Varifrank: The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

It’s been three days now, and I’m still absolutely mystified at the right wing anger of the nomination of Harriet Miers. This issue, of all issues that have occurred in the past 5 years is now splintering the Republican Party into a thousand little shards. It doesn’t make any sense to me how we can manage to invade a country, take the country and the world completely to war, create a wide reaching “patriot act”, raise spending to an all time high and allow Ted Kennedy to write the education bills and nary a word is spoken, but let the President put one woman from SMU up for a shot at a seat on the Supreme Court and suddenly the right wing commentariat thinks its time to start sending checks to Howard Dean. And for all the hypocritical nonsense to start hearing Republicans complain about “cronyism”, well that just takes that cake. How did you get your job Mr. Kristol? How bout you, Mr. Goldberg? Did anyone notice what the current Presidents dad used to do before he became a full time co start with Bill Clinton in the road show of “Alphonse and Gaston”? Cronyism is to politics what bearing grease is to locomotives, you can complain all you want about how messy and unseemly it is, but it sure helps the fresh fruits and vegetables get to the market on time. You take lawyers and cronyism out of Washington DC and you know what you got? Yeah that’s right, you got a low rent version of Lancaster Pennsylvania only with more mosquitoes and worse parking. So let’s knock off the crap about how “she only got her job because she knew George W. Bush” or lets at least knock off acting surprised to see such a thing as if its our first time at the rodeo.

The only smart comment I’ve seen on the subject comes from Professor Glenn Reynolds and it’s to this that I wish to respond.

“My question is whether she's got what it takes to be a Supreme Court Justice. So far, nobody's shown me much in that department.”

Now, that’s a good question. Has she got it, or hasn’t she?

The truth is, we’ll never know for sure until its time. Resumes, as I hope to illustrate do not reveal character. History is replete with examples of people who’s resume looks terrific, only to have the person fold up like a wet paper cup at just the wrong time. History is also full of people who have really poor resumes who turn out to be outstanding for the job. Take General Ulysses S. Grant, or Harry Truman. Take their names off the top of their resumes, and exclude the part where they began to show the world what they were made of and they look pretty shoddy. Haberdasher? Failed farmer? Lives with Mother-in-Law? Drunk? Yet each man so excelled at their jobs that they redefined the position. General Grant was an outstanding General and redefined modern warfare, and was a poor President. Harry Truman was the very definition of a loser until he linked up with the Missouri Democratic political machine. One thing led to another and he became President, and the real shock is, he did pretty well in the job. His resume would not have predicted such a thing.

So how about this example? Lets have a competition to solve a major problem that has puzzled scientists for thousands of years.

Candidate #1: Entrepreneur and small business owner. Works with brother in moderate skilled industrial arts shop. Holds a high school education.

Or

Candidate #2: Astronomer, Physicist and a Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute.

Who is more likely, based on their academic background and depth of experience to solve the problems involved with flight? For those of you who didn’t follow the link, its not candidate #2. It was the two bicycle mechanics from Dayton who did the hard engineering that brought about the science of flight, not the good professor.

For those of you who didn’t like the fact that I accused you of “elitism” this is what it does to you. You start to believe that resumes themselves can be the best judge of character. They are not now nor have they ever been.

This is what elitism does to you; you start to believe that a written checklist of “qualifications” can substitute for true tests and evaluations of character. Did the candidate go to the right schools and do all the right things?

Why sure, well I guess they are in “the club”, ok in you go...

Whoops. Sometimes you get a stinker, like this guy for example.

Attended Knox College
Studied chemistry and Russian.
Received a masters of accounting with honors
Joined the Chicago police as an internal corruption investigator
Then joined the FBI counterintelligence unit.

Family Man, Church going good guy, one of the FBI’s finest. How bad could this guy be? Only one of the worst traitors in 50 years, that’s all.

Ok, lets go for one more. How about this candidate?

I ask you, is he ready for the Supreme Court?

Graduated from Vanderbilt University.
Studied law at the University of Virginia
Clerked for a Supreme Court Justice.
Established a successful law practice.
Named a professor at Vanderbilt University.
Served as assistant attorney general.

Oh he’s a lock for the job. He’s got qualifications up the ying-yang. How could you pass on this guy? A few “originalists” discussions an op ed here and there on Madison v Marbury and he’s a shoe-in. He’s clearly got what it takes to sit on the court. Oh, Dang-it-all, there goes that history thing again. Be careful what you wish for folks, you might just get it.

You see, this guy actually did become a Supreme Court Justice. And how exactly did that work out? Well congratulations, you just chose a vicious anti-semite for your court! There is no 1924 portrait of the Supreme Court because this bastard refused to even sit next to Justice Brandeis! But hey, he’s got a great resume, and by the standards proffered by Krystol, Ingraham, Bork and Krauthammer he should be on the court. I say that President Wilson probably and the country would have been better served if they had spent some time with the man prior to his infecting the court with his bigotry, but hey, he’s got a great resume and comes from all the right families and went to all the right schools, so he’s clearly just a misunderstood judicial genius.

