by CKR
Obama
Romney
Richardson
Edwards
Giuliani
I’m seeing things in the candidates’ statements that can’t be captured by my summaries; that’s why I have been telling you to read the statements themselves. Some of the statements have been easy to abstract into points; others quite difficult.
Each candidate has a distinctive style; every essay reads quite differently. I think that this can tell something about the candidates, but more than one essay is needed to come to conclusions. However, a few characteristics stand out.
All of the essays contained a certain amount of posturing and fluffy feel-good, along with bones thrown to special interests. That is what I was trying to strip away to get to the policy prescriptions. The nature of the posturing, of course, is important, and, by and large, consistent with the ways the candidates present themselves. Thus Obama is for change, Edwards is populist, Richardson is wonky, and Giuliani keeps reminding us of 9/11. Romney is harder to characterize, sort of Giuliani lite.
I left some of the special-interest bones in to indicate ties that may exist.
I mentioned earlier that the candidates tend to present a practice or policy that they deem undesirable, but do not necessarily say how they would improve on it. Richardson and Edwards were the most specific in building on past mistakes; Obama somewhere in the middle, and Romney and Giuliani the vaguest.
Romney and Giuliani’s essays were by far the hardest to work through. Much of what they contain is in the form of generalities, both negative and positive. I often couldn’t extract a policy prescription from a paragraph that looked like it should contain one or several; maybe none were there. I think I may have left out more in Romney’s essay, while I tried to restructure what I perceived to be recommendations in Giuliani’s.
For both Giuliani and Edwards, I was tempted to use whole paragraphs, but for different reasons. Edwards’s paragraphs were nicely structured and reasoned, although I was able to extract individual points, so I kept to my program. That was harder to do with Giuliani’s essay.
Giuliani’s paragraphs were layered: a statement, then examples, then a tightening of the statement. If I took the first statement, it sounded innocuous; the tighter statement frequently didn’t make sense without the rest. This paragraph
For diplomacy to succeed, the U.S. government must be united. Adversaries naturally exploit divisions. Members of Congress who talk directly to rogue regimes at cross-purposes with the White House are not practicing diplomacy; they are undermining it. The task of a president is not merely to set priorities but to ensure that they are pursued across the government. It is only when they are -- and when Washington can negotiate from a position of strength -- that negotiations will yield results.follows that pattern. The first sentence can be taken in many ways. The rest of the paragraph seems to indicate that Giuliani believes he can dictate Congress’s actions.
In general, Guiliani’s and Romney’s essays seemed to have the least content. Guiliani’s teamed that with the most incendiary use of words. At the same time, Guiliani seems to use some of Thomas Barnett’s concepts, but I’ll let ZenPundit comment on that.