Anderson Brown's Political Blog

Can You Guess Why Elena Kagan Has Never Been a Judge?

2010-05-11T04:52:00.000-07:00

A major talking point in the Republican resistance to President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court will be her "lack of judicial experience." It is true that although there is a long history of Justices without prior experience on the bench, Kagan will be the first one in 40 years. But it's worth noting exactly why it is that Kagan never served on the bench: she was caught up in the Republicans' institutional sabotage of President Bill Clinton's judicial nominees.

In June of 1999 Bill Clinton nominated Kagan to be a federal appeals court judge. Orrin Hatch, Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, simply refused to schedule a hearing. This was one of many tactics used to block dozens of Clinton appointees, leaving many important judicial offices empty for months and even years. The cost to the nation was not important to political-gaming Republicans.

Nor is this history one of both sides using the same tactics. Republicans have pioneered the use of the filibuster and other tactics to block nominees, and succeeded in thwarting Clinton nominations at a rate far higher than Reagan or either Bush experienced. And, as usual, the hypocrisy is as high as the elephant's eye.

Like the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, the Kagan nomination can reasonably expected to be successfully confirmed by the current Senate, with its 59 Democrats. But judicial nominations are one of the key battlegrounds in the dangerous evolution of the use of parliamentary maneuvers to stymie the functioning of the government. Like economic and foreign policy, judicial policy requires that the citizens do some homework.

Hey GOP: How low can you go?

2010-05-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to register my disgust with the Republican talking point on the arrest of would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad: that a terrorist suspect (in this case an American citizen) should not be read their Miranda rights. The reason I want to add my voice to this is because the point was stayed on yesterday by leading national figures of the GOP, and these are politicians with reputations as relatively centrist: Arizona Senator John McCain and former New York Governor George Pataki (and others such as New York Congressman Peter King and Independent Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman; if there was literally a memo they couldn't have been more on point).

To me, a few different things come together here to make this GOP talking point more outrageous even than usual:

1) These are not the "wing-nuts." These are the national mainstream party leaders.

2) The conservatives have been standing around at their cocktail parties since the 60s deploring Miranda, and habeus corpus in general, and have used the "war on terror" as a vehicle for stripping Americans of their constitutional rights. This cynical practice of the last administration continues unabated.

3) Both McCain, running for his political life against a right-wing challenger in the Senate race in Arizona, and Pataki, running right to position himself for a presidential bid in 2012, are trying to exploit the bomb scare in a completely brazen manner. They don't mind torpedoing any useful discussion of security procedures with their frivolous sound-byte about Miranda rights.

4) In McCain's case in particular, but generally as well, this sound-byte is obviously racist: focusing on Miranda rights links the "war on terror" to fear of immigrants and to the anti-immigrant Arizona law. As I say, in McCain's case this is just too obvious to be missed. The dog whistle has become a bullhorn.

One would like to think that old pros like McCain and Pataki would try to carve out a niche as responsible centrists who could unite the increasingly-radicalized conservative base with the center electorate. If not them, then who? But alarmingly enough (they know things I don't), the Republican national leadership appears to be making the exact opposite calculation.

Put Bill Clinton on the Supreme Court

2010-04-11T07:05:00.001-07:00

In the discussion about who President Obama will nominate to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, we've been hearing the idea floated that someone with political experience would be healthy for the Court. I'm more inclined to favor a distinguished jurist myself, but I do have a modest proposal if we're going to go with a politician: put Bill Clinton on the Court!

This idea gets more fun the longer one thinks about it. He is, after all, generally recognized as the master politician of his age, whatever else one might think of him. He's not the kind of guy you want wandering around at loose ends, either: the Court is the only box big enough to hold him, and it'd get him out of Barack and Hillary's hair. Idle hands do the devil's work! And he is a former constitutional law professor, after all. And empathy up the wazoo! (At times quite literally, one gathers.) Personal experience with the law, even. And one relishes the thought of the up-the-wall-driving potential the appointment would have for our dear conservative friends. I for one am constantly thinking of new ways to express my feelings for them these days.

True, the confirmation process might be a tad bumpy. But doesn't anybody else miss the gaudy entertainment provided by the Clarence Thomas hearings? (Don't answer that.) I think that the next time Barack, Michelle, Hillary and Bill are all dining together (have they ever dined together as a foursome? Interesting question), Barack should wait until all three are in mid-sip and just put it out there. Fun times! And the most spit-take-worthy thing of all? In all sincerity, I wouldn't mind seeing Bill on the Court one bit!

(Addendum: Although I wrote this post in a jocular spirit, it's turning out to get a lot of attention. A testimonial to BC's enduring charisma, I'd say. One point of information: It doesn't matter (technically speaking) that Clinton lost his law license. A Supreme Court Justice needn't be a lawyer at all, barred, disbarred or otherwise. In fact, the only constitutional requirement for a seat on the High Court is that one be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. That's it. President Obama could put Jerry Springer on the Court if he could get him confirmed. Although, as I stated in the first paragraph, I myself would be more inclined to go with Judge Judy.)

Yes We Did

2010-03-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Obama is the Champion of What?

2009-12-17T05:53:00.000-08:00

That President Obama has some of his lowest poll numbers yet this morning is not the sky falling. Many presidents experience similar numbers in their first years. The troubling number is that more respondents are now against the health care bill than for it. These numbers do not represent a conservative fantasy of everyone rallying to the side of the Teabaggers. The low numbers in general, but particularly the numbers on the health care legislation, reflect the fact that the president has lost the left. When the public option is not in, when expansion of Medicare is not in, there ceases to be enough real reform to make the bill seem worthwhile. This is a mistake: even a watered-down package of legislation would be a step in an incremental move in the right direction.

But that's not what I want to write about today. I want to stick with this issue of where the progressive left is with Obama. Granting that even just a few points of the poll number slippage is owing to left-leaning opponents of the final bill pulling off, the overall numbers are still close enough that that would make a big difference. At a minimum it's certain that the president would have some number higher than what he's got now if he had the Democratic base galvanized, which he does not, and that that number wouldn't be so bad relative to other administrations. Bottom line: this White House would be doing better politically if it were further to the left. The current failure is to be not radical enough.

Demographics are on the Democrats' side, and the country is coming off of a long conservative cycle. Democrats and liberal voters felt that they'd been being beat up on by the Republicans for a long time. They wanted someone who was more pugalistic, a fighter. That was the energy that Howard Dean tapped into. The electorate in general is not as doctrinaire as the various chattering classes. Ronald Reagan wasn't elected in 1980 by a nation won over to conservative philosophy, he was elected by a nation that wanted to change the channel. He presented real change (of the kind he favored) as just that, a change (what the public wanted).

That was a time when voters were realigning themselves, and now is also such a time. There are insurgent currents on the right with which progressives might make common cause. It is the (much smaller) left, after all, that has forever been opposed to corporate dictat, or to wanton environmental destruction, or to massive military operations conducted globally, in perpetuity. But these are also preoccupations of the populist, Christian, middle class element of Republican voters who are so restive today. Obama at his most politically successful could be stripping those voters away like a bear getting at the honey.

But he's not doing that right now because he is coming off as just another yes man to corporate interests and just another yes man to the Pentagon. We know what he said during the campaign: health care for all, and an end to the two wars. That's what he envisioned, he said so time and again. So it was somebody else who told him that he couldn't do public health insurance, and it was somebody else who told him he couldn't withdraw US combat troops from South Asia. Who's your daddy, Barack?

Peggy Noonan, of whom I am not a fan notwithstanding her fine Irishness, did say something on MSNBC this morning that struck me as maybe uncomfortably true: she pointed out that in her experience as a columnist, most national political leaders have die-hard adherents who will angrily rally, showering hostile e-mails on any pundit who lobs criticisms at their champion. She said she didn't see that fierce core of Obama supporters.

A champion must be a champion to some people, but a champion must also be a champion of some cause. With Reagan people felt that they knew what he stood for. They weren't necessarily as committed to conservatism as he was, or even very committed at all. It was the trust that he created by a sense that he was grounded, that he would always move in a predictable direction that was governed by his own judgement come what may. Obama needs to project that aura of leadership now. A leader has to be leading somewhere. This president will see his fortunes rise when he moves to the left, as counter-intuitive as that may sound to some. You heard it here eighty-zillionth.

Obama in China

2009-11-17T03:22:00.000-08:00

Watching early reports on President Obama's visit to China this morning, two thoughts:

1) The Chinese are clearly enjoying their ongoing rollout as a premier world power (I don't like "superpower," it's a debased usage like "supermodel"). As in so many other areas, the Chinese understand the role the US plays in this. A visit by the American head of state is still different from a visit by any other leader. Obama is the right kind of American politician to handle that: he knows how to gain by giving, something the previous administration had no instinct for at all.

There is also a palpable sense that both sides realize that if they can somehow develop a working partnership they can be twice as strong as either can alone ("Chimerica"), leavened by underlying doubts on both sides about the ultimate intentions of the other. Economically, for example, although China may have a strategic advantage because of their truly awesome reserve of US dollars, they could only do serious damage to the US by beggaring themselves. Obama's political style is salutary here: he can make it easier to get concessions (floating the yuan, enforcing copyrights, stopping underselling) by helping the Chinese save face (an all-important factor in Chinese diplomacy).

2) The Bush-Cheney administration was committed to maintaining the security status quo along the Pacific Rim: dozens of bases and a nuclear armada right in China's face. This Pax Americana is no longer tenable politically or financially. With the end of the Cold War (a work in progress) the US must find a way to stand down as the global gendarme or go broke. This is easier said than done.

There are three options: a) Try to maintain the status quo. I take that to be a clear non-starter; not even our allies in the region want that. b) Solve all the regional security problems (insure Japanese security, reunify the Korean Peninsula, peacefully settle the issue of Taiwanese status, etc.). That option is a dream, equally obviously. 3) Have the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Russians handle regional security.

Notice that my critique is not primarily of the big bad USA. It is the Asian powers, on my view, including liberal parties in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, who make free use of anti-American rhetoric, but who have thus far been far from willing to put their money where their mouths are. Only China (perhaps with help from Russia) can deal with North Korea. They don't want to because of the expense. They would like to send the bill to the Japanese and the Americans. China's "Middle Kingdom" intransigent style of diplomacy has also achieved exactly nothing towards resolving relations with Taiwan. Thus even Bill Clinton had to continue the saber-rattling policy of sending nuclear-armed carrier groups into the Taiwan Strait when China's hawkish generals would indulge in one of their periodic rounds of threats, and Obama will too. The Chinese need to do better than that if they want the Americans to go home. I hope they do, because most Americans want the Americans to go home too. I certainly do.

Did You Hear About Glenn Beck and the Chinese Communists?

2009-10-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

I confess that I've never actually sat down and watched Glenn Beck's show on Fox. I'd watch a show if only for the purpose of writing this post, but G. and Sophia wouldn't stand for it. From plenty of sampling in the media I had a pretty good idea that conspiracy rhetoric was a big part of the schtick. You know, where you draw the sinister and shadowy connections. So I hopped on over to YouTube to have a look and sure enough I found evidence that this was a theme.

Well, "big deal," right? Except that Glenn Beck works for the Australian Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox. Mr. Murdoch owns Star TV, the biggest station out of Hong Kong, and he works closely with the government of the People's Republic of China. These deals are of Chinese government influence over content on his channels in exchange for access for Mr. Murdoch to the $50 billion advertising revenue of Chinese state-owned TV. (Here is an Esquire magazine article on the topic with lots of good links, although it embarrassingly repeats over and over the error that Murdoch is "an American businessman"). In fairness to Rupert Murdoch he has publicly asked the Chinese government to open up to the world's media. Those who know him smile and say he wants the money. Glenn Beck works for the same people who produce television news for the Chinese Communist Party. Literal fact.

All paranoia aside, it may be that Mr. Murdoch's worst crime here in North America is his hugely successful "Fleet Street"-ization of American TV news, turning it into a tabloid media more familiar in the UK and Australia, patently biased, patently exploitative. The counter-argument is that it's good that we know what we're watching. And Glenn Beck is nothing, after all, compared with what people are going through in Central Asia.

Obama's Nobel Four Days Later

2009-10-13T05:42:00.000-07:00

The surprise awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was Friday 10th, four days ago, so now there has been enough time to inventory some arguments/reactions to the Nobel Committee's action.

The Norwegians may not be alone in perhaps sincerely believing that for a black man to win the presidency of the United States is grounds for a Nobel in and of itself. This may be exactly right so far as I can see, although the Europeans do have an alarmingly cartoonish perception of American multiracial society.

People were quick to interpret the award as a slap at Bush, both those who applauded such a snub and those who resented it. I think that's maybe overestimating Bush's importance at this point, and I doubt that the Committee's intentions were primarily spiteful. Perhaps some were thinking of European anti-Americanism and the Atlantic community, so to the extent Bush is a factor in that he's a factor (there is probably some truth in all the views of the award).

Bush may also indirectly factor into the sense that the Europeans (and make no mistake, the Nobel reflects European opinion quite specifically if it reflects world opinion at all) see the US as an older, somewhat maladjusted colleague who needs lots of stroking; there is a palpable sense of hopefulness in the comments of European leaders that perhaps the Prize will inspire the Americans to do good instead of evil.

There is an interesting question as to what sort of function the Nobel Peace Prize is to serve. "What sort," as a precise function is indefinable. The Prize is predicated, for one thing, on the idea that the members of the committee themselves are enlightened promoters of peace. In practice this is unavoidably political. Why have such an award at all if no good is to be done with it? Thus the award has grown forward-looking, an act of potential influence as much as of retrospective appreciation.

This was the principal emphasis of Obama's own remarks Friday morning. "This award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity," he said, thus directing public opinion to the Committee's intentions and beliefs as distinct from his own. It was a West Wing kind of moment as the White House managed to put together an effectively classy response to something very big that had been thrown over the transom before breakfast that morning.

As to that, politically it's an overall plus for Obama notwithstanding that it is an eyebrow-raiser. It really is extraordinary to see the Norwegian Nobel Committee throw its weight behind an American president. It's an illustration of how quickly the Europeans could rally back with the Americans if the Americans were doing good things. And there is no doubt that in the long run the Prize increases the individual's personal stature (Theodore Roosevelt, Desmond Tutu, Rigoberta Menchu).

But let's be cynics and assume that the Europeans are more interested in manipulation than seduction. The idea is that having the Prize makes it harder for Obama to exercise American military power. I think that's overstated. In fact one could make an argument that increasing his authority this way makes it easier for him to do what he likes, war or peace.

Specifically it has been said that the Committee wants to discourage an American attack on Iran. That could be given the provinciality of the Norwegians: they may be under the impression that an American attack on Iran remains possible (after 9/11 a Frenchman fulminated to me that the Americans might bomb targets in France).

The really pressing issue, and the one that just possibly (although I doubt it) swayed the Committee to throw the Prize to Obama at the last minute, is Afghanistan. I'm a Democratic Party loyalist and a big fan of Obama, but let's talk turkey for a minute here. The Democratic candidate always has a problem signaling toughness on foreign policy in campaigns against the Republicans. In 2008 Obama had the advantage that the Iraq war was extremely unpopular. He needed to run against that war but avoid coming across as too dovish. So he ran saying that he would prosecute the war in Afghanistan and go after Osama bin-Laden. Now his generals want 60,000 more troops.

The war in Afghanistan is a mistake. Al-Qaeda is operating in Pakistan, and elsewhere. Afghanistan cannot be pacified (ask the Russians, the British, the Mogols, Alexander...). The central government is, as Lincoln would say, "highly metaphysical," as most of the country is governed by regional chieftains. This is indeed a defining moment. The US needs to get out now. That, like health care reform, will only happen with real leadership from President Obama. He can only prove his strength by withdrawal. That's how he can earn his Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile I'd love to be a fly on the wall when he talks to Al Gore about getting the Prize. Inevitably Gore will tease him that he doesn't have an Oscar, but I think Obama has a plan: if he fixes the college football playoff season, and he's working on that right now, I think he would be a cinch for the Espy. Take that, Al Gore!

We're #37 - Paul Hipp

2009-09-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

We've Got "Death Panels" Right Now

2009-09-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

That's right. Bureaucrats deciding who will live and who will die, with an eye on the budget. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times, not exactly known for its left-wing sympathies, reports that HMOs in the state deny on average one out of five claims. I'd suggest reconsidering if you're insured by PacifiCare: they reject 40% of all claims by their livestock - er, I mean clients. Cigna's a little better: they only refuse care to one out of three people who need it (remember these claims are only filed after a sick or injured person sees a physician).

Of course it's not surprising that the present system includes assiduously working, merciless "death panels": the current system is a for profit system. The private bureaucrat isn't trying to conserve budget money, they're trying to make profit money. According to Republicans, that's alright: if you've involved yourself in a business exchange and the other person turns out to get to kill you so he can make some more money, that's the free enterprise system at work. Private "death panels" (that are hard at it every day, right now) are acceptable.

Meanwhile, one of the several health care reform legislative packages includes (among many other things) the provision that, by request of the patient, public option-insured patients could receive end-of-life counseling. This would be, for example, advice about wills, about hospices, and so forth. A study published in the August 18th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that such counseling improved both the quality of life and the longevity of terminally ill patients (and this study was, surprisingly enough, reported without criticism by Fox News, which has degenerated along with the Republican Party itself into hysterical reaction; I guess Mr. Murdoch's people can't stay on top of everything).

It might be useful to point out to your conservative friends that we have "death panels" right now, and that the president is trying to get rid of them.

Puerto Rico and the "Public Option"

2009-08-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

The phrase "health care reform" actually covers several different, interrelated problems. All of the problems are essentially financial. One problem is the high cost of medicine in the US, a consequence of unbridled capital-driven medicine. This will be hard to fix. The health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry are wealthy and powerful, and they will not go down without a fight. The "single payer" option is basically nationalization of health care. It would wipe out these for-profit industries. I support single-payer because a) I think health care is a civil right and b) the present system appears to be unsustainable. However 1) it does not look to me that single payer is politically feasible and 2) after all even us liberals must agree that such a radical change would put us well into the realm of unforeseen consequences and as a matter of fact I really hate bureaucracy: I hate it so much that I actually know how to spell it. If we are to have single payer, it will come at the end of a process that will take years.

However much of the borderline-hysterical opposition to health care reform is confusing two things: "single payer" and "public option." These are completely different issues. I believe that we will end up with some sort of public option in the US as a result of the push for reform that we are seeing now. But public option isn't anything like socializing health care. Public option is an entitlement program for people who cannot afford health insurance. It is an attempt to address the problem of over 40 million people, mostly women and children, who have no health insurance in the US today.

I live in Puerto Rico, and we've already got the public option here - we've had it for years. It's called La Reforma. Anyone can go on La Reforma who wants to, there are no income qualifications or anything like that. It is strictly a matter of choice. In fact even a state employee like me (I'm a professor at the state university) isn't on La Reforma. We've got Triple S, recently changed from Blue Cross. Our paycheck deductions vary depending on which of a couple of different options we choose. It's pretty good coverage that includes prescriptions, dentistry and even psychiatry. In other words, my family's health insurance is just like that of most of you states-side readers. As professional people we don't have anything to do with La Reforma.

Of course the public option could conceivably be competitive, just like the U.S. Post Office has been a competitive carrier for most of our lives. There was a junior professor here a few years ago, a young and single man who was living on a shoestring, and he actually took his chances with La Reforma in order to save the money in his paycheck. Like I said, anyone can choose it, rich or poor. But a parent or a middle-aged person or most of us would prefer better coverage. It's not about us. It's about the poor.

La Reforma is on the scruffy side. You can "choose" your doctor, but only from the list of doctors who accept the plan. That's no different from my family's private coverage, it's just that fewer doctors accept the public plan. There is a myth of "choice": we don't have a big problem, but we do encounter doctors and other health service providers from time to time who don't accept our plan. We get our meds at Walgreen's; Walgreen's doesn't accept La Reforma. Scruffy doctors, scruffy pharmacies, health care that's not as complete and not as high-quality as that of a family with employer insurance or private insurance. But better than no insurance at all. That's what the "public option" is: a minimal medical safety net for the poor. It's an absolute scandal that the US doesn't have it.

US Imperialism, Chinese Imperialism

2009-07-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

It is usually the case that ethnic and religious conflict turns out under analysis to be economic and political conflict. The oppression of one group by another almost always has to do primarily with profit and control, and these are the issues that push ordinary people to the point of violence. This is the case with the recent rise of ethnic violence in far-western China. Han Chinese are migrating into Tibet and Xinjaing, with predictable push-back from the native populations. The migration is essentially economic, including many examples of the classic story of the young man seeking economic opportunities far from home. However this migration has been greatly augmented by Chinese government settlement policy. Although China's economy continues to grow, a drop-off in exports has led to sharp rises in unemployment. In order to avoid unrest in Chinese areas, the western regions are being used as a safety-valve to redistribute idled workers. China also wants to firm up control of Xinjiang as it plans to develop oil and gas pipelines from central Asia and exploit other important natural resources in the region.

What warrants some critical attention is 1) the Chinese government's role in settling Han Chinese in these areas as a matter of policy, 2) the Chinese government's refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of these policies in favor of anti-Western demagoguery, and 3) the problem that ordinary Chinese, at home and abroad, have in overcoming a centuries-old mindset formed by foreign exploitation in order to grow up and accept the responsibilities of a great power.

It is clear that we are living through an epochal time in Chinese history. All Chinese, as well as the Chinese government, must understand that this means that China and the Chinese will be coming under much more criticism in the years to come, both internally and externally. A thicker skin will have to be developed. Americans (like me) are exceedingly familiar with this phenomenon. The most basic fact of life pertinent to this discussion is that the strong person can bear to hear criticism, the weak person cannot. There is no clearer proof of weakness and insecurity (not to mention wrongfulness) than an inability to confront criticism from others.

The specific problem confronting the Chinese government is ethnic violence in Tibet and Xinjiang. These two regions together constitute far-western China. Neither area has historically been inhabited by Han Chinese. They are ethnically, linguistically, religiously and historically non-Chinese areas. I will discuss Tibet, where China's crimes are much graver, in future posts. Chinese conquests, native revolts, and reconquests date back about 250 years in Xinjain ("Uyghuiristan," more accurately). A little bit of historical background helps one gain a sense of the situation, but I will keep it brief.

The first Chinese invasions of East Turkistan, or Uyghuristan, occured in the mid-1700s. Then as now Chinese policy was frankly expansionist, and Chinese settlements were built on conquered Uigher lands in the late 1700s. However China lost control of Uyghuristan through a series of revolts in the early 1800s and for most of the 19th century the country was under Uigher rule. In a scenario common throughout the Far East for centuries (and to this day), the Chinese minority was the focus of native hostility as they tended to be successful merchants and to resist cultural and linguistic assimilation (similar to traditional perceptions of Indians in East Africa and Jews in Central Europe). In 1863 there was a genocidal anti-Chinese rampage that killed over 7,000 Chinese. China reconquered Uyghuristan in 1877 and the new province was given the name "Xinjiang" (meaning "new frontier") for the first time in 1884. However after the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century Uigher leaders reasserted themselves, effectively triangulating with the Russians who have long contested this region with the Chinese. The East Turkestan Republic was declared in 1933.

In 1943 a Chinese Communist delegation visited the country, but fearing a plot the government ordered all Chinese communists killed; Mao Zedong's brother Mao Zemin was one of the victims. The Red Army defeated the forces of the Eastern Turkestan Republic in 1949. Maoist attempts at cultural genocide of the Uighers in the 1960s (part of "The Great Leap Forward") led to massive Uigher refugee flows into Soviet-controlled areas in 1962. In recent years there have been significant ethnic riots, with large but uncertain numbers of deaths, in 1990 and again in 1997, when police roundups during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan led to a series of riots and bombings. The East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM) has existed for many years but suffered a severe setback after 9/11 when the US government accepted and cooperated with the Chinese description of Uigher nationalists as "terrorists." In fact a number of Uighers were held for years at Guantanamo Bay.

The present disturbance originated in Urumqi, the largest city in Uyghuristan, which has been part of the enormous Chinese construction boom of recent years and which subsequently now has an Han Chinese ethnic majority. Apparently stories about ethnic violence among workers in China's Guangdong province led to an outburst of Uigher-on-Han attacks in the city, followed by counter-attacks by gangs of Hans. The government admits to approximately 200 deaths, but has worked hard to cut off internet and other communication access to the area. Journalists have been allowed to interview Han victims in hospitals, but not Uighers. Uigher sources, predictably, claim that China has understated the extent of Uigher casualties.

Another city to watch, though, is Kashgar, the center of Uygher culture. Here cultural genocide on a scale approaching the destruction of the culture of Tibet is occurring while you read these words. The old city, the world's best-preserved example of traditional Central Asian "Silk Road" Muslim culture, as well as the center of contemporary Uygher culture, is being bulldozed away. A small Disneyland-style area will be preserved for tourism. Meanwhile aggressive settlement, far exceeding anything the Israelis have done in Palestine, will insure that the Uygher culture is exterminated forever. Kashgar is closed to outside communication, foreigners found there are driven to the airport and sent away, local people found with foreigners face imprisonment and possibly death.