But I digress…

My point is this. If this Presidency has proven anything, it’s the idea that a persons character matters, and some cases it is truly what matters the most. Both Al Gore and John Kerry had much better resumes than did George W. Bush, but who did we choose? We chose George W. Bush. We took the same leap with him that he has taken with Harriet Miers. Notice that I said “We”? yeah, all of a sudden everyone wants to pretend they didn’t vote for President Bush because he went and broke their heart by not picking their favorite candidate for the Supreme Court. That’s all it took.

We chose character over resume, and yet we look askance when the man who has the responsibility for this decision has done the same. So what does Harriet Miers have to offer on her resume to give us reassurance of her character, her resilience, her capabilities to the job?

No more and certainly no less than all the other men who have gone before her. Some were great, some really stunk, and from their resumes, you really can’t tell one from the other. Only half of them were judges prior, some were not even lawyers, most got the job through some version of cronyism or favoritism.

She does have one thing that I think does matter. She has a history of perseverance. She has a history of survival in the halls of Texas legal politics. She has this history not as a man, but as a woman. She comes from a generation when that battle was not yet won and settled as it is today. This is an accomplishment to easily discounted from many of my generation who have always worked with, around or for women.

Women of the generation just prior to Harriet Miers understand what an accomplishment it is that she was part of that pioneering group who fought the establishment odds to be considered an equal partner in the world, rather than simply “the coffee getter”, “the nurse”, the bit of “slap and giggle” after the real work was over, but we have forgotten how times have changed. Yes children, she fought in those battles in that war a case at a time; a war that we can barely see today except in the background of old movies. But unlike the characters in those movies, she is not a figment of someone’s imagination, she is a real person, and she was there to see it change and by her own action of professionalism, she was there to make it change.

It should be recognized that Harriet Miers is a veteran of a culture war fought and won largely against the odds. She fought it, quietly with dignity and with personal losses. She asks for no medals, no day of celebration she simply asks that she be considered when the time calls for it.

My father taught me that life and the situations it presents, reveals the true character of a person to the rest of us. How a person deals with crisis and travail will better reveal a person than any FBI background check will have ever done. I see that simple lesson being shown to be true in this situation as well.

The character being revealed in this situation is not just of Harriet Miers and the President, but of their critics as well.

Give her a chance. She’s earned it.

My father used to say; “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. That certainly applies in this case. Is Harriet perfect? No. But she is arguably good and that should be enough for all of us.

Oh, and whos the cat in the picture? Oh he's a law student from Washington State. Hell of a guy, He's a good, if not spectacular, student, active in the Methodist Church and the Boy Scouts. Ted has worked for and campaigned for the Republican Party.

He should serve as a warning to those of you who choose to use a resume as the best test of a persons qualifications.

Posted @ October 08, 2005 11:00 PM | Current Affairs

The truly scary part about that picture is that is eerily resembles GWB in his younger days.

As for the debate at hand, the hard-right's handwringing stems from their belief that they could use this nomination to bludgeon the Democrats into permanent minority-party status and that this opportunity has now been lost. I'm with you in believing that Ms. Miers will be a formidable Justice once she's there. I can't tell you why other than that I just have a "feeling" about this.

Posted by: Captain Ned at October 9, 2005 11:41 AM

I picked that picture because I have a friend who goes to psychic fairs and conventions with a portfolio of "family" pictures and asks various psychics if they can tell them anything about the people in the pictures. 9 out of 10 pick teds picture and tell him that "he will do very well and that hes a nice rich man". Howls of laughter ensue when his true identity is revealed.

I dont really know if Harriet Miers will be a good justice or not. The point of both of my posts is to say that no one else can be absolutely sure either one way or the other.

However, we can look at the track record of the president in his ability to choose and say that by most evalauations, hes made some very solid choices. So why is everyone so abosolutely certain that this one is a bad choice?

You cant rely on resume alone, you can rely on schools, family or the ability to write legal decisions. All of those methods have been used with other candidates, and the track record of predicting how the nominee actually does on the court is spotty at best.

In the end you either trust the president to make this choice or you dont and no intellectual argument is going to move you very far from one direction or the other once youve made up your mind on the issue.

I do offer the idea that if I can trust him to sit 4 feet away from the nuclear button, I can certainly trust him with this simple appointment choice.

Posted by: varifrank at October 9, 2005 12:17 PM

You hit the nail in the head! People sometimes miss that, sometimes, qualifications mean nothing if that person doesn't have what it takes or cannot get the job done.

If the same standards that we use to find candidates for high positions in government had been used in 1860, for example, an Illinois lawyer with a history of failed campaign runs would have never become president, nor would have we ever read in our history books that exceptional, 2 1/2 minute speech he wrote, to be spoken as an afterthought at a military cemetery dedication - at the site of a decisive battlefield, no less.

Keep it up!

Posted by: newton at October 19, 2005 12:46 PM

And no. I have seen youth pictures of GWB. Doesn't even come close!

Posted by: newton at October 19, 2005 12:49 PM