One example of how the divergence squeezes candidates came in 2000, when most voters approved of President Bill Clinton’s work, but most had an “unfavorable” view of his post-impeachment character. That flummoxed Al Gore’s campaign when it thought about how to handle Clinton. According to Gore campaign vets like Bob Shrum, Clinton was toxic in states that he’d won twice and where the economy was booming, like Iowa.

Since Sarah Palin doesn’t have a job outside of her book tour, her “favorable” rating is all she has. Not only is it lower than Barack Obama’s favorable rating, it’s lower than a credible national candidate can really stand — Republicans argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton might be unelectable as a presidential candidate when her “unfavorable” rating was a good 10 points lower than Palin’s.

What reason is there to believe that Dobbs, a bottom-feeding broadcaster who struggled to draw 800,000 nightly viewers, has a ready pool of voters waiting for him? All I see is a 2006 Rasmussen Reports poll suggesting that a third-party candidate who talked about ending immigration, as Dobbs does, would score 30 percent of the vote. A Dobbs boomlet makes more sense that the truly foolish “Unity 08″ boomlet of 2007, when some retired campaign consultants suggested that some combination of independent-minded politicians should run for office, just because.

“If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it,” she answered. “When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it. But I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it. That’s really my standard.

“If I am called to serve in that realm I would serve,” she concluded, “but if I am not called, I wouldn’t do it.

Should Democrats be concerned? As Birkey notes, God already told her to run for Congress.

I caught up with the governor following his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee today. After chatting about energy policy (more on this below), I asked him if, given the shrinking pool of potential 2012 candidates, he was considering throwing his hat in the ring. He replied:

I’ve said, when I was chairman of our party in 1993 and [1994], that in the first two years of a Democratic presidency, we need to focus all our attention on those two years — in this case, ‘09 and ‘10. And any Republican who’s thinking about 2012 doesn’t have his eye on the ball. I’ve told thousands of people that, and I’m taking my own advice.

“But you’re not ruling it out?” I followed. At which point he uttered a drawn-out “Uhh” and mumbled something about how he was “just seeing that clock.” Then he took his leave.

He was more loquacious on the topic of cap-and-trade legislation, though, where he had this folksy analogy to offer:

When you grow up in the country, like I did, when you cook a frog, you don’t drop him into hot water, cause he’ll jump out. You drop him into cool water, and then you turn up the heat, and it heats up slowly. And politically, the left has tried to protect themselves by pushing the effects off a few years. Because they know once the job losses start and the higher costs kick in, which they inevitably will, that will be bad for them.

When I asked him if he thought it was necessary to take action to address climate change, he distanced himself from many of his Republican colleagues in the Senate by replying, “I do. I do. I do.”

But he added:

I do not think that the need to address climate change is urgent, that it’s more important than the economy. I’m like most Americans. I don’t think we ought to sink our economy in the name of climate change.

President-elect Barack Obama (WDCpix)

“And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help and I will be your president too.”

So said President-elect Barack Obama, in one of the most revealing sentences in his victory speech Tuesday. In his rejection of standard political divisions, his emphasis on “e pluribus unum,” and his gracious inclusion of those whose support he has “yet to earn,” we can find a clue to what makes our new president-elect so remarkable — perhaps even unique in the nation’s long history.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Some public officials are minimalists. They do not like to reject the fundamental commitments of their fellow citizens. On environmental questions, sex equality, national security and economic policy, they try to bracket our deepest disagreements. They seek to obtain a consensus on what to do — not on why to do it.
Minimalists favor their approach because they think, as a pragmatic matter, it is most likely to work. They also insist that their approach, putting fundamental differences to one side, shows respect to their fellow citizens.

Political minimalism has a distinguished tradition in U.S. politics. In recent history, President George H.W. Bush stands as the leading minimalist. To the extent that Bush succeeded, especially in foreign affairs, it was because he enlisted diverse people, and diverse views, on behalf of the policies he chose.

Other public officials are visionaries. They have a large-scale vision about the direction in which the nation should go. They believe in big steps, not small ones.

