Category Archives: conservatism

The God Gap, Revisited

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For the past few years we’ve been subjected to Amy Sullivan’s admonitions about the Democratic Party’s “God Gap” and how liberals need to learn to talk about religion as glibly as conservatives do.

Well, look who’s got a God problem now. Kathleen Parker writes in today’s Washington Post —

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

“Intelligentsia” being party elites, at the heart of which are “professional conservatives [who] are lifelong Washingtonians who live comfortably as organization heads, lobbyists and publicists,” per David Brooks. This group is neither more nor less Christian than any other random segment of America, and if put on the spot to talk publicly about religion I doubt they’d be any more successful than was Howard Dean.

Parker gets better —

Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows.

Is she saying that evangelicals are “lowbrows”? And how do we spell “elitist”? K-A-T-H-L-E-E-N P-A-R-K-E-R?

In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

That’s last one’s going to infuriate movement conservatives more than dissing God.

Ronald Reagan found a way to speak to white evangelical voters that touched their deeply ingrained and tangled narratives about religion, patriotism and race at a time when Bible Belt culture was being exported nationwide via Christian television programming. The Republican Party and a new generation of evangelical media stars like Pat Robertson forged a mutually beneficial alliance that was less about God than it was about money and secular power. And it worked for them for a while, at least in large parts of the country (although not the Northeast).

George Bush caught on to the same trick and was able to keep the alliance going. But the times do change, and most of the nation figured out what a clown Bush is. I also think the Terri Shiavo episode clarified the religion matter, so to speak, for a lot of people.

Social-Christian conservatives might argue that it’s their party, too, and maybe it was the neocons who really screwed the pooch. Or the small-government, deregulation uber alles conservatives who wore out their welcome. And I say there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Pass the popcorn. And tell Amy Sullivan to find a new issue.

The Hole Gets Deeper, the Faithful Keep Digging

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I don’t know that the Right has entirely given up their “it’s still a center-right nation” argument, but lately another talking point is elbowing its way to the center of the rightie attention span. The new argument is that it was the Republican Party that voters rejected, not conservatism.

E.J. Dionne has a slightly different take on this. He notes that McCain picked a right-wing running mate and ran a classically “conservative” campaign against Obama. Yet he got clobbered on election day. Dionne continues,

Note that I have been using the word “conservative,” not “Republican.” This is because the Republican Party is now wholly owned by the conservative movement. The new Democratic majority is built in part on voters who once thought of themselves as moderate Republicans but have abandoned the party in large numbers.

In other words, voters rejected the Republican Party because of the extreme conservatism it has come to represent.

Dionne goes on to say that the GOP is splitting between the “ideological” conservatives and the “dispositional” conservatives.

The ideological conservatives hold to a faith linking small government and tax-cutting to extreme social conservatism. That mix is increasingly incoherent and out of step with an electorate that is more diverse and more suburban than ever. Ideological conservatives talk obsessively about returning to the glory days of Ronald Reagan and sometimes drop Sarah Palin’s name as a talisman.

Dispositional conservatives have leanings and affections but not an ideology. They have had enough with rigid litmus tests, free-market bromides irrelevant to the current economic downturn and anti-government rhetoric that bears no relationship to the large government that conservatives would inevitably preside over if they took power again.

Dionne says, and I agree, that the dispositionals will win out eventually, but not right away. In the short term, the ideologicals will still be in control and calling the shots. The GOP hasn’t yet stopped digging the hole it’s in.

Shifting gears just a bit — a few days ago, Dionne wrote another column in which he expressed hope that the Obama administration will help the nation find common ground on abortion.

“There surely is some common ground,” Obama declared toward the end of the third presidential debate.

He argued that “those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say, ‘We should try to prevent unintended pregnancies by providing appropriate education to our youth, communicating that sexuality is sacred and that they should not be engaged in cavalier activity, and providing options for adoption, and helping single mothers if they want to choose to keep the baby.’ ” Obama added: “Nobody’s pro-abortion.”

