WASHINGTON - - If you've ever seen two lawyers go at it in court, you know that what they really care about is winning, not some fuzzy concept like justice.
And if you've ever seen two parties really go at each other in an election, you know that winning and losing is the motivation, not some fuzzy concept like what would be best for America.
At some level of their consciousness, party leaders have convinced themselves that Republicans are always better than Democrats and vice versa and they proceed accordingly.
Which means the two parties will spend mountains of money to make sure that on Nov. 6, dawn will break with more of their candidates having been elected than the other party's.
You can see why that is important in the U.S. House and Senate. Not just votes on legislation, but committee assignments, patronage and pork depends on whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge.
And earlier this year, the Democrats sounded mighty confident that they would pick up the six seats they needed to take control of the House away from the Republicans and Republicans were sounding somewhat optimistic that they might take back control of the Senate.
But that was then and this is now and Democratic leaders privately admit winning the House is going to be an uphill fight and Republicans privately admit they probably aren't going to win the Senate.
Which means the status quo. (Which probably means you can forget about any major legislation getting passed before Election Day 2004.)
But that also means a lot more emphasis on the governors races that are also going to be decided this November.
I have never quite understood this. There is no national legislative body of governors, so who cares whether Democrats or Republicans have the most governors in America?
The parties care, that's who. A lot.
Because if neither the Senate nor House change hands this time, bragging rights for who "won" the election is going to be based on which party holds the most governor's seats.
Currently, Republicans sit in 27 governor chairs, the Democrats sit in 21 and Independents (Angus King of Maine and Jesse Ventura of Minnesota) sit in two.
Because some governors are term-limited, there is a lot more turnover among governors than members of Congress. (The Supreme Court has ruled that you can't term-limit members of Congress, though no doubt many people would like to.)
Because of this, retirements and because President Bush grabbed some prominent GOP governors to serve in his cabinet, some big states are facing hot races including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois.
Republicans hold all three states now, but are in danger of losing them.
Aside from bragging-rights, why should the national parties care?
Well, the theory goes, governorships are very important to presidential elections. If George Bush can continue having Republican governors in those critical, big electoral vote states, his chances for re-election improve.
That's the theory, anyway. But take a look at what happened in the last election:
The GOP had governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois and Bush lost Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois.
But he lost them narrowly and he sure doesn't want to lose them again. So Bush has been campaigning for GOP gubernatorial candidates in those states as well as in California, where the GOP candidate is trailing badly, and in Florida, where his brother is ahead in the polls.
By Labor Day, Bush will have flown to 16 states to help Republicans win governor's seats. And he expects that if his candidates win, they will actively work for him in 2004.
Parris Glendening, who is leaving as governor of Maryland and currently is chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, says that the races in the big states, are "a clear starting point for the race to the White House."
Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, chair of the Republican Governors Association, said, "For a more comfortable margin of victory in '04, we would like to win these states."
Earlier in the summer, Democrats were bragging about picking up a lot of governors seats and holding a majority of the states for the first time since 1994. "We'll have 28 or more seats," said Democratic Gov. Paul Patton of Kentucky.
But some polls have been tightening and now Democrats seem a little more nervous. And both sides are now talking about winning "key" states.
"We will not unnecessarily raise expectations," Rowland said.
Both sides would like to brag come Nov. 6. And both sides will certainly find something to brag about. They just aren't sure what yet.
WASHINGTON - - If you were in debt and somebody owed you a lot of money, wouldn't you try to collect it?
I would. And so would Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York.
New York City is about $5 billion in debt, which is getting in the neighborhood of real money.
And while nobody owes New York all that much, foreign scofflaws do owe New York more than $20 million in unpaid parking tickets.
These foreign scofflaws all have diplomatic immunity and have been refusing to pay.
This is very common both in New York, home of the United Nations and many consulates, and Washington, home of foreign embassies.
While diplomatic immunity was designed to protect genuine diplomats from false arrest and harassment, the system has been "gamed" to such an extent that in just New York and Washington alone there are 37,000 people with diplomatic immunityplus all their dependents!
Not only is that number ridiculous, but the actions of these people are all too often criminal.
I have a file several inches thick of the outrages performed by foreign diplomats and their families over the years all because they have immunity.
For example:
- - The son of a Saudi Arabian diplomat was suspected of raping a 16-year-old girl in Alexandria, Va. Our State Department presented evidence to the Saudi embassy, which made "no denial" of the allegation. Because of diplomatic immunity, the diplomat's son was never prosecuted.
- - The ambassador from Papua New Guinea was driving drunk around Washington, D.C. one day when he slammed into three parked cars, critically injuring a 26-year-old American. The ambassador was never prosecuted.
- - Peter Christiansen, a retired New York police detective, testified before a Senate committee that he had tracked down a man suspected of 15 rapes.
