TOMC watched the Republican debate the other day and observed Fred Thompson. Poor Fred. Mr. Cohen says that the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics offer a golden opportunity to shame China into shepherding Burmese reform. Here’s TOMC:
Fred Thompson did great in that debate! He stayed upright the whole time! And he knew the name of the prime minister of Canada! No question, this man is ready to lead.
There the Republican presidential candidates were, debating in Michigan, the state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Its government is foundering in a sinkhole of disappearing revenues. Detroit is a shell of a once-great city. The good union jobs keep disappearing. The sense of betrayal, of loss and sadness, is everywhere.
And there was Fred Thompson, first up to the plate, offering hope to these particularly beleaguered Americans:
“I think there certainly are those in Michigan that are having difficulty. I think you always find that in a vibrant, dynamic economy. I think that not enough has been done to tell what some call the greatest story never told, and that is that we are enjoying a period of growth right now, and we should acknowledge what got us there and continue those same policies on into the future.”
Thank you so much for coming to Michigan, Senator Thompson. Loved you in “The Hunt for Red October.”
When you watch a bunch of presidential candidates on a stage, you are almost invariably looking at a bunch of very rich people. Some of them were born into privilege, like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Some had privilege thrust upon them, like Rudy Giuliani, who parlayed his 9/11 moment into an extraordinarily lucrative public speaking career and consulting business. Thompson rose from humble roots thanks to friends and one well-connected ex-wife.
Voters tend to admire wealth, and they certainly know that nobody gets to be a serious presidential candidate by picking a good mutual fund in a 401(k). They just want to be shown that despite all those chauffeurs, private planes, secretaries, housekeepers, nannies and personal assistants, you still understand what regular folks’ lives are like. Fail, and you wind up John Kerry.
But at least the Democrats who nominated Kerry did not imagine that they were choosing him for his down-home personality. What exactly is the point of Fred Thompson? He once got elected to the Senate by driving around Tennessee in a red truck (which, critics carped, he ditched as soon as he was out of sight of the last voter).
He persuaded people that his opponent was wrong when he claimed Thompson was nothing but a “Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon-spreading millionaire Washington special interest lobbyist.” Of course, that was some time ago, and things have changed. Thompson is now a Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon-spreading millionaire Washington special interest lobbyist and actor.
This week’s debate was Thompson’s first, and he had to share the stage with eight other guys, some of whom have barely bothered to drop in on New Hampshire or Iowa and have no support outside their immediate families. The next time you see a nine-way presidential debate, people, tell yourself: This is being broadcast by lily-livered poltroons who are afraid of offending Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter. If the networks cut out the people who have no supporters, no campaign donations and who spend less time on the road than the average Mister Softee vendor, they could finish in an hour with far less viewer slippage.
The main action in the Republican race is currently the squabbling between Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. At the debate, Romney tried to brand Giuliani as an enemy of the line-item veto. This is, of course, fatal in a party in which everybody quails in fear of the powerful right-to-veto lobby. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a good line-item veto fight. Not as exciting as the moment when John McCain laced into the Smoot-Hawley tariff, but quite the dust-up.
Standing next to the towering Thompson and Giuliani, who always looks a little strange and skeletal, Romney resembled the handsome prince in “Shrek.” Not exactly the most reliable character in the kingdom, but a truly great head of hair.
So there we are. Thanks to two hours of Republicans talking, Americans can now rest assured that Fred Thompson A) has all his marbles and B) is a terrible candidate. All actors, it seems, are not Ronald Reagan. Thompson not only isn’t charismatic, he doesn’t even seem pleasant. If Fred is a man of the people, I am Jennifer Lopez.
“People who play by the rules and work hard can expect to live the American dream,” he said sternly. “If they need help in this country, they get help. And those who can help themselves are expected to do so.”
I hope that’s clear. All you losers out there have obviously failed to play by the rules and work hard. Everybody who doesn’t own a house didn’t try hard enough to buy one. Stick to the program and you will have all the Guccis and Grey Poupon you need.