Above all, these visionaries seek to alter the nation’s self-conception. In changing policy on the economy, or on national defense, they are entirely comfortable with asserting that their vision is the superior one and that alternative visions should be rejected. When they succeed, they transform how the nation understands itself.

Our greatest presidents — including Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt — have been visionaries. In recent American history, President Ronald Reagan stands as the leading visionary.

Obama is something new in American politics — and not just for the obvious reasons. He is a visionary minimalist. This is a key both to his extraordinary campaign and to his unique promise. It even helps explain his conception of public service.

Obama’s minimalism lies in his consistent rejection of the standard social divisions — between red states and blue states, liberal and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. As he said in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.”

Ronald Reagan (Wikimedia)

Obama shows unfailing respect for those with competing views. In designing policies — on climate change, tax reform, energy conservation, foreign policy — he attempts to produce solutions that will accommodate, rather than repudiate, the defining commitments of his fellow citizens. Even on the most divisive issues of separation of church and state, Obama favors approaches that will attract support from all sides.

But Obama is a visionary too. Unlike most minimalists, he is willing to think big.

When he speaks of change, he means to include ambitious plans for energy independence, universal health care and educational reform. No less than Reagan, he wants to transform the nation’s self-understanding. He seeks not only to go beyond the divisions of the 1960s, but also to synthesize deeper strands in our history.

Thus Obama recognizes and celebrates the individualist strain in American culture. But he draws attention to a counterpoint — one that emphasizes mutual obligations.
As he said in 2004 and has often repeated since, “If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. . . . It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper – that makes this country work.”

With the election of a new president, I expect that we will soon enter a novel period of American life, in which a commitment to public service, sacrifice and a sense of mutual obligations will play a far larger role. That commitment will be anything but partisan. It will be felt in red states and blue states alike.

And it will be made possible, and fueled, by the visionary minimalism of America’s president-elect.

Cass R. Sunstein is Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School. He will be the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor at University of Chicago Law School in January 2009. His most recent book, which he co-wrote with Richard Thaler, is “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” His books include “Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary” and “The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever.”

President-elect Barack Obama (WDCpix)

It would be lovely for there to be — if not a full honeymoon period — just a quiet reflective day or two to take stock of what just happened. Whatever the reason, a tanking economy and a wildly unpopular incumbent no doubt high on the list, America just voted a black man into the highest office in the land.

In the polling booths and on the streets after, people smiled at the immensity of what had happened, what they, with the touch of a screen or the mark of a ballot, had participated in: history. Not just history, but a redress of that history.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

There were tears when the victory was announced. Not just in the big crowd in Chicago, where President-elect Barack Obama spoke, but in living rooms everywhere. I know. I saw them in my own living room. I shed a few.

With his rare oratorical gifts, his eloquence, Obama caught that tone in his post-victory speech. He nodded hard at America’s complicated history, but he didn’t dwell there. His was not a racial victory — not just that anyway.

At every turn, Obama eschews the divisive and goes big — raising expectations for everyone. His is a big, wide call for us to band together and be our better selves, post-partisan, patriotic, a word he uses not as a cudgel but as an invitation.

No question, that invitation is resonating. Not just with the young, who are just stepping up for their turn at the bat and who voted in record numbers. They canvassed and called; they traveled the country, eager and earnest and lit up with the chance to be participants.

But the Obama invitation works for many of the older folk, too, the baby boomers, the Clinton and Bush cohort. There is a sense among them — among us, I should say, as I am in this number — of a kind of long hang-over, a sense that we did not keep up the promises of our own youthful days. Instead, we got bogged down in an internecine generational battle, in materialistic pleasures, those SUVS and wide-screen TVs. Of course, even in our self-judgment, there is the inevitable tinge of narcissism.

Obama’s victory turns the page, at last. But again, he does not play the generation card, just as he ran a post-racial campaign as much as possible. Though he is so clearly a post-60’s child himself, he offers a chance of redemption even to the boomers, a chance to be staked again to the country.

In short, Obama has raised the expectations for any and all of us, patriotic expectations, moral expectations, expectations of what it means to be a citizen, a voter whose vote can change history.

