Michael Barone makes an interesting comparison between Clinton-Bush and two English Kings, Charles II and William III whose reigns covered the latter half of the 17th century. First Clinton-Charles:

He also in some ways was a successful king. At 30, he came back from exile and established himself firmly on the throne until his death at 54. (Bill Clinton was elected attorney general of Arkansas at 30 and governor at 32, and left the presidency at 54.) The economy surged during his reign; foreign trade vastly increased; new businesses were formed; new inventions were made. (Sounds a lot like the 1990s.) He presided pretty well over the emergencies of the plague of 1665 and the London fire of 1666. (Clinton is proud of the performance of FEMA in his administration and will undoubtedly be happy to tell you that it did better than it has under George W. Bush.) He did get involved in two wars with the Dutch, with not entirely happy results; but he extricated England without sustaining too much damage. (Bosnia, Kosovo.)

But Charles also left an unhappy legacy. His brother and successor, James II, was a Catholic–a big problem in Protestant England. Soon after he was crowned, there was an armed rebellion led by Charles's oldest bastard, the Duke of Monmouth, whose intrigues Charles had indulged and whom he failed to rein in. Charles could have avoided the problem by agreeing with the Whigs to change the succession, but he stayed true to his brother even while predicting (correctly) that he wouldn't last more than three years as king and, one suspects, supposing that James might provoke another civil war like the one that ravaged England in the 1640s. Après moi, le déluge. (Bill Clinton, meet Chris Wallace.)

The William-Bush:

William called an irregular convention (only a king could summon Parliament) and forced it, through steely determination and clever maneuvering, to declare him king after several weeks of controversy. (Think Florida 2000.) William was a foreigner, a Dutchman, despite his English mother (Bush as a Texan is a kind of foreigner in Washington, even though his father was president). Unlike Charles, William disliked entertaining politicians and spent as little time as he could with them; he refused to deploy charm as a political weapon. (How often does Bush socialize with members of Congress?) He tried to work with both Tories and Whigs but distrusted all of them and was often distrusted in turn. He worked hard during long regular hours, made crisp decisions, attempted to control but did not always succeed in controlling subordinates. He became increasingly unpopular as his reign went on but continued to pursue his policies nonetheless.

William believed that Protestant England and the Netherlands faced an existential threat from the tyrannical and intolerant Catholic regime of Louis XIV, who had the largest army in Europe (just as Bush believes we face an existential threat from Islamic fascists if they get their hands on weapons of mass destruction). He maneuvered the Convention Parliament into authorizing war with France when it was well disposed to him (cf the Iraq war resolution of October 2002). He insisted on continuing the war despite setbacks and defeats year after year. In the process of fighting the war, he created, with Parliament's help, new institutions, notably the funded debt and the Bank of England, which enabled England to defeat a France that was four times its size and which stimulated the miraculous growth of the English economy. He instituted a regime of religious tolerance in England and Scotland (though not in Ireland) and acquiesced in Parliament's Bill of Rights. Parliament met only irregularly before his reign; it has met every year since he became king.

Then the legacy of each...

Charles II was an inconsequential king, in the sense that the regime he established did not last much longer than his own reign. He was happy to let France become the dominant power in Europe (especially if Louis sent him more subsidies), and he failed to confront squarely and settle the most pressing issue before him, his brother's Catholicism. He died popular, but his legacy was evanescent. William III, in contrast, was unpopular when he died, at 51. He left no direct heir but arranged for a Protestant succession that would outlast his successor, Queen Anne, all of whose children had died by 1700. He established financial institutions that would make London the financial capital of the world and that enabled the British government to defend the nation and defeat hegemonic tyrants for many years after. He established practices of religious tolerance and guaranteed liberties and representative government. Most important, he established the principle, never before followed, that England would oppose hegemonic tyrants and preserve the balance of power in Europe and the world–a principle followed by the Duke of Marlborough in Queen Anne's reign, by the elder William Pitt in the 18th century and Pitt the Younger against revolutionary and Napoleonic France at the end of the century and the beginning of the next, by Winston Churchill (a direct descendant of Marlborough, whom William made head of his army before he died), and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and their successors in the 20th century.

I thought it was fasincating, particular in the context of a how I watched last night on the Mexican-American war. You never hear about that war, probably because, well--we were acting as imperialist agressors instead of saviors of truth, justice and the American way... Yet while we hold our noses at the conduct of the war, we sure enjoy the fruits of it. Its no exaggeration to say that without the Mexican-American war, there would be no American superpower everyone knows and loves today.

I am not suggesting that Bush is emulating the Polk administration imperialistic ambitions (ambitions reflected by the popularity of the war among the electorate--Zachary Taylor became president largely as a result of his role in that war...), but both the Mexican-American war and WIlliam's unpopular actions make the same point--good outcomes arise from hard-headed action in the interests of the country. Its called leadership---and not everyone likes it.

I was struck by John McCain's remarks yesterday about the difference between leadership and management.

Not in a good way.

