Avoiding the background check on principle?

Avoiding chaos and deferring to mature judgment are worthy strategies for any political party seeking to govern a freedom-loving country, but I’m beginning to think that in spite of the back-room deliberations that their “superdelegate” rules are designed to support, Democrats are unwilling to screen their own candidates for president. Together with that aversion, Donkey Party loyalists have a concomitant ability to feign shock whenever Republicans do any candidate screening for them, whether through open primaries or by any other means.

Barack Obama has the top of the Democratic ticket all but sewn up, in spite of having spent more time campaigning for president than serving as a U.S. Senator or doing anything else to prepare for the job, with the possible exception of networking among fellow congregants in a large church with the blessing of a fundamentally unserious pastor (anyone who regards “social justice” as an adequate paraphrase of the gospel is a disciple, however well-meaning, of Karl Marx).

With the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama will join the likes of John “Cambodian Christmas Hat” Kerry, Al “Invented the Internet” Gore, Bill “Better Put Some Ice on That” Clinton, and Michael “One-Man Parole Board” Dukakis, all of whom were brutalized by partisan pundits for faults that would have been apparent to anyone doing even a cursory background check.

Democrat party movers and shakers do research, but only, it seems, on Republicans. And I do not mean to suggest that Republicans always do the research they should, either. The FEMA career of Mike Brown, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, and the tragicomic bungling of Alberto Gonzales at the Department of Justice all testify to the bipartisan nature of failure to get with the program.

Current Republican willingness to explore the studio space with derivative slogans like “the change you deserve” is yet another attempt to make Sam Francis look prescient in calling the GOP “the Stupid Party.”

But when it comes to nominating Commanders-in-Chief, Republicans, unlike their counterparts in what Francis called “the Evil Party,” tend to throw their support to known quantities. In this election cycle alone, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani got a more thorough vetting from their colleagues than John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Bill Richardson got from theirs.

If this disparity were almost entirely the fault of some kind of attention-deficit disorder in the news media, as Elizabeth Edwards suggested in a column for the New York Times, then how do you explain why, if you read anything about economics written for non-specialists, you can be certain that Thomas Sowell has consulted more actual data than, for example, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman? Are the well-known and very different political sympathies of those two economists incidental to their different approaches to column writing? I think not. Contrast the writing of Kathleen Parker with Maureen Dowd and you'll see much the same thing.

One consequence of elevating “the dog ate my homework” from an excuse to a governing (and sometimes column-writing) style is that Democrats, because they do more opposition research than internal research, are more susceptible to the proverbial “October surprise” than Republicans are.

Moreover, Democrats have inadvertently turned political rivals who actually do their homework into folk heroes for some people. Say what you will about Karl Rove, but he has more star power than any Democratic operative, and is not willfully blind to the shortcomings of the pols in his own party.

Ronald Reagan formulated his famous “Eleventh Commandment” about not speaking ill of other Republicans precisely because he knew that such speech would otherwise be commonplace. With a view of human nature shaped by hard experience rather than wishful thinking, Republicans acknowledge the existence of skeletons in closets. Democrats pretend the skeletons don’t exist (see, for example, “don’t ask, don’t tell”).

Another consequence of Democratic unwillingness to perform due diligence is that it fosters contempt for “divisive” and “mean-spirited” people who have the temerity to fact-check. Being a little too candid in character-based assessment of Hillary Clinton is what made Samantha Power a “former” adviser to the Obama campaign. And have you noticed that neither Madame Hillary nor her husband has been able to mount a sustained examination of Barack Obama’s gossamer-thin judgment? Bill tried that, and was told to simmer down by ranking members of the Congressional Black Caucus, apparently on pain of losing the honorary “first black president” card that novelist Toni Morrison may now regret having given him.

Clintonian attempts to slow the Obama train by asking questions about judgment are ironic, given Billy Jeff’s tattered pledge to run “the most ethical administration in the history of this country.” When you reach the height of political power on bonhomie and intelligence rather than willingness to study hard, your notion of ethical conduct becomes elastic enough to overlook things like cattle futures, missing background checks, questionable presidential pardons, pilfered FBI files, Lincoln Bedroom rentals, indiscretions with interns, and 115 pages of problematic law firm billing records that were “lost” for two years.

A contemporaneous story in the New York Times reported that when Rose Law Firm billing records were found in the White House, then-Senator Al D’Amato (R-NY) hailed the development with sound-bite sarcasm as “the second miraculous discovery within the past 24 hours.” D’Amato’s allusion was to the just-previous disclosure of a memorandum written by a former Presidential aide saying that, as the Times put it, “Mrs. Clinton had played a far greater role in the dismissal of employees of the White House travel office than the Administration has acknowledged.”

While we shuffle down memory lane for the sake of underscoring the Democratic fondness for shortcuts, we need not peer exclusively at the Clintons, or figure out whether that homework-eating dog is yellow (I crack myself up).

What political junkie can forget Al Gore’s embrace of hanging chads, or the image of National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stuffing classified documents in his pants so no Republican could leverage them into an indictment of a pedestrian anti-terror policy? The security breach that Berger engineered and the $5,000 fine he paid were a small price to pay for postponing a reckoning that party strategists probably regarded as “revenge of the nerds.”

Berger went on to advise John Kerry until cooler heads convinced the Massachusetts senator that he was a liability. As a Washington Post story put it while sounding a theme that Barack Obama would later reprise to great effect, “A Kerry adviser said the expanding controversy convinced the campaign that Berger’s departure was essential because of the serious distraction it posed for Kerry in the week before the Democratic Party nominates him for president.”

The bet here is that an up-and-coming community organizer in Chicago read stories like that and thought to himself, “Questions of judgment can always be dismissed as ‘distractions’ if the rest of your message appeals strongly enough to the base, because no Democrat wants to do any legwork on a charismatic candidate.” Oprah Winfrey was not yet on his Rolodex, but she would be.