Finally, there is the issue of Chinese demagoguery in response to criticism of Chinese imperialism in Muslim areas. The Chinese government (I draw a sharp distinction between the Chinese government and the Chinese people) has for years blamed unrest in Uygheristan on local nationalists, using the familiar language of "terrorism." Now, however, the perception that there is a conflict between China and Uygheristan must be downplayed, so there is a return to blaming sinister foreigners (read the US and the "West") for the "problems." Just as in the US, this propaganda is primrily aimed at a domestic audience, as no outside observer would agree that anyone other than the Chinese government itself is responsible for cultural genocide and ethnic settlement in Uygheristan. How ironic that the rationale given for foreign plots is that the area is rich in resources and the likely route of energy pipelines: that is the reason that China is destroying Uygheristan!

The US is guilty of the same hypocrisy in Iraq and the Middle East in general: if you are going to go to violence in order to assure your access to valuable resources, perhaps each power has as much right as another to struggle for survival in this way. But it is better to have the real motives on the surface, in the discussion. In Iraq and Uygheristan, the issue is oil. National governments will continue to practice the diplomatic and rhetorical dark arts, but ordinary people can be expected to rise above their provincial sympathies and try to see things clearly. Too many Americans are not up to this challenge, but the problem is worse among Chinese.

Republican Misrepresentation of Sotomayor's Role in "Ricci vs. DeStefano"

2009-07-13T07:56:00.000-07:00

There isn't much chance that Judge Sonia Sotomayor will not be confirmed later this month as the next Supreme Court Justice, the first latino/a (and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx no less) to go on the Court. So I'm just going to focus here on something that is very important about what we're watching this week whether she is confirmed or not, and that is the way the right wing (and to that extent the media) are misrepresenting the actual facts about Judge Sotomayor's ruling on Ricci vs. DeStefano. There has been some reporting that this issue will be the focus of Republican criticism.

Remember as we review the facts of Judge Sotomayor's participation in that case that most Senate Republicans understand that the perception that Republicans are attacking Sotomayor because she is a latina is political poison for the Party. The only big electoral state the Republicans carried in 2008 was Texas: everyone can do the math.

Listen to the Republicans this week. They will be implying (sometimes baldly stating) that Judge Sotomayor endorsed reverse discrimination in the Ricci case. The Ricci case, they will loudly state, is the proof that Judge Sotomayor is a reactionary affirmative action reverse racist. Here are the facts:

1) Both sides in the original situation appealed to the same legislation, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Service Board of the City of New Haven invalidated the results of the firefighter's promotion exam because the Board was worried that they might be sued under Title VII. Ironically, the firefighters who had passed the exam (17 whites and 1 latino) then sued the City under that very law, Title VII. Two things to notice: a) Both sides appealed to the same law. This was not a dispute about the constitutionality of the law. b) The Civil Rights Act is legislation that was passed by Congress. Any judicial proceeding affirming the right of the City to act under its interpretation of the Act is affirming the constitutionality of a law passed by the legislative branch. Nothing more, nothing less.

2) The 18 firefighters' case was heard in Federal District Court by Judge Janet Bond Arterton, a Clinton appointee. She ruled against the firefighters in a "summary judgement." That is, she ruled that there was not sufficient reason for the Courts to overturn a decision of the City. Again, this is basic everyday "constructionist" jurisprudence, of the kind conservatives support. No policy-making, and upholding the authority of the elected lawmakers.

3) This is the most important detail, I think: the case next went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. There is was heard by a three-judge panel. The presiding judge, that is the judge that wrote the opinion, was Judge Rosemary Pooler. The third judge was Robert David Sack. Pooler wrote what is called a per curiam decision all of eight sentences long. Such decisions are anonymous and unanimous, and are used by courts where there may be disagreement among the judges but a collective view that it is not worth fighting it out. So Sotomayor played, relatively speaking, a very small role in this case. The Second Circuit simply upheld Judge Arterton's ruling, which simply stated that the City's Board had been acting properly within its understanding of the law. Sotomayor did not write this ruling, and it is an anonymous and unanimous ruling. She sat on a three-judge panel that was presided over by someone else. That's it.

4) The Supreme Court ordered a review of this case certiorari, meaning it exercised its authority to instruct the Circuit Court to send the case up for review. That is, the Supreme Court intervened in the process to cause a case to go up to the Court that otherwise would have come to an end. The Court ruled in favor of the firefighters on June 29th, along the expected 5-4 ideological lines.

Remember the gist of these facts as you listen to the Republicans all week telling us that Ricci vs. DeStefano is proof that Sotomayor is biased and an activist. It is sheer distortion. Get a better sense of Sotomayor here, for example, or here.

(Here and here are two earlier posts tagged Sotomayor.)

Chavez and Honduras

2009-07-01T12:18:00.000-07:00

First of all, let me join the chorus and say that Honduras (or rather, the Honduran political and military elite) ought to bow to international opinion and to today's resolution from the Organization of American States and reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya. President Zelaya was not acting outside of the constitution when he pushed for a referendum on amending the Honduran constitution to allow him to run for reelection (and to presumably propose other amendments as well).

However I am blogging today to lament the political tone-deafness of the left, who quickly fell into a by-the-numbers, knee-jerk reaction of blaming perfidious Yanqui for the coup, led by the patently demagogic Hugo Chavez, who, by the way, is as responsible for this coup as anyone. President Zelaya won the 2005 Honduran presidential election by 4%, the smallest margin of victory in Honduran electoral history. Difficulties in delivering his (admittedly progressive and supportable) efforts to reform the Honduran economy have led to erosion in his standing in recent polls. It is, in fact, improbable, given the available numbers, that President Zelaya would succeed in being reelected even if he had the constitutional right to run (which, remember, he does not). Nor was the Honduran Supreme Court's decision to overrule his firing of the country's military chief and his insistence on going ahead with the referendum unconstitutional, whatever names one wishes to call the members of the Court.

So where do I go on all of this? Zelaya ought to have appreciated that politics is the art of the possible, that his election had been a good thing, and to continue to work for progressive transformation of Honduran politics and economics. But instead he fell too much under the influence of Hugo Chavez, who probably put the situation over the tipping point when he sent a plane full of ballots and other election materials to Honduras, alarming many people beyond the right-wing elite. Chavez was so intent on cultivating another example of his Castroist formula for moving a country towards one-party rule that he pushed Zelaya to go too far too fast. It was obvious to anyone paying attention that Zelaya did not have the popular or the institutional support for this kind of maneuver.

If you want to keep repeating what you've been chanting since your momma taught you the mantra while you were in your crib, that this is all the fault of perfidious Yanqui, that's an easy thing to do. You know the words to the song. But if you want to be part of building an independent, culturally and politically distinct Latin America you might try listening to some other tunes. I acknowledge Castro's motives and his good heart. But the economic failure of his revolution is at least as much the fault of his centralist policies as the bloqueo, which meanwhile serves the Cuban Communist Party's political interests immeasurably: there would be no Cuban Communist Party today if not for the bloqueo. Chavez, meanwhile, is a demagogue, a racist, and a war-monger. So let me ask you, my lefty reader (the only kind I have): are you helping to advance progressive evolution in Latin America? Or are you just pleasuring yourself?

"Say the Magic Words" on Iran

2009-06-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

Responding to Republican criticisms of President Obama's response to the political crisis in Iran, and demands that the president get "tougher" or "lead" the international response, Democratic Indiana Senator Evan Bayh wondered on Chris Matthews' Hardball show last night, "What are the magic words that would satisfy them?" (the Republicans). (And although Bayh is well to the right of me and I don't agree with much of what he says, a good example of the American discussion is this surprisingly sophisticated discussion during his appearance on Fox News Sunday.) This is an excellent question on several levels.

First, just asking the question draws attention to a fundamental reality: there is nothing much more than rhetoric that anyone outside of Iran can offer. Military action is unthinkable; I'm assuming we don't need to spend much time discussing that. Economic and diplomatic sanctions of various kinds have been in place for many years, and tightening them (or even maintaining them as they are) is a bad idea for two reasons: they make things worse for ordinary Iranis who are already in difficult economic straits (this election was largely fought out over domestic economic policy, not foreign policy), and sanctions and other punitive actions change the subject from an internal Irani political struggle to a struggle with hostile outside powers: exactly the kind of narrative change that the hard-liners want.

Which leads to the second level of meaning of Bayh's question about "magic words": to whom would President Obama be speaking when he uttered these mysterious words that would satisfy his conservative critics in the US? To the Iranian regime? That would just be handing them ammunition for their demagoguery. To the Iranian people? Do US conservatives want the president to egg them on into more dangerous territory, without any ability to back them up? That has happened before. To the international community? The Europeans a) have made it clear that they are tired of, and hostile towards, US domination of international security politics and b) very badly need to prove to the world, to the US, and to themselves that they can indeed provide a real alternative to the US on security problems and get real results, and the US badly needs for them to develop this capacity as well.

So that leaves the president talking to the US. More precisely, the Republicans would like to get into a political football game with the administration and see if they can score some points. So they are appealing to the US public: "See, the Democratic president isn't tough enough. He's weak in his response to the crisis in Iran." This is their inevitable position, because their only goal is to regain political power. And that means that there are no magic words that would satisfy them. This is the card that they have to play, and they have to play it.

What Obama needs to do is not speak to the Iranians or to "the world," he needs to educate the American people. His speech in Cairo was truly extraordinary in any number of ways (showing respect for the Koran, for example), but one of the most important things he did was to simply state publicly that the US had helped to engineer the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically-elected Mohammed Moseddeq and installed "Shah" Reza Pahlevi, who ruled autocratically and without democratic process until the Islamic revolution of 1979. All this because Mosaddeq dared to challenge the monopoly of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British government's largest financial asset at the time. By simply acknowledging these events, President Obama probably did, in fact, contribute to the atmosphere of transformation now welling up from the young population of Iran. The Republicans, in their belligerence and willful obtuseness towards history, would push the Iranian mindset back to 1979; Obama is 2009.

An irony is that speaking in Cairo, with a speech that was listened to closely across the Muslim world, a large part of Obama's audience was already well aware of the Cold War history of US and British excesses in the region. But it is in the US that this needs to be understood, not just for reasons of principle, but for the very urgent practical reason that it explains the need for US reticence on current events in Iran. Any perception that the US is actively meddling in the events happening there now will play straight into the hands of the hard-liners. Obama understands this. Who are worse: the Republicans who don't understand this because they don't bother to know our history, or the Republicans who understand this perfectly well?

The tricky part for an American president is that he must never appear to be anything less than completely patriotic, making explicit lectures about past errors and misdeeds difficult. But I think that Obama should just lay it all out there. The Republican Party assumes that Americans are idiots (just the way they like it). What happens when one assumes that they're smart? I teach students for a living and I can answer that question: assume people are smart and they quickly reveal themselves to be just that.

Sarah Palin is a Demagogue

2009-06-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

A demagogue is someone who appeals to people's sense of victimization or to their simple prejudices in order to motivate them with feelings of anger, outrage or spite. In ancient Greece (the source of the word: demos, people, and agogos, leading), entrenched aristocracies were frequently overthrown by demagogues, the sense of the word at that time being "organizers of the common people." Greek conventional wisdom, however, took a negative view of this progression, as typically demogogues emerged as tyrants, meaning rulers who were governed by no law other than their own beliefs and desires.

Today the word demagogue means someone who capitalizes on the resentments or passions of some group of people, usually including the sense that the demagogue is exaggerating or misstating the facts, in order to use the target group as a means to power. Eva Peron, who represented herself as a common Argentine woman as opposed to the local Latin oligarchy, is one modern example of a demagogue. The most striking example of demagoguery in the 20th century was Hitler's use of the Jews, who he portrayed as sinister manipulators and not "authentic" or "pure" Germans, to focus and thus control and direct anger and violence that had in fact built up as a result of German defeats in World War I. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are contemporary examples of demagogues: they are able to blame the United States for the sufferings of their own people and as an external threat that necessitates authoritarian rule.

Sarah Palin is a demagogue. Her rhetoric is strikingly consistent: she is a common person from humble origins (a victimized woman who may help herself to feminist rhetoric when convenient), motivated by a higher law than secular laws (Christianity), and angry and indignant about elite and less purely American forces that are active in sinister plans to deprive the volk of their political autonomy.

I don't think that Palin will ever again be on a national political ticket because I just don't think she's got the right stuff, and so I wasn't much interested in discussing her further, but the other night I saw on TV an extraordinary scene of protesters in front of David Letterman's studio in New York and I felt compelled to take a couple of minutes to spell this out. These people were whipped up into a frenzy. The history of demagogic success is full of tales of broad swathes of national populations who thought "it can't happen here." Sarah Palin understands as well as everyone else that Letterman was not referring to her fourteen-year-old daughter (I'm not going to bother with the ritual "His joke was tasteless but..." caveats). Without any doubt she despises feminists (by the way) behind closed doors as part of the Godless liberal left. She has no compunction about using her children and her family as chessmen in her rhetorical machinations. She saw an opportunity to demagogue an issue and she took it.

She traffics in anger, resentment, innuendo, exaggeration, provocation and distortion. She presided over political rallies where members of the crowd called the Democratic candidate a traitor, a terrorist, a communist, a Muslim, an Arab, a monkey and a nigger, routinely calling for his murder well within her earshot, and only took steps to clean up the perceptions of these rallies when it became politically necessary (in fact she scarcely bothered: it was McCain who took conspicuous steps to clean things up). She is a vicious, dangerous person. That is a plain fact.

The Sotomayor Discussion on the Island

2009-06-05T05:19:00.000-07:00

Some of my North American friends have asked me about the reaction to President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. I'm surprised that there has been such a muted reaction here on the island: not as much press coverage as I would have expected, and so far not a single Puerto Rican friend or colleague has mentioned it. Puerto Ricans have mixed feelings, not all of them attractive to contemplate. Sotomayor was born and raised in the Bronx: this means that a lot of the locals don't consider her to be a "real" Puerto Rican. This alienation between the approximately 4 million Puerto Ricans who live on the island and the approximately 4 million Puerto Ricans who live in the States has deep roots.

The initial large waves of immigration occurred during the Great Depression and during and after World War II, and many of these migrants were from the poorer and blacker sectors of the society. Puerto Ricans, who have a very complex genetic heritage and a society that is, relative to most societies worldwide, not very racist, nonetheless have deeply conflicted feelings about their African heritage. In the Caribbean racism takes the form of "whiter than, blacker than," rather than the one-or-the-other mythology of the North. So the islanders, many of whom are more similar in identity to middle-class people from other Latin American countries than they are to the US urban underclass, often look down on the "Nuyoricans." Depressingly, it is not hard to find people who say "She's not Puerto Rican."

Then there is the "status" issue, that is, the question of the formal relationship between Puerto Rico and the US. Many nationalists feel that Puerto Rican participation in US institutions is part of a creeping assimilation (the pejorative term here is "annexation"). These elements resisted the conducting of presidential primaries by the US parties here last year, primaries that I saw as a very positive development: the tension is between a farther-off goal of Puerto Rican independence (something I am not against and that I predict will eventually occur) and the nearer-term effort to enfranchise Puerto Ricans, who are US citizens but second-class ones who have no senators or congressmen, nor the right to vote for the president (this includes me, by the way: as an island resident, my civil status is exactly the same as all other residents). This while more than one out of ten US soldiers overseas is Puerto Rican: I take that to be an outrage against the US Constitution.

Finally there is an intensely willful insularity among islanders, a manifestation of the deeply ingrained instinct to passive resistance that has evolved over centuries of colonial domination. Ask a Puerto Rican on the street who the Vice-President is and the odds are high that they will have no idea. A paradox of Puerto Rican politics is that the lower the socio-economic status, the more likely that the individual will favor statehood: Uncle Sam protects them from the oligarchic Spaniards; and at the same time the lower classes are more likely not to speak English and to understand very little about US institutions and political life. (The haute bourgeois Puerto Rican professors at the university, who actively work to prevent the students from becoming proficient in English, are almost universally fluent English speakers themselves).

So all in all, I have to report that the reaction is distinctly depressing, considering that Sotomayor's mother was born in Lajas, an area on the southwest coast about a half-hour's drive from where I'm sitting, and that Sonia Sotomayor herself is a native Spanish speaker whose father never learned to speak English. But the circumstances of Puerto Rican political life are both tragic and complex. The marginalized are always turned against each other.

There is some good news to report, however, at least good from a Democratic partisan perspective. In yesterday's El Nuevo Dia, one of the biggest papers on the island (maybe the biggest) and one that could fairly be described as center-right politically, I found an article on page 20 (I'm always on the lookout for any Sotomayor coverage). "Espadas en alto por Sotomayor" was the headline: "Swords raised for Sotomayor." It was a short piece consisting of interviews with two Puerto Rican politicians.

The first was Ramon Luis Rivera, the alcalde of Bayamon, a large municipio that comprises part of the greater San Juan metropolitan area and that consists mostly of large, dense working-class neighborhoods (five of my mother-in-law's six sisters live there). Puerto Rico is divided into 78 municipios, which are a cross between cities and states: "alcalde" translates literally as "mayor," and the head of state of the island is called the governor, but the alcalde is a sort of mini-governor of a geographical region, usually centered around a city of the same name. Bayamon is one of the largest municipios on the island in terms of population and is as I said part of the San Juan urban area, making Sr. Rivera the political equivalent of somewhere between mayor of Newark and governor of New Jersey.

Rivera has been affiliated for many years with the US Republican Party. Many higher-level island politicians affiliate with one or the other US parties, for reasons of political expediancy. But the discussion in the US about the nomination of Sotomayor is turning him around. "Me han sorprendido declaraciones fuera de lugar de varios lideres republicanos": "I have been surprised by the statements coming from various Republican leaders." He singled out comments by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, who have both accused Sotomayor of being a racist. "Sotomayor no solo tiene todas las calificaciones de su capacidad juridica y profesional, sino que tambien le daria un balance filosofico al Tribunal Supremo de Estados Unidos": "Sotomayor not only has all the judicial and professional qualifications, but she will also give philosophical balance to the Supreme Court." Exactly the point that the right-wing Republicans are attacking. He goes on to mention Republican opposition to President Obama's stimulus plans, and unlike the Sotomayor nomination, the issue of stimulus money is on the lips of Puerto Ricans everywhere one goes. The economic situation here is much more desperate than in the States. He concludes that he has been a Republican "hasta ahora," but now he has "la carpeta abierta," that is, the issue is open.

The other politician mentioned in this article was Jose Enrique "Quiquito" Melendez, like Rivera a member of the Partido Nuevo Progresista Popular, the pro-statehood party that is generally viewed as the most conservative party (although that is another complicated discussion; some of the PNP's leaders are affiliated with the Democrats, and their main rival the PPD, the "Populares," also represents some conservative elements such as the Catholic vote etc.: a discussion for another time). Melendez is the PNP's candidate for an upcoming Puerto Rican Senate vacancy, and he was recently dispatched to Washington to meet with the (extremely conservative) Republican senators Don Young of Alaska and Dan Burton of Indiana, who is certainly one of the most right-wing senators today. The original agenda was the legislation on yet another plebiscite on statehood sponsered by Young and Burton, but Melendez also raised the issue of the Sotomayor nomination, urging the Republicans to support it.
His reaction to that conversation was along the same lines as the comments by Rivera: "El Partido Republicano no puede ponerle trabas innecesarias a una candidata que tiene todas las calificaciones": "The Republican Party cannot put unnecessary conditions on a candidate who has all of the qualifications."

The reason all of this is significant is that Luis Fortuno, the young and recently-elected governor, has been very clear about his ideological allegiance to the Republican Party as well as to statehood. Now, however, he is scrambling to deal with a budget in free-fall, quite possibly ruining his chances of re-election by announcing over the past two weeks that he will cut the public payroll by some 30,000 people, and sending out last Monday the first 7,816 dismissal slips in the mail: the kind of thing that is the kiss of death in Puerto Rico's traditional patronage politics. To reform and rehabilitate Puerto Rico's finances he will need every ounce of help he can get from Democratic-controlled Washington. Now the Sotomayor nomination is throwing a major wrench into his plans: perceived Republican prejudice may pull the domestic political rug out from under him.

Thanks a lot, Newt and Rush.

Talking Points For Defending Sotomayor

2009-05-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

When despairing of the inane political football games that Supreme Court nominations too often become, we might take some consolation (cold comfort, I admit) in the fact that it has always been so, and in fact if anything 19th Century Court politics were even rougher than they are today. It's also likely that Sonia Sotomayor's nomination will go through; it's hard to see how the Republicans could stop it. Still, we will now have an interlude of fussing and fighting and it's useful to try to pull out the most salient talking points.

Those points are not, I don't think, the most obvious ones. The obvious points are as follows:

1) Obama continues to follow a recent trend started by Clinton and, after initially stumbling with his arrogant attempt to appoint an old crony, Harriet Miers, hewn to by Bush in his appointments of Roberts and Alito: appoint extremely accomplished jurors. This is definitely a good idea as the corpus of law only grows more complex and simply larger with each passing year. In the case of Sotomayor, we have a jurist who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, was an editor of the Yale Law Review, worked for the legendary Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and has now served eleven years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City.

2) Democrats and liberals like myself also have nothing to complain about: we have the first Latino/a nominee in the history of the Supreme Court - and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, no less! That's maybe the best part. A woman diagnosed with diabetes at a young age, raised by a single mother. Not only that, but she is most famous (until now) for ending the baseball strike in 1995 coming down on the side of the players, thus avoiding what would have been the first cancellation of the World Series in 90 years. Her overall record is liberal but hardly "activist" (as her attackers will begin shouting on cable today), with plenty of examples of ruling against liberal outcomes on the basis of constitutional law.

But here are three points to keep especially "on-message" as the right wing tries to tar Judge Sotomayor: a) She was a prosecutor in Manhattan for six years. b) She was recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but the President who actually appointed her was George H. W. Bush, and most importantly c) as a Judge on the Couirt of Appeals in New York City, most of her rulings have not concerned "social" issues. She has been working most of this time on complex cases involving the financial and banking industries as well as communications technology, just the kinds of cases that are likely to come before the Court in the next few years. These are the things one might want to mention in public debate with the dittohead troglodytes.

New Democratic Senators Hall of Shame

2009-05-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

Twenty-nine Democratic Senators voted in October 2002 in favor of House Joint Resolution 114, "To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq." In subsequent years as the war proved to be long, bloody and expensive, as we learned that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," and above all as the war became exceedingly unpopular with the public, there was plenty of weaseling and squirming and rationalizing about that vote. Democrats among the 29 have basically two lines: first, they were misled about the facts, and second, they respected the president's executive prerogatives.

Yesterday we saw a breathtaking buckling under by Senate Democrats who were stampeded by absurd rhetoric about "releasing terrorists on to the streets of America," exacerbated by overblown accounts of former detainees returning to the struggle and a general demonizing of all of the 200-odd men still held in Guantanamo. Stampeded, that is, by spurious and exaggerated claims that many of them undoubtedly knew to be so. Forty-eight Democrats voted for Amendment 1133 which stripped $80 million of funding to close Guantanamo from House Resolution 2346 which, by the way, authorized $91.3 billion for more war funding.

But the cravenness of this isn't even what bugs me most. It was the other half of the original 29 pro-war Democrats' rationalization that I'm thinking about today. "Hey," they said, "we supported the Republican president. We gave him what he wanted. We got in line like good soldiers." So I'm wondering: was there something about first-term President George W. Bush that inspired such institutional loyalty, such faith in the executive's good intentions, that first-term President Barack Obama lacks? And there are sixteen Democratic Senators who I would particularly like to hear answer that question: the 16 who were among the 29 Democratic senators who voted to authorize the war in 2002, and were also among the 48 Democratic senators who voted yesterday to deny President Obama funds to close Guantanamo.

Here, in alphabetical order, is the Gang of Sixteen: Democrats who gave Bush what he wanted to make the mess (basically because they were politically cowardly and willfully obtuse) and refused to give Obama what he needs to clean the mess up (basically because they are politically cowardly and willfully obtuse):

Baucus, MT
Bayh, IN
Cartwell, WA
Carper, DE
Dodd, CT
Dorgan, ND
Feinstein, CA
Johnson, SD
Kerry, MA
Kohl, WI
Landrieu, LA
Lincoln, AR
Nelson, FL
Nelson, NE
Reid, NV
Schumer, NY

Some of them are very prominent, some of them talk a pretty good game - all of them should be ashamed.

Is David Corn Eddie Munster?

2009-05-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

I always figured Marilyn would be the successful one! Seriously though, David Corn, the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones Magazine and a writer for the excellent CQPolitics, as well as the co-author with Michael Isikoff of the just-out-in-paperback Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, has been doing great TV work lately and you can count me as a fan.

But I still say he looks like Eddie Munster.