To which I said, yeah, right. Wake me up when it happens. There have been several attempts to create a “common ground” movement going back to the 1980s, and every time it is attempted it quickly falls apart. Essentially, someone on the pro-choice side makes the same speech Obama made in the third debate. And then the anti-choice side proclaims it doesn’t negotiate with baby-killers. End of attempt.

But today I read at Washingtonpost.com that some on the anti-reproductive rights side are waving a white flag and expressing a willingness to talk. Jacqueline L. Salmon writes,

Frustrated by the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a growing number of antiabortion pastors, conservative academics and activists are setting aside efforts to outlaw abortion and instead are focusing on building social programs and developing other assistance for pregnant women to reduce the number of abortions.

Some of the activists are actually working with abortion rights advocates to push for legislation in Congress that would provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education — services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies.

The day after the election I explained why I believe abortion is done as a national issue. That doesn’t mean we won’t still be hearing about it on a national level, and in some regions of the country it still has some clout. But the last election revealed that opposition to abortion has no power whatsoever to swing a national election. If anything, I believe their rigid anti-reproduction rights position cost the GOP quite a bit.

The hard core of the anti-reproduction rights movement is unmoved, of course.

“It’s a sellout, as far as we are concerned,” said Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League. “We don’t think it’s really genuine. You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.”

Tons of data collected around the world over many years reveal that there is one sure way to reduce abortion — increase the use of contraception. From Alan Guttmacher:

Publicly funded family planning clinic services already enable U.S. women to prevent 1.4 million unintended pregnancies each year, an estimated 600,000 of which would end in abortion. Without these services, the annual number of unintended pregnancies and abortions would be nearly 50% higher. Among many other benefits, family planning clinic services also save $4.3 billion in public funds each year.

The irony is that Planned Parenthood may very well prevent more abortions than all of the anti-choice organizations combined.

Anyway, whether pregnancy assistance programs will make any measurable difference in abortion rates remains to be seen, but as long as they aren’t coercive, hey — give it a try.

Update: See Steve Benen.

Biting Back

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Little stories that seem to fit together … Mike Allen and Andy Barr write for The Politico,

A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, because “she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.”

Barone said in an e-mail that he “was attempting to be humorous and … went over the line.” …

…“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby,” Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. “They wanted her to kill that child. … I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.” …

… About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Of course Barone wasn’t attempting to be humorous. He was being mean and hateful, period. What’s interesting to me is the way the audience reacted. He was speaking to members of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, which means it was not an Ivy League elitist crowd. And they didn’t just sit there, seething but silent; they weren’t having it. They bit back.

Some post-election analysis in the Greensboro Telegram says Elizabeth Dole lost her Senate seat because of negative campaigning.

Instead of fighting back with positive ads that portrayed herself in a positive light and tried to counteract the negative impressions being created of her with the electorate, Dole spent most of her money going after Hagan. …

… The final straw for Dole may have been the “Godless Americans” ad. She had actually been tightening the race in PPP’s tracking polls but much of her crossover support from Democrats fell apart in the days after she went on the air with that message, which may have hurt her perception as a moderate with swing voters.

Note the closing sentence:

That tactic might have worked in a North Carolina campaign 20 years ago. But the state has changed, and Kay Hagan is more 21st century North Carolina than Elizabeth Dole is.

In the recent election both sides used negative campaigns, but not to the same effect. Joni Balter writes for The Seattle Times,

Obama was called a Muslim — as a swearword not a religion — a terrorist, a socialist, a Marxist and every other “ist.” Yet Obama never lost his focus. His advertising pals did their best to portray McCain as George Bush’s clone. Voters found that image scarier. Eeeeeeeeee.

I think voters found the “Bush clone” charge more credible, also.

Obama’s reassuring voice and sometimes boring consistent talk about helping the middle class gave him the edge. Voters wanted a president with a few new ideas. McCain flopped around from message to message, idea to idea.

