After Iowa, Floyd joked that the two winners were not the two newcomers but the two guys with the strangest names : Huckabee and Obama. "This" , he said, "was reason to think that Engelburt Humperdinck might come into the race."

What was more important, however, was that the three leading
Dem candidates resembled the 3 of 1968, a banner year by any standard.  Hillary Clinton was, probably to her inner dismay, Hubert Humphrey, the establishment insider. Edwards was Bobby Kennedy. OK, not a former Attorney General, but short, rich and pushing class struggle. And Obama, well, that's easy : he was Gene McCarthy : intellectually confident, moralistic,
elitist---the way only an academic can be elitist (and without showing his dibbs on the Illiad, the Aeneid, or even Mark Twain.) This is why Hillary could plow through debates with confidence : "she had been promised." This was why Barrack
had his nose in the air and his platitudes sounding almost like non-platitudes.  This was why John Edwards got a $400 haircut: certainly he didn't need it or prefer that price range. He needed to do the 2008 version of the hair-thing--- and that was no longer a rock star with hair, but an envious rich man. That was 400 bucks and a news story.  

Floyd was tuned to the reality that Republicans needed validation after having lost their way in victory : after all, Bush had become a big spender and the Republican Congress had been crazy for  earmarks. The Democrats had yet to find their path in defeat after 2004.  Floyd knew that the road to the White House lay through pride for the GOP and anger for the Democrats. The GOP needed a lighthouse; the Democrats a warning buoy. Democrats were in need to a real warship : OK, a pirate ship might do : they didn't care that much about the facts. They needed to board and conquer, not define and debate. But that was their primary, Floyd's was another.  Floyd had understood for a long time the IX Amendment to the constitution was the bedrock on which the future of the Dem Party would be built; while the X Amendment would continue as the lawful basis of GOP activities. Floyd extended his didactic activities into the other party. "The IX amendment was made for the left, for people who were determined to establish new rights in society." "The problem," he said , "with the liberals is that they don't enough respect for the constitution to read it----when all the time the constitutionality for what they want (health care) may be lying there in plane sight : number nine. It was James Madison's reconsideration : maybe in 1830 or 1880 or 1980 some new rights will need to be established. Therefore : " The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights should not be construed as to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people."  For the right, Floyd simply said "There are a lot of smart people in the country, but none of them have ever shown me just where the states surrendered their authority to the federal government to regulate reproduction. The states matter!"  That's the X Amendment.

The pre-season had ended and Iowa and NH were upon us. Upon them, the candidates.  Upon the politicians and their minions. Political organizations were descending on Des Moines and Manchester, driving up real estate prices, crowding restaurants and cluttering the airwaves. The people of New Hampshire pretended to be indifferent, but of course they were not. They were flattered by this ritual which had evolved from what was once an election…..i.e. a choice, a selection,  a taking one from the multiple. A deliberate and democratic decision.

Floyd Anderson obliged and attended the ceremonial and traditional functions of the NH all of which were much more established than the people of the Granite State were comfortable admitting : you arrive, you take up hotel space, you go to town meetings, you bug people on the street, you pretend to be casual and relaxed, you debate, you spend lots of money, you debate, you hold meetings, you pretend this droning process is not getting to you, you declare your love for NH; then before the ballots are counted, you rush on to the next state.

But Floyd did alright in the debates because he was willing to acknowledge reality. When discussing illegal immigrants, for example, he dropped one on them about Mexico : Mexico had the highest birth rate in the world in 1980, -81, -82. Mexico had had a revolution when Russia did and likewise had collapsed when the USSR collapsed (1988-89). Mexico was corrupt, poorly run and nearly 100 years behind the USA and western Europe and Japan in higher education; northern Mexico had become a narco-state. Fox, he suggested, was Yeltsin. Putin was more focused  and in control----and frankly, Calderon, short and tough, looked a lot like Putin. Both Yeltsin and Fox were tall and not in control. Both Calderon and Putin would use oil money to fight drug money. Simple enough.