But as the president-elect raises those expectations, he must also lower them. That’s the trick, the balancing act.

Because we are in a downward spiral, a tough economic contraction that will, if he is not careful, threaten to nibble away at the energy and optimism he brings to the table. It’s going to be tough. There are going to be sacrifices. More people are going to lose jobs and homes and health care.

He knows it. We know it. He has to be able to lower our expectations — while raising them at the same time, not just with his verbal gifts, but with his first appointments and actions.

He has to keep us excited, on board, even as we are uncertain and fearful of what lies ahead. No question, this is going to be a tough Christmas. You can feel it out there in the shops and the malls. People are not going to spend. It’s going to be harsh.

We have been in a long, prosperous boom — really since the early 80s — more and more stuff, bigger and bigger houses and toys, a rip-roaring economy going more and more global. As many became ever more successful in their private and professional lives, they grew farther from a sense of a communal, civic life.

The go-it-alone atmosphere of the Bush administration — what Obama called the “ownership socieity” meaning “you’re on your own” — did not help. There has been a real paternalistic swagger to the Bush folk, much diminished, of course, in the final throes, by the economic down-turn. But for a long time, they strode the world stage full of certitude and secrecy.

The Clinton administration toyed with raising bigger expectations for any and all, but they were, in a sense, personal expectations, that we would do well for ourselves, achieve a lot. Certainly the economy boomed. But, let’s be honest, some of the big de-regulating that we now have to pay for happened then, too, not just in the Bush years.

There was peace, though the Clinton folk, arguably, did not focus hard on the first acts of terrorism, a forerunner of what was to come. By that time, in his second term, Clinton was bogged down in defending himself after a dalliance with a bouncy intern in a beret.

Bye-bye boomers. The new guys are coming, Obama at their helm. Calm, steely, deeply married, a devoted father of young kids, he comes with the promise of a new beginning on every level.

But he is a child of that economic boom, too; a product of a great education, high achievement, a big house. It will fall to him, right off the bat, to deal with the nation’s fears while keeping our optimism up, to calm the country while beckoning it to make tough, expensive choices about health care and education.

It is a big, nuanced balancing act: lowering expectations while raising them at the same time. Obama must now lead a country full of both hope—and fear.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”

John Nance Garner (Wikimedia Commons)

Despite Vice President John Nance Garner’s notorious description that the vice-presidency as not worth a pitcher of warm spit,” the fact is that the office, and who holds it, matter enormously.

That was true in Garner’s time and even more so today. Nine vice-presidents before him had advanced to the presidency, six by succeeding a deceased president.

Five more men have been added to that list since Garner’s day, three because of the death or resignation of the elected president.

And recent vice-presidents have been granted considerably greater responsibilities than their predecessors while holding the No. 2 office. Consider, for example, Lyndon B. Johnson and the space program; Al Gore and environmental policy, or Dick Cheney and national security.

Warm spit indeed.

What follows is a capsule account of the 46 vice presidents.

* Total number of presidential terms since 1789: 55

* Number of persons who have served as president: 43 (Grover Cleveland is usually counted twice — as both the 22nd and 24th president — so the actual number is 42)

* Presidents who died of natural causes in office: 4 (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt)
their average age at death: 63
average length of elected term before death: 12 months

* Presidents assassinated: 4 (Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy)
their average age at death: 52
average length of elected term before death: 12 months

John Tyler (Wikimedia Commons)

*President who resigned: 1 (Richard M. Nixon)
age at leaving office: 61
length of elected term served before resignation: 20 months

*Political party of presidents who died in office or resigned: Whigs: 2; Democrats: 2; Republicans: 5

*Average age on leaving office of all presidents who died or resigned: 58

*Average length of elected term served before death or departure: 13 months

*Percentage of elected terms interrupted by death from natural causes: 7.3 percent (4/55)

*Percentage of elected terms interrupted by assassination: 7.3 percent (4/55)

*Percentage of all presidential terms served in part by vice presidents: 16.4 percent (9/55)

*Number of persons who have served as vice president: 46

*Number of vice presidents who became president: 14 (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, George H.W. Bush)

*Percentage of vice presidents who became president: 30.4 percent (14/46)