Moment of Truth for Republicans on Abortion

2009-05-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

For the record, my own position on abortion is "safe, legal, and available to all," that last clause referring to my opposition to cutting federal funds to hospitals where abortions are performed even when medical professionals recommend the procedure. But a winning phrase from the Clinton years is "safe, legal, and rare." And Democrats have an effective strategy for reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies: real (as in explicit) sex education, and access to birth control including condoms (the only method that also prevents the spread of STDs) and the "morning after" pill. The public is smart: a concerted sex education effort and access to birth control will certainly reduce the frequency of abortion and any common-sense person can see that.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have a self-contradictory position: they want to outlaw abortion, but they also oppose sex education and making condoms and other forms of birth control available to young people. For some reason (and Lord knows I'm not the one to ask) Republicans are against sex. And since they are against sex they are against knowledge (education) about sex and even against safe sex (sex with condoms and other forms of birth control). But they are also against abortion. That's the contradiction, at least from a public health-policy perspective.

The Democrats can absolutely wipe the floor with the Republicans on this one, but we need to understand that the audience is the broad, centrist public and the message needs to go out on point and relentless: explicit sex education and access to birth control is the most efficient strategy for reducing the number of abortions. The empirical facts are a slam dunk on that one. So you say you're anti-abortion? Then we can assume you're in favor of sex education and birth control. Or we can assume you're a hypocrite...CHOOSE.

A Conversation About the Indian Elections and Kashmir

2009-05-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about a post on Sunday's landslide victory by the Congress Party in India yesterday when I had this exchange with a good friend, an Indian academic working in the US. She graciously agreed to my posting our conversation, good for me since she knows more than I do!

Indian Friend: Maybe not so exciting as the Obama win but, I hope you agree, ALMOST!
(opened champagne last night)

AB: Yes I've been sketching a possible blog post about the Indian elections this morning. I was disappointed that the NYT coverage did not bother to explain just how reactionary/violent the Bharatiya Janata Party really is, or even remind its readers that the BJP has actually been in power in the recent past. Instead the NYT chose to emphasize the comparatively less important set-back for the Communist-led coalition, spinning this as a public referendum on the need for "economic reform." They're going to make a Noam Chomsky out of me yet. But you know things are bad when the big old, bad old Congress Party are the good guys by miles! Which at this point they are. Anyway, everybody repeat three times: "US-Pakistan alliance bad, US-India alliance good." If you can't remember after three times, chant it again.

IF: Hey Andy,
I think the NYT emphasized the Communist setback because that was indeed a real surprise, whereas the BJP one could certainly be explained, even if it was bigger than expected. What was also not emphasized in the article is that the Congress victory is significant not only as a mandate vis-a-vis the BJP but also vis-a-vis the Kashmir separatists - and I hope that gives Obama (and Clinton) a message not to meddle in that region!

But you know things are bad when the big old, bad old Congress Party are the good guys by miles!

Disagree. Except for the short bad period of Indira Gandhi's obsession with personal power, the Congress has been pretty much on track re secular democracy. And it sure helps to have a Prime Minister who's a PhD in economics!

AB: Don't get me wrong, I've always supported Congress. Has there ever been a choice? As to Kashmir, I'm slightly confused by your comment: granted that both the Islamic militants and, notoriously, the Indian Army have committed many excesses at the expense of the native Kashmiris, it has not been my sense that the Kashmiris themselves are Muslim separatists generally. Do you disagree? If not, expect Congress to resist Islamicist incursions of all kinds, which they will see (more or less correctly on my view) as proxy antagonism from Pakistan. Would you support a fundamentalist Islamic Kashmir aligned with Pakistan? Do you think that Congress would acquiesce to that? I'm not concerned about "terrorist havens" or any of that nonsense, rather about Kashmir itself. Is it your view that the jihadis coming in from Pakistan and Afghanistan a more progressive force than the Indians?

IF: Don't get me wrong, I've always supported Congress. Has there ever been a choice?

Yes. Congress's best point has been its secularism. Its bad points have been its attempts to control the judiciary and of course its continuation of dynasty politics. The BJP started, btw, as a party to counter Indira Gandhi's attempts to turn India into a police state in the late 70s, which sprang from her desperate attempts to hang onto power. That's when she declared her infamous Emergency. I was desperate to vote but was underage by 1 month (voting age was then 21). Indira Gandhi's younger son Sanjay was even worse than her. So yes, the BJP was at that time a good choice. After Indira Gandhi's assassination the Congress has not been dominated by any one individual and that, I think, has been what saved it.

As to Kashmir, I'm slightly confused by your comment: granted that both the Islamic militants and, notoriously, the Indian Army have committed many excesses at the expense of the native Kashmiris, it has not been my sense that the Kashmiris themselves are Muslim separatists generally. Do you disagree?

Yes, of course there have been excesses. But until recently it appeared that India was trying to hold on to Kashmir at all costs, because the militants kept demanding a boycott of the elections. However the state elections (last Decmber, when I was there) and last month's national election has shown an overwhelming majority are against separatism. This, I think, should eradicate the militants' goal to romanticize themselves as resistance martyrs. And therefore I think a clear indication that things should start returning to normal. The excesses must be dealt with of course, but if it were a case of an army holding an entire region against its will that would be far greater "justification" for terrorist attacks as well as for Obama's interference.

If not, expect Congress to resist Islamicist incursions of all kinds, which they will see (more or less correctly on my view) as proxy antagonism from Pakistan. Would you support a fundamentalist Islamic Kashmir aligned with Pakistan?

It would be dangerous, but if that's what the people wanted there would be no grounds to oppose it.

Do you think that Congress would acquiesce to that?

No, for several reasons:
1) It's not what the majority wants
2) Even if, hypothetically, the majority had voted that way, this doesn't take into account the sizeable Hindu minority that has fled the valley in the past 19 years.
3) If this were to happen it would set a precedent for all kinds of ethnic break-away regions in India.
4) By insisting on elections, Congress (led by Omar Abdullah, an absolutely excellent candidate - young guy in his mid 30s) basically called the separatists bluff. (There were 2 separatist candidates for the state elections in December).

I'm not concerned about "terrorist havens" or any of that nonsense, rather about Kashmir itself. Is it your view that the jihadis coming in from Pakistan and Afghanistan a more progressive force than the Indians?

I'm not talking about progressive. But certainly one can't FORCE people into democracy. If the majority in Kashmir WANT jihadi rule, what gives India the right to IMPOSE itself on Kashmir? That's why I'm so happy about the Kashmir elections. I'm not saying the Kashmiris want to be part of India necessarily because of democracy. But they do want to cash in on India's economic boom that's for sure. They also know that one of their main economic assets was tourism, and the only way their tourist industry can thrive is under India. There's no way the jihadis are going to encourage "houseboats for honeymooners"! They've really been hurting economically in the past 19 years.

So that's why I'm very very happy about the Kashmir elections. If it had gone the other way, it would have justified the 1990s view that Kashmir was India's Vietnam.

This is how the Kashmiri separatist candidate's defeat was described in Dawn.

Check out CNN-IBN if you get a chance on www.livestation.com. It is NOT, despite its name, IBN (Indian Business News) a business channel. There ARE other better news channels in India but this seems to be the best one available on Livestation.

A Matter of Perspective

2009-05-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

Conservatives have been telling us for years that energy conservation was a silly idea: "You're only going to save maybe 1% of our crude oil consumption that way" they'd scoff at this or that proposal (at lots of proposals: because there are lots of ways to conserve energy!), "It's just a drop in the ocean!" And that was the argument: saving a little is no use, so forget it.

I'm not sure what's supposed to be "conservative" about this attitude. It has no relation to the commonsense frugality of my parents who grew up during the Great Depression, for example. Nor does it resemble the humble traditions of thrift and saving that hardworking immigrants have been bringing to this country for centuries. It is the cynicism of hopelessness, at best, and the cynicism of those who know that their personal interests are served at the expense of others, at worst. The fact is that when billions of barrels of crude oil are being consumed every day, 1/2 of 1 percent, say, translates into an awful lot of oil. With numbers of vast magnitudes the fact that must be realized is that even a small percentage of a very large number is, in real numbers, itself a very large number.

This old argument comes to mind watching the (I would say cynical) reaction of the media to President Obama's announcement of $75 billion dollars of savings in federal spending announced this week. By trimming here and trimming there, closing this office and canceling that order, the White House, busy enough with other things, has announced that they have saved a sum equal to approximately 1/2 of 1 percent of the federal budget. And out come the cynics: "A drop in the ocean," "A political stunt," and so forth. I beg to differ.

Every householder knows that it does indeed make sense to cut out the monthly sushi outing, or hold off on ordering that new CD from Amazon, when pressed with a big mortgage payment, a large credit card debt, college bills and so forth. $500 a year in savings: that's a month's worth of credit card payments, or a month's worth of groceries, or a new piece of furniture. That's real money! And guess what: do what the Obama administration has done three months into its term 199 more times and: no deficit at all. 200: is that so large a number? Meanwhile, lots of folks, apparently, figured for a long time "Hey I owe $12,000 on my credit cards: another 60 bucks for this gizmo doesn't change that situation." That way lies madness. That way lies the impasse at which we have arrived.

So yes, it is a matter of perspective when we're talking about trillions of dollars of deficit spending. But the moral of that has been backwards in the media this week, and I'm not talking about know-nothing Fox, I'm talking about MSNBC, even. The implication of trillions of dollars in debt is not that 1/2 of 1 percent savings is nothing. The moral is that it's a WHOLE LOT. When I save 1/200th of my annual budget, that's good. When Obama saves 1/200th of the annual federal budget, that's not just good, that's great.

Empathy on the Supreme Court

2009-05-07T03:37:00.000-07:00

Why not put Bill Clinton on the Supreme Court? Obama and Hillary need to keep him busy, and it's the only box big enough to hold him. Plus he's a notorious empathizer.

Speaking of that, I'm marveling at this week's conservative attack on President Obama, who made the outrageous assertion that he wanted to appoint someone to the Court who might have empathy for ordinary people. Horrors! This is more of the Keystone Kops routine we're seeing from a right wing that is now led by Rush Limbaugh. How great is it to have political opponents who are spending the week declaring themselves to be against empathy? Rhetorical geniuses they are not.

Meanwhile, I'd love to have an interview with Justice Clarence Thomas about all this. He wasn't quite four-square against empathy in his dissent to Virginia vs. Black in 2004, when the court upheld a right to cross-burning under the 1st Amendment. "Those who hate cannot terrorize or intimidate to make their point," he wrote, adding the interesting metaphysical observation that burning a cross was more like burning a house than it was like making a statement; one could, after all, burn down a house to make a point. So how about it, Justice Thomas? For empathy, or against it?

John Wilke 1954-2009

2009-05-05T12:14:00.000-07:00

My old college buddy John Wilke passed away last Friday at the age of 54. I have known him and his wife Nancy for 31 years. John was a staunch liberal from before the day I met him until the day he passed away. He had a very "straight"-looking demeanor and was always polite and diplomatic, but he was burning with righteous indignation at corporate greed and exploitation when we were students at New College in the 1970s and that spirit carried him through Columbia Journalism School and on to a distinguished career as an investigative reporter. He was a thorn in the side of the mighty; if you were to ask Bill Gates about him you'd get an earful.

John told me he had cancer some months ago, and we had an e-mail conversation about death and dying, but he was never anything but his always positive self. He never said he was dying, he was reflective but never complained. Here are obituaries from his employer of 20 years The Wall Street Journal, his sometime employer The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.

Two Points About the Torture Debate

2009-04-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

Two quick points about the political football game Washington is having this week over the "torture memos."

1) The "debate" about the torture memos and what to do about them is, most unfortunately, a distraction that helps the Republicans, on my view. It allows them to kick up a bunch of gorilla dust (for example, I'm doubting the Cheney people sent someone over to inform Nancy Pelosi that they had waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, but you would think that they had from watching cable). Just put it all out there (without cherry-picking either) and walk away, and it will take care of itself.

2) One thing that does make me mad, though, is the way the military just sort of tossed those loser guards from Abu Ghraib and not a single officer even so much as fell on his sword for a sweet pension deal, while we now know (and had every reason to think at the time) that the policy of rough interrogation was coming down from the very top. The attitude of the brass seems to be, "Well those kids weren't our professional torturers, so it's not the same thing." Seems a bit low for all the officers to run off and let those hillbilly kids go down.

Media Cheerleading For the Destruction of Somalia

2009-04-18T05:44:00.000-07:00

I posted the YouTube interview (actually Davey D interviewed him) with the Somali-born rapper K'naan below and on Facebook last Tuesday. I was disturbed by the sceptical response it elicited from my mostly educated, mostly liberal readers and Facebook friends, so I did a little more research into K'naan's claims, that I will report below (well, report on the reporting: I'm just a guy in his pajamas). Since then, the media has been devoting a great deal of attention to the tearful homecoming of the American hostages as well, of course, to the heroic conduct of the Navy SEALs who killed three Somali pirates (all aged between 17 and 19), presenting the story in the crowd-pleasing form of the heroic rescue after the terrible ordeal, without so much as a mention of the background of problems for Somalis that puts the piracy in context.

So I was interested this morning when I saw that the NYT had an editorial on the problem, and I turned to it immediately. The NYT is my basic newspaper, and I'm not the sort of cranky, correcter-than-thou lefty, like Noam Chomsky, say, or the late Harold Pinter, who indulge themselves in a blanket rejection of the motives or integrity of the NYT, not that I'm naive (Chomsky has done good work in the past on media coverage of Cambodia, Indonesia and other places). But this morning my old friend the NYT, I'm sorry to say, pushed me too far, and here I am, spending some time this beautiful Saturday morning giving you some background on the situation in Somalia.

Somalia, a failed state ruled mostly by local warlords for years, has the longest coastline of any African country. With no national government with any effective international influence, it has been the site of illegal dumping of waste, mostly from European nations, for many years, including nuclear waste. International organized criminal networks, long involved in the lucrative business of dumping toxic waste illegally, have colluded with private companies in this practice. There is some persuasive documentation that as a result of this abuse of the lawless situation along the Somali coast, local people have suffered various illnesses including birth defects that are associated with pathogens in the environment.

In addition to the illegal dumping, Somali waters are exploited without any compensation to Somalia by international fishing fleets that have not only taken fish that a country with a functioning international presence would be able to harvest with its own native fishing fleets, but have actually fished these waters out of large numbers of commercially desirable fish species through the use of banned equipment such as fine-mesh drag nets.

Another shocker is that the Islamic Courts Union government that was ousted with US support in 2006 had actually successfully curbed the pirates, who quickly got back into business (along with the international mafiosi no doubt) after those evil religious people were thrown out.

All of this needs attention from the media that it is not getting. One of my friends on Facebook, sceptical of K'naan's claims, actually made the argument that if these "pirates" were organized Somali nationalists trying to defend Somalia and to make a point, we would have heard about it in the media, wouldn't we? And that's the point I want to make today: not only are we not being given this essential background to the pirate situation in media coverage, but the media is actively cheerleading us on to forget about the human dimension of the pirates altogether. We hear about the terrible "ordeal" of the "hostages," as if they have been through hell; not one American as been so much as injured by these people. It is also not lost on the Somalis or on many other people that the US media got on this bandwagon only after Americans were seized. These seizures have been happening for years to crewmen from the Philippines, Egypt and other countries without any accompanying orgy of jingoism in the American media. It's really insidious and they're going to make a Chomsky out of me if we don't start getting some background.

And hurrah for K'naan, I've watched the interview twice now and he's getting lots of stuff right, he's really smart. I found out about this when a friend e-mailed me the interview after he found it on Rock Rap Confidential.

Knaan on Nuclear Waste Dumping Along the Somali Coast

2009-04-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

The Dam Starts Breaking

2009-04-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to read in the NYT this morning that the Cuban American National Foundation, which has for many years been the main lobbying vehicle for the anti-Castro Cuban exile community, is now calling for expanded official relations, loosening of travel and remittance restrictions, and increasing business relations. This is particularly striking since the CANF, under the leadership of Jorge Mas Canosa (who died in 1997), was the Cuban equivalent of AIPAC: a lobby capable of single-handedly keeping US policy on a hard-line track. There is no other comparable group in the Cuban exile community. The CANF has not today gone so far as to call for an end to the economic blockade and rescinding of the Helms-Burton Act, but they did in their new proposal acknowledge that the old (ancient: since the early 60s) policy has failed. They can have no illusions that this proposal is a significant step toward full normalization of relations with Cuba.

There is a confluence of circumstances just now that together comprise a real opportunity to get to a Cuba policy that is not insane ("not insane" is a sort of step-one goal for US foreign policy at this point). The Cuban community in the US has changed considerably both through latter-day immigration and the coming of age of the grandchildren of the original exiles: neither group shares the emotional attitude of the 60s generation. US politicians of both parties needed Florida to win the presidency and it was true until recently that the Cuban vote could swing that (one of Bill Clinton's lowest moments was when he signed Helms-Burton). Meanwhile Yankee gradually started to pay attention to the US's own interests: both the US Chamber of Commerce and, believe it or not, the Pentagon have endorsed an end to the blockade for some years now. To top it all off, Bush-Cheney managed to turn Guantanamo Bay into a symbol for one of the darkest episodes in all of US history, tarnishing America's image in the world for years to come. I haven't expected Obama to spend political capital on the Cuban issue, he's got too much on his plate, but there does come a point where it's politically so easy that there's no reason not to make the change.

One last thing, the bad news, I guess, for my liberal-left readers and friends: I've been to Cuba, spent weeks living with faculty (and Party members) from the University of Havana, traveled out to small towns in the interior (where I was the guest of the local military commander, among others), wandered in Havana far from the tourist spots, and my opinion is that the centralized economy of Cuba doesn't work. Cuba is very poor, the quality of life is low, and these conditions cannot all be explained away by blaming the bloqueo. I am not a friend of the Castro government. I would like to see multiparty democracy and markets in Cuba. And you know what would be the most effective way of bringing an end to 50 years of a well-intentioned, patriotic, non-kleptocratic, but utterly failed dictatorship? Full normalization. The Party wouldn't last twelve months.

"...the rest of the world must change as well"

2009-04-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

"The United States must change," President Obama told the Europeans, "but the rest of the world must change as well." I thought of that today reading about the latest North Korean missile launch. Readers of this blog know that I strongly support a standing down of the US as global cop, with the concomitant reduction of the size of the US military and its budget, and a general unwinding of the post-WWII "leading role" of the US. But the international community will actually have to do most, not just some, of the work required for this to occur.

For the moment I think we can forget the Europeans so far as helpfulness is concerned. The only thing more precious to the Europeans than their typically chauvinistic and masturbatory anti-Americanism is the fact that the US absolutely handles all military security for the European continent, from the tiniest "mouse that roared" disputes to the largest conflagrations. The Europeans are of no use and will not be of any until they can, at a minimum, handle military security on their own continent; at the moment there is no doubt that they cannot. They have let this go on because the United States indirectly subsidizes European social "safety net" policies by continuing to pay for European military security, and they've kind of got us: what alternative do we have? Let Europe burn? They are rather effectively holding us hostage.

Asia is a different story. The question for today is, what to do about the failed and dangerous state of North Korea? Two stories illustrate the situation pretty thoroughly: First, GOP candidate-in-waiting Newt Gingrich telling Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday yesterday that he would have "disabled" the missile (Newt being Newt, his favored weapon was ray guns. No, it's true. Check for yourself), and second, the continuing reluctance of China, at this point North Korea's de facto patron and protector, to take any strong action because of the problem of paying for huge influxes of economic migrants if the North Korean regime were toppled, a burden they would share with the South Koreans in any event.

There's one more country with a border with North Korea, and that's Russia. Another big story this week was about Russia and China working on the idea of a global currency to replace the US dollar, part of a larger strategic aim to work together to establish real hegemony in Asia (that is, to push the Americans out of Asia).

Say, Russia? Um, China? Here's one American who would like absolutely nothing better than for the US to be out of security commitments in Asia altogether. Heave ho! But, uh, guys? That means you're going to have to deal with it.

Who Will She Be?

2009-03-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

I've been very impressed the past couple of days by Jennifer Granholm, the Democratic governor of Michigan. She's very articulate and fast on her feet, deftly supporting President Obama and the auto industry, including ousted CEO Richard Wagoner. I've been enthusiastic about Kathleen Sibelius, Democratic governor of Kansas, for a long time. Both of these women look like presidential material to me. Of course, any woman who wanted the Democratic presidential nomination would have to get through Hillary Clinton, who I am proud to say I supported for the nomination most of last year. The point is, the Democrats are the party of women, and their bench is deep: women in the Democratic Party will assert their claim for spots on the ticket, presumably after we try to reelect this administration in 2012 God willing.

So it was particularly obnoxious, I thought, to get a media blip today about how Sarah Palin was predicted to be the first woman president. If she's on the ticket in either 2012 or 2016, I'd say the GOP will be in big trouble. The argument is that it's the conservatives who can elect a woman, but the opposite is true. It's not about tokenism: the Democrats are the party of women, just as they're the party of blacks, and the party of gays. Anyway, if the Republicans can't find a responsible, centrist candidate the next time they have a shot, their time in the wilderness will be quite long.

Charisma Gap

2009-03-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

This week's faces of the Republican Party in the media are Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Only Gingrich has any chance of running for the 2012 GOP nomination, a prospect almost as delightful to Democrats as Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin would be. Meanwhile there is a question as to whether Obama is becoming overexposed, in the media sense of being in our faces too much. This can happen and he needs to be sensitive to the possibility, but so far I think he is deliberately being the Anti-Bush: Bush, through a combination of natural aloofness, natural inarticulateness, and a philosophy that the president ought not have to explain himself too much, ended up seeming out-of-touch. Obama is behaving as much like Theodore as like the other Roosevelt: the presidency is a "bully pulpit" and we live in times when the public needs to be continuously updated and educated on what's happening.

I think Obama is also trying to humanize (as in cut down to size) the presidency. He is essentially a technocrat, a fact obscured by his recent historical political successes. If he keeps talking publicly as much as he has been so far, the public (and the media) will tune out a bit, and that might not be a bad thing for the institution. Some unglamorous, nonsuperstar officials are trying to make the trains run on time and keep the lights on, and if you're interested in that sort of thing you can tune in, otherwise you can seek entertainment elsewhere.

It was ironic today when the Czech president denounced the stimulus spending strategy of the US: the Eastern European politician thinks that the Americans are too socialist! When the crisis is economic it sorts out the wheat from the chaff, it's real work to figure out any of this stuff enough to start to get a handle on it. For example Paul Krugman is all for stimulus spending, in fact he thinks that so far the government has not spent nearly enough, yet he is equally adamant that the banking policy of buying up bad assets is a terrible mistake. I confess that this is too deep for me at the moment, but I'm working on it!

Testing Obama

2009-03-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

The first 100 days of a presidency, when the new president still enjoys the support and hopes of the public, is a time to get things done, and Obama is doing that. It is also a time for severe testing from his antagonists: will he buckle under pressure? I am glad to say that our man shows no sign of doing that. He is severely and dangerously hampered by the economic crisis, but my sense is that the public is clear enough on the fact that this is a crisis created by funny-money Republicans and their corporate clients. Not that Obama should leave that to chance, and he isn't, repeatedly referring to the fact that he "inherited" the crisis. He also keeps saying, "I'm the President now and I accept responsibility," which among other things is a graceful way of saying "I'm in charge here and you're not." MSNBC stuck with his town meeting in California last night and I thought he was masterly. He knows that his function is essentially political and that he needs to stay in permanent campaign mode, and he's doing that, and he's great at it. Good for him.

He is being criticized for discussing the Final Four, and for going on Jay Leno tonight, but he understands that he needs to communicate with the public and maintain a relationship with the public. He will reach a huge audience on Late Night (not including me - way past my bedtime). That is not "neglecting" the economic crisis, it's functioning as the president. As to that, I'm as disgusted as everyone else by the AIG bonuses, but it has become a distraction. $160 million is big money but it's nothing compared to the money that the government is using for the bailouts, the stimulus package etc (and I am supporting the government at this point). The Republicans have double-downed on that: if he fails they hope to win big, but the flip side is that if he succeeds they definitely lose big. And aren't they the ones arguing that the economy will turn itself around in a year or two? In which case credit will go to...Obama.

On the sports thing, remember how Hillary had a Yankees/Mets problem? She couldn't have it both ways, and as a carpetbagger, she couldn't claim lifelong allegiance (that's how the local politicians finesse it). Sarah Palin got outed by the media for making the same speech about the local sports team in every city she visited. True fans have feelers for that. I always wondered why Bush, one of whose sole actual interests was baseball, didn't discuss it more. Mr. Regular Guy probably figured that the best way to stay out of trouble was just to say nothing, and he was aloof enough in general that it fit. Obama is a real person (politicians: are you listening?). He knows that sports is polarizing but he also knows that it's all in fun. It's a way for people to talk to each other (half of the men in any bar wouldn't be able to converse at all if they couldn't get into something about sports). He's not gaming us. He's being himself. He's into basketball - so sue him!