Mud, even really clever mud, looks trivial in an economic meltdown. The voters may be amazed or numbed by the level of sludge but they clamor for solutions. That is where Obama beat McCain. Because McCain offered few new ideas, the dirt became the message

I think it’s more than just “economic meltdown” causing the change of attitude toward toxic campaigns. I think people are just sick to death of the hate and the lies. Younger people in particular grew up being marketed to in mass media, and IMO on the whole they’re far less credulous about advertising claims than their elders.

Somewhere in the past week I read that a pre-election poll found that something like two-thirds of voters saw Obama as “liberal.” So the GOP worked the “liberal” line — most liberal Democrat in Congress, I think they called him, which isn’t true — and it didn’t frighten anyone. I think for most people the word liberal, like fascist, has become a meaningless pejorative divorced from any political definition. It’s like calling someone a douchebag, in other words. It defines an adversary by the speaker’s dislike of him, and nothing more.

Now, I would like to educate people as to what liberal really means and restore the term to its previous luster. But conservatives had better beware that the term conservative is going down the same road, to mean something like flaming douchebag.

But the larger point is that the country has changed. I think the Atwater-Rove style of scorched-earth campaigning has lost its effectiveness. I’m not saying negative campaigns will go away, but I think the “anything goes” days are over. I think people are sick to death of being emotionally manipulated and lied to by politicians who, when they’re elected, turn out to be really, really bad.

Never Say Never

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I wrote yesterday that I hadn’t seen any Democrats talk of a permanent majority. Well, now I’ve found one.

“This was not just a change election, but a sea-change election,” Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, said during remarks at the National Press Club. “This is the end of the conservative era.”

“What you’re seeing in the nation is the emergence of a center-left majority,” Borosage continued. “We are witnessing the creation of a permanent progressive majority.”

Let’s forget the word “permanent,” shall we? That’s nonsense. The pendulum will continue to swing. But the rest of the Politico article linked above makes some critical points.

The groups Democrats were successfully able to court in 2008, including Hispanics, single women, Asians and youth voters, are a growing part of a electorate, said [Stan] Greenberg, while the base voters Republicans have depended on have become a proportionately smaller part of it.

Conservatives ought to be worried that 66 percent of voters under 30 voted for Barack Obama. A clear majority of voters between the ages of 30 and 64 voted for Obama. Only the 65+ voters preferred John McCain. This doesn’t bode well for the future of the Republican Party.

Certainly, many of those young voters might be persuaded to vote Republican in the future. However, this election shows us that this group won’t be won over by Atwater-Rove style “fear and smear” campaigns. This means the current Republican establishment has no clue how to campaign to them. Also, I think Republicans have bleeped up so badly that younger voters will be wary of them for a very long time. They are not likely to switch allegiances until Democrats bleep up really badly. Which, of course, they are capable of doing.

Back to Stan Greenberg:

“A lot of Republican voters were brought in with gimmicks,” the pollster said. “They had their base and then would try to pick off specific groups of voters on narrow issues.”

Greenberg insisted meanwhile that those who voted for Obama “share a world view.”

I think this is critical. I’ve lectured many times on the patched-together nature of the Reagan coalition. People calling themselves “conservatives” in America really do not share a worldview in the intellectual sense. They share a lot of resentments and biases, yes. They are attracted to the gauzy glow of a shared mythos, and the imagery (e.g., cheesy eagle art), narratives and slogans that go with it.

Other than that, however, conservatives don’t make sense. They want “small government” but a big military. They support war as a solution to foreign policy problems, but they don’t want to raise taxes to pay for war. They want “liberty” but support warrantless wiretaps. They want “free markets” but mostly support corporate welfare. They want government “off our backs” but in our bedrooms. (One could do a lot with that last one, metaphorically speaking, but I think I’ll leave that to your imaginations.)

In other words, they have a laundry list of positions (on which they do not all agree), but the positions do not make an integrated whole. They don’t see how the parts fit together. Well, they don’t fit together. But they should, if they’re going to come together as a philosophy of governance. This give us a clue why a Republican Congress, working together with a Republican president, totally bleeped up large parts of the planet.