Two of the victims identified the man, but he was the son of a military attaché from Ghana and had diplomatic immunity. "I was forced to let him go," Christiansen told the senators. "As he left, he snickered and laughed at the crime victims and myself."
- - The son of a Brazilian ambassador once got into a fight into a topless bar in Washington, pulled out two guns and fired several shots, hitting a bar employee in the hand, leg and abdomen. The ambassador's son was sent home to Brazil to sip pina coladas, while the wounded American could not even get his medical bills paid.
- - Shoplifting by diplomats is considered commonplace. They are never prosecuted. There have also been cases of robbery, counterfeiting, weapons smuggling, heroin smuggling, assault and - - I kid you not - - the keeping of slaves on American soil.
Crimes committed under the cover of diplomatic immunity plague not only the United States, they occur in countries around the world.
So far this year, foreign diplomats and embassy staff living in Britain have escaped prosecution for 21 serious crimes. Furthermore, diplomats owe nearly $2.3 million in unpaid rent and parking fines.
On this side of the pond, Mayor Bloomberg was so fed up by all the unpaid parking fines owed to New York City, some of which were five years old, that he fixed a deadline for payment.
After that deadline, he said, New York would begin towing away hundreds of diplomatic vehicles. (Only those attached to consuls would be towed, however, not those attached to the United Nations. The mayor does not want to drive the UN from his city.)
The owners of the consular cars would get the same treatment, in other words, that you and I would get.
But who do you think howled the loudest when Bloomberg announced his towing policy?
Not just the foreign countries. Nope, our Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell, picked up the phone and personally told Bloomberg to cease and desist.
Which is what always happens when anybody starts to crack down on foreign diplomats.
Our State Department gets weak in the knees and says, "If you crack down on foreign diplomats here, foreign countries will crack down on U.S. diplomats overseas!"
To which I say: Let them. U.S. diplomats have no business not paying their parking tickets. Let U.S. diplomats pay for their tickets overseas, and let foreign diplomats pay for their tickets in the United States.
There is actually a law, passed some years ago, the requires the United States to subtract the amount of a countrys unpaid parking tickets from its foreign aid. But what if the country doesnt get foreign aid?
And this hardly helps New York. Diplomats will park illegally and say, "So you want to reduce food shipments to the starving of my country? Go ahead. I dont care. I just want to be able to park in front of a fire hydrant whenever I want."
Other politicians joined in supporting Bloomberg, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said, "The flagrant disregard for parking regulations has serious ramifications for the safety and the quality of life of New Yorkers."
But Secretary Powell urged Bloomberg to negotiate with foreign countries and warned him that what he was planning to do would violate international law.
At the last minute, a complicated compromise was worked out by which the foreign countries will supposedly pay some money and New York will cut them some slack until they do.
"I dont think you should look to this as the solution to the citys $5 billion budget deficit," Bloomberg said. "If we get two or three million dollars out of the $20 million, I think wed all be very happy. Its unrealistic to think youll get much more."
Which is true just as long as our State Department keeps standing up for foreign law breakers. As long as that keeps happening, the rules will stay the same:
The United States gets to be diplomatic while everybody else gets the immunity.
WASHINGTON - - The magazine I work for asked me to write an essay about political hoaxes, but I had to explain that in politics they don’t call it a hoax. They call it campaigning.
Politics is about creating an alternative reality, anyway, in which a fully informed people elect public servants who exist only to do the public good and are never motivated by greed, self-interest, or a lust for power.
This was probably true when it came to George Washington. After him, things sort of went to hell.
Washington was so beloved he did not have to campaign, which made it easy to refrain from flimflam.
"After Washington, every candidate had to run, had to advance his own cause," said presidential historian Gil Troy. This need to sell oneself led to what was then called bunkum and hokum and what today we call statesmanship.
It was inevitable, perhaps, that candidates soon came to view voters as an audience that needed to be entertained.
"William Henry Harrison's 1840 campaign produced . . . the first systematic and widespread use of what today would be called image advertising," wrote Kathleen Hall Jamieson in "Packaging the Presidency."
Before 1840, campaigns emphasized American symbols. But Harrison's forces were out to create a good-old-boy image. They "appropriated the log cabin and cider [barrel] to transform the wealthy son of a governor into a farmer and backwoodsman," Jamieson wrote. Pioneers and rural voters loved it.
Opposition Democrats revealed the truth: Harrison lived in a Georgian mansion. He owned 2,000 lush acres farmed by tenant farmers. He had been born not in a log cabin but in Virginia's beautiful Berkeley Plantation. (Which you can still visit today.)
The son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Harrison was no rustic. But voters did not care. They enjoyed the myth and they elected him.
He promised to serve only one term, but he didn’t get even that far. On a cold March 4, 1841 (presidents were inaugurated in March back then) he gave a long speech, caught pneumonia and died in Washington exactly one month later.
He was the first president to die in office and the nation was grief-stricken.
Which I guess means that way back in olden times people liked to be bamboozled.
As historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," "Barnum's great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived."
