“What if our campaigns were much, much shorter?” Ben Smith asks at Semafor. “The presidential campaign is currently a two-year cycle, which begins just after the prior midterm elections. … [Kamala] Harris is accidentally demonstrating the alternative: She’s the hot new thing in August, riding on vibes and goodwill six months after the Super Tuesday peak of modern campaigns.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we only had to suffer a few short months (maybe even WEEKS) of presidential campaigning every four years?

That’s how it used to be, even in the days before radio, television, and the Internet, when campaigning was limited to the speed of rail transportation and print newspaper coverage. Until the 1970s, candidates often didn’t even announce until well into election years, and it was frequently impossible to know whom political parties would even nominate until their summertime national conventions. Campaigns were autumnal affairs, not multi-year slug-fests.

My main disagreement with Smith’s take is on his idea that the modern American presidential campaign cycle only lasts two years.  In reality, we live (as his piece’s title mentions) in the age of the “permanent campaign.”

By the time a president delivers his (perhaps, and maybe as early as next January, her) first inaugural address, the re-election campaign is already underway, and the campaigns of future opponents or successors are at least gassing up for the long drive.

Barack Obama, for example, clearly launched his 2008 presidential campaign within days of delivering a well-received speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His ascent from the Illinois State Senate to short tenure in the US Senate was more looping campaign ad than regular career move.

President George H.W. Bush’s two sons both stopped by the politics store to pick up governorships, both with obvious intent to generate presidential buzz.

Then there’s Harris, who barely got her US Senate seat warm before swerving into the presidential nomination lane for 2020.

Adoption of Smith’s “compressed schedule” proposal (presidential primaries in July, conventions shortly thereafter) wouldn’t shut down the “permanent campaign” nonsense in and of itself, but it might presage a cultural change in which perpectual “pick me” antics cost, rather than benefit, candidates.

Again, wouldn’t that be nice?

A cautionary note, however:

A shorter campaign season would merely provide a respite from the tiresome pageantry, not a solution to our bigger problems. It wouldn’t necessarily result in better government, even if we define “better” along the lines of Grover Norquist’s moderate prescription (“reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”) rather than in terms of my own root and branch anarchist abolitionism.

As respites go, though, I’d joyously greet an end to the “permanent campaign.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Ah, the tempest teapot of vice-presidential campaigns: Republican veep nominee JD Vance, Senator from Ohio, accuses Democratic veep nominee apparent Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, of engaging in “stolen valor garbage.”

Vance’s allegations seem to involve three components:

First, that Walz retired from the National Guard after 24 years in infantry and artillery jobs, instead of adding another hitch so as to deploy with his unit to Iraq (the unit received its orders two months after he submitted his retirement paperwork).

Second, that while Minnesota’s official government web site described Walz’s rank at retirement as Command Sergeant Major, he actually retired as a Master Sergeant because he hadn’t completed the Sergeants Major Academy while holding the job of (envelope, please) Command Sergeant Major.

And third, that Walz referred in passing to “weapons of war, that I carried in war” in an anti-gun-rights rant. Walz never carried a weapon in war, if for no other reason than that the US hasn’t been — legally/constitutionally speaking — at war since 1945, two decades before his birth. He almost certainly carried, at least, a side arm, during periods when the US military was engaged in combat, even though he didn’t see any himself.

Vance, on the other hand, served one enlistment in the US Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq as a “combat correspondent” who, by his own admission, saw no “combat.” I suspect he carried a weapon in that (pseudo-)war. So valor! Much rifle!

I seldom speak “as a veteran,” but “as a veteran” (and, by the way, a Marine who ran for vice-president 16 years before Vance, appearing on the ballot in Tennessee for the Boston Tea Party), I find this line of gotcha name-calling, and the whole concept of “stolen valor,” boring and silly.

A veteran is just a former government employee who may have held, but didn’t necessarily hold, a job with “kill people” in its description of usual duties. There’s nothing inherently more “valorous” about that than there is to any other government jobs/workfare program; “valor” is a rare individual occurrence, not an automatic attribute of “service.”

As for false or embellished claims as to the character of a veteran’s work, who cares?

Family-friendly version of an old saying: The difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins “once upon a time …” while a sea story begins “no kidding, you’re not gonna believe this …”

Neither of these two politicians seems to have embellished his record to any wild degree — if I had a dollar for every “former US Navy SEAL” I’ve met, I’d have more dollars than the number of SEALs who’ve ever existed — and given Vance’s need to nitpick at this level of triviality, I doubt any new bombshells are wired for later detonation.

And if the idea of “stolen valor” bothers you, you’ve got too much time on your hands and probably a tendency toward unjustified grievance. Some idiot wearing an “unearned” Medal of Honor neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg. Get over it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On July 31, retired brigadier general Susan K. Escallier signed a pretrial agreement under which Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi would have pleaded guilty to various roles in the terror attacks of 9/11 in return for sentences of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. On August 1, bending to outrage (real and feigned) over the matter, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the deal.

The case may seem unrelated to last month’s US Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States, granting presidential immunity for “official acts” — an immunity manufactured from whole cloth in contradiction to both the plain text of  the US Constitution and the entire history of American jurisprudence.  The two stories however, are of a piece.

The three defendants have spent their last two decades in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If they’d been charged and tried as ordinary criminals in federal court, they’d have almost certainly found themselves quickly convicted, shortly thereafter sentenced to death, and long since dead, like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (about six years from crime to execution).

That’s not a comment on their guilt or innocence; it’s just recognition that finding a jury which WOULDN’T convict them and recommend a sentence of death would have been extraordinarily unlikely given the climate of the time.

But former president George W. Bush just wasn’t having any of this Constitution stuff. Whether or not he actually called the Supreme Law of the Land “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as a later retracted article claimed, he certainly treated it that way.

The US government, under Bush and with the cooperation of Congress and, in parts, the Supreme Court, simply seized power to declare people “unlawful enemy combatants,” try them via military tribunal instead of the constitutionally required court/jury system — if it tried them at all instead of just having them murdered, as Barack Obama and Donald Trump later did — all while holding them indefinitely in violation of the Constitution’s “speedy public trial” requirements and torturing them in violation of its “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibition (as well as international law).

Let me say this again by way of emphasis, because it’s important:

If the constitutional requirements had been followed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi would almost certainly have been killed by lethal injection years ago.

The way these three alleged terrorist masterminds were treated wasn’t about achieving justice.

It wasn’t about “winning the war on terror.”

It wasn’t about preventing future attacks.

It was about implementing George W. Bush’s kingly view of presidential power: “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

The SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity in Trump’s case affirmed that claim, ensuring that neither Bush nor his predecessors or successors need ever fear they’ll face justice — even the kind of justice denied Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi — and that their victims will never RECEIVE justice for crimes committed against them by modern American monarchs.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY