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Leadership!
In case you were curious, this is why we don't elect Senators to the Presidency.
On the Nomination (Confirmation Michael B. Mukasey of New York, to be Attorney General):
- Biden (D-DE), Not Voting
- Clinton (D-NY), Not Voting
- Dodd (D-CT), Not Voting
- Obama (D-IL), Not Voting
- McCain (R-AZ), Not Voting
For the record, only 7 of 100 Senators voted "Not Voting". Is it coincidence that 5 of those 7 hemmer/hawers are the only 5 Senators running for President?
How confidence inspiring.
We pay even the lowliest Senators a couple hundred bucks per vote. Isn't the least they can do show up and hit the button yea or nay?
(HT: Mark Noonan)
For those of you keeping score at home, the United States has elected only one President who had not previously served as Governor, VP, or in a senior military leadership role, since Hoover vacated office 74 years ago. That President (JFK) did in fact serve as Senator in his highest pre-Presidential station, proving that even upper chamber Congressmen can, theoretically, make it to the White House.
But the odds (mercifully enough) are still overwhelmingly against Senatorial types (like Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Biden, Dodd, and McCain) who have designs on the Oval Office. And these pathetic displays of non-executive, bureaucratic, poll-driven, unprincipled decision making (or decision avoidance) offer the very best evidence of why that is.
Handcrafted by Flip on November 10, 2007 |
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Comments
It depends on what the votes are about. From TomRoeser.com (Tom Roeser is an old-time politics guy from Illinois. He also worked in Minnesota for a while, and knew Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy _very_ well.) http://tomroeser.com/blogview.asp?blogID=24255 Gene [McCarthy] hated roll-calls and didn’t like it when he was criticized for missing some. He had a point. A Republican senator from Iowa named Jack Miller was a CPA and grammarian. He would amend language in bills to add semi-colons and take out commas. Each time a Miller amendment would come up, to add a semicolon and remove a comma, elderly Margaret Chase Smith of Maine who wanted a 100% record, had to hustle through the corridors to vote on these semicolons. She finally said the hell with it - because of Jack Miller. Hip surgery required her to stop her perfect voting record at 2,941. “Damn Jack Miller,” said McCarthy. “I told Margaret it was no good at all to break her neck voting for semicolons.”Posted by: Rich Rostrom | Nov 10, 2007 2:12:39 AM
Until recently (Gore-Cheney), did VP actually constitute Executive Experience? VP may have been perceived as Executive Experience at the same time that it was considered a joke. I don't think LBJ had much to do in the Kennedy years, but he ran against a Senator and had a year as President. Did Nixon have any executive duties under Ike? Hillary had at least as much to do as Gore in the Clinton WH--I think she's seen as equivalent to an active VP. Thompson had a good line on Rudy's management experience: managers are people who leaders hire. Granted, none of this excuses missing the Mukasey vote.Posted by: Canaan | Nov 20, 2007 12:48:46 AM