*Average length of term served by vice president who assumed office on death or departure of the president: 35 months

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were later nominated in their own right for the presidency: 5 (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford)

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were later nominated for the presidency and won: 4 (all but Gerald Ford)

Chester Arthur (Wikimedia Commons)

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were not nominated by their party for a full presidential term: 4 (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur)

*Number of vice presidents who assumed the presidency on death or resignation of the president, and their highest office achieved prior to vice presidency: 9

o John Tyler: U.S. senator and governor of Virginia

o Millard Fillmore: congressman (chairman of Committee on Ways and Means)

o Andrew Johnson: U.S. senator and governor of Tennessee

o Chester Arthur: Collector of New York customhouse

o Theodore Roosevelt: governor of New York

o Calvin Coolidge: governor of Massachusetts

o Harry Truman: U.S. senator

o Lyndon Johnson: U.S. senator (Senate Majority Leader)

o Gerald Ford: congressman (House Minority Leader)

*Percentage of terms of persons elected originally to the presidency not served by those so elected: 17.6 percent (9/51)

*Percentage of vice presidents who became president due to departure of originally elected president: 19.6 percent (9/46)

David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan professor of history at Stanford University. His book, “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Sarah Anzia is a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford.

Waas uses his scoop to build the case that contrary to the perception of Bush as a detached figure, the president ran the show when it came to the spying program:

According to people familiar with statements recently made by Gonzales to federal investigators, Gonzales is now saying that George Bush personally directed him to make that hospital visit….Gonzales has also told Justice Department investigators that President Bush played a more central and active role than was previously known in devising a strategy to have Congress enable the continuation of the surveillance program when questions about its legality were raised by the Justice Department, as well as devising other ways to circumvent the Justice Department’s legal concerns about the program, according to people who have read Gonzales’s interviews with investigators.

The hospital visit revelation adds a new wrinkle to a story now part of Bush administration lore: Gonzales and Card presented an envelope to Ashcroft to sign off on a then-secret spying program the AG found legally suspect. However, Ashcroft’s wife and chief of staff had alerted Deputy Attorney General James Comey what was afoot and Comey raced to the hospital and successfully prevented Ashcroft from re-authorizing the program.

The reason Gonzales is talking to federal investigators is that the Justice Dept. is looking into whether the former AG lied under oath to Congress about the process in approving the spy program.

What Gonzales is saying will surely lead to another explosive inspector general report on Justice Dept. corruption. But by tying himself to the president, Gonzales has increased the possibility of using a presidential claim of executive privilege in order to avoid cooperating with subsequent investigations.

On the other hand, Gonzales’s statements to investigators could mark a breakthrough in probing the White House. “What began as investigations narrowly focused on Gonzales’s conduct,” Waas writes, “could easily morph into broader investigations leading into the White House, and possibly leading into the appointment of a special prosecutor.”

The lawsuit doesn’t concern anything Cheney has actually done– like, for example, not produce White House emails. Instead, CREW and the others are trying to make sure that Cheney doesn’t  use his claim that his office is not part of the executive branch as a reason to withhold his VP records.

Back in 2001, President George W. Bush released an executive order that lays out his views on executive power. Compared with the rest of the document, the section on vice presidential records seems innocuous: “the presidential records act applies to the executive records of the vice president.”

The 1978 Presidential Records Act makes clear that the president and vice president must give the National Archives all policy-related documents when their administration ends.

The problem, say the lawsuit’s plantiffs, is that Cheney has already spurned the National Archives by claiming he’s not part of the executive branch. And Bush’s executive order refers to the vice president’s “executive records.”

So what if Cheney claims that administration-defining documents — the lawsuit specifically cites notes and records on Iraq and energy policy — are actually “legislative records”?

Filing a lawsuit for Cheney’s complete records while he is still the sitting VP is a unique strategy.

Then again, according to the White House, the “vice presidency is a unique office, neither part of the executive branch nor the legislative branch, but it is attached by the Constitution to the latter.”

Judicial intervention could both preserve Cheney’s records and finally do away with his claim to be floating somewhere above the Constitution.