Matt Yglesias

Consolation Prize

Mary Ann Akers writes for The Washington Post about John Kerry’s classy response to being passed over for Secretary of State. Then she says:

Instead of traveling the globe and crafting U.S. foreign policy, Kerry will get the consolation prize of serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which has jurisdiction over confirming Clinton and the rest of the national security team.

Kerry does have jurisdiction over Clinton’s nomination. But Robert Gates doesn’t need confirmation (he’s already in office) and if he did need it Carl Levin’s committee would have jurisdiction. James Jones doesn’t need confirmation either. And Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano will need to be confirmed by their own committees. Foreign Relations will confirm Rice, Clinton, and Clinton’s top subordinates — but that’s it.

Feingold an Unacceptable Committee Chair?

Some “Democratic strategist” named Michael Feldman seems to think that John Kerry shouldn’t be Secretary of State because that would (combined with Joe Biden’s departure for the Vice Presidency) leave Russ Feingold to chair the Foreign Relations Committee. He says “of course that poses a whole series of problems.”

Andrea Mitchell sensibly asks “Why does it pose a series of problems?”

To which Feldman replies: “Well, because of Senator Feingold’s opposition to the war and I think that would immediately, his vocal opposition to the war, I think that would immediately then raise some issues for the caucus and for leader Reid.”

Now the truth is that Feingold, like most any Senator, has taken some positions over the years I don’t agree with (opposing NATO expansion in the mid-nineties, for example) but the idea that anyone could, with a straight face, argue that Feingold should be disqualified on account of having been correct about Iraq is a sad comment on the state of things. That said, the soon-to-be presence in the White House of a war opponent is changing things. Mitchell is a soundly establishmentarian figure and she immediately shoots back with “But the president[-elect] of the United States is opposed to the war.”

At any rate, though I’ve heard enough asinine things on television to believe that Feldman may well have said this because he meant it, I also think this may be more about Kerry than about Feingold. There’s a developing meme out there that Kerry is some kind of dangerous leftwing radical (his selection “would be … bound to provoke controversy with moderate Democrats” for some reason) and the Richard Holbrooke Fan Club hasn’t gone out of business yet in the press.

What Might Have Been

Kevin Drum asks:

Now, suppose Kerry were running this year and therefore had the following three advantages over his previous self: (a) he was running after eight years of Republican rule instead of four, (b) the economy sucked, and (c) he had a fantastic fundraising advantage over his Republican opponent.

Question 1: how well do you think Kerry would do? Question 2: how well do you think Obama is going to do this year? Question 3: how big is the difference between the answers to Q1 and Q2?

I think (c) shouldn’t be added into the experiment. You can’t treat Obama’s spectacular fundraising success as exogenous to his individual appeal as a candidate or to his campaign’s particular organizational and tactical gambits. Rather, I think the way to specify the hypothetical would be to wonder what would have happened if instead of offering tepid support for the war and running for president in 2004, Kerry had offered mild opposition to the war and ran for president in 2008. I think he’d be doing pretty darn well, though presumably with a slightly different electoral coalition behind him than Obama has.

Kerry’s Redemption

Did a TAP Online article about John Kerry’s awesome speech last night. For a sense of how much more awesomely attack doggy he was than everyone else, compare this word cloud to these other ones.