Uninspiring shortlists

What do you do when you're presented with a short-list of eight or nine candidates and none of them is particularly appealing? That seems to be the case, now, with both the World Trade Center memorial and the Democratic presidential candidates.

I'm quite glad, now, that I was out of the country when the finalists for the World Trade Center memorial were announced. I'd been looking forward to blogging them for a long time, and was very disappointed when I found out I couldn't make it.

Now, however, that the initial flurry of attention is dying down, the consensus opinion is loud and clear: none of the above. It's not the "we hate them all" that greeted the original plans for the site as a whole: it's more inchoate than that. Rather, there's a niggling feeling that none of these concepts is quite right, and that if we rush ahead and build one of them now, we'll probably regret it.

I certainly have no faith in the ability of any of these memorials to stand the test of time. I remember, as a kid, being rather perturbed at war memorials with eternal flames: it seemed to me axiomatic that whatever else the flame was, it obviously wasn't eternal. What I didn't realise then is that eternal flames have a habit of sputtering out wherever they are in the world: this is a known issue which still hasn't been resolved. But faced with an enormous acreage to convert into a memorial, everybody seems to have resorted to some kind of technological wizardry vastly more complex than a common-or-garden eternal flame.

Dual Memory is the worst offender in this resepect, with its "evolving images [which] are reflected as water flows down the walls that support the plane of water above". But did Michael Arad stop to think about what might happen if his water features had to be turned off during a summer drought? And there are huge practical difficulties associated with keeping 3000 votives in suspension, or maintaing a crystalline cloud. Remember, these things are meant to last for dozens, if not hundreds, of years.

With hindsight, the "program guiding principles" were far too broad and ambitious. The memorial had to, inter alia, "respect and enhance the sacred quality of the overall site"; "evoke the historical significance and worldwide impact of September 11, 2001"; "inspire and engage people to learn more about the events and impact of September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993"; and, for good measure, "create an original and powerful statement of enduring and universal symbolism".

It seemed that the winning entrants didn't take the guidelines all that literally, but even so, original, enduring and universal symbolism is a tall order for anybody. (Quite literally: many people, including LMDC bigwigs, seemed to think that the memorial would include some kind of skyline-restoring structure which would complement or even outdo the Childs/Libeskind Freedom Tower. It's interesting that none of the finalists go much above grade.) In the end, we've arrived at a shortlist of plans which either ignore a number of the principles entirely, or which fail to meet their high standards. Better to wait a while, now that Plan A seems to have gone off-track somewhat, than to rush ahead with a proposal which doesn't have public support and which, in any case, has been designed to complement a general site plan which could change significantly between now and even its first built stages.

But at least, in the case of the memorial finalists, waiting is an option. In the case of the Democratic presidential candidates, the timetable is set, and we're stuck with the ones we've got. One of them, for better or for worse, is going to go up against George W Bush in November 2004, and it's up to the country's registered Democrats to pick the candidate with the best chance of success.

Once again, received wisdom has it that "none of the above" seems like the best choice. That's why Wes Clark joined the race so late: his advisors were telling him that it was still wide open, and that none of the candidates had caught the public imagination. In opinion polls, Bush has a narrower lead against an unnamed "Democratic candidate" than he does against any named individual: none of the choices, it would seem, has any appeal beyond simply being not-Bush.

The front-runner, of course, is Howard Dean, who recently went on Hardball to embarrass himself on foreign policy:

the key, I believe, to Iran is pressure through the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is supplying much of the equipment that Iran, I believe, most likely is using to set itself along the path of developing nuclear weapons. We need to use that leverage with the Soviet Union and it may require us to buying the equipment the Soviet Union was ultimately going to sell to Iran to prevent Iran from them developing nuclear weapons.

Yeah, that's right, the Soviet Union. Four times in three sentences Dean proved himself to be completely out of date, living in the past, and hardly the sort of person you'd want putting in place a coherent statement on America's position in a unipolar world.