Which brings me to my last thought for now: out of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, which would you least like to sit down and have a beer with? I know not everyone will agree with me, but Bush is a white-knuckle drunk, tight-lipped and with a chip on his shoulder, hypervigilant about "authenticity," always the sure sign of an inauthentic man. Meanwhile I'd love to hang out with either Bill or Barack, relaxed, smart as whips, enjoying themselves, generous-hearted and articulate.

Colbert en espanol

2009-03-10T18:07:00.001-07:00

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Lou Dobbs

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

Irish Peace is Easy

2009-03-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

The despicable murder of two British soldiers and wounding of two others and of two pizza deliverymen, for God's sake, at a British base in Antrim outside Belfast is a bizarre recidivist act almost certainly carried out by the so-called "Real IRA," a benighted group of social misfits who cannot summon up the strength of character to give up hating. Hating is like a drug, in the sense that getting intoxicated on the hatred constitutes an escape from unpleasant reality.

There also continue to be belligerent and bigoted Orangemen; Ian Paisley only managed to back into civilization within the past few years. But the real story of Northern Ireland today is the total marginalization of both groups from the vast majority of people living in the province. Belfast and Derry today are prosperous middle-class communities where most people have only a vague idea of whether their neighbors are Catholic or Protestant, and couldn't care less. The violence is carried out by poor, ignorant slum-dwellers on both sides who have been left behind by recent Irish history.

As to that: Irish peace is easy. There is absolutely no danger to the economic or political interests, let alone the physical safety, of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland posed by unification under the Republican government in Dublin. None whatsoever. And this is a fact that will be readily admitted by the great majority of Protestant northerners on the street. Reunification would be best done by a majority vote in a plebiscite that demonstrated that a majority of Protestants as well as Catholics favored it, and this could be organized over the heads of the reactionary Orangemen leaders, so far as I can see, today. But there is also nothing stopping the British from withdrawing unilaterally: as I said, the possibility of some sort of bloodbath in that event is long, long gone. The British government should stop posing as the virtuous guardians of public safety in Ireland (have they ever been that since the 17th century?), and start making concrete steps towards full withdrawal and the reunification of Ireland. And that would be that.

Required Viewing

2009-03-08T06:47:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Time for Marijuana Reform

2009-03-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

Something that has troubled me for a long time is the absence of any public debate (or media coverage) of the US's out of control rate of incarceration. With 5 percent of the world's population, we hold 25 percent of the world's prison population: 7.3 million people, one out of every 31 adults in the country (in 1982 it was one out of every 77 adults). Beyond the outrageous fact that the US imprisons more of its citizens than any other country, there is a long trail of statistical evidence of pervasive racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Meanwhile, consider the following:

1) a study by the Sentencing Project in 2005 found that almost half (45%) of the estimated 1.5 million drug arrests in the US that year were for marijuana.

2) An article in today's NYT reports that spending on prisons is growing faster than any part of the budget except Medicare spending; it costs an average of $29,000 a year to keep someone in prison.

3) A recent study by the Congressional Research Office reports that marijuana sales may account for more than 60% of the $8 to 25 billion of Mexican drug cartel profits through the sale of drugs in the US. This is the money paying for the weapons used in the escalating violence that is destabilizing Mexico.

4) It has long been recognized that taxes on legal marijuana would be a significant source of revenue for states. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in California, where the annual budget gap is now at 42 billion dollars, marijuana is the most valuable crop, with an estimated worth of 14 billion dollars: completely untaxed.

5) The main obstacle to legalizing marijuana is political: public opinion has been consistently against it. But the situation is not static: Gallup reports that today over a third of respondents favor legalization, and the trend line is strongly towards pro-legalization. Going a little further into the politics: almost half (44%) of men between ages 18 and 49 favor legalization, as well as almost half (49%) of residents of Western states, half (44%) of independent voters, more than one out of three (37%) of registered Democrats, and a majority (54%) of self-described "liberals." This indicates that a popular Democratic president could reform federal marijuana laws without undue political risk; Attorney General Eric Holder stated last week that the government would halt DEA raids on medical marijuana vendors.

People, this one's really not that hard, is it? Full legalization of production, distribution and sale, with full taxation, sales through licensed vendors with proof of age, just like alcohol. It's not just "OK": it's urgent.

Real Withdrawal

2009-02-27T12:51:00.000-08:00

Count me among those liberals who don't like the sound of 50,000 US troops in Iraq after the so-called "withdrawal." President Obama has to listen to the military leaders and make tough decisions, and I'll keep supporting him through this, but 50,000 troops in Iraq is 50,000 too much. But then, I don't think that we should have any troops garrisoned in Germany, or Japan. I don't think that present-day Russia could occupy Finland, let alone Poland, let alone Austria; the idea is simply ridiculous. Anyway, Europe needs to handle its own security. North Korea is even more ridiculous to consider a threat. What I want for the USA is what Canada and Australia have: a prosperous Anglophone democracy that is not considered to be, and does not consider itself to be, at the center of world affairs. I don't want to be at the center of world affairs.

Not only that: it's dangerous and against our interests for the US to be the world's biggest arms dealer. We need to get out of the business. Live by the sword...we don't need this. We don't need to be spending more on the military than all of our allies combined. It's time to stand down.

Meanwhile, speaking of arms races, let me address Michelle Obama's sleeveless dress. I know nothing about sleeveless dresses, but I do know what I like. Strong shoulders, strong arms, strong back: magnificent. That's what a First Lady should look like.

Finally, as to taxes: go get those rich people! That alone is worth my vote. Redistribute the wealth! I'm all for it.

A Good Day for Obama

2009-02-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

I'm home today and I've had the TV on, first Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's press conference and then President Obama's town hall meeting in Ft. Myers that just concluded. I'm not going to go into substance, just want to make some observations. I thought Geithner was impressive. He comes across as a hard-charger, and I thought he was surprisingly articulate for someone unaccustomed to public performance (he did use a teleprompter). Meanwhile Obama was great. He's finding his stride. They dominated the news cycle entirely. They're on the offensive. What I liked best was all the explaining, all the respect for the public's intelligence. I'm a little tired of Bush-flaying, time to move on, but compare Obama's performance, with an unselected crowd in a county that voted for McCain, with any comparable performance by Bush. No comparison. Night and day. Smart people: Allah be praised.

Down to the Hard Core

2009-01-30T02:43:00.000-08:00

Republicans these days like to claim that the Bush-Cheney administration wasn't really a conservative Republican administration at all, a sweaty, desperate maneuver that may nonetheless serve some function at least by helping some of them go on. The rest of us might do well to note that the last administration was full-speed ahead on tax cuts and deregulation as a way to strengthen the economy for the past eight long years, and that the result of this strategy was ever-more disparity between the rich and what used to be called "the poor" but what we might as well now call "everybody else," and the current position of the economy, butt-up in the ditch. Thus one can only shake one's head in disbelief at the latest soundbite coming from the congressional Republicans, that their stimulus proposal contains "more job-creation" than the Democrats', a slogan based on the entirely discredited notion that giving all the money to rich people is merely efficient administration and not willful sabotage of the government, a project they enthusiastically support when they think no one is listening.

Meanwhile President Obama was probably making a rare slip into snarkyness when he tossed off the line that Republicans shouldn't just sit around listening to Rush Limbaugh, and I imagine Obama regretted his loose tongue this past week as Mr. Limbaugh has enjoyed the (as everyone is saying) "ka-ching" cachet of being singled out in this way. But after a couple days of this, I'm wondering: maybe it's not such a bad idea if the conservative movement is identified in the public eye with Rush. His followers are legion, but not that big of a legion. When he says that everyone is expected to bend over and grab their ankles because Obama is black (and lord knows nobody ever criticizes black people, right?), if everyone else is paying attention we might start to notice that there are bigger legions out there. Limbaugh as titular head of the conservatives: I find that that grows on me.

From Baseball to Basketball

2009-01-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush was a baseball president. Understanding baseball was the key to understanding his methods. In baseball you have to maintain consistency over hundreds of innings, racking up statistical victories. Steady relentlessness is everything, and the view is long. Barack Obama is a basketball president. In basketball you set up the play in a fast-moving situation, looking a few steps ahead.

Applying this to the wrangling about the stimulus package, what we have today is a Democratic president who is politically armed to the teeth, with the country behind him, the party heavyweights gathered close, and a legislative majority, and he's the one making nicey-nice and heading up to the Hill. And we've got the Republicans, dangerously exposed and vulnerable, and they're the ones complaining and being obstreperous. That sure looks like a set-up to me.

This isn't 1993

2009-01-15T04:57:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama has outlined an ambitious agenda for his first "one hundred days," the initial months of a presidency when new presidents traditionally exploit their mandate, their "honeymoon," and the political difficulty of attacking a president who still enjoys the hopeful expectations of the electorate. This agenda includes closing Guantanamo, drawing down the troops in Iraq, and moving on a much larger bailout of the economy than anyone has ever seen. This week, perhaps because it was felt that something ought to be presented for the gay community to atone for the Rick Warren flap, we hear that Obama intends to rescind the "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gay military personnel.

This item invites reminiscence of the early days of the Clinton administration. Clinton tried to establish a gay-tolerant military. He also (with the prominent participation of his wife) tried to move forward on an ambitious reform of health insurance and health care. Notoriously Clinton met with failure on these and other early initiatives. There was even a Time magazine cover of the "incredible shrinking president." Some speculated that he would be altogether unable to govern. Today, mindful of this history, some are cautioning that Obama should go slow. I think that Obama is nothing if not measured, but more importantly there are huge differences in the political circumstances of 2009 as compared to 1993.

Bill Clinton won the election of 1992 by a plurality, splitting the vote with Bush and Perot. He managed to win the Democratic nomination that year largely because more senior Democratic politicians (Mario Cuomo for example) made the calculation that the incumbent Republican would win reelection after Reagan's domination of the previous three elections. Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, public confidence in Republican foreign policy was high: "triumphalism" was the neologism of the day. Clinton and his ally Al Gore were Democratic Party upstarts. Their strategy of staking out centrist positions squeaked them into office but did not endear them to the Democratic establishment or to the liberal electorate. They were on their own.

Today the situation is entirely different. The incoming Democrat has been elected with one of the biggest electoral vote margins of modern times. The outgoing administration leaves in public disgrace, with the Republican Party bleeding voters. Both the economy and US foreign policy are widely perceived as in critical condition. Obama has packed his incoming administration with the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country and with officials with deep connections to the Congress. There is token resistance to a stimulus package from some right-wing backbenchers, otherwise everyone wants to get in on the action. Resisting Obama is, for the moment at least, politically unwise in the extreme.

Under these circumstances Obama, if he continues to be as adroit as he has been so far, ought to have little trouble with, for example, closing Guantanamo and reaffirming our commitment to the Geneva Conventions. I'd say he can still pile a little more onto his plate. Here's my suggestion: unilaterally normalize relations with Cuba, rescind the blockade, rescind Helms-Burton. If Obama were to do that, Cuba would be completely transformed within twelve months: no more Cuban Communist Party, no more loss of business to the Canadians, Spanish, Japanese and Argentines that would more sensibly be handled by US farmers and business. I don't see how anyone could stop this.

0-2 for Harry Reid

2009-01-08T03:42:00.000-08:00

Harry Reid badly miscalculated when he tried to punish Joe Lieberman for supporting John McCain and for speaking at the Republican Convention. In the end the Senate majority leader had to stand by Senator Lieberman's side before the cameras while Joe smilingly explained that he had been given everything he wanted. This week Sen. Reid appears to have done it again, putting his foot down that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich could not succeed in appointing Roland Burris to fill the remaining two years of Barack Obama's senate seat, as it now appears he may.

There are two questions with which I am not interested today: First, I don't care to go after Harry Reid except on one particular point. Secondly and more importantly, there is a legitimate issue as to whether Roland Burris is likely to be a good senator, but this issue is mitigated by the fact that a) it's impossible to know such a thing for certain and b) in two years the voters will be able to make the choice for themselves.

I think that the issue with Harry Reid here is an attitude that party bosses in Washington are entitled to power in state politics. On the right the idea of "states' rights" is a shibboleth (not an incoherent one) for conservativism shading off into libertarianism shading off into racist and fascist elements. But progressive political reform also confronts the centralization of power and loss of respect for voters.

The voters of Connecticut, for example, took the really extraordinary step of re-electing Joe Lieberman as an independent after he had lost the Democratic senate primary: as clear a political mandate as one could have. You're welcome to be his ally, or not. In the Illinois case, Gov. Blagojevich is not only under no indictment as this is written, he also continues to be the democratically elected governor of Illinois. His right to a legal process is absolute. The state legislature may or may not be able to impeach him. But all the party leadership in Washington needs to remember is this: the Illinois state government will send their choice for senator when they have determined who that will be. There is a process, and no reason to think that the process needs help. Just as an independent senator doesn't need guidance from party elders.

Bush's Last Day Party

2008-12-30T11:24:00.000-08:00

So it's official we're going to have a Bush's Last Day Party at our house on Jan. 20th. I just signed up to make it a host party for MoveOn.org. We already have our life-sized Barack standup for pictures, and I'm devising a "Pin the Donkey on the Ass" game with prizes. Plus beer 'cause Barack is Irish.

Don't Hurt the Shoe Guy

2008-12-18T16:33:00.000-08:00

If you threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein your whole family would have been tortured to death. It's really important that everybody gets it that you can throw a shoe at the president of the United States and live to tell the tale. That's why I signed up as a fan of the shoe-throwing guy on Facebook. Today we're hearing reporting that people overheard his being beaten, that he has broken ribs, and so forth. Big mistake. President Bush needs to make sure that the shoe-throwing guy isn't harmed. Unfortunately Bush has spent the last eight years trying to turn the US into Paraguay, so I'm not optimistic.

Caroline, Be a Kennedy, Not a Bush

2008-12-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

I always thought it was fitting that George W. Bush was appointed President by the Supreme Court in 2000. It's just so declasse to be elected by popular vote don't you know, so much germ exposure, and do you know some of those people have never even traveled abroad (er...never mind). All the good stuff - RNC chairman, CIA director, baseball commissioner - these are appointive posts.

The case of the Bushies comes to mind this week with the news that Caroline Kennedy has announced that she is actively seeking New York Governor Paterson's appointment to the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton. It's one thing to announce that one is running for election. That is the first appeal in a campaign of appeals to the voters, who are many. But to announce that one is running for appointment is not an appeal to the appointer, who is one. You appeal to one person, preferably, in person. A public announcement puts pressure on the appointer, enough so that this may have been a miscalculation. Maybe Paterson will feel obliged to decline to appoint her so as not to appear to have caved in. (And Paterson himself has not ever been elected governor: curiouser and curiouser.)

Another curious thing is the kind of boutique nature of this Senate seat since the patently carpet-bagging Hillary Clinton moved to New York to campaign for it in 2001 (granting she did an exemplary job by all reports). Caroline Kennedy is someone who, like Hillary Clinton, might easily be elected to this Senate seat by the voters of New York on the basis of associations, popularity and name-recognition. But as a potential appointee she conspicuously lacks any formal qualifications, and the governor, presumably, is supposed to appoint a professional caretaker (a politically adventitious one of course) to fill the seat until the next election. I think it would be great to have Caroline Kennedy in the Senate, but there are fundamental procedural problems here that she may not overcome.

(Three days later: sure enough, now some are in favor of Kennedy and some opposed: Cuomo had more support in a poll reported on MSNBC last night. So now Paterson will take a political hit whether he appoints her or not, through no fault of his own. If I were him I'd be mad. And I wouldn't appoint her.)

GOP's Last Stand?

2008-12-12T03:36:00.000-08:00

The Senate Republicans, in their theological zeal to avoid developing a national automobile industry policy of any kind, have voted to scatter our automobile industry to the winds, and the workers be damned. Make no mistake that under bankruptcy it will be the salaried workers who get the shaft. Pensions, health insurance, stock options and everything else they have will be on the judge's block. It is Republican opinion that bankruptcy is the best way to get at the union, which is obviously the source of all the problems, representing as unions do today some five percent of American workers, and espousing such radical notions as that workers worldwide should not be forced to accept wages reflecting the labor market in, say, Bangladesh.

What is striking is that the Senate GOP makes this stand in the teeth of dire warnings from all quarters: Bush, Obama, Wall Street, Senate Democrats and everyone else within shouting distance have warned of the consequences of abandoning hundreds of thousands of workers and an industrial plant stretching across the Great Lakes. It's almost a ritual flaming out of the Republicans, a kind of noble hari-kari on the ruins of Reaganismo. Because it is now the old guard of the "movement" conservative Republicans in the Senate who will now possibly be remembered as, if not the party that shot down the American auto industry, at least the party responsible for the distribution of suffering when the bills came due: the politically culpable party.

Myths of Chicago

2008-12-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not buying the "corrupt Chicago" line about Rod Blagojevich's outlandish flameout. East Coast elites would not hesitate to point out that Albany is the problem in New York state politics, not NYC. Chicago municipal politics is a stepping stone to national politics in its own right and its elite is a national elite (the Daley family, Jacksons Rev. and Jr.,Harold Washington etc). Blagojevich is a reflection of an old political-machine culture, to be sure, but look to Springfield for the problem and count your blessings that you've got Chicago.

Game of Chance

2008-12-04T16:14:00.000-08:00

The recount in the senate race in Minnesota gives me another opportunity to make a point that I thought was important during the Florida electoral debacle of 2000. In 2000 the lawyers for the two parties were quick to step in and define the process as a legal one between the parties: may the best lawyer win. In the end the Supreme Court essentially appointed Bush, acting out of a well-intentioned but misguided sense of duty to resolve the crisis. The issue here as I see it is about who the interested party is, and I would argue that that party is the electorate, not the political parties.

The fact is that in a state-wide vote involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of votes, any margin in the three digits is a statistical tie. In that circumstance there literally is no truth about who won the election. The phrase "margin of error" refers to the logical impossibility of establishing, within such a narrow margin, which candidate actually received the majority of votes. While Minnesota has a good reputation for clean and fair processes, I don't think that a recount process that ignores the problem of the margin of error is in the best interests of the voters, considered generically. The political point is that the interests of the voters considered as a group is not the same as the interests of either of the parties.

Say I voted for Franken (or Gore) and my neighbor voted for Coleman (or Bush). The outcome is a statistical tie within the margin of error. At that point my neighbor and I have an equal right to satisfaction. That is, every voter, granting that the electoral process has not determined the winner (it is a tie), deserves an equal chance of satisfaction as that of every other voter: we are not the political parties, we are sovereign individual voters. The fair thing to do is to flip a coin (or any other equivalently random process). That way my neighbor and I enjoy equal chances of satisfaction, uncorrupted by the vagaries of a highly politicized legal process. It doesn't matter what the parties want: the parties are not sovereign. The voters are sovereign, not at all the same thing. That is why a game of chance is actually the most rational way to decide an election when the vote has fallen within the margin of error.

As of this evening my guy, Al Franken, is up by about 600 votes. Doesn't matter. Flip a coin.

Bring Back the State Department

2008-12-02T05:53:00.000-08:00

A perspicuous column by David Brooks in today's NYT inspires me to weigh in at this moment when the incoming administration will have an opportunity to make some basic reforms not only of US foreign policy, but of the foreign policy apparatus itself.
One of the most institutionally destructive episodes in United States history was the evisceration of the State Department in the period from the onset of the Cold War during the Truman Administration through the "loss" of China in 1948 and the subsequent McCarthyist witch hunts for "communists" in government in the early 1950s. The State Department, long a preserve of professional, career diplomats, linguists and scholars, became a favorite whipping-boy of politicians of the time who painted Foggy Bottom as elitist, intellectual, internationalist and not to be trusted. The by-the-numbers worldview of the Cold War painted every regional conflict as a chess piece in a strategic struggle between East and West, and every regime around the world as a proxy of one side or the other. Under those circumstances professional diplomats, always unpopular in an anti-intellectual, populist country, became unacceptably inconvenient as any nuance of understanding was a rough spot to be smoothed and covered over with Cold War rhetoric.
This minimalist worldview led to the partition of Vietnam after democratic processes in that country produced results inconvenient to Washington's Cold Warriors, and to American support for dictators of the worst sort around the world. It also led to the eclipse of the professional State Department in favor of the unbridled Imperial Presidency, with its own in-house foreign policy apparatus under the new, Orwellian language of "national security." Today we are left with a State Department with little or no power compared to the National Security Council and the Defense Department, one that is woefully incompetent in the areas of language and intelligence (broadly construed, as it should be, to include historical and cultural expertise).
Bottom line: US foreign policy has long been politicized, with no independent, professional voices allowed to be heard in the White House.
In an earlier post I recommended that NATO be disbanded as we evolve a new set of trans-Atlantic security arrangements, ones that do not assume a forward role for the US particularly in matters pertaining to European security. I also think that the National Security Council and the post of National Security Adviser are relics of the Cold War era. Let's streamline and professionalize our government and get back to the days when a professional State Department gave advice that was independent and professional (admittedly State like all parts of government has always had a degree of politicization; maybe we can do better).
While we're on the topic, I think that the choice of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State is a good one. Now the Clinton's fortunes are tied to Obama's, but more than that Obama has put the interests of the country first: far from mixing the message, the presence of the Clintons (plural) as US foreign policy players sends the message to foreign leaders that the US government is unified. That the vice-president-elect is the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee amplifies this effect even more.

Barac O'Bama of Moneygall

2008-11-24T11:31:00.000-08:00

Cabinetry

2008-11-20T04:00:00.000-08:00

Obama cabinetry that is. Obama has invoked Lincoln as an executive role model for forming a cabinet for a long time. Lincoln famously put his chief political rivals in his cabinet - William Seward to Secretary of State, Salmon Chase to Secretary of the Treasury and Edwin Stanton to Secretary of War - as immortalized by a brilliant series of novels by Gore Vidal, a superbly-timed book by underrated public intellectual Doris Kearns Goodwin and books innumerable. There are a number of things to be said for this kind of approach. One's enemies are kept close, their fortunes yolked to yours. Ideally they altogether cease to be enemies as the national project moves forward, but idealizations are idealizations. I wouldn't take either the cynical view or the lotus-eating view. It looks to me that our man is stocking up on political power, both within the Democratic Party and beyond, and in this respect is indeed closer to the Lincoln model than the other model currently on offer, the Kennedy "best and the brightest" model. His cabinet decisions so far have been lining up political heavyweights for the battling ahead.
I think that this a good thing. What I liked about John Edwards 2.0 was his understanding that reform of government policies involving the automotive, banking, financial, insurance, medical, pharmaceutical and oil and gas industries would necessarily involve fights that some would win and others lose, and that some of these antagonists are very powerful and will not concede anything easily. We do need to revalue and reemphasize intelligence and analysis, as the Kennedy brothers consciously tried to do after the sleepy 50s, but the situation calls for some tough political battling, and in turning to Clinton, Daschle, Emanuel and such Obama is clearly shopping for political firepower.
An example of the battle that is unfolding right now is the fight over how to protect the automotive industry. Although many advocates of bankruptcy are sincere in their good intentions for the industry, it is true that taking that course would be hugely advantageous to the stockholders at the expense of the workers. I say, money comes with strings attached. The US does indeed have an interest in a population of several hundred thousands of workers, many of them highly skilled and experienced as machinists, electricians and for many other trades, not to mention a huge physical plant for manufacturing and transportation that extends from western Pennsylvania to Minnesota. Not only that, but auto markets worldwide are expected to greatly expand as demand rises from developing countries in Asia and elsewhere, where most consumers want cheap, efficient, reliable cars. The US ought to do what is in the best interests of the country, and that is to take this opportunity to rebuild the auto industry from the ground up. An American auto industry that had a cultish devotion to energy conservation, minimizing the carbon footprint, capitalizing on waste flows, fuel efficiency and economy would be a very formidable industry internationally. I suspect that it would not be the younger generation of workers who would resist such a cultural shift, but the older managers and owners. Just a hunch. Meanwhile it is an ideal opportunity to design such a retooling and reform with a new labor dispensation in terms of pensions and above all health insurance.
Neither management types nor union types much like this kind of liberal ranting from the blogosphere, I know, but calm down: all of these things can be achieved well short of any sort of nationalizing or union-busting or choose your poison. It is not unreasonable to point out the obvious outlines of a national manufacturing policy, and liquidity should not simply be pumped out into the monetary ocean. Companies that have the will to adapt should be helped. In fact, the US automobile industry has demonstrated great adaptability in the past. At the same time, Obama's need to amass some political authority could not be more clear.

