THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2010 DAVID S. BRODER


When country came first for politicians


tinerant politicians and journalists have learned they can expect a warm welcome and a stimulating evening when they visit the hilltop home of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics here at the University of Kansas. When my turn came Monday night, I found it an intriguing place to assess the closing stage of the 2010 campaign. What I learned was no sur- prise. Kansas is about to join the national trend. The governorship, which had been held for years by Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama’s secretary of health and human services, is almost certainly going to revert to the GOP. The one Democrat in the House delegation is retiring this year, and his wife, who is trying to hold the seat, is unlikely to succeed.


I So we did not spend much time disputing what


the returns here and nationally will show on Nov. 2. Instead, Bill Lacy, the old Washington hand who runs the institute, focused the dis- cussion on the significance for President Obama and the Republicans of what is almost universally expected. As it happened, my airplane reading en route to Kansas was the Sunday New York Times Maga- zine article by Peter Baker, my friend and former Post colleague, titled “The Education of a Presi- dent.” Baker had spent the late summer and early fall interviewing members of Congress and the senior White House staff on the lessons of the first two years of Obama’s term. And Baker had been given a rare, two-hour interview with the presi- dent to inquire about Obama’s answer to the ques- tion about the relationship between the president and the Republicans in the remainder of his term. Baker is far too shrewd a reporter and analyst


to believe that the answers he received in these pre-election interviews will be as candid and as full as those to come after the returns are in. But the mind-set he found will shape that outcome. Baker’s story offers the best evidence of Obama’s likely reaction to this impending defeat. Here is the key sentence, in which Obama ex- pressed his belief that an election does not have to be seen as a zero-sum game in which any Repub- lican gains can be measured in defeats for the president and his agenda. Wrote Baker: “Obama expressed optimism to


me that he could make common cause with Re- publicans after the midterm elections. ‘It may be that regardless of what happens after this elec- tion, they feel more responsible,’ he said, ‘either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.’ ” A Republican partisan could characterize that as a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition, but in the setting of the Dole Institute I was not inclined to be cynical. From my seat, I was looking directly at the large photo mural of former senator Dole and his fre- quent partner, Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan, the House minority leader. One of them — Ford — achieved the presidency only briefly, when Richard Nixon was forced to re- sign. The other — Dole — failed each time he ran. But no one regards them as political failures, be- cause they realized that victory is counted in more than vote totals. They won the ultimate tests of character for two reasons. They did not sacrifice their political principles. And they acknowledged that they shared the responsibility for making this system of government work. It helped that they came to Washington as young military veterans, survivors of a war against an implacable enemy. They knew the difference between the Nazis, who were truly evil, and the Democrats, who were simply fellow Americans with different political beliefs. For Obama and the Republicans to establish a


productive post-election atmosphere, it may re- quire nothing more than the recapture of that wis- dom of their political forebears. Behave as if you are veterans, and today’s political disputes will re- cede to their proper size.


davidbroder@washpost.com DAVID IGNATIUS


n the week in which China’s secretive lead- ership signaled the identity of the country’s likely next president, I found myself meet- ing here with groups of Chinese high school students, business people, journalists and aca- demics. The eerie thing was that politics al- most never came up. Americans sometimes assume that a richer


China will soon demand greater freedom and democracy. Don’t bet on it: What Chinese re- peat to foreign visitors, in so many settings that the canned phrases become credible, is something like this: We like what we’ve got; we’re worried about losing it; we want stabil- ity even if it means less freedom and open- ness. Chinese don’t seem to know much about Xi


Jinping, the man who this week became heir apparent to President Hu Jintao, beyond the fact that he is a “princeling” son of power and that he is married to a star singer. This makes him a man who is likely to maintain the status quo — and perhaps reform the system and spread the wealth just enough to keep any dis- senters quiet. For most Chinese I encoun- tered, those qualities seem to be enough. “You don’t find many idealists in China to-


day,” says Alan Guo, a former Google employee who has created an online shopping business here. “It’s more important to solve a traffic jam in Beijing than vote for president.” There’s protest in China, to be sure, but it’s


largely about economic and property issues. The freedom agenda of Tiananmen Square in 1989, embodied today by the imprisoned No-