The debates were fine enough with less being decided on the GOP side than on the Democratic side. Only two things were decided in NH : Hillary Clinton was tough and Rudy Giuliani mistook a fair, an event, a ritual, festival for an election. The NH primary is not so much an election as it is a cultural exercise : a Protestant Marti Gras, a Kentucky derby without the horses, a World Series without the American League or the National League. It was more than a convention or a blind ritual; it had become a ceremony exerting its influence far beyond the borders of this state. For an Italian misjudging a ceremony was truly a cardinal sin. But when it was over there were many more, more authentic primaries to face.

In the early debates several things became clear : Bill Richardson was pretty emotional for a guy who been Sec of Energy and Amb to the UN; Chris Dodd acted like he was in the Senate fighting for another $26m for his state; Joe Biden was looking for his campaign legs; Dennis Kucinich believed in class struggle; Mike Gravel had a sense of humor; and Sen Barrack Obama was a sophisticated speaker.

On the GOP side : Floyd was disappointed with the failure of the GOP to discuss affirmative action. Here, he thought the liberal media was really setting the agenda for his conservative party. He also disliked the way the issue of terrorism or the war of terrorism was discussed. It was not so much that the discussion was not put in terms of fascist Islamic movements, but that the mechanics of foreign policy was often omitted. He was strongly for an alliance with Russia on the problem of terrorism. Floyd Anderson believed that there were only three countries which took aggressive responses to terrorism : the USA, Britain, and Russia---and of those Britain sometimes wavered with internal divisions. He did, however, find some common ground with Joe Biden who said that the road to a political solution in Iraq meant working with local government and local neighborhoods. Floyd went a step farther. In Floyd's words : "Iraq was a tribal society; stability could only come through working with the tribes." He felt that the central government should formally commit 40% of all oil revenue to the 15 tribes of Iraq. This 40% would then be apportioned according to a fairly refined formula.

He did learn to respect his opponents. He recognized Mike Huckabee's success as the product of having dealt intimately with the very real problems of his parishioners : he could imagine the Rev Huckabee sitting in a small office with a middle aged couple who had just lost a teen aged child or with some other person who had experienced a great personal loss. He soon recognized Mayor Giuliani's speaking skills  and John McCain's tenacity and honesty. He was puzzled, however, with Mitt Romney's failure to share his great skills in business and finance with the audiences. Romney, he thought, was getting poor advice. You run on your strengths---and Romney's strength was his very considerable knowledge of trade, finance, production and distribution, not any long established association with Ronald Reagan. If he were going to be the next Ronald Reagan, certainly the Republican Party would recognize that; reminding folks of it himself would only diminish the resemblance. It looked to Lt-Gov Anderson as though someone was telling Romney the political equivalent of this baseball advice : "Have Floyd pinch hit for Alex Rodriguez in the bottom of the 9th."

Several of the other Republicans did not seem to know why they were in the race. Tancredo, he thought, was single issue candidate who could have better gotten out his message by talking about Mexico : northern Mexico as a narco-state and Mexican migration : in 1958 Mexico City had 3 million people; by 1981 it had 28 million. This rapid urbanization caused great problems with housing, traffic, health care, crime, education, and pollution.

Super Tuesday pretty much showed John McCain to be the candidate of the Republican suburbs, but his victory there was fueled by successes in NH and SC.  (This suggested that the suburbs draw their fuel from fairly traditional sources.)  By mid Feb, Giuliani was on a side track, not the main line and Mitt Romney was too flawed with pressured speech, choppy gestures, sophomoric self-comparisons to Ronald Reagan, and most of all his failure to display his talents in business. The road was open for the GOP, the party of the heir apparent to anoint the heir apparent.