You’ve got to say this about Fred Thompson. He’s one hell of a tall candidate.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Seldom has a country’s rise been as smooth as China’s in recent years. Bush-bashing has left the world with scant surplus indignation to devote to Beijing’s backing for many of the planet’s ugliest regimes, including those in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran and Cuba.
Talk of “harmony” — the buzzword favored by President Hu Jintao — and “no strings attached” assistance has been the camouflage for China’s readiness to get in bed with thugs from central casting who can provide the oil, gas and raw materials that fuel the furious growth critical to preserving one-party rule.
Hu’s harmony is mostly hogwash. But who cares? The global thirst for China’s business, and for alternative power centers to Washington, has given the slogan a free ride.
China is not in the business of exporting war, development models or moral and political blueprints. It wants stability for its upward glide. Democracy comes in a distant second to growth, if at all. The tarnishing of the “D-word” in Iraq has suited China fine.
What suits China less is saffron-robed Buddhist monks in neighboring Myanmar — the former Burma — confronting the guns of a military junta that began its rule in 1988 with the massacre of 3,000 protesters and has not wavered in its corrupt brutality since.
The Burmese troubles are troubling to China for several reasons. They are on its doorstep. They come in a country transformed in recent years into a virtual client state, where the Chinese are building roads, burning forests, backing gas projects and dreaming of long-coveted access to the Indian Ocean.
Worst of all for Beijing, the unrest presents about as clear a picture of good versus evil as exists outside fairy tales. There’s little to debate in young monks being gunned down and everything to deplore. For a Buddhist, killing monks is like killing kin. Nine months from the Beijing Olympics, that’s bad.
So the Chinese have been writhing. Not to the point of supporting United Nations Security Council action against Burmese barbarity — the official view is that “pressure would not serve any purpose” — but to the point of gestures suggestive of some discomfort.
These have included facilitating the work of the U.N. special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari. He’s been instrumental in opening new avenues between the military and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader who has long been under house arrest.
China has also offered guarded statements about supporting “stability, reconciliation, democracy and development of Myanmar.”
Democracy? Well, up to a point. View all this as the minimum China thinks it can get away with on the last pre-Olympic lap. Stability, as ever, is the key word; “democracy” is a sop. Still, the Chinese may be ready to hedge their Burmese bets.
The junta’s leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, is 74; nobody’s immortal. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is part, is reviewing a new charter that obliges member countries to “strengthen democracy.”
The Burmese military is increasingly isolated in a region where the Indonesian transition from military rule has given the lie to generals who say their rule is indivisible from national survival.
That said, Myanmar is a weak state where the danger of fragmentation is real. Insurgencies and drug warlord militias could easily fill a vacuum. “The country presents a democracy challenge, but also a failed state challenge,” says Thant Myint-U, a historian.
In North Korea, another Asian country that reeks of failure, China and the United States have united to push Pyongyang out the nuclear business. But it was precisely the nukes that concentrated Chinese minds: nobody in Beijing wanted the militarist wing in Japan emboldened by Kim Jong-il’s folly.
Burmese folly lacks such a galvanizing threat. It does, however, present a unique opportunity for a great power, the United States, and two emergent great powers, India and China, to press for a rapid end to the junta’s rule.
Myanmar is a buffer state between India and China; both have major economic interests there and fear turmoil. India has already called for “political reform.”
I don’t think Olympic boycotts work; nor do I think a breakdown in Chinese-American relations serves anyone. But fierce criticism by Mia Farrow of Chinese complicity in Darfur atrocities through support for Sudan produced modest movement. The nine months to the Olympics present a unique opportunity to shame China into shepherding Burmese reform, beginning with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.
It’s time to call “harmony” to task. Monk-murder in a client state is no advertisement for China rising. India and China need political ideas to frame the economic rise of Asia: the sanctity of monk power is not a bad place to start.