Tiananmen’s diminishing legacy I


beijing


bel Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, has mostly been throttled. Among the elite in China’s wealthy cities, fear of the peasants in the hinterlands seems to be a bigger concern than the opaque Communist Party leadership. For a snapshot of China’s future, talk with students at Beijing High School 101. Decked out in their blue-and-white uniforms to meet visiting Western journalists (organized by the Committee of 100, a private U.S. group that promotes Chinese-American dialogue), the children are astonishingly bright and well- spoken in English. But even here at the top of the heap, there’s a fragility. They’re all prod- ucts of China’s one-child policy, and you sense the heavy expectations of their parents: Study, succeed, prosper, don’t lose your seat on the express train to riches. A boy with a wisp of a mustache worries


that the gap between China’s rich and poor is widening and that the wealthy “just want to play golf.” A female classmate agrees: “In this society, materialism prevails. People chase af- ter riches.” But these kids don’t seem likely to rock the boat. Many look quizzical when the visitors advise them to follow their dreams in choosing a career. At Tsinghua University, a graduate student named Yin Wang offers a catchy and probably accurate line: “Young people don’t care who succeeds Hu Jintao; they care about who suc- ceeds Michael Jackson.” A recurring theme here is self-censorship by a population that doesn’t want to risk crossing the fuzzy limits on free speech. Stu- dents attend journalism school partly to learn


Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, in 2007. RUTH MARCUS


The wrong call It’s not Ginni Thomas who deserves an apology


A


s a wife, I understand where Gin- ni Thomas is coming from. In particular, as the wife of a husband who endured a far less bruis- ing confirmation process and is now, as chairman of the Federal Trade Com- mission, far less the target of criticism, I feel her anger. Hell hath no fury like a wife whose husband has been publicly scorned. My husband is Mr. Let’s Move On.


I’m more Lady Macbeth with a Google alert. In my wifely capacity, not my col- umnist self, I remember — I still bristle at — every snarky quote, every unfair news release directed his way. If you worry that I’m referring to you, rest as- sured: I am. So I’m not surprised if, nearly two decades later, Ginni Thomas remains consumed with the terrible injustice that she is convinced was done to her husband during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. If she still wants the apology she believes is owed by Anita Hill, I can empathize. In fact, from her point of view,


Thomas phrased it rather nicely in the message she left on Hill’s office phone at Brandeis University: “I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay, have a good day.” A nice closing touch if you believe the person you’re addressing falsely ac- cused your husband of sexual harass- ment.


So, one wife to another, I get it. As a reporter who covered every sor- did minute of the Thomas-Hill hear- ings, I don’t. Ginni Thomas is wrong about who should apologize to whom. (I should probably say here that I


met my husband at those hearings. He was a staffer for a Democratic senator, I was The Washington Post’s Supreme Court correspondent, and we started dating afterward.) Does anyone besides the two of them know the full truth about what hap- pened between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill when he was a Reagan ad- ministration official and she was a young lawyer on his staff? Perhaps not. But as I wrote when Clarence Thomas released his angry autobiography, the overwhelming weight of the evidence is on Hill’s side.


She complained to friends at the time about his behavior, telling one, Susan Hoerchner, that Thomas, then the chairman of the Equal Employ- ment Opportunity Commission, had “repeatedly asked her out . . . but wouldn’t seem to take ‘no’ for an an- swer.” Another former EEOC employee, Angela Wright, described how Thomas pressured her to date him, showed up uninvited at her apartment and asked her breast size. Some of the strangest behavior that


Hill cited — Thomas asking about a pu- bic hair on his Coke can, and his taste for extreme pornography — resonated with episodes from Thomas’s past. Acollege classmate, James Millet, re- called “an almost identical episode,” The Post’s Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher report in their biography, “Su- preme Discomfort.” Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson found two others who recalled a pubic hair-Coke can com- ment at the EEOC. What’s a wife to do with this uncom-


fortable information? Clarence Thom- as has taken the road of angry denial and, unless she’s about to let her mar- riage unravel over it, the path of least resistance may be for Ginni to join him there. Why seek satisfaction from Hill now? One explanation might be that Ginni Thomas has recently found her- self in the media cross hairs over her role as head of a group dedicated to ex- posing the leftist “tyranny” of Presi- dent Obama. Perhaps that has re- kindled her unresolved feelings about Hill. Was it a coincidence that she made the call on the morning the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined, “Activism by Thomas’ Wife Could Raise Judicial Issues”? And what to make of the behavior of the other party to this odd transaction, Anita Hill? Why not ignore the mes- sage, rather than refer it to the campus police? Why play it for reporters and give interviews about it? A voice mail on an office phone isn’t exactly in- trusive, and there was no harassing fol- low-up. Ginni Thomas might have been out of line, but she wasn’t threat- ening in any way. Mayer and Abramson titled their book “Strange Justice.” That adjective might be fairly applied to all the play- ers in this seemingly never-ending epi- sode.


ruthmarcus@washpost.com lawrence, kan.


