Sam Nunn (Ga.), Charles S. Robb (Va.) and David L. Boren (Okla.), and former presidential candidate Gary Hart. Republican organizers include Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), former party chairman Bill Brock, former senator John Danforth (Mo.) and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.
Centrist, Republican effort. Take the trouble to park their own cars on crowded Georgetown streets and then think of themselves as vaguely Jeffersonian. Political monorchids. What are they up to?
Those who will be at the Jan. 7 session at the University of Oklahoma say that if the likely nominees of the two parties do not pledge to "go beyond tokenism" in building an administration that seeks national consensus, they will be prepared to back Bloomberg or someone else in a third-party campaign for president.
Who are they looking at?
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a potential independent candidate for president, has scheduled a meeting next week with a dozen leading Democrats and Republicans, who will join him in challenging the major-party contenders to spell out their plans for forming a "government of national unity" to end the gridlock in Washington.
Wait! Doesn't that amount to a compromise between (approximately) the ideologies and politics of Dick Cheney and Joseph Lieberman? In effect? Kind of looks that way. In a country that's hungry for change, what kind of support are they getting?
The list of acceptances suggests that the group could muster the financial and political firepower to make the threat of such a candidacy real. Others who have indicated that they plan to attend the one-day session include William S. Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine and defense secretary in the Clinton administration; Alan Dixon, a former Democratic senator from Illinois; Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida; Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa; Susan Eisenhower, a political consultant and granddaughter of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower; David Abshire, president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency; and Edward Perkins, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
So we're talking about a collegial, inside-Washington, don't-upset-our-applecart kind of a deal. Parlor idealists. Innocents and unabashed manipulators.
Then, too, the timing of the announcement is quite telling.
Boren said the meeting is being announced in advance of Thursday's Iowa caucuses "because we don't want anyone to think this was a response to any particular candidate or candidates." He said the nation needs a "government of national unity" to overcome its partisan divisions in a time of national challenge he likened to that faced by Great Britain during World War II.
"Electing a president based solely on the platform or promises of one party is not adequate for this time," Boren said. "Until you end the polarization and have bipartisanship, nothing else matters, because one party simply will block the other from acting."
Got it! The people of Iowa can't be trusted to make a choice which might influence other voters in other states -- democracy is inadequate! Do we understand that correctly? So this group is pushing its own (rich, corporate) candidate as a better choice than, say, Obama, Edwards, or Clinton?
Nunn, for his part, described Bloomberg as "an enormously capable man" but said: "I've made no decision who I'm going to support. Most of us hope to shape the Republican or Democratic side's response, but who knows where this is going to go? I think the country's at the tipping point, and it's going to take a lot more understanding by the electorate for anybody to be able to lead."
"Understanding by the electorate"? Do we detect a note of arrogance here? Michael Bloomberg can get his hands on an awful lot of money at the last minute. Of course that has nothing to do with it.
You embarrass yourselves, senators. And you embarrass us.