George W. Bush is a True Conservative

2008-11-13T11:42:00.000-08:00

"He ran as a conservative," goes the line from the Republican Party apologists, "but he didn't govern as one." All those people who supported him for reelection in 2004 can't wait to throw him over the side now. The claim is that the massive spending and resulting cosmological debt-hole are, by definition, non-conservative. Conservatives stand for fiscal responsibility, right? And if this administration ends in fiscal disaster that means, by definition, that this is a non-conservative administration, right?
Not so fast. Here are three ways in which Bush Administration spending, and the resultant problems, are straightforward products of conservative thinking:
1) The biggest elephant in the room is military spending. All empires, from the Athenians and Caesarean Romans of antiquity to the Spanish and British Empires, have declined when their international commitments, and therefore their military burdens, broke their banks. It's like any other burst of energy in nature, the bubble expands until the energy is spent. There is no sane reason for the United States to sustain the current level of military spending. It doesn't make us safer. We must stand down as gendarme of global security. Conservatives (who have morphed over the decades since WWII into messianic imperialists) simply refuse to face the fact that the foreign entanglements that Jefferson warned about, and the economic and social militarization that Eisenhower warned us about, are not sustainable under contemporary economic reality. Today's conservatives either think that the US can maintain global military supremacy for all time (in denial about the plain fact that all things come to be and pass away), or worse, think that the US is destined to fulfill Biblical "end times" prophecy. George W. Bush isn't their problem, they are our country's problem.
2) Conservatives espouse "fiscal responsibility" in only the narrowest, most selective sense. They mean, for the most part, that the government ought not to fund programs that help the poor, that protect the environment, that support public and higher education, and so on. Pro-business conservatives have an economic model that is predicated on consumer spending. That nice check for $1,200 or so that you got last year? You were supposed to go down to the mall and spend it. That was the idea. That people ought not to consume more than they need, that saving is a virtue, that usury is a moral wrong: none of that is any part of contemporary conservative philosophy. "Fiscal responsibility" is not a real philosophy for conservatives: it's a code for limiting the size and role of government. Thus the question as to whether helping the poor, protecting the environment, supporting education might actually be fiscally responsible policies in the long run has no interest for them. Deregulation of the financial industry is itself a deeply perverse expression of "responsibility," as conservatives seek to lessen, not maintain, financial protection for ordinary citizens. Their resistance to progressive taxation is also not an instance of "fiscal responsibility," rather it is an expression of faith in supply-side economics.
3) The current administration has very self-consciously spent the federal government into the ground, as a way of weakening and diminishing it. Whether or not that is a good goal, consider the hypocrisy of conservatives who now run away from this project, that they supported in the most full-throated way while they were supporting Bush and Cheney through two elections, much as all the macho talk about how the federal government ought not be in the business of paying for regional disasters was forgotten in the face of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Now they want to tell us that these are not conservative policies after all. Nonsense.

The Amazing Lieberman

2008-11-09T07:38:00.000-08:00

I can't say I much care for Joe Lieberman's foreign policy views. He would, by all appearances, gladly court global war and human catastrophe on an historic scale in the pursuit of his support for Israel. He is hostile to any attempt to reach out diplomatically or economically to the Palestinians, whose very existence he questions. He thinks, for reasons that elude me, that escalation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would further Israel's interests, and he advocates attacking Iran for the same reason, although what would happen next if the US attacked Iran is anybody's nightmare: it would be a classic instance of the dog catching the car. He is an Israeli defense hawk more belligerent than majority public opinion in Israel itself, sitting in the United States Senate. And he pursues this apocalyptic agenda at the expense of any other political interests he may have: amazingly enough, this is someone who votes with the Democrats 90 percent of the time. You read that right.
Which brings me to my reason for discussing him today: you've got to love the audacious political career that this man has charted for himself. He was Al Gore's vice-presidential candidate in 2000, the first Jew on a national ticket (and a practicing Orthodox Jew at that). In that election, Lieberman's credentials as a foreign policy hawk and (remember?) an avatar of "values" were considered to be an asset to the ticket. And of course he was very nearly elected. Then, by 2006, anti-war sentiment in the Democratic Party had built up such a head of steam that Lieberman lost the Connecticut Democratic primary for nomination to the Senate to the anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. At that point, politics being what it is, his old cronies (ie Chris Dodd) went over to campaigning against him. But wait: the Republican candidate was a disaster, and the meltdown of that campaign freed up enough conservative voters that Lieberman was elected as an independent. That was, I thought, tip-your-hat sort of stuff: now Lieberman could do anything he wanted, and that included continuing to caucus with the Democrats. If that were the end of the story it would be a great story.
But it goes on! Lieberman, caucusing with the Democrats and continuing to vote with the Democratics on most Senate votes, went out on the stump for McCain in the 2008 election. He didn't just say "I support McCain." He traveled around at McCain's elbow for months, whispering handler's instructions in his ear, and the final audacity was to go to the GOP convention in Minneapolis and address the delegates. At which point many Democrats said OK, you've pushed us too far, you're out. But wait: the Dems didn't get the 60-seat majority they needed to have a veto-proof Senate (and there will be battling over filibusters as well). So Lieberman goes on. Harry Reid talked tough about throwing him out as Homeland Security chairman, but when their post-election meeting finally came it was Lieberman who was calling the shots, walking away from the meeting saying that the Majority Leader's propositions were "unacceptable." And there we sit. After all, Lieberman is an independent, and not only that but it was the Party, not him, that declined to put him forward as the Democrat senator from Connecticut. He asked for the nomination.
No, I don't like a messianic Middle East hawk. Don't like that one bit. But the career? Brilliant. At some point you've just got to hand it to the guy.

Inventory of the Goodies

2008-11-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

Friday night Sophia went trick-or-treating for the first time, it was great to see her carefully sorting through her bag of goodies like I remember doing as a kid. Last night lifelong liberal Democrats like me got a treat, not a trick, for once and I've done a little sorting today myself.
State by state, the news is better than I thought it was last night. All three contested Rocky Mountain states, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, went for Obama. New Mexico was expected, Colorado was in play the whole campaign, Nevada is striking and reflects demographic changes in the region. One of the McCain campaign's scenarios was to flip the Rocky Mountain states, didn't happen. That's a new map, I voted for Jerry Brown in 1992 in the Colorado caucus when Gov. Moonbeam won it, 16 years later we've got a growing, politically fascinating region that the Democrats should fight for. Indiana is maybe the single biggest win for the Democrats, a true upset and Obama did it with increased turnout by urban African-American voters combined with white working class support: it wasn't suburban liberals, it was a brilliant campaign by Obama and the 50-state strategy of the grossly underestimated Howard Dean. Obama won in Florida and Virginia, and appears to have won North Carolina by a slim, 5-digit margin. As recently as August the pundits were out there saying that the Democrats had no chance in Florida. Three big southern states for the black Democrat and his Yankee running mate.
Which brings me to the big picture. This time around, the Democrats won California, New York, Illinois, as usual. They also took Florida. If they can build on the win in Florida, the Republicans are left with: Texas. One big state. And that's not enough. Not only that, but Latino voters went big for Obama. That was a real unknown (like so many things that we could only know by actually having a black candidate for President). There were real indications that Latino voters wouldn't go for a black candidate, that the two ethnic identities could be played against each other (by the Republican Party: who else?). Well no: Latinos went for Obama by 73 percent in Colorado, 76 percent in Nevada, 69 percent in New Mexico, 57 percent in Florida. And have you heard? There are lots of Latinos living in Texas! I've heard it on good authority!

Don't Forget Jesse Jackson, Don't Forget 1988

2008-11-05T09:58:00.000-08:00

Watchin' TV and Cookin' Food on Election Night

2008-11-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

6:55 PM: Collateral Damage: Pat Buchanan (of course I'm watching MSNBC, I'll flip around later) says that people have invested high expectations in Obama, but do they really know what they're getting in terms of policy agenda? Buchanan's purpose is to question a liberal mandate, but I think also that the fact that the great mass of these people about to vote for Obama aren't political animals means that the McCain-Palin campaign managed to insult a lot more people than they were aiming at with all these attacks on socialism, anti-Americanism and so forth. We were all asked to accept the suggestion that the sitting Speaker of the House, the sitting Senate Majority Leader, and the Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominees of the Democratic Party, as well as large geographic swathes of the country, were anti-American, socialist, etc. Sarah Palin, by the way, advertised herself as the "first Christian" mayor of Wasilla, unlike, say, the Lutheran man she displaced for that position. Bullies insult people, but they need to know when to stop. To put it in terms that the GOP nominee might understand: you were dropping too much ordnance. Too much collateral damage. Sound familiar?
7:39 PM Watch Where You Aim That Thing: Howard Fineman reports on MSNBC that African-American voter turnout is up everywhere that the Pennsylvania state GOP ran Reverend Wright ads this week. (The McCain campaign wasn't running them.)
Indiana (admittedly it's a tiny number of precincts reporting) is going for Obama. Another Pat Buchanan moment earlier today was when he started explaining one possible McCain scenario: "Say McCain wins Indiana and..." Say he wins Indiana? If McCain loses Indiana it's the end of civilization as we know it. Meanwhile I just flipped, as promised, over to Fox and glory be: they're reporting from the same planet as everybody else. Much better graphics, even.
8:24 PM (7:24 Eastern, remember): Both Maine and New Hampshire showing 67% for Obama. Iowa isn't the only place where a whole lot of white people are voting for Obama. New Hampshire is significant as a place that's been very kind to John McCain over the years. Meanwhile Indiana and Virginia are showing for McCain. Maybe deciding to do this running post thing will turn out to be more dramatic than I thought. I hope not.
10:39/9:39 Eastern: Fox has called Pennsylvania and Ohio for Obama. By my calculations McCain can't win without Pennsylvania. Anna K. just called all excited, but also reminding that it's not over. I don't think that any unexpected states are going to flip either way, but Obama is well ahead in Florida, Virginia isn't called yet and interestingly North Carolina is actually looking stronger for Obama than Virginia. Meanwhile Louis Fortuno has won the governer's race here, and that means that the whole university administration will be replaced, which under the circumstances is good news for us professors. I'll stay up a little later but this does look like a wrap - because no surprises either way. Hundreds of thousands of people gathering along the river in Chicago, I wish we were there.
Chris Matthews reports that there are as of tonight no Republican congressmen (or women) in New England. Not a one. Not that Christopher Shays was a bad guy.

Noon in Puerto Rico on Election Day

2008-11-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

It's 11:47 AM Atlantic Time here in Puerto Rico, an hour ahead of Eastern (they "fall back," we stay the same, no DST). From everything that I can see (OK, obsessively stare at), we're on course for victory for Obama tonight. But it's not in the bag or at least if it is in the bag we can't yet tell. Like everyone else, I just want it to be over so we can move on, an apparently universal emotion today aggravated for G. and me by the closure of the university here since last Wednesday because of political and labor problems. Sophia has got her wading pool set up outside. When cars go by we can hear the party flags flapping in the wind.
Speaking of that, Puerto Rico is going through some political changes itself. Anibal Acevedo Villa, the Popular Party governer who initially got good marks when he took over from the patently oligarchic Sila Calderon (PR's first woman governor), has seen the public sour on him as he was unable to tame the endemic corruption that undid the last Nuevoprogressista governor Pedro Rosello as well (stateside readers: the Populares/PPD are the party of the status quo, the Nuevoprogresistas/PNP are the pro-statehood party). These are structural problems with a deep cultural dimension and it's going to take a lot to change things; people are more just angry than they are resolute to do anything in particular. They are, however, likely to turn the government back over to the Nuevoprogresistas today. This was helped by the effective ousting of Rosello who very typically tried to claim the nomination for himself once again (he had one of his loyalists step down to free a senate seat for him after losing both the last election and extensive legal challenges). Fortuno, the PNP candidate this time, thus represents a fresh face in contrast to both Acevedo and Rosello.
An interesting development here is the visible evolution of Puerto Rican party politics past its traditional focus which has always been the status issue. The younger faction that has taken over the PNP may develop the party along Democratic Party lines (something Rosello also tried to do), and if that succeeded, and the PPD came to represent an essentially conservative posture (they are the party of the Catholic Church as well as other populist/conservative elements), politics in PR would indeed be transformed. Meanwhile the same evolution of a more rational political discourse is evident regarding the PIP, the independence party. They are under intense pressure this election from yet a fourth party, the new Puerto Ricans for Puerto Rico (PPR? I'm not sure), which is polling around 6 percent vs. the PIP's truly dismal 2 percent (it's true that a likely PNP victory tends to bring out the "melones," so called because they talk a PIP (green) line while voting a PPD (red) line in the voting booth. I cannot yet make out what the new party stands for: for the moment they are the Cinderella ticket and are catching basically a free ride. The problem for the PIP considered as a nationalist party is that, for various historical and social reasons, it is also the self-styled vanguard party of the left. This turns out to be disastrous over the long term. Without the people the PIP is a party but not a movement. There is no reason that the nationalist movement needs to be the socialist movement, and some very practical political reasons why it shouldn't be. That might sound like an opinion hostile to independence, but the opposite it true: my view is that the single biggest political problem for Puerto Rican nationalism is the identification of the movement with the left, and with (inevitably) anti-US sentiment. What an irony that the left-wing intelligensia that dominates the PIP is itself the single biggest obstacle to the nationalist movement's success! But as I say, we can see things changing and today is a big day for local politics here.
Meanwhile the US election is more important and will make more of a difference here as well as in the States. The Republicans can try to hold the line and not suffer too big of a defeat, and I'd say that's more likely than a blowout. But a blowout would be much better for the country, that is several notches too far over to the right. Progressive taxation, regulatory enforcement, health insurance for all Americans: that's the way to put the middle class back in power, and it's not going to be easy to do.
I'm getting slightly more traffic today than usual, at least for a Tuesday. Anybody who does happen to read this: everybody's got to vote. More is better. If we could flip a couple of red states and break 300-325 on electoral votes Obama's first hundred days will be much more successful.

Obama Wins Iowa Caucuses January 2008

2008-11-02T08:17:00.000-08:00

Sarah Sinks It

2008-11-02T02:34:00.000-08:00

I haven't been of the mind that John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was one of the definitive issues of this election. We've got catastrophic war for empire, the Great Depression II, the first black president...plenty of more important stuff to think about. Although like all liberal bloggers I've expressed dismay about her candidacy, I've also been thinking that she was a bit too easy to gang up on, that that courted a kind of populist backlash and besides, the real issue here is John McCain and his fitness to be making this kind of decision. This morning, though, an hour before Meet the Press and two days before Election Day, we wake up to this amazing prank interview with Palin by two notorious shock jocks out of Quebec. The issue is not that her staff is so inexperienced that a phony phone call got through (that sounds like how they're going to try to spin it). The issue is, once again, how she handled herself in an unmanaged encounter. She was so excited, I think, that she failed to listen to any of the substance of what was being said, and so the fault is more a lack of seriousness of purpose that can perhaps be chalked up to a lack of experience. That's the charitable take. But I can't see even the most loyal GOP operatives gritting their teeth and defending her over this one. I won't mention any of the details other than the cartoonish fake-French accent. The rest I leave for you to explore and digest on your own. And I think that this incident is a sort of tipping point, if we haven't passed it already, where it can definitively be said that the selection of Palin has been a disaster, just all by itself, for this campaign. And I say that in full knowledge that we will very likely be living with this person for years to come.

McCain in 2000!

2008-10-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

OK, I still think it would have been better if Gore had won in 2000. Still (and whether or not McCain loses on Tuesday as everyone expects), it's hard not to think that things would have gone a lot better if McCain had won in 2000 instead of Bush. It would have been much less likely that the US would have invaded Iraq, and the shame of torture scandals almost certainly would not have happened. We would have missed out on Sarah Palin. McCain was 64. 2000 was really his year, I think, but the GOP heavies outsmarted themselves. Ironically enough they were worried about the party getting saddled with a right-wing Christian candidate so they looked around for a safe, conventional candidate and settled on George W. Bush, in the process passing over the loner McCain. Just another clusterfuck for the old Navy airman (if you've wondered why the old military men tend to be full of rage).
But I can think of some things that would probably not have been different. For one thing (thinking of McCain), whatever happened to the conservative idea that the United States should avoid foreign entanglements and the corruption of empire? The Republican isolationists who fought against America's entry into World War II were pillars of the Senate, senior Republican senators like Robert Taft. Whatever the wisdom of their policies, look at how far the parties have transformed between then and now, when conservative Republicans are the self-conscious champions of empire, considering inviolate a military budget that is larger than all others combined, and assuming the American garrisoning of the world as a natural fact, to be sustained indefinitely.
Meanwhile we can also safely assume that there wouldn't have been any health care reform during a McCain administration, and not much would have been different in regulatory oversight of the financial industry either. McCain might have done better than Bush has with privatizing Social Security, and we all might have done a lot worse if he had.

Run Up the Score

2008-10-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

With two weeks and two days to Election Day, Barack Obama could still lose this election, but it is increasingly difficult to see how. But there is more to elections than just whose nose got over the finish line first. Elections are symbolic. Ask George W. Bush if all elections are the same; he can tell you about the difference between being appointed President by the Supreme Court in 2000 and winning by four million votes in 2004. Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama this morning on Meet the Press was not a game-changer, but it was rich with symbolism (as well as substance: if there was any doubt that the McCain campaign's fixation on William Ayers and McCain's selection of Sarah Palin were blunders, Powell's measured criticism today ought to clear that up). And Powell will move some votes, among undecideds and among a new, exotic species, Republicans who are jumping ship and voting for Obama. That's good: today I want to make the argument for running up the score.
When the Republicans and their unfortunately kind of brilliant field marshall Newt Gingrich took over the Congress in 1994 the conservative movement, thirty years after Ronald Reagan's speech endorsing Barry Goldwater at the 1964 GOP convention, finally won the definitive victory it had pursued all those years (Reagan's own impressive numbers in 1980 were interpreted as to some degree representing Jimmy Carter's failure of confidence). 1994 was the symbolic defeat of the old, legislation-based Democratic Party model of government that dated back to Franklin Roosevelt and that reached its apogee during the JFK-LBJ era of the early and mid-sixties. It was Bill Clinton, that most protean of pols, who then announced that "the era of big government is over." That's the kind of symbolic victory that moves us from one era to another. Such elections are rare: the apostate conservative Andrew Sullivan pointed out on the Chris Matthews Show this morning that the last time the Republicans were handed such a symbolic defeat was the landslide reelection of Roosevelt in 1936 (1932 was about "change" after the crash of '29, 1976 was about Watergate, Nixon's resignation in 1974 and the ignominious end of the US war in Vietnam in 1975. Clinton won by plurality in 1992 with Ross Perot pulling down about 20 percent of the popular vote).
The pendulum needs to swing again. A big part of the reason I was a Hillary Clinton supporter throughout this primary season was that a victory for Hillary, incarnate devil of liberalism, would have constituted an unambiguous defeat of conservatism, a statement by the body politic that Reagan's movement had run its course. We can still have such a moment, and the signs are everywhere that we need it. Joe Scarborough, getting back to his conservative roots in time of crisis, laid out the revanchist line this morning: if not for the economic collapse, Republican conservatism would have won the election. And conservative apologists are already pointing fingers at Obama's tremendous cash advantage, never mind that it was they who resisted campaign finance reform on the grounds that political donations ought to be considered constitutionally protected "free speech." This time, the people have spoken (Fairness footnote: John McCain has indeed been a "maverick" on campaign finance, although that and opposing torture are pretty much it). We need a blowout. Go get 'em, Sarah!

McCain's Trash Talk

2008-10-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

The day before the last presidential debate, we read that John McCain is telling reporters that he will "whip Obama's ass," and has taken to self-consciously repeating the word "fight" in his stump speeches this week. I've never understood the function of trash talk before a confrontation, a smart jock could maybe explain it, obviously it's meant to be a kind of psychological warfare (boxers take the art to its highest level), but mostly it's a way to psyche up oneself and one's supporters I think. But at this point the Republican ticket is at risk of degenerating into snarling, sullen reactionaries. Correction: into appearing to be the snarling, sullen reactionaries that I kind of suspect that they are. The problem is issues: ain't got none.
So far rightward did the Bush-Cheney administration push things that there is barely a substantial issue remaining on the table that allows a true conservative to simultaneously state his or her honest opinion and appeal to undecided voters. For example, when McCain touted an out-of-the-blue plan to buy up bad mortgage debt during the second debate the biggest effect was to rile up conservative critics, a bad hit for a campaign that has the base, the anti-Obamas, and little else. And McCain's attempt to get out front on global warming has now been eclipsed by his running mate's inability to admit that humans are having negative impacts on the environment at all. Two perceptions are building this week: 1) McCain is flopping around trying to get some traction and not finding any, an indication he has no core other than his character, and 2) this ticket is two obstreperous, combative personalities at a time when that is exactly the wrong temperament to lead the country into the emerging multi-polar world. At Obama rallies, Obama says nice things about McCain, and the crowd cheers. At McCain rallies, McCain slanders Obama, and the crowd calls for Obama's head. And Obama's lead keeps widening. Go get 'em, Sarah!

Why Is McCain Running Right?

2008-10-09T05:33:00.000-07:00

It's not a rhetorical question, today I'm really wondering why John McCain is running a "base" campaign. The choice of Sarah Palin, for example, was a base pick, aimed at appealing to the Christian Right and other hard-line domestic-issues conservatives, and she is out there running the line that Obama is "different" (black, liberal) and generally riling up the most xenophobic elements in the party, which makes for exciting rallies in a scary, fascist sort of way, but which is almost guaranteed to turn off independents and centrists. But it's not just Palin. No tax increases for corporations and the very wealthy, "victory" in Iraq, opposition to health care insurance reform: what gives? The issue at the moment isn't whether these conservative positions are wise or otherwise. My question today is, why is McCain seemingly driving his campaign over a cliff?
There are several possible explanations. 1) Maybe the campaign is simply so obtuse that they honestly think that rallying conservatives is the same thing as rallying the country. But that seems unlikely (at least for those of them who are not xenophobes from small-town Alaska). 2) More likely, the reasoning is "last man standing": the Republican cannot win without the conservative base, so make sure the base is OK just in case the Obama campaign hits a rock somehow and McCain gets a chance after all. That is, stay prepared to get lucky. That position makes some sense, but only granting that one has already decided that, barring some political catastrophe for Obama, there's now no use in going after the center. Not "prudent but hopeless," rather "hopeless but prudent." 3) But I have a suspicion that something more personal is going on here. This is John McCain's last hurrah. The cap to his political career is the Republican nomination in 2008. That's in the bag. All that is left is coming in with a respectable showing among conservative voters. So get out there and try to make your performance with conservative voters decent enough so you don't spend your twilight years a political laughing stock. Even that isn't terribly urgent: history will blame the Republican defeat on George W. Bush, not McCain. Go get 'em, Sarah!

Are You Better Off?

2008-10-07T16:42:00.001-07:00

Watch Where the Battle is Fought

2008-10-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Which is worse, thirty more days to Election Day and your ticket is trailing, or thirty more days and your ticket is ahead in the polls? As a partisan it always feels good to be winning, but this pleasure appears superficial when you want to also maintain some insight into what's going on. Thirty days is plenty of time for the other side to stage a comeback, or for your side to blow it all. Maybe. But sometime right around now there will be a tipping point when the pros in politics and the media will know what's going to happen to a certainty. They won't say it, for various reasons. Both campaigns have an interest in campaigning to the very last day, even when everybody inside knows that the game was over, say, two weeks ago. I remember in 1992 that we ("we" who were not clueless) knew that Clinton-Gore were going to win, I remember telling one of my classes that I believed that Clinton was in, maybe a week out. As I recall, the point was reached when one could simply do the math. But if you're just a member of the lumpen professoriat like me that late date is the earliest that I would dare call it. The Mike Murphys and Bob Strausses of the world often know these things quite a bit earlier on.
This time around, nobody is going to give me any points for predicting an Obama-Biden win this week while they're up in the polls, but what I've got is this:
Consider the 2004 election result. The Democrats lost that election when they lost Ohio and Iowa, and it was a close thing for them in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania besides. In 2000 they carried Iowa and of course that election is unusually ambiguous, but in both of those elections the battleground was in the Upper Midwest, and in both many argued that Ohio was the state that swung it. I knew, in the last months of the 2004 race, that the fact that Michigan, Wisconsin and even Minnesota were in play was very bad news for Kerry-Edwards. Sad, too: Minnesota and Wisconsin are old "Progressive," anti-gold standard states, left-leaning through much of the twentieth century, and Michigan and Ohio are Rust Belt states that were longtime bastions of Democratic Party and labor union power. When the election is being fought in states like that you know the Democrats are in trouble.
Now look where the battleground is today. Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, bedrock Republican Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and, most impressive of all, Florida are in the "too close to call" category as of today. Two months ago (maybe even one month ago) the suggestion that the Democrats had a shot at Florida would have drawn hoots from the punditocracy. One thing they were right about is that the state is an absolute must-win for the Republicans. Even if Obama-Biden don't take Florida, forcing McCain-Palin to fight there draws money and time from other areas: this week McCain actually dropped, altogether, his Michigan campaign. He simply can't pay for it and scramble in expensive media markets like Florida and Virginia. Speaking of Virginia, if Obama wins any Southern states at all he will be the first non-Southern Democrat to carry a Southern state since JFK did it in 1960 (and with this Sunday morning's political talk we learn that there is now movement in Louisiana, of all places). He's competitive in four. Oh, did I mention he's black?