KLMNO


R


A21 GEORGE F. WILL


Candidate Obama In West Virginia, he’s the man to beat


few slaves, left Virginia; almost all have seams of coal. Barack Obama has a remarkable hostility to coal. For example, in 2008 he said: “If some- body wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” Hillary Clinton trounced Obama


I CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS


67 to 26 percent in West Virginia’s primary. John McCain beat Obama here by 13 points. Obama lost only 13 states by a larger margin than he lost here. So pity Gov. Joe Manchin. He is seeking the Senate seat held for 51 years by another Democrat, the late Robert Byrd. Manchin has the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Rifle As- sociation. He favors extension of the Bush tax cuts. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and “card check” (abolition of secret ballots in union- ization elections). He says he would have voted against Obamacare. He is suing the Environmental Protection Agency against restrictions on moun- taintop mining, and he denounces “President Obama’s administration’s attempts to destroy our coal industry and way of life in West Virginia.” But because Obama is the head of Man- chin’s party, the governor, 63, may lose to someone who has hitherto lost two Senate races.


“I am running against Obama,”


says John Raese. He lost by just four points in 1984, when Jay Rockefeller won the first of his five Senate terms. In 2006, Raese unsuccessfully chal- lenged Byrd. But this year, when many Democratic incumbents are in jeopardy because they are unpopular, Manchin is burdened by popularity. Raese’s political jujitsu is obvious and obviously helping him. In 2008, Manchin was elected with 70 percent of the vote. Almost 70 percent of West Virginians approve of his perform- ance as governor. But fewer than half that many approve of Obama. So Raese tells West Virginians that vot- ing for him is win-win: You keep the governor you like and deny another conscript for the multitentacled Washington blob known in Repub- lican rhetoric as ObamaReidPelosi. Raese, 60, is trim, tanned and gray- haired and radiates the confidence of a multifaceted businessman. He


E.J. DIONNE JR.


What Obama owes L


columbus, ohio


et us contemplate the joys of be- ing in the political opposition when unemployment in your


state tops 10 percent. Kevin DeWine, the affable chair- man of the Republican Party in Ohio, has a transparent board behind his desk at state headquarters where he scribbles reminders to himself. A per- manent fixture is this list of words: “Spending, taxes, jobs, economy, def- icit, debt.”


DeWine says he keeps the issues


what subjects are off-limits. Young reporters who dig beyond the official account get brand- ed as “unreliable” and lose good assignments. The government monitors the Internet to


keep it tame, and Chinese businesses and con- sumers play along. One of China’s biggest Web sites is said to employ 100 people to scan the proliferation of micro-blogs here. Parents avoid telling their children about the Tianan- men protests for fear they will ask more ques- tions — and get in trouble. The threat to this elite urban life comes from the still-poor rural provinces. The Chi- nese revolution began among such peasants, and there’s an almost palpable fear that the new China’s growing inequality could trigger another such revolt. That’s one reason people are nervous about democracy: They don’t want to enfranchise those angry peasants. The Communist Party this week approved a five- year plan that calls for “inclusive growth” — meaning a bigger share of the pie for the po- tentially restless rural areas. At a banquet in the Great Hall of the People,


a Chinese official named Nan Zhenzhong ex- plains that although the coastal cities may re- semble Europe, the interior of China is more like Africa. He repeats the word “stability” so often it sounds like a creed. In nearly two hours of talk, Nan doesn’t once mention the new leader, Xi, who was val- idated that very day. That’s another sign of the anti-political mood. Perhaps only a country born in a revolution could be so wary of change.


davidignatius@washpost.com


inventory as a reminder to all of his party’s candidates. “If they are not talking about these things,” he says, “they are off-message.” And his candidates seem to listen. Republican Steve Stivers is in a re- match with Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, one of those endangered-but-still-gutsy Democrats who won’t back down from her support for the new health- care law, financial reform or the stim- ulus. Among the first words out of Stivers’s mouth when I chatted with him over the phone were “the debt and jobs,” followed quickly by “un- employment” and “big spending.” Thus the key question as the 2010 campaign enters its final days: Is there anything Democrats can do to shake the GOP off its relentlessly ef- fective focus on a handful of themes? These seem to resonate with voters without actually solving any prob- lems. So far, Republicans have not even been forced to explain how their promises add up. Will they get away with offering tax cuts and a reduction in the deficit without specifying be- fore Nov. 2what spending they would eliminate or trim? In the meantime, Democrats have


left loyalists such as Kilroy, who de- serve better, without the support of a driving national message. There is no Democratic counterpart to Kevin De- Wine’s handy list. For her part, Kilroy doesn’t whine.