Frankly, after the New Deal coalition broke up in the early 1970s, Democrats didn’t have much in the way of a worldview, either. Less ideological than Reagan Republicans, Dems have been great at thinking up programs to solve this or that problem, but beyond “good government” they had no glowing worldview to unite them or make the Dem brand distinctive. They had no talent for pointing to the shining city on the hill.

Republicans, on the other hand, were great at pointing to the shining city on the hill. They developed a religious faith that if they were true to their ideology, it would lead them to the Promised Land. But, as I’ve said, their ideology is a disjointed mess. And as the luminous Saint Ronald fades from memory, if not from rhetoric, they’ve forgotten the shining city and have fallen back on stoking hate, fear and wedge issues to keep the coalition together.

[Update: Yes, I know Saint Ronald stoked hate, fear and wedge issues also, but he made these nasty things sound virtuous and positive. A large part of Reagan’s appeal was that he could make bigots feel good about themselves again. There was genius to that. No one who has come after has been able to match him.]

The hopes many of us have pinned on Barack Obama is that he personifies the best of both sides. He has the rhetorical skills to show us the shining city, while at the same time he’s got the smarts to see how the parts fit together, how the details add up to a big picture. If he gets anywhere in the ball park of being the president he promises to be, he’ll be a great president.

(This morning I changed the default blog category, the stuff that is listed after “Filed Under,” from “Bush Administration” to “Obama Administration.” Boy, did that feel good.)

I’ve been having a lot of fun reading conservative commentary on where conservatism should go from here, and I hope to write about that sometime over the weekend.

Dear Conservatives: Pick Your Fights

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This is to be the first of an irregular series offering advice to conservatives, explaining to them why they lost and what they need to do to win in the future. They won’t take it, but there are things that need to be said, for the record.

Today’s advice: Pick Your Fights.

During the Clinton years I tried giving this same advice to righties when they wondered why most Americans still liked Clinton after all the mud that was slung at him. Righties I talked to wanted big, screaming banner headlines in the newspapers every single bleeping day about whatever allegation was being pushed by the Right at the moment. They wanted this whether there had been new developments or not.

As it was, every bleeping time one opened a newspaper or flipped on cable television, there was Trent Lott or Bob Barr or Tom DeLay or somebody accusing the Clintons of one thing or another. And I truly think after a while most Americans tuned it out. The constant stream of allegations became white noise. The economy was good, there were few apparent crises (and what crises did exist seemed far, far away), gas was cheap, life was good. Plus, the President was a likable guy whose public persona didn’t mesh with the way the Right portrayed him.

I honestly think the steady drumbeat of Whitewater Whitewater Whitewater to some extent inoculated President Clinton from fatal damage when the Monica, um, involvement was exposed. People were so used to the Right screaming about scandal that, when a real scandal came along, it didn’t seem that big a deal.

Also, the Right’s perpetual ire over everything Clinton was out of touch with the public mood. There is much to criticize about the Clinton Administration. Just one example — free trade policies. But the buzzword of the later Clinton years was complacency. Not hysteria.

I think a similar phenomenon took hold during the recent election campaign. Every bleeping day the Right was going on about Bill Ayers or the Rev. Wright, or twisting something Barack Obama said into a scandal. But when people saw Obama for themselves, they saw he was hardly the wild-eyed radical. And while the Right frantically looked for the magic bullet — some scandal that would soil Obama’s public image — Obama talked about real issues and what he thought ought to be done about them.

And they haven’t stopped. The minions are still in campaign smear mode, holding up every single thing Barack Obama does as evidence that he’s the bad guy. Now they’re complaining about Obama’s transition web site, for pity’s sake.

Personally, I hope they stay in perpetual campaign smear mode. It’s good for our side. There’s a rule in business management — when everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. Emergency becomes the “normal.” Well, I’d say that when everything is a scandal, nothing is a scandal. If the Right would learn to STFU until something happened that actually mattered, they’d have more credibility, and their accusations would have some impact.