Some of the People All of the Time

2008-10-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

I'm going to watch the vice-presidential debate tonight, although G. wonders if it's a good idea since I tend to literally writhe around in physical pain listening to these things. Tonight will be heavy on defense, since Biden has much to lose and will prefer to let Palin hang herself, while Palin would doubtless like Biden to run on and burn up as much of the clock as possible. Palin will try to shake something out of Biden, he's the elitist liberal baddy in the mythical scenario she's surfing. Biden will try to leave Palin alone and go after Bush, McCain, and the republicans in general. But what makes this debate (five hours from now) interesting is the jaw-dropping performance of Palin in her interviews with Katie Couric this week, emphasized by the almost equally incredible performance by Tina Fey where she did an SNL skit using words that were very close to the actual transcript.
The trouble for Palin is this: she hasn't just measured up as a weak debater. She failed to come up with any discussion at all of the judiciary, for example, when asked. She did say things: she said that Roe v. Wade ought to be handled by the states, and she assured Couric that if elected she would enforce the law. But that was it. She also, even more astonishingly, failed to mention a single specific news or opinion source that she had read: not an Anchorage paper, not Fox, not a recent book, ningun. Joe Scarborough, who has been cracking a bit under the strain over at MSNBC, laid the blame on the "Bush handlers" and laid out what might have been fighting answers to many of the questions Palin simply failed to swing at. But Joe: you are already able to speak in an unguarded and informed manner about the judiciary, the media, Russia, a book you've read recently, and so forth. So is everybody at your table, and a good percentage of your viewers. Is it true that she is literally unable to discuss political questions?
It's remotely possible that she is a seasoned enough "stealth" candidate that she is simply on message which is to say nothing, like a Republican nominee for the Supreme Court, and hope that the general public doesn't ever really grasp the full extent of her radicalism. Or maybe she's just trying to lower expectations so that she has a shot at slaying Goliath. There was an old SNL skit where Reagan was a kindly old charmer in person, but an evil genius when everyone was gone. I want to see them do the scene where the Bush "fixers" realize that they've got a candidate who's never heard of Time Magazine (a good old liberal rag, by the way).

Hey Wall Street: Who's Your Daddy?

2008-09-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

The professor in me has to start out with the point that our basic structure of popular economic theory, that there is a spectrum from "right" free-market ideologies to "left" socialist ideologies, is badly outdated and has been for some time. All of the large Far Eastern economies, for example, long ago ceased to be fixed on this spectrum. Nonetheless ironies abound as everyone reacts to the meltdown of some of the largest private investment firms and banks in North America. The central irony is that our thoroughly modern generation of positively feral free-marketeers, whose like had not been seen since the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, are now to be bailed out with taxpayer's dollars (700 billion dollars, raising the national debt from $10.6 trillion to $11.3 trillion).
This circumstance outrages leftists and rightists alike, from members of various socialist parties in Italy and Spain to John McCain, who argues that weathering the storm would result in a stronger dollar over the long term, a not-totally-unreasonable argument with the added benefit of lots of populist red meat.
The problem for the ultras of all stripes is not that anybody is willing to sacrifice themselves out of some misguided sense of fairness to Lehman Brothers, but almost everybody (McCain and not all Italian Communists excepted) thinks that letting Freddie Mac go down might do serious enough damage to the economic system itself that it's worth the money to prop it up. I'm not into drama; reading along as far as I can see there's a good chance that this financial evaporation ("evaporation" is more accurate than "meltdown," no?) won't in fact result in major institutional changes.
Here's the irony that I like best, though: It was the Bushies who wanted to effect radical institutional transformation. They wanted to get rid of Social Security altogether. One of the President's major initiatives (a failed one) was to urge Americans to privatize their retirement funds. Driving the federal government farther and farther into debt was seen as a way to weaken it. The ideological project was to reduce the federal government to a more minor player, with more power in private hands. The entry of many more middle-class, individual investors into the stock market, although over-stated by corporate boosters, was a significant movement that was a real victory for free-marketeers. However, years of Republican dominance in Washington chopped away at regulation and oversight - not an ad hominem charge on my part but simply what conservatives proudly proclaim to be their agenda - resulting in the present train-wreck (more fun word than either evaporation or meltdown), and the final upshot looks to be that the hated "State" will end up as major shareholder, no doubt cooperating with the non-rich shareholders that have been treated like fodder by the Bushies and their corporatist supporters. That, in other words, is the apparent accomplishment of George W. Bush: the exact opposite of what he set out to achieve.

Biden Takes the High Road

2008-09-10T03:40:00.000-07:00

Joe Biden was exactly right to raise the issue of stem-cell research in response to Republican attempts to portray Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old mother of a Down's Syndrome child, Christian pro-life advocate and opponent of sex education in schools and stem-cell research, as someone who will look out for the interests of working mothers and women in general. Policy, policy, policy: who will deliver a larger share of the wealth to working women, through progressive taxation, safeguarding Social Security and extending health coverage to uninsured people (most of whom are women and children)? The Democrats, and the Republicans actually propose moving in the opposite direction on all of these things. Who would keep abortion, terrible thing as it may be, safe and legal and out of back alleys? The Democrats, Republicans the reverse. Both George H. W. Bush and W. were likely believers in the science of stem-cell research, but both vetoed it because they had to throw sops to the Christian Right for political reasons. Now the GOP VP nominee is part of the Christian Right herself. The good news is that if the campaign is decided on the issues, the Democrats win. The bad news is that, with the exceptions of the Iraq war and oil (not even energy) policy, the campaign has yet to be about the issues after all these months. So, as I said, Biden is exactly right to hammer the Republicans on stem-cell research, and he should not be scared off by phony McCain campaign posturing.
This is important because McCain appears for the moment to have achieved his twofer from the Palin nomination: he has solidified his right-wing base and has also caused some movement of independent and undecided women voters to the Republican column. When the election is as close as this one appears to be even a point or two of movement can swing the election. I didn't think that McCain would gain many women voters with the Palin choice, but I turn out to be wrong about that. I thought that since women voters in general tend to be slightly less conservative and slightly more liberal than male voters, Palin's extremism would turn them off. I think that part of my reasoning was right: if we are talking about undecided voters at this point after the conventions and VP picks, we are talking about voters who may have as strong opinions on issues as anybody else, but who are more likely to be unclear on what the actual policy positions of the candidates are. If they are presented with kabuki theater posturing about who is the more noble Roman, as the Republicans favor, they will vote accordingly. If they are educated about the positions of the parties, as Joe Biden started working on with his remarks on stem-cell policy, we may get a very different outcome. Press the attack, keep talking about real policies. Education, environment, health care.

More Clarity is Good

2008-09-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

One theme I've noticed on my politics blog lately is the need for clear electoral choices, which is a concomitant condition for the possibility of the Democrats defining themselves. I mentioned that Obama ought to state a clear, unambiguous and comprehensive pro-choice position, for example. So I think it might be a good thing if the religious right succeeds in getting out the message that we're hearing from Gary Bauer, Rev. Dobson and the like on why Sarah Palin makes them happy with the ticket. As a GOP congressman explained to a CNN, I think it was, reporter on the floor of the convention: "We teach these virtues (abstinence), but then life goes on." So there you have it: ban education about sex and birth control from the schools and teach abstinence, and let the teenage women have babies as a consequence. The position does not deny that abstinence-based policy may contribute to teenage pregnancies. The conservative position is that these pregnancies are a normal part of life, and to let them happen - oh, well yes, to coerce these events, in fact, by banning not only abortion but sex education. So if that is how you feel about the matter, you maybe should vote Republican, all other things being equal. If not, not.

Sarah Harriet Palin Myers

2008-09-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

It's a really consistent effect that Democrats tend to think that the Democrats will win and the Republicans are blowing things, Republicans the reverse. Even the most seasoned pundits fall prey to this. Having said that, no matter how I tote up the pros and cons, I just can't see Sarah Palin as anything but a net negative for McCain. There will be a lot of discussion about her inexperience and lack of qualifications (indisputable), and the fact that McCain skipped over so many more qualified Republicans will bring the discussion back to the pandering issue (which will turn out to be a delicate matter, ultimately decided by women voters). The idea seems to be that you get the undecided and independent women voters while simultaneously shoring up the conservative base. The glitch there is that undecided and independent women voters do not appear to be conservative this time around. They want abortion rights, and they are pro-environment, while Palin's signature issues are radically pro-life and anti-environment. As to that, McCain has (inexplicably, to my liberal mind) problems with "movement" conservatives, but if there are two issues where he has been firmly on the Right forever, they are abortion and the environment: thus she adds little to the ticket's conservative profile to anyone paying attention. Meanwhile on the age issue this looks like a backfire to me: most importantly her inexperience forces us to consider the future of an incoming 72-year-old president who has had skin cancer three times, but more viscerally the sight of the two of them looks like an old man with his daughter (girlfriend?), and the undress-me glasses don't help (OK maybe that's just me. My 58-year-old sister wondered what older women would make of a mother of five with a Down's Syndrome infant out running for president).
But on top of all that, this morning I'm thinking this: when George W. Bush appointed old cronies like Alberto Gonzalez and Harriet Myers to high office, he very clearly was expressing contempt for the institutions: to hell with those eggheads and careerists who labor for decades developing the backgrounds to run the government. Lawyers and scientists and all that: all you need is the Bible! McCain has to, at a minimum, run as not-Bush to have even a chance of winning. This is a Bush judgment all the way.

Boomerdammerung

2008-08-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, George W. Bush, Keith Richards, Al Gore, Ron Wood, John Kerry, Charlie Watts, Joe Biden, Brian Jones and Dick Cheney were all born within a seven-year period: from 1941 to 1948 (Do you know which three were all born in 1943? Can you guess which two were both born in 1942? Charlie Watts and Dick Cheney are the oldest, Al Gore is the youngest). They represent the senior phalanx of the generation known as the baby boomers, born in post-WWII prosperity, roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. And they are, or at least until recently have been, in charge of everything.
But this election, a generational change is occurring, and the torch will be passed to a different generation, with a different outlook, to move in another direction... Obama, you say? Well true enough (1961), but actually I was thinking of McCain. He was born in the middle of the Great Depression, 1936, before the war. Passing the presidency off to him would be moving the country back to before the boomers.
(Answers to quiz: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and John Kerry were all born in 1943. Joe Biden and Brian Jones were both born in 1942. Clinton and Bush were both born in 1946: remember that Sartre play, No Exit?)

Let Obama Be Dean

2008-08-19T05:11:00.000-07:00

After all the ballyhoo about Obama being mugged by the Civic Forum people last Saturday, people are saying let Obama be Obama. The problem is that Obama is being Obama, a communicator and conciliator by inclination and talent. These qualities could well make him an able executive, but as a campaigner the Democrats need someone who can put the Republicans on the defensive and keep them there. That can't be done by charming people but it can be done by presenting a real alternative. Obama needs to get a little less Clinton, a little more Dean. For example even at a Christian venue such as Civic Forum, when asked about abortion the Democrat should say, "Safe, legal and rare," which is still a sugared-up version of what ought to be "Safe, legal and available to all." "Safe and legal, that's my position, vote accordingly." Having such a clear position helps in argument, and helps to avoid arguments. On taxes the Democrat has a harder job of communicating just how lavish the Republican tax breaks have been for large businesses and the rich. But that's the place to stick, even if it means squaring off against some big shots and making enemies. The debt, the deficit, the budget. That was the theme doing a lot of work for the Democrats in 1992 when Clinton won. Where is the national debt clock? It's possible that even anti-militarism vs. militarism might work for the Democrats. We'll never know until we try. But don't put Howard on the ticket. Put Hillary on the ticket.

Late Veepstakes

2008-08-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Time grows short for Senators McCain and Obama to announce their respective running mates. As of this writing we still really don't know in either case. For both, it is a choice that could (not necessarily will) make or break the campaign. One would think that they are both close to a final decision, but my sofa kremlinology does not see traction anywhere. McCain's present trajectory is taking him in the direction of Huckabee, not that McCain will choose him (he won't), but the Republican campaign is turning out to be much more traditional than we might have expected. More war and oil rigs are required. Vice-President Romney will attend to the oil rigs. Meanwhile there is an opportunity to burnish the national reputations of some younger conservatives through the medium of the Veep list and all its attendant theatrics.
By the way, what is with the ritualistic "Would you comment about your being on the veep list?" question that every TV journalist must ask it of every politician rumored to be so? It's like the very traditional, very ritualistic sports interviews before and after games: "Well we're hoping to do well and we feel good, but they're a tough team, so let's hope for the best." "Well the nominee has to be free to make a decision in the best interests of the campaign, so I wouldn't interfere by promoting myself." And that's it. So the behavior is wholly ritualistic. Can some anthropologist explain this to me?
Meanwhile as to the Democrats, I like it that Obama has this kind of cagey streak to him where we don't know what he's going to do. I started out not liking Jim Webb, but I was won over finally by his interest in prison reform, a major issue that is too much off the radar screen. As to Joe Biden, I've liked him as a senator for a long time, but how could Obama justify the choice of Biden (or Dodd) if he weren't going to choose Clinton (or even Richardson for that matter)? I think I was wrong that Obama could nominate a woman-not-Hillary, in any event we're not seeing much of the other prospective nominees (ie Kathleen Sebelius). Rachel Maddow has made the point a few times that there's no particular reason why Hillary Clinton has to be the only woman whom the party could nominate, which is true enough except that Hillary Clinton happens to be an actual politician who is a woman candidate for national office, and not an abstract woman candidate for national office like we're used to thinking about. If Obama had a bigger lead in the polls he might want to play it safe with Evan Bayh or some other white-bread young midwesterner, but something more daring is called for I think. The continuing uncertainty of the role of the Clintons at the convention kind of jumps out at me. Obama had to make it clear to the world that he could and would decide on his running mate based entirely on his own considerations: he had to prove that he was in control of the process. He couldn't have it appear that the Clintons had shot their way on to the ticket. And I think now he has accomplished that, so now's the time to...nominate Clinton. Which is the obvious choice from the most basic of political considerations. Maybe Obama's known that he was going to pick Clinton in the end all along.

GOP Playing Cards

2008-08-02T04:12:00.000-07:00

I want to post today about a persistent bit of doublespeak from Republican rhetoricians. When Democrats point out that Republican policies favor the rich over the poor (which they do: check out the regressive tax code, attitudes towards enforcing regulations, resistance to campaign finance reform, and on and on), Republicans accuse the Democrats of "class warfare." This phrase not-so-subtly impugns Democrats as "pink," that is, as not truly supportive of economic and political freedom. That's a sleight-of-hand. In a secular democracy anyone can organize for whatever reason they want. Get enough people to vote for free chocolate milkshakes for all and that's what you'll get. The real erosion of our traditions in recent years has been the diminution of the middle class, both in terms of size and power, as Republicans have used the coercive power of the central government to artificially redistribute the wealth upwards, towards a tiny economic elite that now holds a dangerously large share of our commonwealth. "Supply-side economics" is a cover for graft, an excuse for politicians to divert lavish gifts to corporate allies (it was George H. W. Bush, it's useful to remember, who coined the term "voodoo economics" while running against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Republican primaries). But according to contemporary Republican rhetoric, anyone who tries to rally the middle class, to organize workers, or to appeal to the interests of the poor is practicing "class warfare." A malevolent bit of political judo.
This week we've seen an equally offensive variation on this tactic from the McCain campaign. They have accused Obama of "playing the race card." Let's consider this suggestion. First of all, there is no contest over black voters. Forget about Obama: the Democrats have won 95+ percent of the African-American vote in the past two elections and will do so this election as well, regardless of who the candidate may be, the Full Employment Act for Black Conservative Commentators notwithstanding. Second, there is a history to the phrase "playing the race card," that is undoubtedly why the Republicans decided to obfuscate it. Traditionally it has referred to race-baiting tactics by the Republicans. Accusing Obama of "playing the race card" manages to throw up some dust for when the Republicans really do start race-baiting, which happens when: they accuse Obama of playing the race card! Positively diabolical. Third, as is borne out by the polls which consistently show the Democratic Party with a huge advantage, but Obama continuing in a tenuous position as he cannot open up a lead among white voters, the cost of a candidate being black continues to outweigh the benefit. The evidence suggests that Obama's race is currently costing him somewhere between five and ten points in the national polls, enough to potentially cost him the election. Fourth, as in the case of class interests, race interests (think of Irish and Italian Catholic urban politicians in the early 20th century) are a perfectly legitimate platform for political organizing, but Fifth, Obama isn't even doing that: he has no reason to work on rallying his African-American base and every reason to try to make himself acceptable to whites. The only even coherent version of "playing the race card" as applied to Obama's campaigning against McCain would be if Obama were accusing McCain of being a racist by sheer virtue of the fact that McCain is running against a black man, and it's true that the Clintons suffered that fate (quite unfairly) in the primaries, which is maybe what scared the McCain campaign into making this preemptive strike. But that backfires (at least I hope it does): there can be no doubt this week that it is the McCain campaign that has injected race into the rhetoric, something Obama has all this time scrupulously avoided doing, which is not surprising since it can only hurt him, something the McCain campaign understands only too well.

Listening to Iran

2008-07-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Before discussing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's interview with Brian Williams yesterday, I have to make clear that although I think that Israel has serious problems that are to a good degree their own making, and although I think that both the US and Israel itself would both actually be better off if they were not so closely identified with each other, I think that the anti-Israeli statements by President Ahmadinejad over the past several years are perhaps the most irresponsible and disturbing language coming from any quarter of the contemporary Middle East, and one can only assume that he understands perfectly well that everyone will make the connection between these frankly apocalyptic remarks ("Israel will cease to exist," etc.) and Iran's Uranium-enrichment program, to what end I simply cannot comprehend. I hope for a change to a more liberal, more secular set of political institutions in Iran, as an advocate of religious freedom and human rights.
The Iranian president (OK, Ahmadinejad)is of course playing domestic politics, in both bomb-thrower and conciliator poses. Playing the Great Satan routine has always been a meal ticket for fundamentalist Shia politicians. Now in the March 14th parliamentary elections there were real gains for the "pragmatic conservatives" and the "reformers," and Mahammed Qalibaf, a likely challenger in next year's presidential elections, argues that a "Third Wave" of pragmatic secularism is asserting itself. Ahmadinejad may be back-pedaling to create a less confrontational atmosphere to forestall the rise of more liberal political forces. The Iranians are also no doubt fascinated by their own history of influencing the outcome of US elections. I doubt, though, that they have as good a fix on what sort of outcome they might prefer, and how exactly they might go about influencing American voters, than we might imagine they do.
The reason I'm posting about this today is one really important segment of the interview to which every American really ought to listen. Williams asked Ahmadinejad if Iran might not enjoy more access to "the wider world" if it cooperated with international pressure to suspend or otherwise modify its uranium-enrichment activities. (The link at the top of the post is to the NBC transcript.) Iran, Ahmadinejad said, was "A great country, a great nation with a great economy, a rich culture, thousands of years of history and civilization. And we have very good economic and cultural relations with countries around the world. It would be very good for you to walk our streets and gain a better appreciation of life in this part of the world." Iran, he suggested, did not necessarily need "the services" of any countries in particular.
President Ahmadinejad may or may not survive next year's election and he may or may not be a skilled statesman (points off for blandly asserting that there are no gays in Iran). But his statement is a good example of the way that the ground is shifting under our feet. Eras, like empires, come and go, and they do so in political time, not geologic time. And like fashions, you can tell that something is in decline the moment most people know about it. An American Era, such as it is, was at a high point during the first half of the 1950s, with millions of American forces garrisoned around the world, an American military governor in Japan, American troops dying by the tens of thousands in Korea, and the US the preeminent economic engine and financier of the world, not to mention the biggest petroleum exporter. And the mindset of many Americans, both in government and in ordinary life, is that that era continues to this day and will continue indefinitely into the future (as John McCain, who cannot imagine that we may someday not be stationing military forces in Iraq, let alone Germany and Japan).
Two unexpected things to wake up to someday, and that someday is today: a) we're not the unipolar "hyperpower." We're not even necessarily the most impressive, or even the scariest, hegemonic pole on a stage that includes several (more than two). When did that happen? And 2) the age of American hegemony was a construction of the FDR Democrats. They were the ones who took the US into an international role and integrated the US and world economies. But today it's the Republicans who are still intent on tending the locomotive of empire. The Bush/McCain crowd just isn't getting it. Mahmoud Amadinejad, a political machine back-bencher who doesn't know what planet he's on, looks like Werner Von Braun compared to them. And maybe the biggest domestic story is this: however much the conservative/Republican alliance may be holding up in other areas, on the foreign policy front the split looks to be complete: Republican imperialists like Bush and McCain are literally the opposites of Libertarians and traditional Republican isolationists. On the spectrum of attitudes, the Democrats are located between them.

Split Authoritarian Personality

2008-07-24T07:24:00.000-07:00

Reading an NYT story about police departments' complaints about being forced to spend too much time and money on "anti-terror" activities by Homeland Security, I was struck by some inconsistencies in the Administration's frankly authoritarian style. "Frankly" because it is an article of faith in the Bush-Cheney crowd that the executive lost too much power in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam mid-70s. There is a political agenda behind this mythology as it serves to justify the actions of the Nixon/Ford Republican administrations as well as the current one.
Anyway, here's the inconsistency: we are constantly hearing that the administration believes that military policy ought to be set by "officers on the ground," that is by the professional military. (Another problem with this line is that it shields to some extent the civilian politicians in the White House from being accountable for what is after all their war policy.) But this hands-off approach to administering security apparently doesn't extend to the police. That's too bad, since the approach of countries such as Germany, that have approached anti-terror measures more from a police perspective than a military one, has had significant success in rolling up terror networks. But we have a split-authoritarian personality here.

Clintonesque Obama

2008-07-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

It's hard to miss how closely Barack Obama has studied the electoral strategy and tactics of Bill Clinton in the 90s. He has moved rapidly in the last two weeks to reposition himself in the center, signaling that he is not an abolitionist on the death penalty, that he will not immediately withdraw from Iraq, and that he supports government support for "faith-based initiatives," among other things. Long-time Clinton supporter that I am, I should be heartened by this. The argument at this point is about winning the election, after all, and what we learned from the centrist Southerners of the Democratic Leadership Conference is that a Democratic politician can't be shy about running to the right when it is expedient, especially at the national level. Win first, then you can govern. Today quickly becomes another yesterday that can be conveniently forgotten.
So I'm sure I'll cause a lot of hair-pulling frustration on the team of young Ivy-leaguers assigned to closely monitor my statements on this blog and summarize them daily for the chief's breakfast when I say this morning that I'm not totally sold on this rebranding of Obama. In the 90s, the goal was just to win one for the Democrats. This election is different. Clinton just wanted to steer the battleship, but there exists now an opportunity to turn the battleship around. What is needed is for the liberal Democrats to beat the conservative Republicans. It is not enough just that there is a Democratic president (a significant achievement in the 90s). The ideological pendulum can swing, inaugurating a period of progressive America. But in order for this election to have that symbolic resonance, the candidate must present himself as clearly liberal. This will take courage. For example, it may be that the math indicates that being a death penalty abolitionist is a loser, but that doesn't mean that the Democrat has to affirm the death penalty to get elected. Obama needs to approach this with a subtle touch.
I wouldn't necessarily include the "faith" stuff in this criticism, though. I can think of at least five reasons why it might pay off for Obama to try to carve out an identity as a Christian candidate, roughly from less important to more so:
1) He needs a productive way of repeating the fact that he is a Christian, as double-digit numbers of poll respondents still identify him as a Muslim.
2) It does indeed help with the Clintonian strategy of portraying Obama as more moderate, and more recognizably American, which he does after all need to do (to be precise, he needs to raise the comfort level with white voters).
3) He might be able to make some lemonade out of the lemon of Jeremiah Wright, since that gentleman's intemperate statements at least made clear that Obama has indeed been in a long-term relationship with a Christian church.
4) John McCain has a weak spot on his right flank, and the Christian right is part of that. Obama has shown a heartening ability to wade in and go on the offensive wherever possible, something we missed in our last two national candidates.
5) Long-term, it's never been obvious that Republican policies were the most in tune with a genuine Christian spiritual practice. There has always been an impressive Christian left in this country, but the smaller size of the left in general as left them for a century in the wilderness (admittedly a place the Christian left obviously feels comfortable being). If we move into a more liberal American era, a renaissance of progessive Christian politics could be a part of that. Don't leave religion to the troglodytes!

What Sort of President?

