Yesterday's "Stop Nunn" post generated significantly more email than I usually receive for an article. Almost all of the email generally agreed that Nunn should not be Vice-President, but that my criticisms were too harsh and Nunn might serve a useful role elsewhere in an Obama administration.
For one thing, as reader DC emails, Nunn did at least opposed the Iraq war (both of them, in fact). This is a good sign that Obama is looking to put a war opponent on the ticket:
By one important measurement, Nunn is progressive -- against the Iraq War from the start. His boomlet is a sure sign that the Obama team has (correctly) decided that no one who voted for the war resolution can be on the ticket with him. Yes, there are other reasons to deep six Nunn. But his right call on Iraq has earned him a short list mention.
Never mind secretary of state, we nominate Sam Nunn for a new cabinet position: secretary of nuclear -- not nonproliferation, but, in the words of sociologist Amitai Etzioni - de-proliferation. Who's better equipped to not only halt, but reverse, the spread of nuclear weapons?
Ed Kilgore at New Donkey doesn't think that Nunn either should, or will, be Vice-President, but he takes umbrage at my assertions that Nunn would be worse than Lieberman, and that the DLC's foudnign mission was to elect Nunn President:
The invidious comparison of Nunn with John McCain's close friend and supporter Joe Lieberman is more than a bit odd, too, since the Georgian shares none of Joe's adoration of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy (au contraire), of the Iraq War, or of John McCain's neo-Cold War posturing towards Russia, China and Iran. Indeed, as a surrogate if nothing else, Nunn could do Barack Obama a lot of good by getting under John McCain's thin skin on his dangerous approach to national security.
One final thing about Chris' post: in an effort, I guess, to bring out the Big Berthas on the Nunn Veep idea, he says that "the DLC was originally founded in order to elect Sam Nunn President. I'm not kidding." Chris' authority for this assertion is a disputed, agit-proppy Wikipedia entry on the DLC which says the group's "original focus was to secure the 1988 presidential nomination of a southern conservative Democrat such as Nunn or [Chuck] Robb."
You know, I somehow don't think that founding DLC chairman Dick Gephardt (who ran for president in 1988), or founding members Al Gore (ditto) and Bill Clinton (who nearly ran that year) were "focused" on elevating Sam Nunn to the presidency in 1988. But this and other bad and good arguments for and against Nunn will be heard a lot if his apparent short-listing for the vice presidency continues.
I certainly overstated the case that the DLC was founded to elect Nunn President, since even the source I cited actually implied that it was founded in order to elect a moderate or conservative southern Democratic Governor or Senator to the White House. Nunn was just an example of the type of politician they sought, not the paradigm or first choice.
As far as Nunn being worse than Lieberman, I based that assertion on Nunn flirting with a Unity 08 ticket run back in 2007. I guess since he didn't actually run as a third-party candidate, while Lieberman did, that in and of itself makes Nunn better. Throw in all of the stuff listed above, and yeah, Nunn is preferably to Lieberman.
Still, while I left out some of the positive things about Nunn, and while I may have used hyperbolic descriptions, there still appears to be a consensus that Nunn would be a poor choice for Vice-President. Even on an electoral level, Poblano accurately points out that Democrats will win Virginia or North Carolina before we win Georgia, and if we win Virginia and North Carolina the election will be decided no matter what happens in Georgia.
For those interested, Dylan Matthews has started a "Having Nunn of It" campaign to oppose Sam Nunn for Obama's Vice-President. Even if what everyone says is right, and that there is really no serious chance of Nunn becoming VP, it still seems like a worthy campaign to support.
Following the news that former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle has been hired by the Obama campaign as Chief of Staff for the Vice-Presidential nominee, there has been quite a bit of speculation about the ramifications of this hiring. While this is purely speculation, I side with Ben Smith, who thinks that this means Clinton is less likely to be the VP nominee than ever. Doyle was not only fired from the Clinton campaign, but was also talking openly of working with Obama well before Clinton made her concession last week. All in all, it is hard to imagine that this is the person who would be chosen to manage Clinton in the general election.
While the odds of Clinton becoming VP might be sinking, the odds of former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn being chosen appear to be rising rapidly. Here are three quick reasons:
When looking for advice at the start of his Senate career, Obama apparently sought out, and met with Nunn, one month into his first term back in February of 2005.
At worst, Nunn is in the top ten right now. Personally, I find this prospect extremely disturbing. Consider the following:
Putting Nunn on the ticket would be an open admission by Barack Obama that John McCain and Hillary Clinton are right: Obama does not have the experience to be President, and does not cross the "Commander in Chief" threshold. Rather than helping Obama out on the "experience" front, it would emphasize his lack of experience.
He is a board member of the following publicly held corporations: Chevron Corporation, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell Computer Corporation, General Electric Company.
Putting a 70-year old, white, southern, corporate dude on the ticket would almost entirely wipe away any notion that Obama is a "change" candidate. Sam Nunn is more status quo than David Broder. He is the least "change" candidate one can find.
Less than a year ago, Nunn was openly talking of running against the Democratic nominee in the general election and accepting the top position on the "Unity 08" ticket.
The DLC was originally founded in order to elect Sam Nunn President. I'm not kidding.