I think we can count on them not learning that, however.

The Myth of Liberal “Overreach”

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So far I haven’t seen a single Democrat, or independent liberal for that matter, claim that the election of Barack Obama means there will be a permanent Democratic majority forever and ever amen. The best outcome most of us hope for is that Dems will at least keep if not increase their seats in Congress in the 2010 midterms and that President Obama gets a second term. Beyond that, anticipation dissipates into the Unknowable Unknown.

The only certainty is that all compounded things will decay. Nothing lasts forever, in other words.

This has not stopped a number of conservatives from wagging fingers at us and warning us not to expect a permanent Democratic majority. Of course not, dears, but nobody thinks in terms of “permanent majorities” except you. Oh, and clue: As long as there are human beings, history will not end.

The disconnect may be that conservatives don’t grasp the meaning of the word “permanent.” James Antle, associate editor of the American Spectator, writes,

After Tuesday, the Republican remnant in Washington is fearing the worst. While they seem to have dodged a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, they will have less ability to shape and block legislation than at any time since Jimmy Carter’s administration. Conservative Democratic senators are few, and many moderate Republicans from blue states will feel pressure to cave into Obama’s agenda. Republican opinion leaders warn of a big, and perhaps permanent, shift to the left.

It’s happened before and could happen again.

A permanent shift to the left happened before? But it didn’t last, did it? That means it wasn’t permanent.

Conservatives also are warning us not to “overreach,” meaning don’t go all New Deal on us. Antle continues,

But these concerns could be as overwrought as Democratic worries that their party would forever be shut out of power by an ascendant right wing after November 2004. Undivided American government leads to overreach, and overreach leads to defeat. It took four years of Carter to bring about eight years of Ronald Reagan. It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress.

Let’s think about this. Did Reagan sweep Carter out of office in 1980 because of “overreach”? Did George Bush and the GOP win in 2000 because the Clinton Administration was guilty of “overreach”? That’s not how I remember it. There were many factors that caused Dems to lose those elections, some of which were the fault of Dem administrations and Dems in Congress, and some of which were not. But “overreach” was not one of those factors.

Carter lost in 1980 mostly because he seemed weak and ineffectual, not because he “overreached.” His actual policies were middle-of-the-road for the time. Among his achievements were deregulation of the airline and telephone industries.

Regarding “It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress” — let us note that President Clinton won re-election easily in 1996. And, frankly, I think it’s possible that he would have been re-elected in 2000 if he could have run for a third term.

So what “overreach” is Antle talking about? If you want to see an example of “overreach,” let’s see — invading Iraq? the Patriot Act? The Terri Schiavo episode?

Disintegration

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The Right is splintering into McCain and Palin camps. C’est une hoot.

Faux News, a wholly owned subsidiary of the upper echelon of the Republican Party, is leading the charge against Palin.

Even I think the “she’s so dumb she doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story is farfetched. The larger point is that the string-pullers want to make Sarah Palin the scapegoat. They are swift-boating their own.

The puppets are not having it. Erick Erickson of Redstate announces Operation Leper:

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

I think the whispering campaign is being facilitated from higher up than the McCain campaign, but that’s a hunch. I’m not exactly a GOP insider. Certainly most of the whispering is coming from the McCain campaign, but if higher-ups didn’t want Palin to be the scapegoat, you know Faux wouldn’t be repeating the whispers.

My sense of things is that most of the Right blogosphere is siding with Palin, not McCain. But there is disintegration among rightie bloggers, too. For example, there has been some sort of falling out between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged. I don’t quite understand what’s going on with this, but there it is.

I may not be a GOP insider, but I do know that the talking points memo that went out from On High to the GOP minions yesterday had these two bullet points:

  • Warn Democrats that they’d better not pursue a culture war.
  • Warn Democrats that they’d better not push for card check.

I know this because every representative Republican bobblehead on cable news yesterday brought up these two points. And I believe these are points that otherwise would not have been on anyone’s mind yesterday, especially card check. If you haven’t heard about card check, go here for an explanation.