The GOP anointed McCain in spite of his differences with the party on immigration and campaign reform because they knew that, if anything, he was to the right of Bush on anti-terrorism. The current president was willing to sustain American casualties in order not to kill too many of the opposition. The war in both Afghanistan and Iraq were being fought with hesitation and with the handicap of police rules in order to show the people of those places that America was a compassionate and moderate power. The effect was probably to convince the people there that American lacked resolve, sometimes courage and most definitely a plan.------And indeed they did : from the very beginning it was evident the idea of democracy for Iraq was a bit of an abstraction for Bush. Between occupation and election stood mostly a vacuum : a political vacuum for the Iraqis, an administrative vacuum for the Americans.

Finally, Floyd B. Anderson knew this:
There were two theories how to win a war  :  1) von Klausowitz, Prussian, writing in the early 19th century said :  You win by killing the enemy. You kill so many at all levels of the enemy's army that soon the enemy is either unwilling or unable to replace the losses and quits.
       2) Secondly, Jomini, French, early 19th century, says that you win by taking territory and holding it. Soon the enemy is able neither able to advance, retreat, maneuver, be re-enforced or re-supplied. He is Cornwallis at Yorktown. He quits.

Both went to work for Russia as Napoleon became more powerful and more imperial.  Although he had never  been in the military, Lt-Gov Anderson knew this : Jomini was much more applicable to Iraq and less so Afghanistan than was von Klausowitz.

But now it was mid-February and the money was running out. The groundhog didn't smile on Floyd : he was pressed for cash and no harking back to a library for Jefferson or Washington or the Adams family was going to pull in any money. He went back to Des Moines and met with Ralph Jenkins. Together the old college buddies breathed new life into a third rate campaign.

biden?  yes, i expected a younger better lookin' dude. but biden is a good choice : he re-assures the wash insiders, the clark cllffords & the tommy bogges-es.
conservatives regard Biden as sincere but misguided; not really bright but trust-worthy.
 
The fact that the Dem Party has to swing to its v-p candidate for the blue collar vote is not only a bad sign for this election but for the next 6 elections. They are the affirmative action party, if you ask me---which is a catching basket for other items like Indian gambling and illegal immigration and gay marriage.

If Obama was 43% as smart as people think he is he'd say----"With regard to alternative energy, we Dem have spent too much time on tax credits and not enough on streamlining construction permits. We treat building and erecting solar collectors and wind mills like they are off shore oil rigs. Let's move 'em!"

McCain shd say about Obama and the surge----"A president has to be able to recognize success whether its in bridges or remedial reading or long term health care or law enforcement or preventing animal diseases or in diplomacy or bio-technology or in making steel. A president who puts politics before acknowledging the success of other Americans endangers the success and progress of the country. The surge was successful and Senator Obama shd be man enough to say 'well done, boys. Well done.' "

Floyd B Anderson decided to run for president as he was walking up the steps of the statehouse in Des Moines, Iowa. Floyd was Lt-Gov of Iowa, a position he had held for nine years and three months. Floyd was moderate Republican and 63 years old. He was single, his wife having passed away seven years after a divorce some dozen years ago. He had a son in California and a daughter in NH, neither of them very political. He stopped at the landing atop the steps, took off his tie and descended, heading for the nearest coffee shop. He thought that he would announce informally to the first person with whom he might share coffee.

When he arrived, however, the place was nearly empty; so he sat down alone and sketched out a strategy to succeed James Madison, Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. When had finished, he called his friend Ralph Jenkins in California and told him the news. Ralph didn’t take him very seriously but he did promise his support.

