Category Archives: Democratic Party
On the Couch
Nate Silver’s data say that if the election were today, the electoral college vote would be something like 350 to 188 in favor of Obama. Still, Dems faint in terror at the least discouraging news; the wingnut faithful (although not the GOP party itself) are only now telling themselves that McCain might lose. Nah, he couldn’t.
Rush Limbaugh’s gut is telling him McCain can win (or is it gas?) and John H of Power Tools tells us,
From Drudge: Zogby’s polling yesterday had John McCain pulling into a one-point lead, 48-47, over Barack Obama. That result is an outlier, I suppose, but Obama has never been able to seal the deal with the voters and quite a few remain undecided, one in seven according to a recent AP poll. Throughout the campaign, McCain has made a series of runs where it looked as though he might catch up, only to fall back again. And the state by state polls continue, for some reason, to look worse for McCain than the national numbers.
Still, I have a feeling that once you get past his core constituencies, Obama’s support is very thin. The fact that he has had to try to cast himself as a tax-cutter is revealing. Does anyone really believe it? True, there’s a sucker born every minute, but still… If there really are voters who have contemplated voting for Obama on what are essentially conservative grounds, it would not be surprising if some of them shift their allegiance between now and Tuesday.
I’m not even going to comment on that.
Y’know what? If the poll numbers were exactly reversed, right now the GOP would be making open preparations for the inauguration — “measuring the drapes,” as it were — and the Dems would have written off the election and be debating how to re-organize for 2012.
If Obama wins narrowly, the Right will console itself in the belief that ACORN stole the election and the majority of the people are still behind the rightie agenda. IMO the deepest, darkest, most terrifying nightmare lurking under the bed for righties is that they aren’t the majority. That’s a reality too terrible for them to face, even if God rubbed their noses in it.
Wingnutism is built on the foundational belief that only righties are the real Americans, and all others are freakizoid elitist not-Americans with deranged ideas. If the wingnuts were to realize that most Americans do not, in fact, think as they do, I’m not sure how they would react. Truly, brains would explode. But I don’t think they would ever admit they aren’t the majority. I don’t think they are capable of it. Obama could win every state in the Union on Tuesday, and they still wouldn’t admit they had truly lost.
Center-Right?
In recent days I’ve heard, over and over again, that America is a “center-right” nation, and Obama had better not forget that, else he push liberalism too far. John Meacham of Newsweek writes,
Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal–a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that ‘the majority is to govern’ has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.
Which “past Democratic presidents” are we talking about? Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy certainly were not politically imperiled. Harry Truman didn’t lose public support because of liberal policies, but because of Korea. Jimmy Carter was not, in fact, particularly liberal in his domestic policies (any righties reading this who now are choking and sputtering should do some research), and pushing liberalism too far was not what cost him re-election. Bill Clinton wasn’t notably liberal, either.
IMO only Lyndon Johnson fits Meacham’s mold. Lyndon Johnson pushed liberalism (in the form of his Great Society programs) further than the white majority was ready to go at the time. Of course, that little Vietnam War dustup cost him some support, too.
And isn’t it astonishing how well the right-wing narrative has been imprinted in our brains? Meacham warns that Obama had better not take the too-liberal path that has tripped up so many Democratic presidents, even though it didn’t?
Here’s my problem with the “center-right” claim: Wingnuts see themselves as being “center-right,” even though on any global politcal spectrum they’re hanging off the extreme right end by their fingernails, and Obama’s policy proposals as they are would be considered center-right just about everywhere but here. Those of us who really are liberals quickly acknowledge that Obama is less liberal than we are. So where is the center?
If Obama does win next Tuesday, there will be significant excitement and expectation within the Democratic base that a progressive agenda — universal health care, removing the troops from Iraq — will quickly be passed into law.
If that happens, expect Republicans to use such an agenda as fodder in 2010 for the need to have divided government in Washington.
I can see the Republican campaign now. We warned you people that if you elected Democrats you’d get affordable health care and we’d get out of a pointless war in Iraq. You didn’t listen. And how you’re sorry, huh?
If that happens, expect Republicans to use such an agenda as fodder in 2010 for the need to have divided government in Washington. … Governing and campaigning are not the same thing. And, in a country that — if the Post/ABC survey is to be believed — still tilts center-right, Obama must be careful not to drift too far to the left in the heady early days of his administration.
Yeah, he doesn’t dare actually accomplish anything he promised in order to win the election. Americans don’t really want any of that stuff, even though they elected him because of what he promised. Makes sense.
The Post poll Cillizza talks about said that just 22 percent of likely voters called themselves “liberals” while 38 percent called themselves “moderates” and 37 percent claimed to be “conservatives.” The problem with self-identifying polls like this is that hardly anyone know what “liberal” or “conservative” means any more. If you asked people to define liberal, you’d probably get some nonsense about liberals loving to raise taxes, put everyone on welfare and otherwise waste money. By that definition, I’m not a liberal, either. However, that’s not what liberalism is.
