Andrew Rice

Andrew Rice emails his take on (part of) last night’s debate:

Due to unavoidable conflicts--it was my night to cook dinner, and I had to run to the grocery store--I missed the first 40 minutes of the debate last night. I came away thinking that it was actually a very sober, issues-driven affair.  read more »

• 0 comments

It's double-issue time for the Observer, meaning that a) most of us will be taking a break for a few days and b) Andrew Rice will be taking over as guest editor of the Politicker during the dark week.

Rice has written for The New Republic, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, and of course, for us. He's also written extensively about Africa and is currently working on a book about an unresolved murder in Uganda and the legacy of Idi Amin.

Anyway, we're delighted to have him back. If you've got tips, complaints, comments, advisories or photos, email Andrew at Andrewrice75(at)yahoo.com.

Over to you, Andrew.

Andrew Rice sends in this email about what the primaries might look like in 2008:

You know, I realize it's way early to even be thinking about this, but it occurred to me yesterday morning when I was reading about California moving its primary up that one possible outcome of all this frontloading could be the return of another one of those mothballed political traditions, the brokered political convention. In years past, the way it played out is that the eventual nominee builds some momentum in early contests, wins big on Super Tuesday, and then runs the table as the rest of his contenders drop out (or are hounded out by calls for party unity).

But if big delegate states like California and New York move ahead in the calendar, there might not be time for this shaking-out process to occur. It'd effectively be a national primary, taking place over the course of a couple weeks, and you could certainly imagine a scenario where Edwards takes the south, Hillary wins New York and the northeast, and Obama wins Illinois and California --in other words, a return to the kind of fractured regional politics that made the smoke-filled rooms of the old conventions such interesting places to be.

It'd be cool for journalists, but maybe a nightmare for the parties. Imagine the prior scenario -- no one has a majority of regional delegates, so let's say two candidates-- Obama-Edwards? Edwards-Obama? -- get together in an anyone-but-Hillary coalition. But the math is not so simple because way back in the 1970s the Democratic Party instituted a "superdelegate" system, as a check on insurgency campaigns. As you know, most of the superdelegates are party elders--the very sort of people who might be beholden in some way or another to the Clinton machine. So all of a sudden, you have candidates spending the spring courting the likes of Tony Coelho. Journalists everywhere have to start familiarizing themselves with the arcana of delegate selection. The Huffington Post starts a "Draft Gore" campaign. It's chaos--and everyone realizes that the nomination process, though it pretends to be democratic, is really a relic of the party boss era.

So there you have it, my off-the-wall prediction for 2008: The new primary process is going to replace the electoral college as everyone's least favorite anachronism.

On to Denver!

-- Josh Benson

So about that scintillating rumor - the one picked up and held firmly at arm's length last week by super-sub Andrew Rice -- about Westchester native and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer running for the Sue Kelly seat in 2008...

Fleischer wishes to put the speculation to rest once and for all.

For the record, he said in an impressively Shermanesque email, "I do want you to know that I am NOT running. Now that I have children, I would never do anything that could risk making them into Redskin fans."

-- Josh Benson

Alright, this is admittedly slightly off-topic, but I wanted to return to something I read not long ago, during Barack Obama's triumphant "book tour" through the vital publishing state of New Hampshire. In John Dickerson's Slate dispatch from the trail, he writes that:

It's easy to see why New Hampshire Democrats were in a frenzy over Obama. He is a winning presence in a room. He is stylish in his uniform of white shirt, no tie, and dark blazer. He carries himself with the weightless self-possession men's magazines achieve only by employing a team of stylists and wardrobe artists. Even his left-handed signature is elegant--a B and an O connected by confident slashes. If he really were a rock star, he'd have it etched into the side of his private plane.

Did you catch the key phrase in that paragraph? No, it wasn't "New Hampshire" or "frenzy" of "confident." It was left-handed.

Hear me out on this one. I admit to being a little biased, being of inclined to the sinister side myself. But here are the facts: In my lifetime (that is, since the advent of Gerald Ford), there have been six United States presidents. According to various lefty advocacy sites--there are a surprisingly large number of them--four of those six presidents have been southpaws. In the 1992 election, in fact, all three candidates were left handed. I'm not sure about the cognitive science, but I have to say, it sounds like a trend--maybe even a cabal. (And who knows how many other of our presidents were born lefty-inclined, back in the days when parents used to cruelly "cure" their children of the outre tendency?)

Much has been written about whether Obama's status as a member of minority ethnic group could keep him from the presidency. But could it be that his status as another minority--a small but influential society of like-handed individuals, living almost unnoticed among you--could cancel out the disadvantage?

Then again, maybe Republicans will attack him as just another left-winger.

--Andrew Rice