Entries for June 2007

Gerard Baker in the Times of London makes a point that I have made myself on occasion: The way we pick vice presidents is crazy. We spend lots of time and money and psychic energy on picking our presidents, with millions of people in one way or the other involved. But we let one man (or, quite possibly this time, one woman) select the vice presidential nominee. And this is considered by just about everyone as the way it should be. Yet, as Baker points out, vice presidents have a tremendous advantage when it comes to running for president. So the decision of Ronald Reagan at something like 3 in the morning in a Detroit hotel room to pick George H.W. Bush as his running mate leads directly to Bush's election as president in 1988 and his son's election as president in 2000 and 2004. Had Reagan picked someone else, it is extremely unlikely that either Bush would have been president.

Allah pundit on Hot Air has watched the video of the Senate roll call and reconstructed the order in which the votes were cast. He notes that in the first round of alphabetical-order voting, six senators who had voted for cloture on Tuesday voted against it: Bond, Domenici, Ensign, Murkowski, Stevens, and Webb. That was a pretty clear signal cloture was going to lose, since cloture requires 60 votes and had gotten 64 on Tuesday; the only possibility of its going the other way was if some who had voted against it Tuesday switched, and at that point none had. On the contrary, two seen as possible no-to-yes switchers had voted no again: Bayh and Stabenow.

The immigration bill died today in the Senate as only 46 senators voted for cloture, 18 fewer than two days ago.  That’s a big turnaround and can be only partially explained by switches on the part of senators (Bond and Webb) whose amendments were defeated in the interim. I’ll list the switchers in the categories I used to analyze the “no” voters on Tuesday.

Here’s the Senate roll call on cloture on the immigration bill, 64 to 35 in favor of considering the bill. Of National Review's list of seven senators who could block "amnesty," six—Bond, Brownback, Burr, Coleman, Ensign, and Webb—voted for cloture, while Cochran voted against.

I separate the “no” voters into four categories.

Yesterday afternoon I sat down for an hourlong interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The subject was the immigration bill pending in the Senate, which Chertoff has been lobbying for. In this blog I’m just going to set out what he said, without directly quoting him, as fairly and accurately as I can.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has changed his party registration from Republican to Independent, which everyone is taking as a step toward running as a third-party candidate for president. Bloomberg, whose income is said to be about $500 million a year, is capable of self-financing a campaign, and he has very good job ratings as mayor of New York. A mayor or former mayor of New York has not been a serious candidate for president since DeWitt Clinton in 1812. Now we may have two of them in the 2008 race.

How serious is a Bloomberg candidacy? And who does he take votes away from? Speculation about these questions is interesting, but I think the answers depend on who the Republican and Democratic parties nominate.

I have a tendency to ignore the Monday papers, which are often filled with evergreen stories that can't get into print when there are more pressing news stories. But sometimes a truly important story appears on Monday. A prime example is Jay Mathew's story on the upper left side of Monday's Washington Post, headlined "Maverick Teachers' Key D.C. Moment." The news peg was the appointment last week by D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty of 37-year-old Michelle Rhee as school superintendent.