To get a real measure, it would be more accurate to give people some sort of typology test, something like the famous Myers-Briggs personality test, to test actual attitudes and opinions on issues. I bet the results would show the nation is a lot more liberal than it thinks it is.
Update: See Thers at Whskey Fire.
Hate Versus Hope
Like many of you, I suspect, I am skeptical that Barack Obama will be able to accomplish many of his proposals before 2010, or even in his first term. Money is too tight; emotions are too raw. Yes, we can, but it ain’t gonna be easy.
However, I want voters to vote Dem on Tuesday if for no other reason than to send a loud and clear message that the days of Atwater-Rove hate, fear and smear campaigns are over. I want conservatives to understand that if they want to win elections, they’ve got to have something more to offer than the demonization of their opponents. Of course, that would put hacks like Ed Rogers out of work. And what’s not to like about that?
Last night, after the half-hour infomercial, the McCain campaign ran a standard hate ad. Ominous music, unflattering photo of Obama, whispery voice telling us we can’t trust him. How many times have we all seen that same ad? The identities of the candidates change, but it’s the same damnfool ad. I suspect that ad worked against McCain more than for him.
I think the best thing about the infomercial was that it gave voters another look at Obama, so they can see for themselves he’s not frightening or radical. McCain called it a “gauzy feel-good commercial.” Yeah, it was. So what has McCain given us except murky, feel-bad commercials?
Seems to me that every time I see McCain or Palin they’re wiggling their fingers in the air and saying boogaboogaboogabooga. Not exactly a plan for governance. Of course, that was all the plan Bush ever had, either.
As I’ve said before, if you look at the two candidates’ web sites you see that Obama’s “issues” section has ten times the detail as McCain’s “issues” section. So who’s the empty suit?
Even when he stops smearing Obama and addresses issues, McCain offers little else but slogans. For example, if you go to McCain’s economy section and scroll to the bottom of the page, there’s a video called “The McCain Economic Plan.” It is comically insubstantial, consisting mostly of McCain decisively telling us how decisive he is. The only specific offered is the promise to build nuclear power plants.
McCain-Palin supporters are scarier than McCain. This is not to say there aren’t jerks on the Dem side, also, like the asshole in San Francisco who hung Sarah Palin in effigy recently. Keith Olbermann made the guy the Worst Person in the World, and he richly deserved it. I hope the Secret Service let him know that threats to candidates are taken seriously.
But seems to me that all we hear from McCain-Palin people is hate. Well, that and ignorance. This was in the New York Times today:
People at McCain and Palin rallies often accuse Democrats of just wanting handouts. “A lot of people on the other side just want free money,†said Susan Emrich, at a McCain-Palin rally in Hershey on Tuesday. A real-estate agent, she wears a T-shirt that says, “I’m voting for Sarah Palin and that White Haired Dude.†Ms. Emrich would like to attend another rally later that day in nearby Shippensburg, but can’t. “I have to work,†she explains. “I’m a Republican.â€
WTF does that mean? Does Ms. Emrich assume all Democrats are welfare recipients? And then there’s this:
When you ask Republicans what they think of Mr. Obama, the word “socialist†comes up more often than not. They mention that he is a smooth talker, and not in a good way. A lot of them seem to have real problems with Michelle Obama, too, though they cannot pinpoint why.
Of course not.
And they do not much care for that Joe Biden, either, or whatever his name is — many cannot immediately summon it.
Can we say “low-information voter”? See also Sean Quinn’s account of a McCain rally in Miami.
Last night on “Hardball,” Tweety interviewed Tom DeLay. Why? I flipped the channel; there are more entertaining ways to pollute one’s mind than watching DeLay. But now I’m sorry I did. Joan Walsh wrote,
DeLay, of course, was one of the most corrupt, hypocritical and divisive pillars of the 1990s GOP revolution, and he’s hugely to blame for his party’s sad fortunes today. But he still gets around the cable shows, and to see him on “Hardball,” just a half hour before I was on, spewing hate about Obama, was kind of unsettling. Obama’s a radical and a Marxist, he insisted, more radical than Al Gore, John Kerry or Barney Frank. He threw out Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. Ultimately I lost track of the times he called Obama a “Marxist.” But appearing right after DeLay, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz mopped the floor with him, to Matthews’ apparent surprise and enjoyment. Obama should send her flowers. I should send her flowers.
Walsh on the informercial:
So that experience shaped the way I watched Obama’s 30-minute infomercial, and it was a perfect tonic. Maybe it was a dull for a moment or two, but Obama can stand to be a little dull, when he has the likes of DeLay and other vicious hit men tarring him as a dark and dangerous Marxist socialist “redistributionist.” He’s fighting for the right to be one of us: normal, sometimes dull and yet presidential, and his ad did it all tonight.
Can we turn American politics into something other than a freak show? Yes we can!