Regarding culture wars, I wonder if the GOP realizes that the anti-reproductive rights movement could be turning into more of a liability than an asset. The alliance with the so-called “pro life” crowd certainly didn’t help the GOP Tuesday. I’m guessing there are closed-door discussions going on right now about whether to cut the cord, so to speak, with the Fetus People. If the FPs are dumped, they will be dumped slowly and gently and gradually so that nobody, including them, notices.

However, my first prediction for 2012 is that by then abortion as a national issue will have quietly been forgotten. It might not survive to 2010, in fact. It will still have potency in some states, of course, but it will be kept local. Unfortunately, fighting same-sex marriage will be ramped up to take abortion’s place as the “central front” of the culture wars.

More interesting fallout:

Take a look at the “McCain Belt” — places where McCain did better than Bush did in 2004.

The map linked above inspires dumb hillbilly jokes, and as a hillbilly-American myself, I know a lot of ’em. But I will refrain. For now.

This will not surprise you — the “Impeach Obama” campaign already is underway.

Howling in a Well-Appointed Wilderness

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The day has dawned, folks. Nothing left to do but vote. I suggest voting as early in the day as possible.

There is a lot of good commentary available today, none of which was written by David Brooks. Brooks has outdone himself in teh stupid today, warning us Obama supporters that we can’t imagine the deprivation that awaits us.

His [Obama’s] upscale, post-boomer cohort has rallied behind him with unalloyed fervor. Major college newspapers have endorsed him at a rate of 63 to 1. The upscale educated class — from the universities, the media, the law and the financial centers — has financed his $600 million campaign (which relied on big-dollar donations even more heavily than George W. Bush’s 2004 effort). This cohort will soon become the ruling class.

And the irony is that they will be confronted by the problem for which they have the least experience and for which they are the least prepared: the problem of scarcity.

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

Most of the post-boomers I know live extremely frugally, often because they are still paying off college loans and because the basic costs of living eats their entire income. The Gen Y post-boomers in particular are the first generation in living memory with no expectation that they look forward to lives of growing wealth.

However, Brooks imagines that, because Obama’s supporters tend to be more educated than McCain’s, Obama supporters are all well-to-do.

Barack Obama is a child of the 1960s. His mother was born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. For people in Obama’s generation, the great disruption had already occurred by the time they hit adulthood. Theirs is a generation of consolidation and neo-traditionalism — a generation of sunscreen and bicycle helmets, more anxious about parenthood than anything else.

Obama is not only a member of this temperate generation, but of its most educated segment. He has lived nearly his entire adult life within a few miles of one or another of the country’s top 10 universities.

I think the “great disruption” Brooks refers to is the 1960s.

Certainly there are plenty of young and affluent people who are keenly interested in sunscreen and bicycle helmets. But Brooks assumes the young folks supporting Obama have no idea what scarcity is and have not a care in the world regarding their financial futures.

This, I think, tells us a lot about why the Right (of which Brooks is a member and spear carrier, even though he pretends not to be) has no clue how to appeal to most voters now. In all their screaming about “liberal elitists” they failed to notice that the leadership and intelligentsia (a word I use loosely) of the Right is as spoiled, as insulated, and as elitist as any group of people since the court of Louis XIV.

Brooks concludes,

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

Actually there is a plan for it, which is why smart young liberals (and some of us old ones, too) have worked so hard to take the government away from the Right so we can implement it. It is unfortunate that the gross mismanagement of the Bush Administration has left us with few resources to carry out the plan, but most of us liberal know what has to be done.

We need to stop shoveling money to the already wealthy, to war contractors, to special interests, and instead invest in America. We need to repair infrastructure. We need to invest in education, in new technology, in new industries. We need to stop treating American workers as “cost,” as an expendable resource that can be easily replaced in the third world. We need to relieve both individuals and business of the crushing costs of feeding the health insurance racket.