This may sound hard to believe, but Sam Nunn would be a worse Vice-Presidential choice than Joe Lieberman. It is hard to even think up a more anti-progressive Democratic VP candidate, in every sense of the word progressive, than Sam Nunn. Along with a few other bloggers, I have been spending a decent amount of time arguing against Jim Webb as VP (see Matt and Natasha for more on this), but Nunn really seems like a disaster. Perhaps it is time for a "Stop Nunn" campaign.
The Democrats have plenty of strong VP picks this cycle. Amongst those who get a lot of blogosphere attention I'm particularly partial to Sherrod Brown, Brian Schweitzer, John Edwards, Chris Dodd, Kathleen Sebelius and Bill Richardson.
Nevertheless, the blogosphere doesn't make the decision. And we have less influence than the media. The conventional wisdom in the media is that Obama needs to pick a moderate elder statesman with defence and foreign policy credentials. A lotofpeople seem to be backing Sam Nunn.
This would be a truly appalling choice. He's been good on nuclear non-proliferation issues and is no doubt a dab hand at negotiating with banana republic despots, but he's terrible on economic issues and routinely favoured regressive social policies.
He supported the Iraq war and he mulled an independent run this year. The only saving grace is that he's too old to run as Obama's successor.
Thankfully such a choice appears unlikely at present. Obama's decision to interview Patty Murray suggests that he's not fooled by the beltway consensus that Unity 08 was a great idea.
Nevertheless, there's still an outside chance that Nunn, or similar wastes of space like former Indiana congressmen Lee Hamilton and Tim Roemer. And even if that doesn't happen, this kind of media discourse pushes the Overton window leftward, so figures like Feingold are not perceived as remotely plausible candidates.
"It's a possibility, not a probability," said [former Georgia Democratic Senator Sam] Nunn, now the head of a nonprofit organization out to reduce the threat posed by nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry. "My own thinking is, it may be a time for the country to say, 'Timeout. The two-party system has served us well, historically, but it's not serving us now.'"
The 68-year-old former senator, still considered one of the foremost experts on national security, confirmed that he's discussed a presidential run as part of several conversations with Michael Bloomberg, the New York mayor.
More important, Nunn said he's been in touch with Unity '08, a group with a goal of fielding a bipartisan or independent ticket for president. Initial talks began with Hamilton Jordan, a co-founder of Unity '08 and former chief of staff to President Jimmy Carter.
Sam Nunn has been flirting with running for President since the mid-1980's, and this just strikes me as a long overdue convulsion continuing that trend. A friend of mine who worked for Nunn when he was in the Senate told me once that Nunn wanted to be President, but didn't want to have to run for President. Hard to imagine that has changed now, especially as an Independent candidate who would have no chance whatsoever of winning. It is also a sign of the more progressive times in the Democratic Party that Nunn, like other key figures in the DLC, are openly flirting with Unity08 and Bloomberg, when they were founded in the 1980's to try and force a southern conservative, like Sam Nunn, as the Democratic presidential nominee:
The DLC was founded in 1985 by Al From and other Democrats after Ronald Reagan's re-election. The organization started as a group of forty-three elected officials, and two staffers, Al From and Will Marshall. Their original focus was on influencing internal Democratic politics so as to secure the 1988 presidential nomination for a Southern conservative such as Sam Nunn or Chuck Robb, both of whom were early DLC supporters. However, when the DLC's pet project, the Super Tuesday primary, turned out to be a boon for Reverend Jesse Jackson, a vocal critic of the DLC, the group began to shift toward attempting to influence the public debate.
From, like Nunn, now apparently considers both winning Democratic the primary a lost cause, and also considers Clinton too far left to be tolerable. First:
According to Michael Steinhardt, chairman of PPI's Board of Trustees until he resigned at the end of 1995, the Third Way Project was to be 'a new approach to separate ourselves from the Democratic Party.' He explained [to author Baer] that the DLC began to take on a more bipartisan focus, which appealed to a number of contributors, including Steinhardt himself, who advocated the formation of a third party and went so far as to meet with Bill Bradley to try to persuade him to run for President in 1996."
Sources told CBS 2 Bloomberg brought three deputy mayors with him, and proceeded to talk through every angle of a presidential run. By the end, the group had zeroed in on his running as an independent in 2008. And, the sources said, he seemed intrigued.
The dinner was held at the home of Michael Steinhardt, a legendary Wall Street hedge fund manager and a Bloomberg friend. He brought along Al From, head of the Democratic Leadership Council, which played a part in Bill Clinton's rise to power in 1992.
Whatever efforts the DLC has made to make the Democratic Party more conservative, they have generally failed. Self-identified liberals now make up a higher percentage of self-identified Democrats than they did at any time in the past, and so the Sam Nunn's and Al From's of the world have refocused their efforts from trying to elect a conservative southern Democrat, to flirting with independent candidacies. If Nunn did run, it would probably be bad for the Democratic nominee. However, I just don't see a Nunn run happening, considering his twenty-year flirtation with the idea that he never followed through on before. Why actually pull the trigger now, when you are 68, have a much lower profile, and a much lower chance of winning? Mostly, this seems worthy of note because it demonstrates once again how the ideological locus of the Democratic Party has shifted over the past twenty years. Whether we want to believe it or not, and while there are boviously still hurdles to overcome, it is safe to argue that progressives and liberals are gaining ground in the party. Of course, we need to keep pushing further.