2008-07-01T12:30:00.001-07:00

Today two points about how we should pick a president, and who we should pick:
1) I was surprised over the past couple of days of a revival of speculation in the media that Hillary Clinton would after all be chosen as Barack Obama's running mate. Even Chris Matthews seemed to be into the idea (remember the guy who snubbed you all senior year and then decided to be friends at the graduation party?). I was surprised by the level of enthusiasm, of course it requires too much kremlinology to figure out (what are their conversations like?), but it is an unexpected occasion for me to reiterate my own thinking on why Obama should choose Clinton as his running mate.
She got half of the primary vote. Not only that, but the Democratic rules of proportional allocation and a mix of primaries and caucuses, the product of the populist Dean faction at the DNC, did exactly what it was designed to do: it forced the party into more of a consensus-based process. To me, small-"d" democracy requires more than just asserting opinions: we also need to understand compromise. When Bush I got 25 percent in the Republican primaries in 1980, Reagan didn't hesitate. He was old-school: Bush came in a strong second, Bush was on the ticket. And the math is still there: Clinton took the big electoral-count states, Obama has an uphill struggle cracking 25 percent of the white vote. So yes, my position continues to be, as always, put Clinton on the ticket.
2) There is discussion of Obama's resolve to pull US forces out of Iraq. Reality check: no president is going to just pull everything out if that would result in some sort of humanitarian catastrophe. Maybe that will be difficult, maybe not; nobody really knows that. So the question is not, what will Obama or what will McCain do in Iraq in the first three months, say, of taking office. The question for voters is, who do you think should be in charge of this: McCain, who is not only comfortable with the idea of garrisoning US soldiers all around the world for the indefinite future, but appears to assume that some such scenario will go on, or would you prefer Obama, who understands that the "lone superpower" routine is bad for the US and unhelpful to out relations with the world? My view is that this is precisely the wrong time to have a military man. We badly need to step back and try to have a more subdued international profile, like Canada or Australia. We need to make real cuts in military spending, not just cuts in the rate of increase in military spending.

"Constructionism" and Gun Control

2008-06-27T08:11:00.000-07:00

I agree that the Second Amendment is ambiguous enough to sustain differing interpretations. Is the right to bear arms something the citizenry has in the context of a well-regulated militia, or is that right a necessary precondition for same that thus needs to be protected? This is the crux of the 5-4 disagreement on yesterday's historic decision that the Second Amendment does in fact constitute an inalienable right of the individual citizen to own a gun, something never before found by a court in our history, believe it or not.
Today I'm not so much engaged in this Talmudic argument as I am by the question of what a "conservative" Supreme Court really amounts to. What we've been told for many a long year is that "conservative" jurisprudence is not really "political" in the secular sense of pushing an agenda (unlike liberal jurisprudence, supposedly). Rather "constructionists" (famously Robert Bork) claimed that it was legislators who determined the law, and that when liberal jurors found "rights" that were not explicitly contained in the constitution they were legislating from the bench: liberals were "activist judges" who had gone beyond their constitutional function. The interesting thing about a strict constructionist like Bork was that his view definitely worked both ways: just as he repudiated Griswold vs. Connecticut, which struck down a Connecticut law prohibiting birth control, on the grounds that no right to birth control could be found in the Constitution, so his position committed him to the view that if, say, California mandated birth control use, the courts would be beyond their purvue to intervene. Similarly, in arguing for a state's prerogative to prohibit political demonstrations, he admitted that his view also precluded judicial intervention if a state were to mandate, Cuban-style, participation in demonstrations. Of course this testimony belied Bork's legitimacy: he was nominated because he was correctly thought by the Reagan administration to intend to apply his reasoning to defending right-wing zealotry, not zealotry of the left-wing variety. Nothing in strict constructionism tends in either direction. The whole thrust of constructionism, in fact, is to affirm the authority of the legislature and to limit the power of the judiciary. It's a judicial philosophy that a doctrinaire socialist could easily love, and the Senate was right to reject Bork's nomination.
But it doesn't look like we have to worry about the perils of constructionism, because the newly right-leaning Roberts Court has flown in the face of that philosophy with yesterday's decision: they have codified a new right, like the right to privacy or the right to an abortion, not explicitly stated in the Constitution. This signals that the Roberts Court will pursue a conservative political agenda. They will invoke juisprudential notions when it suits them, but these will be ignored, as they were yesterday, when they are politically inconvenient. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: activist judges!

Money, Judges, Terror: Isn't Politics Great?

2008-06-25T04:57:00.000-07:00

A few items between working with my plants in Puerto Rico in the spring:
1) On Obama's decision to forego public financing:
The McCain campaign is trying this week to make an issue out of Obama's recent policy reversal. McCain is working the vein of his high poll numbers on "personal character." The idea is that Obama, in signing a pledge to participate in public financing last year and then going back on that pledge this week, is showing that he is not as good as his word.
First, a little reality check: all national-level politicians, certainly including McCain, reverse themselves regularly on all manner of things in the process of navigating the political rapids. This is not even a particularly stand-out example of expedient duplicity, and here's why: because Obama turns out to be able to raise literally hundreds of millions of dollars over the internet and from small, individual donors, vs. the $85 million limit he would have accepted under public financing. More money=more likelihood of winning the election. If you follow politics, that moves you, and if you don't you don't care about this issue de jour anyway.
Which brings me to what I was thinking about this morning. The McCain line is that our wonderful crush Obama, up there on his pedestal, turns out to be playing down and dirty like all the rest of them. Don't trust Prince Charming! (Which puts McCain in the position of the disapproving father-in-law like Dole in '96.) But I think that this line of attack backfires. Conventional wisdom since the 70s has been that the Republicans are tough campaigners, and the Democrats are wimps. Republican tough guys like Lee Atwater and Tom Delay didn't mind playing some dirty pool; just look away if you don't like it, until we get the job done for you. And finally, in the 90s, with Clinton-Gore, we finally had our own SOBs. Halleluya! The Clintons have always understood that you have to win first, and that that means poisoned winecups and knives in the back and throwings of innocents over the side. And winning elections. McCain has been comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter. This kind of thing only illustrates that Obama is more Clintonian than Carteresque. Republicans beware.
Speaking of the Republicans, remember that business about how "true conservatives" loathed McCain, cast McCain out, would vote for McCain over their dead bodies (with apologies to Yogi Berra)? Part of the reason for that was that McCain was a maverick champion of campaign finance reform, something that the Republican Party (you will recall) was against. Part of why that was so treasonous, apart from the fact that "movement conservatives" surprisingly turn out to be people who think that Daddy Warbucks ought to be allowed to buy elections any way he can, was that campaign finance reform was generally thought to tend to help Democrats win elections.
So is McCain likely to draw blood on this one? No. What should Obama do? Carry on!
2) An even mini-er flap that blipped across the screen this morning was a report that job applicants to the Justice Department were turned away partially on the basis of their political attitudes and activities. I think that Joe Scarborough is right that this is just business as usual since the 1700s (although the lead paragraph of the NYT story reports that the discriminatory actions were illegal). The question is, why does the big bad Bush administration get clobbered with a news story about it? The specific answer is that the Bush Justice Department was called out on much more serious political machinations over appointments to United States Attorneys' offices, so they now draw critical attention. But consider what a train wreck for conservatism this is. Conservatives long cherished the idea that they were the pure ones, who had a "strict constructionist" view of the role of the judiciary and thus a) weren't playing politics with judicial appointments in the same sense that liberals were, and b) didn't appoint jurors who would do the same. Twenty-eight years after Reagan's election, how does it look to most voters? Like the Republicans are the supreme political gamers of the judiciary, thoroughly politicized and positively theological. Of course worldlier Republicans will explain to you that judicial appointments are essentially political combat from the earliest days of the republic; see item 1.
3) A more serious topic this week is that of terror attacks and voter behavior. Charlie Black, one of McCain's top campaign officials, commented this week that a terror attack between now and Election Day would help McCain. McCain immediately repudiated those remarks and as of this writing it is not clear if there will be further consequences.
First to the rhetoric: McCain makes a big show of repudiating the remark because the implication is that the campaign is secretly hoping for an attack, an "October surprise" that will swing the public back around to the hawk. Besides the idea of hoping for bad news (as in casualties), this also leads in the paranoid direction (although our educational system seems to be more effective in immunizing people from vast conspiracy theories than does, say, the French). Well sure: I for one don't believe for a second that John McCain is secretly hoping for somebody to blow up a building. The problem here is that we seem to get stuck in an unhelpful "no talk rule" where nobody is allowed to speculate on the political impact of possible terror attacks. Nobody except everybody (that's how no talk rules work).
On to the substance: People certainly do attempt to influence US elections with both talk and action. Dick Cheney just went on the air and said it in the election of 2004: "A terror attack would be more likely if the Democrats won." Lots of people howled in protest, but the Vice-President is an unflinching sort of fellow. More important to remember is that the Iranians very consciously tried to bring Jimmy Carter down during the Hostage Crisis of 1980. Conventional wisdom (such as Charlie Black expressed) on this issue can largely be traced back to Carter's loss of that election and the subsequent release of the hostages on the day of Reagan's inauguration.
That doesn't mean that the conventional wisdom is right. On the one hand, it's true that there has not been another large-scale successful attack since 9/11, and the Administration can claim credit for that, but on the other hand a successful attack now would play to a Democratic argument, that the Bush Administration's militancy has not actually made the world safer. (I would note that another problem at this point is that the Americans are systematically overestimating the degree of control that they have over events, one way or another.) We all labor within our own set of biases. To me it looks like common sense that militant anti-Americans want right-wing, militarist administrations in the US. A war, after all, is precisely what they want. Just obvious-seeming to me, but lots of people disagree. Politics is hard, that's why we tend to get formulaic.

Whole Lotta Lemons

2008-06-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the CBS/NYT poll reported that 81% of respondents thought that the country was headed down the wrong track, the highest number in the history of the poll. I'll bet I'm not the only liberal who thinks that there might be a silk lining in this sow's purse. That's a big bag of lemons, enough to make a whole lot of lemonade. Even as the ominous economic news keeps not going away, there is a palpable and growing sense that the US is ready to make changes. That's what this kind of polling data reveals: a willingness on the part of individuals to make changes in their own lives.
Great leaders (Lincoln, FDR) know what any good teacher knows: people rise to the level of the expectations that are put on them. If one treats people as passive spectators, that's how they behave. But contrary to some of our lazier intuitions, it also turns out that people don't like to be passive spectators. People want to feel that their lives have meaning, that they have something to commit to, and eventually something to be proud of. And that requires engaging them at a personal level in challenges and problems. Maybe the biggest failure of the Bush Administration is the utter lack of any sense of sacrifice, even a sense of responsibility, on the part of the citizenry. It suits the corporatists if we are just consumers, and it suits the conservatives if the government makes no demands whatsoever on the commonweal. But this ideological value of detaching the public from the government of the nation is a spiritual dead-end. People need that sense of communal enterprise, shared effort and sacrifice. Right now we're at the end of two terms of Alfred E. Neumann, and you can feel the dissatisfaction: it's a dissatisfaction with our own lives as citizens, not just with the service we're getting from our elected servants (and this Administration doesn't act like servants, they act like masters).
It's a dangerous business. The good argument that Bush has (and yes, that he does understand, if you listen to him) is that demagogues have always harnessed collective energies to this or that cause, creating enemies, fanning hatreds, consolidating power (the argument is weakened coming from Bush, since he does so much of this stuff himself). I too am wary of the dangerous potential of collectivist thought. So, what to do?
Energy policy, is the obvious thing. The People are telling us through these polls that they are ready to make real sacrifices, to change the patterns of their own lives, to evolve, to get involved. The next president needs to approach energy policy the same way JFK approached the moon shot in the Sixties. Set a goal, one that is positive and in the national interest. Be ambitious. Communicate to the public that the goals can be reached only through collective action: we can't just vote for a policy platform and then sit back like we just changed the channel. Reduce energy consumption, increase all forms of energy production.
Another thing that has to change is America's role as global gendarme. We've already been fired from this job by the rest of the world. We just haven't noticed it yet. And I will say this for the USA: the Europeans and the Asians are much too hidebound and cautious to take the radical actions that will be needed. We're still going to have to lead, by cultural default, even as we finesse the end of our hegemony, such as it is. And good riddance to it!

The Obamas and the Threat of Blackness

2008-06-17T13:10:00.001-07:00

This past Sunday, Father's Day, Barack Obama gave a speech at a black church in which he deplored the fact that more than fifty percent of black children in America are growing up in single-family homes. He pointed out that while this is a problem in society in general, the numbers on the black community are particularly bad. He used strong language to go after black men who do not accept parenting responsibilities: "Any fool can have a child, it takes a man to be a father," etc. What was interesting was the discussion of Obama's speech in the media. Some pundits seemed to think that the speech had to be meant either for his black audience or for the white audience. Those pundits often interpreted the speech as a kind of "Sister Souljah moment," an attempt by Obama to reassure white voters that...what, exactly? That on social issues, he wasn't too...what? Libertine? Highly sexed, maybe? Irresponsible? What we see here is not the threat of Barack Obama, a politician with a particular set of priorities and intentions, but rather the way that Obama will inevitably become a screen upon which are projected everyone's thoughts and feelings, conscious and unconscious, about black men and black people. It is really extraordinary. After all, the rhetoric of fatherhood and responsibility is standard fare in black churches and in speeches by black community leaders, as it has been all these long years. It's nothing Bill Cosby hasn't said a thousand times before, or Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton, or for that matter Louis Farrakhan, Old Scratch himself. Anybody who's actually been around the black community, even a little bit, knows that it is a small-c conservative community in many ways, highly religious, very down on crime and drugs.
What turns out is that a black presidential nominee is in a win-win situation: he can "raise the comfort level" (Jesse Jackson's phrase) with the white voters while simultaneously showing the black voters the vast potential for uplift that a black president will provide. He can show all parties that a black president will be even more substantially positive for society that just being an entry in the history books, and even more than just being a "positive role model." But meanwhile we will be subjected to this unintentionally racist commentary: "He's criticizing the black community, in order to reassure whites" that he's not too...what?
It's even worse with Michelle Obama, who the Republicans apparently confuse with Eryka Badu. What's the difference? She's sitting there in her big wicker chair with her beret and sunglasses, giving us the black power salute. Even more than most candidates' spouses she will have to be careful to criticize no one, but I think that she can also take a lesson from her husband's Father's Day speech. Farrakhan talks about the black leader who is "too black, too strong" (I know about that from listening to my old Public Enemy albums). But telegraph that strength in a message of uplift, and guess what conservatives? The center will be cheering the Obamas on, and the GOP will appear to be...what?

Cheney vs. Miranda

2008-06-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of Miranda vs. Arizona, a decision of the Warren Supreme Court in 1966. The Court ruled that statements made under interrogation are admissible only if the prosecution can show that the defendant was informed of his right to consul, and of his right to refuse self-incrimination, prior to the interrogation. The ruling came after a legal movement formed in response to police interrogation practices that were widely perceived as brutal (the source of the slang term "the third degree"), but they were grounded in the 5th and 6th Amendments to the Constitution (part of the Bill of Rights), and in the broader Writ of Habeas Corpus, which states that police must show reason ("due cause") to hold or interrogate anyone.
This week the Court ruled that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have a legal right to access to federal courts, a blow to the Bush Administration which has tried to make the case that the prisoners have no legal rights at all. But here's the real relationship between Miranda and Guantanamo: conservatives have always despised Miranda. (In fact conservative theorists even question the Bill of Rights.) Conservatives like Dick Cheney have been standing around at cocktail parties for the past 42 years deploring this legal curtailment of the prerogatives of local police to beat confessions out of people. Nor is this any kind of secret, or "right-wing conspiracy." Just ask them. They've been positively full-throated about it, all these years.
That, in turn, tells us all we need to know about the Bush Administration's aggressive posture on interrogations of "terror suspects," as well as the Orwellian "Patriot Act" that codifies domestic surveillance. All of the rhetoric of a "war on terror" was used, here as elsewhere, as a way to bum's-rush the public into accepting a radical conservative agenda. The real target has always been habeas corpus itself. 9/11 was seized upon right away as something that could be used to further the conservative philosophy of the administration. Remember, we got through World War II without systematically torturing prisoners. Imagine the hypocrisy of these people. Or no, you don't have to imagine it: it's laying bare now for all to see.

"Ageist"? Try Again.

2008-06-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

Watch out for a little piece of gotcha judo I noticed some conservative commentators working up this week. The idea is that anytime anybody criticizes John McCain as "out of touch," or "confused" about anything, they're "speaking in code" and really mean that he's too old. (For the record, I do not think that a vigorous person in their 70s is too old for the presidency. That seems a superficiality of our tedious youth culture to me.) Well, no. Specifically people have been hammering McCain for his repeated confusions of who are the Sunnis and who are the Shia, and for his apparently quite considered statements that he thinks American troops might be garrisoned in Iraq for decades on end like they are in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. Both the slip and the attitude strike me as confused and out of touch. Two ways in which people are often wrong are by being confused (unappreciative of the complexities and complications of a difficult region of the world) and out of touch (unaware that America's post-WWII superpower role is no longer serving the national interest). Some groups that I've noticed being confused and out of touch are foreign policy hawks, reactionary nationalist jingos, and career military people. A lot of them are young and gung-ho actually, that can be part of the problem with their judgement. These are three groups that, for somewhat varying reasons, are of the mind-set that international problems are in general amenable to military solutions. Old empires have a way of drifting into that mind-set when they become, you know, out of touch and confused. I'm not going to stop stating my opinion that he's confused and out of touch because you accuse me of denigrating him as an old fogey. I don't think that he is an old fogey.
Of course critics of Obama have the same sort of problem. African-Americans have a very understandable reflex to hear criticism of blacks as racist. That's an easy theory to fall back on. (After all, some of the critics are racist.) We already saw that in the primaries when the (demonstrably non-racist) Clintons were smeared for daring to treat Obama as a formidable opponent. For example I was struck that there seemed to be the suggestion that mentioning Jesse Jackson, just as such, was obviously race-baiting. Really? I thought Jesse Jackson was one of the heroes of the Democratic Party, myself.
Be that as it may, there's going to be a whole lot of criticizing of McCain, and a whole lot of criticizing of Obama. It's called an election. Don't kid yourself that somebody running for president shouldn't have to take a pounding. They should.

Another Question for McCain

2008-06-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of NYT columnist Paul Krugman, and he has another excellent column in today's NYT. He points out that after the Reagan victory in 1980, and especially since the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, the Food and Drug Administration has been shrunk in terms of resources and personnel, and headed by former lobbyists for Big Agriculture and particularly the meat industry. In fact, meat producers who wanted to voluntarily inspect their own meat for disease were actually prevented from doing so by the FDA during the current administration. This is telling commentary in the context of this weeks' massive demonstrations in South Korea against a new agreement to allow the import of American beef into that country.
All of this suggests another question for Senator McCain. Although he is currently trying to distance himself from the Bush Administration on environmental issues, using energy policy as his chief talking point, Democrats would do well to remember that Senator McCain is one of the principal, longstanding advocates for western ranching interests. As such, his record on environmental regulations, especially those effecting the cattle industry and ranching in general, is something close to perfect: perfectly bad, from either an environmentalist or a public health point of view. My point in discussing that today is not just to point out that this is deplorable, but to continue the project of developing talking points for the campaign. McCain has deep ties to cattle ranchers, who have supported him with serious money for many years. So ask him what he's going to do about meat safety. And while we're at it, maybe we might want to ask him about what sort of foreign policy turns a long-standing ally like South Korea against us as well.

Basic Taking Point on Iraq

2008-06-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

This is best kept as brief as possible. When the point is good, make it and then "don't just do something, stand there," as Dean Atchison once instructed his diplomats. Here is the basic question on the war in Iraq: what is the war aim? What is the application of military force meant to accomplish, and when will we know that that aim has been achieved?
Meanwhile, it is unlikely that any American president will precipitously pull out of Iraq if the consensus was that such a withdrawal would trigger a humanitarian catastrophe. So the question is, do we want a President who is hawkish and vows "I will never surrender," or do we want a President who recognizes that the situation is toxically bad and that we need to get out as soon as we reasonably can?
And now return to the original question.

Obama's Veep

2008-06-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

My view is clear enough to my legions of faithful readers, I think The People have spoken and Senator Clinton has been voted in to the veep slot. However the ultimate choice is Senator Obama's to make, and he needs to consider his options and he might not agree with me about the political imperatives of the situation. The process of choosing a vice-presidential running mate involves an enormous number of variables. It is critical for the campaign but the candidate also must be able to assume the presidency. Today we're seeing the preliminary discussions of "the list" in the media, so I'll join in with my discussion/ranking, but you know I'm going to end up with Clinton in the #1 rank as best choice; today's discussion is about everybody else.
First there's a group I think of as the Usual Democratic Party Suspects, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Tom Daschle. None of these look like strong prospects to me. The only one who I'll include on the list is Bayh, but aside from a steady moderate-liberal political profile, his best asset is he's a very midwestern, white-bread character, a Clinton supporter and the scion of a Democratic dynasty in the Upper Midwest, which is indeed crucial territory for Obama. Biden is too old, too loud, and too Old Washington, if he had a conservative cachet he might bring "balance," but he doesn't. Obama will need his help as chairman of the Judiciary Committee when John Paul Stevens retires. Dodd and Daschle are much too mild and soft-spoken for the gladiatorial aspects of the Veep role in the national campaign. In Daschle's case, it's true, there's a bit of "Minnesota nice" sidewinder under the mildness, but he has the onus of having been ignominiously ousted from his Senate seat by a Republican challenger. Only Bayh makes the cut from the old Democratic bench.
Mike Bloomberg likes to be a chronic mentionee, and he certainly has exceeded all expectations as Republican mayor of New York (although the second crane incident might count as a substantial failure). He would supposedly help with the Jewish vote, where Obama supposedly has problems. The two problems with that argument are a) Leibermenschen notwithstanding, the Jewish vote continues to be largely Democratic in any event, and the conservative minority may have crested with the conservative movement in general, and b) Obama's problems with white working class, rural, and union voters is a bigger problem, and those folks are mostly Protestant and unimpressed with fancy New Yorkers. But really the decisive argument here is the same one that applies to the rebellious Republican Chuck Hagel: a campaign that needs to unify a fractious Democratic Party isn't going to go with a Republican. (Not that Hagel would bolt on the GOP anyway, he's not that kind of guy.) I think we can safely rule both Bloomberg and Hagel out.
You have the military men, Wesley Clark and Jim Webb. On the one hand, national security voters are going to go with McCain, that's his main identity, so you don't want to throw too much good money after bad chasing voters you're not going to get anyway. On the other hand, the McCain campaign will keep national security in the air, mentioning it every day from now until November, so it might be a good thing to have someone who can handle all the counterpunching that will have to be done over that issue. Clark, though, is not seen as a leader (anymore) in military circles, after his close association with the Clinton administration and his subsequent runs for the Democratic nomination. Liberal generals are wonderful creatures but somewhat exotic to the voters, and they are seen negatively by the "support the troops" crowd. By all reports Clark is also a bit too much the star of his own movie for the veep slot (like Bloomberg, he'll make sure he's on the list if you don't). Cross him off. Webb does get on the list. He's a New Democrat, a war hero in Vietnam, a political champion who won a Senate seat for the Democrats in Virginia, now a bellwether state. Personally I don't care for his aggrieved soldier routine (he can't admit to his homeboys that Vietnam was a mistake), but he would be a help to Obama going up against McCain.
There are the political warhorses Ed Rendell and John Edwards. I like Edwards a lot more now than I did in 2004, I like the militant populist Edwards who's going to take the fight to the corporatists. However, he was the veep candidate on the losing ticket last time and that makes it hard to justify choosing him again. That's also a hard choice to justify because he came in a lagging third this time around: why pick him if you're not going to pick Clinton? And then there was that reporting about the troubles that the Kerry campaign had with him. He certainly could help with the downscale white demographic, but I think we can cross him off. Rendell is a little better of a prospect, but he gets you Pennsylvania and that's all that he gets you. National voters won't remember that he was a loyal Clintonista, but they will hear his strong East Coast urban accent. Obama can do better, even if he wants a Clinton supporter.
Can Obama choose a woman other than Clinton? Maybe yes. I think it's hard to gauge whether a woman veep is more asset or liability, but the demographics of the Democratic Party suggest that it might be a good idea. I'm gratified to see Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, who I've been touting on this blog since last year, emerging as the most-mentioned Woman Who's Not Clinton. After her comes Claire McCaskill of Missouri. A sleeper is Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, although I admit that I don't know if she'd be available (guy in my pajamas that I am). Some women are going to be on the list for sure, and at the moment the buzz seems to put Sebelius above McCaskill, although it's true that Missouri turns out to be an important battleground. On the other hand if the Dems could put Kansas into play that would be an unexpected headache for the GOP. Both are midwesterners which is good, both are young which is good.
My #2 on The List, though, has to be Bill Richardson. His assets are extensive: forget about the problem with the Hispanic voters (a major issue); no more problem about lack of foreign policy expertise; New Mexico is yours; he is someone who is seen as both a veteran Clintonista and someone who stood up to the Clinton machine for Obama, as well as a candidate in his own right, the only other one who rose up out of Seven Dwarfs status in the primaries. If he's not the veep, he'll be at the top of the list for Secretary of State.
So, my ranking: #5, Claire McCaskill; #4, tie between Evan Bayh and Jim Webb; #3, Kathleen Sebelius; #2, Bill Richardson, and the #1 prospect for Veep is Hillary Clinton. You heard it here millionth.

