to one of his political enemies as “nothing but a little pissant”. Or consider the election of 1828, in which surrogates for John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s wife a bigamist and his mother a prostitute. And that was before television.

Maybe somebody should have resigned for that. But that is where we have lost perspective. Some comments are within bounds, while some are not. But by whining about every little barb, candidates are trying to win the election through a war of staff resignation attrition and Americans are losing the ability to distinguish between what is fair game and what is not.

Consider that this year Bill Shaheen was forced to resign his volunteer position as co-chair of Mrs Clinton’s campaign in New Hampshire after his comments regarding the Republican party’s use of Mr Obama’s admission of teenage drug use. “The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight …and one of the things they’re certainly going to jump on is his drug use.”

Was that a suggestive statement? Sure. Was it out of bounds? Not egregiously. Are Republicans going to raise this issue should Mr Obama become the Democratic nominee? You bet.

Or this week, we had Geraldine Ferraro, another Clinton volunteer, popping off with some late-night bar room logic. Rather than having to resign, as she has just done, she should have been dispatched to a cruise ship for a few weeks of sightseeing and spa treatments. I hear Antarctica is a popular destination this time of year.

Politics is a messy business, but campaigning prepares you for governing. It prepares you to get hit, stand strong and, if necessary, hit back. So our candidates need to buck up, toughen up and recognise that time spent whining and sniping is time not spent addressing the real concerns of the people.

So Ms Power, come back to work. New York Times, get out of these candidates’ way and let them run for president. Everybody take a deep breath. And if somebody somewhere refers to their rival as a little pissant, do not sweat it. Nobody seems to even know what that is.

The writer, former campaign manager for President Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, now co-hosts XM Radio’s 60/20 Sports and is a CNN political contributor