We need to realize that America has finite resources, and we must set priorities and make cost effective use of those resources for the benefit of the greater good — all of the people of the U.S. — and not to enhance profits that benefit only a select few.

We need to remember that government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

It’s the Right that doesn’t get that, Mr. Brooks. And that’s why you’ll be losing a lot of elections today.

Don’t Forget to Breathe

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The final pre-election polls show Obama in the lead. I would have said “comfortably” in the lead, but you know us lefties. We always expect a cartoon anvil to drop out of the sky and flatten us.

The Right is still running a signature right-wing campaign. They’ve got the illegal immigrant aunt, more 1960s terrorist ties, claims that Obama will destroy entire industries/ban Christianity/start another holocaust. A vote for Obama is a choice to go to hell.

Good thing the election is tomorrow, or in a few more days they’d be claiming Obama wants to eat your baby. With fava beans and a nice chianti.

Michael Tomasky theorizes why the smears aren’t working the way they used to:

That coalition of affinity that Reagan created between right and middle, Bush has put asunder. His failures have made the average, apolitical American as distrustful of conservatism as he or she once was of liberalism – indeed somewhat more so, since the memory of conservative failure is fresher in the mind. This is a new context. Many experts have yet to grasp it. Certain elements within the mainstream media haven’t quite got it yet. And clearly some liberals just can’t believe that it might be the case.

This is not to say that negative campaigning will disappear as of tomorrow. But it is to observe that political contexts change, and eras end. I’m still suspicious enough to use the conditional tense, but by Wednesday morning even the most paranoid liberals may be forced to accept that fact.

I believe we are looking at an enormous political re-aliagnment, bigger than 1980. More like 1933. But these things don’t begin and end neatly. The re-alignment has been going on for a while — at least since Katrina — and I don’t expect it to end tomorrow. I’ll have more thoughts on that later.

The Audacity of Desperation

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Some wingnut found a Weather Underground newsletter from 1975 (I didn’t know the Weather Underground was still around in 1975), and documents that the words “organizers,” “communities,” “audacity,” and “socialism” appeared in close proximity in the same paragraph.

Wow! This proves that Barack Obama is a Marxist! Oh, wait …

This paragraph from the newsletter actually frightened one of the commenters —

… the system itself is inhuman, and socialism is a real alternative; the energy crisis is the fault of Rockefeller and the oil companies, not the Arab people; unemployment is caused by capitalism not “illegal aliens” stealing jobs; war in Indochina or the Mideast is part of the problem, not the solution; political and social action can change things.

I’m not entirely sure why the wingnut found this disturbing. All of these issues were issues in 1975, as I remember. The Yom Kippur was was in 1973 and was still on peoples’ minds in 1975. Also in 1973 OPEC enacted an oil embargo on the U.S., which caused a lot of aggravation. In 1975 we had just pried ourselves out of a war in Indochina, but there was an ongoing war in Lebanon. Most of the issues we are facing now have been going on for a long time.

This post and the commenters also bring up the rumor that Bill Ayers must have ghost-written one of Barack Obama’s books, apparently based on the observation they both speak English and use some of the same words. The Times of London tells us that Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah, are connecting the dots. And if they can’t find dots to connect, they make some.

Fox contacted Dr. Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Oxford who wrote a software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favorite words and phrases. Fox offered Millican $10,000 to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s books.

Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.

Cannon insisted, however, that he was not interested in making an issue of Obama’s memoir “even if it were scientifically proven” to be someone else’s work.

Of course not. The $10,000 was just to satisfy idle curiosity.

Update: Alert blogger Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money shows us the Obama-Ayers-Weather Underground conspiracy is broader than even I had imagined.

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the term “audacity” also appears no less than twelve times in chapter seven alone of US Army Field Manual 3-0. This can only mean that the Weather Underground has already successfully seized control of the United States Army!!!!!11!!1! Has anyone investigated the connections between David Petraeus and Bill Ayers? No one is safe!!!

Further, the Weather Underground had a circular logo. So does Obama. So does Mozilla Firefox.

Is there no end to this?