The plan that Floyd outlined was as follows :
1) Write a series of essays to be published in small town newspapers in Tennessee and Kentucky. The essays would be a sort of modern day Federalist Papers on the purpose functions and limits of government.
2) Secondly, they would set the tone for a new political culture in the USA: a new patriotism. He would call for presidential libraries devoted to the earliest presidents. Washington/Jefferson at UV; Madison/Monroe at Geo Mason; the Adams family at U Mass; and Jackson/Polk . He really couldn’t decide whether it would be feasible to include van Buren in the Jackson/Polk library. Of course, van Buren was a Jacksonian and Jackson’s Sec of State, then his v-p but he was also a New Yorker. Floyd knew that van Buren’s papers were at the University of Rochester and that they wouldn’t give them up easily. What he did believe is that the idea of a library of Washington and Jefferson and the Adams family rather than another library to yet another mediocre president would appeal to the American people. 3) He would advocate another Mt Rushmore type memorial to 4 more presidents, this time on a granite mountain either in Colorado or Utah---somewhere near I-80 on land already owned by the federal government. These four faces? Madison, father of the constitution; J Q Adams, the most successful Sec of State in Am history and probably the American who lived the most historic life of any since 1600E, even being ambassador to Russia when Napoleon invaded in 1812.
4) The Lt-Gov would advocate the building of a new canal in Central America.
5) A manned mission to Mars.
6) He would strongly support biotechnology, recognizing its two basic divisions : agriculture and medicine. The government would have to face up to its role in two ways : clarifying the law in patents and copyrights, as well as its role in research.
7) He would run a very aggressive war against terrorism.
8) He would rebuild America’s image in the world, explicitly defending America’s role in defending freedom and fighting hunger, poverty, exploitation and genocide. He would be a president who would not be too modest to remind the world to which nation the oppressed fled whether in the 18th century, the 19th, the 20th or the 21st.
9) He would do something very controversial : in foreign policy he would encourage Europe to take responsibility for its own defense; he would ally with Russia against terrorism and he would turn toward a long neglected area of US foreign policy and assistance : Latin America.

The stategy would be to publish in weekly newspapers in Tennessee and Kentucky in order to get the attention of the press and then move to a few larger markets to raise money. The press would probably pay him more heed if he were publishing in out-of-the-way places then if he were competing for attention in NYC and DC. The donors, however, would have to be approached where they were : in the suburbs of Chgo, NYC, LA, and DC. He learned later that they were everywhere; their address e-America.

Once Ralph Jenkins began to receive e-mail from Floyd, he began to see that Floyd had some serious possibilities, that Floyd had done something most men do not : he had grown substantially after age 50. Floyd began his essays with the vitality of America. He quoted Gen Howe who had commanded British forces in the colonies during the Revolutionary War and who probably composed the best sentence ever constructed on America “Had the British realized the vast resources and great potential of America in its origins, it might have done more to bind America to its empire.” Floyd’s essay compared American trade to that of the Spanish colonies which until the 1770s were limited to trading with a single port in Spain : Seville. When they finally gained trading privileges at the port of Barcelona, they thought they had been blessed. He informed the reader that while the port of Havana, Cuba was occupied for only 11 months during the Napoleonic wars its received some 165 ships compared to only 12 ships the previous year.

Floyd Anderson knew, of course, that the economy was always the number one issue of any presidential contest. He therefore set out in his 5th and 6th weekly publications to outline his economic reforms : a lower corporate tax and a corporate flat tax. Gone would be the numerous, complex and verbose tax credits for business. In Lt-Gov Anderson’s mind, tax credits were the act of a government reaching into control what was left of an income after they had taken 35 to 50%. Anderson believed in laissez faire, especially at the lower level---and among those especially in the early phases.

The election would be held in 2008 and it would be the greatest presidential contest since 1824, when J Q Adams triumphed, via the US House, over Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay and William Crawford. The end of Bush 43’s term would signal the first also since 1824 that 2 consecutive presidents had served two full consecutive terms. OK, Truman/Eisenhower together came within one month of the four full terms, but then the reality was that Truman was boosted into presidential orbit not by his own popularity but by that FDR.