McCain admitted that his intention was to surround himself with "experts" who would advise him on policy, thus one assumes, compensating for his own poor grasp of economic issues.

Today I read the obituary of Richard Darman--one of these quasi-anonymous advisors whose influence in politics is hard to over-estimate. Darman is perhaps most famous for engineering George H.W. Bush's tax increase--the one that destroyed his presidency and gave us eight years of Bill Clinton.

National Review, the conservative magazine, called Mr. Darman’s work “the most catastrophic budget deal of all time,” and Mr. Bush himself later said it was the biggest mistake of his presidency. But many economists believed that the agreement’s tough “pay as you go” rules and a resulting infusion of revenue eased the recession of the early 1990s, and paved the way for the later budget surpluses and economic boom.

You can ignore the New York Times bullshit at the end about how taking money away from people produces economic boom--Darman's death was just one more opportunity for them to tell the BIG LIE.

For my purposes today, I am less interested in the economic lessons than the political one. Bush bought the Darman proposal because he, like McCain, was ignorant.

When you don't really know, you are susceptible to all sorts of manipulation, and when you are president of the United States, you are the target of the most sophisticated forms of deception ever invented by man. The upside to convincing a president to exercise his mandate in favor or one group over another, for one policy over another, is absolutely mind-bogglingly huge--billions at a stroke. The ground shakes beneath you.

It happened to Reagan and it happened to the Bushes. Its been happening to McCain for decades. I believe that McCain thinks of himself as a conservative, but he's been in Washington a long time, a man of modest intellectual capacity subjected to metaphorical mind-control beams for many, many years.

Ironically, in the one area that he actually has expertise and intimate knowledge--military affairs, he was a voice in the wilderness, telling everyone who would listen that Rumsfeld was wrong, that Bush was getting snowed. McCain is the answer to his own question--we can't have yet another easily gulled nice guy in the White House.

We don't need someone smart, we need someone brilliant. Someone with long experience seeing past sophisticated lies, someone who knows the value of seeing past the fog of uncritical assumption, dogma, crap data and political temptation.

That man may be Mitt Romney.

His experience is completely on point because the stakes in the business deals he's concluded are just as big as they are for a president. The lies, obfuscations, and manipulation that attend any big money deal require the utmost in due diligence, and Romney has proven himself exceptionally disciplined in this area.

Romney is Darman-proof.

American Thinker celebrates the three worst presidents in American history.

Lists like these are necessarily subjective, but its interesting to note that these three presidents--Johnson, Buchanan and Carter, are pretty much universally described ambivalently at best and failures at worst on other lists of this type.

They are all Democrats.

Notably, Johnson and Buchanan's presidencies failed because of the distinctly Washington Democrat paradigm--government by poll. Buchanan and Johnson governed on the basis of what would keep them in power, not what the country needed. Buchanan set the stage for the civil war, Johnson's depredations were so obviously awful that he did not run for reelection.

Carter certainly didn't run on the basis of the polls. Turning over the Panama canal to a tin pot dictator was distinctly unpopular with the American people. Carter just had and still has, extraordinary bad judgment.

Neither Clinton or Obama can outright win the delegate race.

That means he [Obama] would need to win 77% of all the remaining pledged delegates to hit the magic number of 2,024 to secure the nomination. That is highly unlikely due to the proportional delegate allocation rules in the Democratic Party.

Clinton would need to win 94% of all the remaining pledged delegates to hit the magic number of 2,024. (ABC News currently has her at 1449.)

The Democrats worse nightmare is here--a brokered convention that can't declare a winner without disenfranchising large and important voters blocs.

Michigan and Florida are the elephants in the room. They have no delegates and Hillary won both decisively, but without competition since the other candidates kept their pledges while Clinton did not.

Restore their delegates and the Obama camp has good reason to call foul. Abide by their exclusion and Obama's victory is tainted by the alienation of to important general election states.

The super delegates' position is little better. The mere fact of having super delegates decide a race like this only underscores how undemocratic the Democrats really are. Already a laughingstock because of they Byzantine primary and caucus, or primary/caucus (Texas two-step) rules, the prospect of selecting a candidate in a smoke-filled back room is appalling. The loser is going to represent a very angry and disillusioned set of constituencies.

The larger issue is how the misbegotten process makes the party look.

Do you really want these buffoons running the country? They can't even run a nomination process!

It all makes it far more likely that we are going to see both candidates on the ticket, with the remaining efforts a matter of whose on top, and whose on the bottom.

Ross Douthat posts an excellent defense of presidential candidate freak show media coverage.

The personal is political. By this I mean that when we elect a new chief executive, we aren’t just electing to live with their policy positions. We’re deciding to live with their personalities – their sexual appetites and Daddy issues, their spouses and their friends, their religious beliefs and their psychodramas – for four or eight long years. (Or more, in our dynastic age, since we’ve been in Bushworld since 1988, and Clintonland since ’92.)

One can simply dismiss the left's complaints about Stephanopoulos and Gibson's "irrelevant" questions as predictable spin for a disastrous "debate" performance, but as Douthat implies, politics isn't just local, its personal.