She’s not the type. In defending health-care reform, she cites actual constituents the law has directly as- sisted. In a nation where some 50 million lack health coverage, Kilroy says, she is proud to have kept her promise from two years ago to take steps to solve the problem. She is also thoroughly realistic about the extent to which joblessness has created a double-whammy for Democratic candidates. On the right, she says, “the voters who are worried about change are worried because they don’t have a job.” And on the left, “the ones who are worried because


wheeling, w. va.


n 1863, West Virginia became the 35th state by seceding from some secessionists: 50 counties, with


owns newspapers and radio stations; his barges ply the Ohio River carrying limestone; he manufactures Proctor Silex pots and pans, bumpers for Buicks and shiny metal stuff for Har- ley-Davidsons. He burns a lot of coal. And he takes what he considers Oba- ma’s anti-business agenda person- ally. Channeling his inner John Galt


(the Promethean entrepreneur in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”), Raese insists, “There is nothing wrong with making money.” His audience finds nothing objectionable about that. Lamenting that “we are in an in- dustrial coma,” he says of the Bush tax cuts, “We’re not going to ‘extend’ them, we’re going to permanentize them.” He laments that there are “no more Oldsmobiles or GTOs,” but the government is pushing “little electric cars.” His listeners are not potential buyers of Chevrolet Volts. In a smoothly delivered and rap- turously received canter down mem- ory lane, Raese invokes some names not normally heard in campaign speeches: President Warren Harding (he cut taxes), Jack Webb (star of the TV program “Dragnet,” the last epi- sode of which aired in 1970; Webb died in 1982), Audie Murphy (the most decorated combat soldier in World War II, then star of western movies; he died in 1971). The invasion of Grenada and the Monroe Doctrine also get endorsed. Raese knows his state’s population is almost as old as that of Florida, which is known as God’s Antechamber. His listeners warmly applaud a member of the au- dience, former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Bob Friend, 79, who 50 years ago this October played in the World Series. Warming up an audience that hardly needs that service — Repub- licans this autumn live at a roiling boil — a speaker at the rally was pleased that ABC’s “World News” re- cently showed to its national audi- ence a yard sign that says “Obama Says ‘Vote Democrat’ ” and also says the sign is provided by West Vir- ginia’s Republican Party. The speak- er says the state party’s Web site crashed under the load of people ask- ing for signs. This is just another straw in the wind — the gale, actually —that has filled Raese’s sails and pro- pelled him into a competitive race in what may be the nation’s most thor- oughly nationalized contest. georgewill@washpost.com


change hasn’t been fast enough are worried because they don’t have a job.”


Kilroy, who has been on ballots since 1991, recalls encountering a vot- er who told her: “I’ve voted for you throughout your career, but I’m not voting for you this year because I don’t have a job.” She spoke to her constituent about


what Congress had accomplished and about how the tied-up-in-knots U.S. Senate had blocked other House initiatives. To which the voter replied: “Do you think I care they’re stuck in the Sen- ate? I don’t have a job.”


Stivers, who lost to Kilroy in 2008 by just 2,312 votes, has had much happier doorstep experiences. “Peo- ple were mad at George Bush two years ago and they were going to take it out on anyone with an ‘R’ after their name,” he said. This time, they’re eager to talk about — you guessed it — “the debt and jobs.” What Kilroy has going for her is


the determination of Gov. Ted Strick- land to get reelected and the best- organized state Democratic Party in the nation. Its headquarters in a renovated former Salvation Army building here hums with activity, looking more like a national party command center than the typical ramshackle state party office.


While Strickland trails Republican


John Kasich in public polls, he nar- rowly leads in his own surveys and hopes to overcome the enthusiasm gap with organizational energy. President Obama sees Ohio as a fire- wall in his 2012 reelection effort, and having a friendly governor would be a major asset. Obama’s visit here on Sunday, which drew a crowd of 35,000, was an exercise in firewall- building. Kilroy, however, could still use the


firewall of a simple, coherent nation- al argument. Many of the Democrats’ political consultants warned of the dangers of “nationalizing” the elec- tion and preferred a race-by-race fo- cus.


But guess what? This already is a


nationalized election. Kevin De- Wine’s list is the GOP’s template. Over the coming week and a half, the president and his party need a few good words of their own. That’s the least they owe Kilroy and those like her who were willing to risk their po- litical lives to keep their promises — and his.


ejdionne@washpost.com


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