Put Clinton on the Ticket

2008-06-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

Today is Tuesday June 3rd, the day of the last primaries, Montana and South Dakota. My 83-year-old mother called me this afternoon to ask about the superdelegates. She and my dad voted for Obama in the Ohio primary, but today she was under the impression that Clinton had won the popular vote, and that the superdelegates might swing to Obama anyway, which rightly struck her as dubious. We talked awhile and I assured her that Obama was going to be the nominee fair and square. (It's true that the Florida and Michigan fiasco puts the whole thing under something of a cloud, and that's got to be a terrible thing for the Clintons.) But later when G. and I turned on MSNBC I was really struck by a number I saw. It was at 6:30PM. The popular vote numbers (I'm not clear on how these were calculated, assuming FL and MI were left out) were 17,428,810 for Obama, and 17,425,541 for Clinton. That's a difference of 3,269 votes out of over 34.8 million cast! That's a statistical tie. Two points for my Democratic, Obama-supporting friends: 1) As Democrats, we're supposed to be people who respect small-"d" democracy, consensus politics. I'm not impressed with your dislike of Clinton, if you dislike her, when your sentiments are put up against over 17 million people, half of the Democratic primary electorate, who voted for her. Are you with the people, or with yourself? 2) Some of my friends are saying that this election is going to be an easy thing. Obama doesn't need to make painful political calculations. Think again. This one is going to be hard-fought, and the Democrats should have won the last two, remember, but they screwed them both up. We must not leave anything to chance. As to the discussion of Clinton's statement today that she would be available (I don't have her exact words) for the VP slot, I saw this as more humble than arrogant. After all, of course she's a prospect for the VP slot, let's be real. But in stating her availability, she was saying to Obama, "OK, you can reject me. I've put my cards on the table. The decision is yours to make, you know I won't reject you." She was precisely not playing games. Put her on the ticket.

Job McDole

2008-05-29T05:37:00.000-07:00

I am pleasantly surprised that Barack Obama turns out to be scrappy in his jousting with John McCain. Of particular interest is the back-and-forth about the war in Iraq, and foreign policy in general. Apparently, McCain means to slam Obama's honor, patriotism, integrity, manliness, etc., each and every time the young whippersnapper so much as dares to mention foreign policy or military matters. I'm sure McCain will learn to pedal the rhetoric back a bit as he adjusts to the pace of a summer-long campaign. The one soldierly virtue that the Republicans need this time around, and that McCain has in abundance, is steadfastness: don't wait for McCain to start going wobbly when the polls are down. The other soldierly virtues, not so much; the problem for the classic Republican national security campaign that McCain will run (and that won in 2004) is that anybody paying attention can see that a hawk is exactly what the USA doesn't need at this juncture. Politically speaking, the war is exceedingly unpopular. The war aim isn't clear, criteria for "victory" are very fuzzy. The President, speaking at the Air Force Academy graduation yesterday, said that he was going to make clear what victory and closure would consist of, and then launched into an impossible rhetorical laundry list (secular democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan; the region at peace and prosperity; no "havens for the terrorists," and three or four other "items"). It was almost a self-parodic illustration of the extent of the quagmire. Meanwhile, Barack Obama (unlike Hillary Clinton) offers an unambiguous alternative: his stated goal all along has been to extricate the US from Iraq as quickly as possible. If the election thus becomes a referendum on the war - vote for McCain if you think that the war is a good idea, vote for Obama if you don't - by all indications McCain loses. Add to this personality differences: McCain is all prickly impatience, and he is unable to conceal his contempt for opponents, while the laid-back Obama dishes out a feel-good rhetoric of conciliation, and comes out of the primaries with a reputation as the high-roader. McCain is badly whipsawed. He can't win without conservative support, but the sense of the electorate is that the conservatives have had their turn at bat and it's time for a new inning. McCain, the angry old man (and notably pale of visage I might add) is coming to this scenario out of central casting. Obama should keep on talking about the war, about diplomacy, about national security. Take that issue away from McCain and he's got precious little left to fight with.

Will the Left Sink the Democrats?

2008-05-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

The left has decided that Barack Obama is their candidate. That's not news, although why the left coalesced around Obama rather than Clinton or Edwards is a matter that bears some speculation, as either of the other two are at least as left as Obama on the issues (Edwards was the farthest left in this primary season). What is news is that the left turns out to be a problem as we find ourselves in an exceedingly delicate political situation here in the far endgame of the Democratic primaries. I will try to be as direct as possible: both the left and the black voters are failing to appreciate the gravity of Obama's problems with working class whites. They are also making the big mistake of construing all of Clinton's voters as anti-Obama voters, ignoring two things: 1) many of those voters have been supporting Clinton since way before Obama emerged as the front-runner, and 2) many (almost certainly most) of Clinton's voters are motivated primarily by economic concerns. They see Clinton as the best hope of economic improvement. Clinton's voters are for the most part voting for Clinton, not voting against Obama. It was disappointing to hear an African-American caller on C-Span's Washington Journal the other day denigrating Clinton's supporters as ignorant crackers and Rush Limbaugh dittoheads. I would expect people who have been unfairly maligned for political ends to be sensitive to not doing that, but I guess I'm too optimistic. And that brings me to Florida and Michigan. I was also disappointed to hear Rachel Maddow on MSNBC making a distinction between what she called an "ethical" position - Michigan and Florida ought to be disenfranchised because they "didn't follow the rules" - and a "strategic" position - Clinton's, that is, what is needed to win the nomination. This manages to imply that Clinton is unethical and at the same time that the voters of Michigan and Florida deserve to be punished for some wrongdoing. Double nonsense. The situation with Florida and Michigan is a fiasco, to be sure, but now the reality is that the Democrats need both states to win the election. Contrary to what some of my Democratic friends seem to think, this election is not going to be an easy thing. We cannot write anyone off, concede any battle. Maddow, like a lot of Obama supporters, wants to silence Michigan and Florida because she's in the tank for Obama. What about consensus? What about representation? Who are these boutique "progressives" who turn out to be obtuse about consensus politics, alienated from working class people, disdainful of rural whites, hostile to compromise? Populists they ain't, folks, and this old-fashioned liberal says that if the Democratic Party loses the current wide-open opportunity to become a real alternative for ordinary working class whites, it might mean another generation of Republican power. What we are now going to find out is, how wise is the leader? Will Obama show that he is a bigger person than so many of his supporters are turning out to be?

Depends on What You Mean By "Rise"

2008-05-16T05:43:00.000-07:00

It's not surprising that the success of the candidacy of Barack Obama is causing dramatic effects in the politics of the South. But Obama has taken us into the land of unforeseen consequences, and small surprises, and lessons, abound. Mostly this morning I am thinking about the Democratic Party. The Party now needs to rise to the historical moment, define itself, show that it can win elections, and present a clear (enough) and compelling (enough) vision and agenda to govern. Right now we are working out what exactly the Democratic coalition is, and until that comes into focus we will not be able to develop a coherent philosophy, because we don't at the moment know who we are. These abstractions are made very concrete by the political news coming out of the Old South. A "perfect storm" scenario has developed as the candidacy of Obama has at long last awakened the sleeping giant of the Southern black electorate, at the same time as the Republican Party is left holding the bag of an alarmingly bad economy, a hugely unpopular war, and a president whose disapproval ratings are higher than those of Richard Nixon's on the eve of his resignation. Add to this decades of immigration into the region of people, white, black, and otherwise, who don't share the political instincts and tropes of the old, apartheid South.
But Democrats need to be careful. Consider the lessons of the recent victory in a special election of Travis Childers to Congress in a heretofore safely Republican district in Mississippi. Childers won with overwhelming support of black voters there, and their numbers had been greatly increased by the Obama phenomenon. But he also was able to gain enough white votes to win because he is a staunch Dixiecrat, against gun control, against abortion rights: someone who would have had to run as a Republican in many other regions of the country. The key lesson in this is about party loyalty: the bridge between social conservatives who are disenchanted with the economic and foreign policy of the Republican establishment and African-American voters in the South is the Democratic Party. A Party that represents real black civic power and enfranchisement, while still appealing to traditional regional values, can only be based on the concept of Party loyalty at this point; later on we can grow into our new coalition. Right now it's just a practical reality that the Dixiecrats need the African-American vote, and the African-American community needs white allies. This is not the same conceptual equation as building something on "the left," or winning a battle between conservatives and liberals. For that matter, many Southern blacks are also strong Christians, law and order folks, and so on.
Meanwhile the race issue, that has floated the Republicans' boat so many times in the past, threatens to sink it now. In the special election in Mississippi Republicans were quick to play the race card (look, it's not some "dirty little secret" that the GOP uses racist tactics in the South; apart from national security rhetoric and Christian rhetoric, race baiting has long been the main tactic of the GOP in the region). But this time, running ads "tying" (I'm not sure how "tying" works) Childers to Obama had the effect of rallying the newly-galvanized black voters to Childers' cause. It works both ways: if the main issue in Republican rhetoric in the South is going to be built around the point that Obama is black, that means that the Republicans are distinguished from the Democrats mainly on race, and not in a good way. Nor can the Republicans simply walk away from their base, which has helped them win so many times before: somewhere around one-third of the Republicans' voters are frankly, explicitly racist at least in the sense that they would decline to vote for a black, and they will tell you so if asked (roughly mapping onto the one-third who identify themselves as "Christian fundamentalist," sadly enough. What happens to the GOP if being a self-identified Christian comes to mean that one is against racism?).
That brings me to the last point. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show this week ran clips of racist white voters in West Virginia. One middle-aged woman in a diner said that granting the history of conflict between blacks and whites, she was frightened of black candidates and would vote against them. To many of us (myself included) this may seem like a rather bizarre way to process America's history of slavery and racism (all Stewart had to do to get his laugh was run the clip and mug at the camera in disbelief), but we have to take a deep breath and try to listen to these people, understand their fears, and communicate with them. The Democratic Party will go on to govern in the years ahead, and to transform the country in the needed ways, if we can present an alternative political reality to people like her.

Radicals Don't Want to Talk Either

2008-05-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

I think I can fill in a little bit more than just adding to the liberal chorus of outrage over Bush's comments to the Knesset to the effect that the Democrats, through the practice of diplomacy (disdained in itself by the Bush administration), commit appeasement like Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. Three points:
1) The radicals and terrorists reject negotiation, just as Bush does. It is a canard to suggest that Obama thinks that "some argument" will change the minds of radical religious militants. Obama (and Carter) are trying to engage now-marginalized moderate Arab voices, as any sensible diplomacy must. What Bush's rhetoric does is to imply that any representative of, say, Iran or Syria is a "terrorist," something not even the Israelis would claim: thus Bush dangerously distorts grave matters of foriegn policy in the name of holding on to political power.
2) What needs to be repeated enough to get through to the popular consciousness is that the Republicans plan to run a national security campaign against the Democrats. In the 2004 election Vice-President Cheney publicly stated that a Democratic victory would make terrorist attacks more probable. It might be that the Democrats should engage with this issue, rather than trying to change the subject: voters can decide at the polls whether the appropriate approach to reforming America's diplomatic profile in the years to come is engagement or belligerence. There is no doubt that John McCain would continue with the current belligerence.
3) Common sense: if you are a radical anti-American of any kind, and particularly if your goal is to alienate the Arab world from the USA, what you want is for the Republican conservatives to stay in power. It greatly legitimizes Al Qaeda and other such groups when they are portrayed by the Americans as military foes, whereas the European approach, to view them as a problem for law enforcement, both diminishes them and has proved much more effective in terms of both security and diplomacy. I'm sure Osama bin Laden is hoping for a Republican victory, just as Raoul Castro is: that would help to keep them in business.

How the Rules Are Helping Clinton

2008-05-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

Today Senator Clinton is trying out the line that "If we'd had the Republican rules I'd be the nominee right now, and if the Republicans had had our rules they'd still be fighting." This may be true on both counts (that's uncertain), but it misdirects our attention away from the real differences between the two parties and the real political consequences of those differences. The point of the proportional allocation on the Democrat side was to promote consensus democratic practice. The idea was to force the candidates to negotiate with each other, with the goal of a more inclusive ticket. I very much support this commitment to building a populist Democratic Party, not least because it acknowledges the fact that in our system, the voter is sovereign: we are electing the representative of the people's will, not a king or a queen. And the fact is that the Democratic rules have put Clinton in her current position, namely that Obama really has very little choice but to put her on the ticket. The people have spoken because they were allowed to speak. The primary voters have divided themselves into two halves, and that forces the leaders to bring the two halves back together. This is the people leading, and the leaders following: exactly what the proportional delegate allocation was meant to achieve. In the more pluralistic future that is fast approaching this difference between the parties could be decisive, if the Democrats become the populist party, as we should.

The Morning After Indiana and North Carolina

2008-05-07T03:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I opined that yesterday's primary would only be decisive if Obama won both states. This morning I'm not so sure: Obama has won North Carolina by 15 points, 56% to 41%, while Clinton squeaked by in Indiana at the low end of a 2 point difference. I had expected the hockey game to continue, and as someone who's been for Clinton since last summer, I even had my clever post headline (if nothing else) for today: "Don't Tell Obama, I'm Still With Mama." Pretty good, eh? But that's not how I feel. What I'm thinking about are three things: 1) Now I can finally, really feel the inspiration of a charismatic young black Democrat who has a solid chance to win the presidency. That feels really good, my caution as a party loyalist prevented me from letting myself go with those feelings up until now. 2) I'm starting to worry about the general election, and specifically about whether Obama will be able to draw enough white votes to win. The news from the primaries is good on that: Indiana is an overwhelmingly white state and about half of the Democratic primary voters pulled the lever for Obama yesterday, and his unexpectedly large margin of victory in North Carolina means that he managed to draw significant white support there as well (I know that Southern whites are sensitive about the stereotype that they're more racist than everybody else, and I think that some white Democrats in North Carolina didn't like the part that they'd been assigned in the script that they were handed). But the fact that he has not, in fact, managed to win white majorities in big states, and this among Democratic primary voters, looks like the biggest political issue going forward. 3) I am convinced that he needs to put Clinton on the ticket, both out of respect for the Democratic Party ethos of consensual democracy and for more pragmatic political reasons (actually those reasons are the same, come to think of it). Probably the best thing for Clinton to do (assuming that she wants the VP spot, I think that she does want it) is to withdraw, go home, and wait for the Obama campaign to do the math. The best thing for Obama to do is to contact her privately and offer her the job, and start working on getting the Democrats into the White House in 2008.

The Morning of Indiana and North Carolina: United We Stand

2008-05-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

Tonight we will learn of the results in the primary voting today in Indiana and North Carolina. It is possible that Obama can put down Clinton's campaign for the nomination, if he wins both states. However, as of this morning things are not trending his way in either state, although Indiana is (fittingly) a "jump ball," in a state that Clinton was long expected to win. More worrisome is the degree to which Clinton is narrowing his lead in North Carolina. Any outcome other than a double Obama victory means that the boxing marathon continues.
But this brawl is only over who will be at the top of the ticket. The ticket is decided, and it has been decided by the electorate. Consider the facts, as of this morning: Out of 2,831 total pledged delegates so far, Obama has a 155 lead (and remember that something will still have to be done about Florida and Michigan). Out of approximately 29 million popular votes cast so far, Obama leads by 600,000. The Democratic Party is having a primary, not a winner-take-all election. The goal of the process is to select a winning ticket for November. Consider, also, the demographics: Obama has the black voters, the under-30 voters, the college-educated and urban professionals. Clinton has the older voters, the rural voters, the union voters and blue-collar voters, and enjoys a significant gender gap in a party that is 55% women. Whichever one gets the nomination, they will desperately need (not just need but desperately need) the other to retrieve and rally their respective supporters. The good news is that they can do that: Obama can rally the African-American voters and younger voters if he is the VP candidate, the Clintons can rally the working-class whites and older voters if Clinton is the VP candidate.
I think that that part of it is decided already, folks: we are now involved in an endgame to determine which of them will be on the top of the ticket.

Operation Obfuscation

2008-05-06T01:25:00.000-07:00

Just a note on some discussion of Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" on MSNBC last night. Limbaugh has been telling his audience that Republicans should cross over and vote for Clinton in the primaries, his ostensible thesis being that Clinton would be easier to beat in the fall. The MSNBC crew (Matthews, Barnacle) hit the common sense points: 1) Limbaugh doesn't really have the pull to swing a point in a primary, Democrat or Republican; 2) more interestingly, it's at a minimum debatable which candidate, Clinton or Obama, would be the more formidable candidate in the general election (I for one suspect Clinton would be stronger, although at this point it looks like either one would probably win). But I'm posting about this because no one on MSNBC made what I take to be a likely explanation of Rush's schtick (besides that it's some theater for Limbaugh, who is essentially an entertainer): it has been widely reported over the past few primaries that Republicans are crossing over to vote in the Democratic primaries. These are Republicans that are being pulled off of their party, and who are trying to elect the next President, no sabotage intended, and that is very bad news for the GOP: evidence of a real realignment. I think Limbaugh is intentionally obfuscating that. His theatrics divert attention from an embarrassing discussion.

Black Generation Gap

2008-04-29T04:27:00.000-07:00

This morning we wake up to the disturbing reality that the Rev. Wright issue might actually help to bring down the candidacy of Barack Obama. A portent of the future can be seen by random sampling of Fox News, where you will find an obsessive orgy of race-baiting aimed at the white audience, exploiting the dangerously cathartic effect resentful white reactionaries enjoy when they call black people "racist." Bob Herbert in today's NYT takes the line that Rev. Wright, who stated to the press corps yesterday that Louis Farrakhan is "one of the most important voices of the 20th and 21st centuries," is deliberately shooting down Obama. I don't go in for that sort of paranoia (I'm brought up short by the fact that a lot of people actually seem to believe that the Clintons want to sabotage the general election, an outrageous claim), but he might as well be right when we consider today's polling on Real Clear Politics that shows Obama in a dead heat with McCain, while Clinton vs. McCain is at the moment opening up a lead, almost ten points up on the latest AP poll. The real poison was the next thing that Wright said: "Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains." This makes it clear who "the enemy" is.
But I'm not here to pile on. I've posted before to the effect that there is a striking absence of appreciation of, or even listening to, the messages of Rev. Wright and other traditional black voices (Farrakhan, for that matter, develops some of the themes of Malcolm X, who is eminently worth reading). Besides dismissing the ideas of traditional black nationalists as something not worth listening to, there is also no appreciation of the fact that at the nationalist end of the black political spectrum, the more the mainstream reviles you, the more credibility you have. Another factor here is the black generation gap. Older blacks (Bill Cosby, who I admire, is another example) have a sensibility and a worldview reflective of an older, harsher and above all more segregated time (there is even nostalgia for the segregated middle-class neighborhoods of the 40s and 50s, like Russians missing Stalin). Their rhetoric is essentialist, "us" and "them." Obviously this is jarringly dissonant with Obama's attempt at a post-racialist rhetoric.
I don't think that Obama is in any danger at all of losing support from black voters. In fact I think that he might be well-advised to reject Wright in stronger terms than he has so far (Wright appears to be forcing him to do this). But the theme that is emerging on this blog is that Obama has been strategically incorrect in trying to run as a black candidate who is not a black candidate. We cannot overcome our racial problem by going around it (Obama as Ulysses), or over it (Obama as Icarus). We must work through it (Hercules). And whites must remember that racism is a white problem, and that if the country can't elect a black man today that is because the white community must evolve. The best thing about Obama is that he refuses to fall victim to the self-fulfilling prophecy, that we're not ready for him.
Meanwhile as to the proposal, endorsed by McCain and Clinton, of a gasoline-tax holiday over the summer (that is, during the election): shame on the both of them. We need to have a national energy policy that addresses our long-term needs, not pander to the voters with artificial prices that drive up the debt. And cheers for Obama for having no part of it.

Climbing Mt. Race

2008-04-28T11:35:00.000-07:00

I was struck by some discussion of Obama on TV last night (it was probably MSNBC). Obama's problem, it was suggested, was that he was becoming (through the Rev. Wright flap etc.) to be "identified with the black agenda," and that he was therefore increasingly "threatening" to white voters especially the "Reagan Democrat" working-class whites who are voting for Clinton by large margins. This is emerging as a potentially serious problem as some of these voters are openly telling pollsters that they won't vote for Obama if nominated (it is likely that there are more who think this way but are embarrassed to admit it publicly). There are at least two strategies available for the black politician who wants to climb the Everest of American politics, getting elected President. One is to be the "accidental black man," the charismatic and attractive candidate who just happens to be black. Obama has been perceived for much of the past year as the accidental black man, even as he tapped into a deep vein of longing among white voters for the opportunity to redeem themselves at long last by voting for a black candidate. The obvious benefit of the accidental black man strategy is that such a candidate is non-threatening to white people. The unfortunate corollary to this is that the non-accidental black man is (still) threatening. But the accidental black man strategy hasn't worked in any event. Obama got where he is by solidifying his base among African-American voters (black men support Obama by somewhere around 95 percent). The appeal of the accidental black man strategy is that we all, whites and blacks alike, can pat ourselves on the back and say, congratulations, we're all beyond that awful race stuff. But this is a celebration to which we are not entitled. No, a black candidate is still a black candidate, and has no chance of advancement if he is not, for starters, a champion of the "black agenda," whatever that is (I'm not clear on what that is, but I know that "agenda" is a somewhat loaded word that people use when they want their opponents to appear more sinister than they are, as in "the gun-control advocates' agenda"). So what's the other strategy for climbing Mt. Race? That is for a large enough portion of the white electorate to be brought around to the view that the interests of the black community are not antagonistic to their own. This does not involve black people somehow acting any differently than they do (being "less threatening"), but it does involve educating the larger community, Rev. King-style, about the legitimate needs and concerns of the black community. What I'm suggesting is that Obama's grand strategy for transcending race is premature. If a black candidate can get elected to the presidency today (and I don't know if it's possible or not), he ("she" might be a bit of a stretch) will have to do it by simultaneously offering a coherent program addressing the country's various needs and articulating a credible vision for advancing the interests of the African-American community.

Why is Big Media Issues-Free?

2008-04-23T00:51:00.000-07:00

The morning after the Pennsylvania primary, I'm not sure there's much more to say about the Democratic race. The voters are speaking the way the polls were speaking during President Clinton's impeachment trial, and like then the power-brokers and the pundits can ignore the voice of The People for so long and no longer, and in the end we will have the Obama-Clinton ticket, because that's what The People have (already) commanded. The Party may yet disobey this command, but that, I predict, would be a grave error.
This morning something a little weightier interests me. I'm a politics junkie and handicapping the horse race is good fun and all, but the degree to which our political discussion has become issues-free is striking. In the past I've thought that our collective aversion to serious debate was a combination of being too fat and happy and America's legendary anti-intellectualism, but that theory doesn't really do the work it has to do in the spring of 2008. I think it's the very gravity of the situation that is rinsing out even the thin film of policy debate that usually passes for substance in Big Media. Conspiracy theorists are more optimistic than I am: they tend to think that finite groups of willful persons are successfully manipulating events. I think, on the contrary, that we have a tiger by the tail: large structural changes are generally driving things and, for the most part, nobody's in charge. Here's this morning's take on why there is now no substantial policy discussion happening on our politics-saturated television screens:
Dynamic systems, like flowing water, tend to seek equilibrium. Our two-party system, for example, has been successful for a long time because it adds another level of stasis to our political institutions. Where I live here in Puerto Rico, for another example, the public has distributed itself almost precisely into the half of voters who support the "populares" (the pro-status-quo party) and the half who support the "nuevoprogresistas" (the pro-statehood party). 50-50 splits are stable arrangements that are easier to get to than the stability of total victory for one side (and obviously more desirable from the small-"d" democratic point of view). It has always been thus, but the larger the system the more homogenous it appears, and we are now living in a fantastically huge system, not only in terms of persons (hundreds of millions in-country, highly integrated with global billions), but also in terms of information (both in terms of bits and of sources).
Both the proliferation of sources (not only the internet but also cable and satellite TV and radio and, contrary to popular hype, even more print media than ever before) and the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of the population leads to informational and political "cocooning." Individuals are now able to choose their sources of news and opinion and most people very actively construct a customized information environment that largely echoes back their preconceptions (I'm guilty: lately I've been experimenting with networking on Facebook and I very quickly worked myself into Liberal Intelligentsia Land). People now have huge, interactive information resources to work on developing their own world view and theories of what to do and how to do it, and thus the political news becomes simply handicapping the horse race. Big Media is no longer the arena where minds are going to be changed, except in superficial ways (Does he cheat on his wife? Is she obnoxious? Do they cheat on their taxes?).
But most importantly of all, and this is really the thought that is driving me here, real discussion has simply become too radical to be handled by the stasis-maintaining Big Media, because the changes that are necessarily being considered by any real discussion are much more radical than they've been in decades. Tax policy is wildly regressive by any historical standard, and reform means a substantial redistribution of wealth. Health care is similarly dangerously maldistributed, and reform means changes in government, medicine, insurance. America has to stand down as global gendarme and cease to flood the world with weapons, but many communities and whole regions depend on military industry. Can you spell "global warming"? And so on. The irony of our current situation is that it is precisely because the choices that we must make are so radical that we cannot bring ourselves to even discuss them. A paradox is that the more pundits proliferate on the cable news shows, the less they have to say.