Nearly 150 years after Harrison, Americans had not really changed.
Everyone knew George H. W. Bush was by manner and upbringing a northeastern preppy.
After he lost the Iowa caucus in 1988, his team created an alternative reality: Bush as a beer-swigging, pork-rind-eating, horseshoe-pitching Texan.
As Spy magazine put it, the putative Texan "was born in Massachusetts, grew up in Connecticut, lives in Washington, D.C., and pays taxes in Maine."
Bush even had his own version of the log cabin: a Houston hotel suite that made him an official resident of Texas. Newspapers howled at the deception - - how could a hotel room make you a Texan?
But the public did not care. Once again, the image was more appealing than the reality and Bush was elected.
Lincoln once said, "You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."
A century later, movie producer Joseph Levine summed up the new reality: "You can fool all the people if the advertising is right and budget is big enough."
And, often, the people don't even mind.
WASHINGTON - - It was to a group of senior citizens at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting in Las Vegas, that DNC chief Terry McAuliffe told a slight fib.
"When we get Dick Gephardt in the Speaker's chair, we won't have a joke of a prescription drug plan for seniors, we'll have a real one!" McAuliffe thundered.
No doubt McAuliffe believes the Democrats have a better prescription drug plan than the Republicans, but if seniors are waiting for Dick Gephardt to become Speaker of the House in 2003, they shouldn't hold their breath.
That's because just about everyone in Democratic politics knows that Gephardt is going to run for president next year.
If the Democrats win the House in November (and that is a big if with them needing to pick up six seats to do so) Gephardt could become speaker if he wanted to. But he doesn't want to.
(So who would be the new speaker if the Democrats take control? Most likely there would be a battle for the job between Nancy Pelosi of California, currently No. 2 in the Democratic House leadership, and Martin Frost of Texas, who is currently No. 3.)
But what if the Democrats fail to re-take the House? That's an even easier decision for Gephardt: It would give him the perfect excuse to abandon his minority leader's job in order to run for president.
A Gephardt presidential bid would not only set off a scramble for leadership in the House, it will set off a scramble in Iowa.
And that scramble will be among the Democratic presidential wannabes running away from the state.
The Iowa caucuses are the first contest in the presidential primary season and are followed eight days later by New Hampshire primary. Gephardt would probably be so strong in Iowa, however, that there is little reason for some of the candidates to run against him there.
Gephardt comes from neighboring Missouri and won the Iowa caucus the last time he ran for president in 1988. (He got 31 percent, Paul Simon got 27 percent and the eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, got 22 percent.)
Gephardt would be so strong in Iowa in 2004 that the other Democrats might decide to borrow a page from John McCain's playbook and skip the state all together.
Look at what happened in 2000: On the Democratic side, Bill Bradley decided he had to challenge Al Gore in Iowa. It was a crazy decision. Bradley had no farm policy (and farm policy, defined as how much money you can give to farmers, is the lifeblood of the Iowa caucus) and Gore did.
What Bradley needed to do was spend much more time in New Hampshire, where he had a chance. Instead, he squandered time and money in Iowa. Result?
Bradley lost Iowa by 23 percentage points and went on to New Hampshire where he lost by 4 percentage points.
If Bradley had skipped Iowa and spent more time in New Hampshire, could he have won there?
Well, John McCain on the Republican side, decided to skip Iowa and concentrate on New Hampshire instead.
Though many said this was madness, McCain pointed out a few things: He could not beat George W. Bush in Iowa, Iowa was halfway across the country from Washington, D.C. and he had to change planes to get there.
New Hampshire, he pointed out, was a cheap, direct flight from Washington, which made it easy for him to do his job as senator and still campaign for president.
In any case, McCain practically lived in New Hampshire and he beat Bush there by 19 percentage points.
What's the lesson? The lesson is that when there is a prohibitive favorite in Iowa, you might as well skip it and go to a state where you have a chance.
Among the current top-tier Democratic contenders - - Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut - - none today looks like he could beat Gephardt in Iowa.
Two not on that list - - Al Gore and Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who have not decided whether to run for president - - might wage a good fight against Gephardt, but that would give the rest of the field even less of a reason to go to Iowa and stand on the sidelines.
Gephardt is very strong with labor (a big source of money and campaign volunteers) and traditional Democrats. He also has another strength.
According to ABC News: "After a losing cycle, activists often look for a nominee who is as unlike the party's previous nominee as possible (think Bob Dole leading to George W. Bush, or Michael Dukakis leading to Bill Clinton). So in 2004, any candidate who is viewed as the opposite of Gore -- or at least, the opposite of how Gore was perceived -- will have that advantage. Too stiff, too political, too arrogant -- all are traits and labels to be avoided this time."
And who does ABC rates as the top-tier candidate most unlike Al Gore? Dick Gephardt.
Which could lead to an very interesting campaign slogan:
"Gephardt - - At Least He's Not Gore."
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