Dean is doing very well in galvanising the younger end of the Democratic party; he's raising lots of money, and none of the other candidates look like toppling him in the near future. That said, however, I've never liked the guy, mainly because he seems to have no policies. Push on something like gun control or gay marriage, and all you'll find is the federalist cop-out: that's not a question for the president, that's a question for the individual states.

When I saw Dean at an event in New York, he certainly came over very pro-gay, talking about his implementation of civil unions in Vermont. What he didn't say was that they were court-ordered (he didn't really have a choice in the matter); and that when he's pressed, you get exchanges like this:

KING: So you would be opposed to a gay marriage?
DEAN: If other states want to do it, that's their business. We didn't choose to do that in our state.
KING: And you personally would oppose it?
DEAN: I don't know, I never thought about that very much.

Yeah, right.

The problem, or the reason that Dean is doing so well, is that none of the rest of the field seem to be having any luck at all in getting Democrats to care about them. Personally, I'm a big fan of Edwards, but even I have to admit that he's done an atrocious job in getting his message out. Or rather, that's been his problem: he's been concentrating on substance, and thereby losing out at the expense of Dean, who's nearly as good as Bush when it comes to showy rhetoric unencumbered by actual positions.

There's still a possibility that Kerry or even Clark might manage to get a groundswell going, but I feel Edwards slipping away into the land of the once-likely, along with Joe Lieberman.

Of course, the fact remains that it probably doesn't make the slightest bit of difference who wins the Democratic nomination. I wrote last year that

The chances of a Democrat wresting the presidency from Bush in 2004 are slim indeed: in order for that to happen, the economy will have to continue to deteriorate, the housing-market bubble will have to burst, and the US will have to fuck up in Iraq. Two out of three might just do it; one out of three won't be enough.

And just as the Democrats started seeing Iraq as good for them and not the Republicans, we get this economic turnaround. Alan Greenspan is going to be able to keep rates down for one more year, which means that even if Iraq is an election-winner for the Democrats, the economy and real-estate wealth is going to go for the GOP. They'll have two out of three, and the election in the bag.

Against that sort of incumbency advantage, the present line-up of Democratic candidates looks decidely sub-par. And no, there isn't a white knight (Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton) waiting in the wings to gallop on stage at the Democratic National Convention and ride into the election with a huge and unexpected mandate. Unfortunately, unlike the WTC memorial, "do nothing" is not an option. The Democrats are going to have to choose someone, rally behind him, and hope for the best. All we can hope is for the best candidate to win – and for some much-needed luck.

Posted by Felix at 21:47 EST

Comments

"And no, there isn't a white knight (Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton) waiting in the wings to gallop on stage at the Democratic National Convention and ride into the election with a huge and unexpected mandate."

pray tell, why not? I'm ready to quote this back at you. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we all know Hillary is a force of nature.

Pardon the strained wit.

Posted by: Stefan Geens at 19:14 EST, December 03, 2003

I feel a wager coming on: I'll happily bet you 2BVCs that Hillary does not run for president in 2004. I'll even go one further: I'll bet you 2BVCs that the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 is going to be one of the nine now running. (Carol MB, Wes Clark, Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, Kerry, Kucinich, Lieberman, Sharpton).

Posted by: Felix at 19:26 EST, December 03, 2003

How about we double or nothing the BVC you owe me at the moment?

Posted by: Stefan Geens at 16:28 EST, December 05, 2003

I do apologize, as felix has just pointed out to me, he owes me a BC, not a BVC, so I propose a BVC or nothing in that case, which is more or less a double or nothing.

Posted by: Stefan Geens at 16:37 EST, December 05, 2003

OK, for the record, this is now a BC bet, on the understanding that at the moment I owe Stefan 1BC, and that 2BCs = 1BVC. So if I win, I owe Stefan 1BC and he owes me 1BC, the two cancel each other out, and we're all square. If I lose, I owe Stefan 2BCs = 1 BVC. I win if any of the nine Democratic candidates currently running for President receives the nomination.

Posted by: Felix at 14:55 EST, December 06, 2003