There would be no shortage of presidential aspirants. Hillary Clinton was the favorite to win the Dem nomination. But the whole crowd was colorful and colored with paradox. Clinton was a US Senator from NY the wife of an ex-president who had only stayed with her philandering spouse out personal ambition. There was a Mormon, but from Massachusetts not from Idaho or Utah. There were other aspirants out of the US Senate : ex-Sen John Edwards, who had been the v-p nominee of his party in 2004. Edwards was a trial lawyer, but from NC not from California. There was Sen Joe Biden of Dl a new comer by social standards; then there was Sen Dodd of Ct who as the son of a former senator had been around since before he was born. There was Bill Richardson, former Sec of Energy under Sen Clinton’s husband. Richardson was a new England aristocrat masquerading as a Mexican. (Floyd supposed that if there were a real Mexican running, he would be masquerading as a New England aristocrat.) There was Sen Barrack Obama who, because he was black via a father from Kenya was an African-American, not and Afro-American (those who trace their ancestry through slavery to Africa). Of course, there was Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of NYC and mayor during that city’s most horrific moment. During the crisis the mayor acted like a true hero and in the aftermath of the attack the mayor acted like a true Italian, full of sentiment and ceremony. No mayor of NYC, however, had been elected to higher office in slightly more than 150 years. There was John McCain a military hero who had spent five years in POW camp in Viet Nam. There would later be Fred Thompson of Tennessee, also a former US Senator , who joined former govs Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and James Gilmore of Va. From the US House came Duncan Hunter of Ca and Tom Tancredo of Co, also as Republicans. Finally, there was three more colorful candidates : D. Kucinich also from the US House selling class struggle , very former Mike Gravel of Alaska, and Mike Huckabee former gov of Arkansas.

THEN Floyd Anderson did something no one expected and few were able to do : he introduced a sense of art into the campaign. As he explained to Austin Jenkins, whose prosperity allowed him to leave California for Iowa and a few other political destinations, “if Huckabee can baffle them with morality, I can baffle them with art. Art and a little patriotism.” The Lt-Gov did this by treating the map as his canvas and making his itinerary a sojourn of meaning. He did just what only a mind relative insulated from the din of the metropolis could do. He became a little original:
Floyd struck out on a tour every city or hamlet in the USA named Springfield. At each Springfield he spoke of their differences and their commonality. In Springfield, Mass, he spoke about the history of industrialism in America. In Springfield, Mo, he spoke about values and loyalty. In Springfield, W Va, he reviewed the history of John Brown. In Springfield, Or , he addressed hi-tech and future of the world. In Springfield, SD, he spoke about small towns and good government. In Springfield, Ohio, he spoke about commerce and education. But everywhere he spoke of unity : “We all live in Springfield,” he said. “Even Manhattan is Springfield.” At every stop he used the line “Even Bart Simpson lives in Springfield.” By calculation, the Springfield segment of his tour ended in Springfield, Ill, because his next stop was Lincoln, Neb.

Floyd’s second segment was to visit the four state capitol’s named for presidents :Lincoln, Madison, Jefferson City and Jackson, where naturally he spoke about those four distinguished persoanalities. For him Madison was the most fun; it allowed him to make a few points about the fourth president that are often missed : a few months after Mr Madison’s constitution went into effect revolution broke out in France, the most influential country in Europe and in Brazil, the largest country in South America. But he enjoyed speaking about Jackson, Jefferson and Lincoln as well.

He extended his state capitol tour by adding several others : in Atlanta he spoke about myth; in Olympia he spoke about ideals; in Sacramento, of the sacred; in Salem, about peace; in Columbus, of history. His best speech in this segment was not surprisingly in Phoenix, where he spoke of a city rising from its ashes : lower Manhattan or New Orleans. Even went to Bismark, where he made the 19th century German chancellor look like more than an iron curmudgeon. Bismark had a sense of humor and a sense of history. Floyd Anderson had both as well; so he made it work. He even went to St Paul and spoke there about the visions and courage required to build a new culture, admitting that Mike Huckabee could probably do a better job with St Paul than he. When he got back to Des Moines, he assured his friends that that city’s name meant “the center”. And indeed, for him, it did.
It was Dec-19-2007, the preseason/cactus league was over and his daughter was flying in from NH with his grandsons Aaron, Devon, an Trevor.

A new year stood before Iowa’s smartest man.

Posted by Donald at 1:31 PM

Labels: Iowa's smartest man, political odyssey, tommy