The Infomercial
No Fear
North Carolinian Terry Mancour looks on the bright side of having his car keyed:
The anecdotal reports from our fellow Obamanauts have documented a string of petty vandalism across New Carolina, with cars bearing Obama stickers getting viciously hacked like this every day. It was an erratic and not particularly successful attempt at voter intimidation. At least I didn’t feel intimidated. And I tried to keep things in perspective.
A century ago there would have been lynchings and homes afire, doors being busted down at 4am, the kind of cruel guerrilla warfare one tends to associate with banana republics and Asian despots. Even a few decades ago there would have been angry meetings, axe-handle wielding thugs, vicious dogs and fire hoses. If the sum total of politically oriented violence in North Carolina was reduced to a few angry words, a scuffle or two and poorly worded public attacks, well, I had to count that as progress.
It’s progress on several fronts, I think. Four years ago I heard from several southerners who said they did not dare put a Kerry bumper sticker on their cars or a Kerry sign on their lawns, and petty vandalism was the least of their fears. Of course, according to righties, the only vandalism that went on was against people with Bush signs. And maybe there was more retaliation against people with Bush signs, if only because in many parts of the country it took a ton of courage to display a Kerry sign at all.
Maybe southerners are less fearful of openly supporting the Democrat this year. See, that’s progress.
Mancour continues,
“You don’t seem very intimidated,” he said, surprised. He was from California and he had been watching the circus that is southern politics with a mixture of amusement and anxiety. Clearly he had been expecting dogs and fire hoses and race riots by this point.
“I’m not,” I shrugged. “Like I said: they’re scared. And I’m not. I’m not even particularly angry. If my cherished ideas of political philosophy were getting flushed down the toilet every day, I’d probably be scared to. I guess it’s because I’m a parent. When I see stuff like this, it reminds me of my kids drawing on the walls. You can get upset about it, but they’re just kids.”
It may be that the most devastating thing you can say to a rightie is we’re not afraid of you any more.
End of Days, the Prequel
The Asian and European markets are tanking this morning. It’s shaping up to be a fun day on Wall Street.
Now, for the good news — Nate Silver says the McCain campaign is on life support. In “Blame game: GOP forms circular firing squad,” Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen and John F. Harris of The Politico document the unraveling of the GOP political machine. There will be some juicy books written about the McCain campaign when this is over, I bet. The GOP also expects to be routed in the House.
Headline in today’s Los Angeles Times: “McCain’s homestretch strategy: paint Obama as a socialist.” Brilliant.
Even Scott MClellan endorses Obama.
According to Nate Silver’s “scenario analysis,” McCain absolutely must win Florida and Ohio to win the election. Both states are leaning blue at the moment, but, y’know, stuff happens, especially in Florida and Ohio. On the other hand, Obama can lose both Ohio and Florida and still win the election, Nate says.
It’s looking about as good as it could possibly look for Obama.
In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne makes the interesting observation that the GOP seems to be splitting into McCain and Palin camps. The stats say Palin is a drag on the ticket, Dionne says,
Yet the pro-Palin right is still impatient with McCain for not being tough enough — as if he has not run one of the most negative campaigns in recent history. This camp believes that if McCain only shouted the names “Bill Ayers” and “Jeremiah Wright” at the top of his lungs, the whole election would turn around.
Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party” (David Brooks), as someone who “doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin” (Kathleen Parker), as “a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics” (Peggy Noonan).
If you think about it, Dionne continues, you see the split forming between the party elite and its rank and file.
Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.
They’re all scapegoating Bush, of course. But “movement conservatism” is coming unglued, and this is not Bush’s fault alone.
Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush’s apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the “real America” is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin’s speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.
Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as “Joe the Plumber” often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.
When the dust settles after election day, it will be interesting to see how working-class Americans voted.
Time and Tides
These days events and issues and the nation seem to be sweeping toward some irresistible something that’s bigger than all of us. It feels like river currents rushing toward a waterfall. Have you felt that, too?
History shows us that no status quo lasts forever, no matter how solid and immutable it seems. Sometimes changes are slow and imperceptible, but occasionally some confluence of events breaks the old order apart and sets up a new one almost overnight, or at least within the space of a few years instead of a few decades. Most of the time invasion or insurrection are involved in these changes, but not always. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a prime example of events taking over and forcing change almost overnight without gunfire.
I’m not saying I expect armed revolution or a change in our form of government. I am saying that the political status quo that has prevailed in America for the last few decades is disintegrating rapidly. I suspect the next two or three years will be disorienting for most of us.
Assuming Barack Obama wins the election — it’s looking good, folks, but it ain’t inevitable — I don’t expect a replay of the Clinton years, in which a huge right-wing juggernaut worked relentlessly to destroy the Democratic administration.
Oh, they will try. I fully expect that within two weeks of an Obama inauguration, Tony Blankley will be all over cable television explaining ever so unctuously that the Obama administration has already failed. Hell, he might not even wait until Obama is inaugurated before declaring the Obama administration has already failed.
But Blankley is complaining that other “conservatives” are abandoning the cause, leaving him to fight on alone. His old comrades in arms, like George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks have left the field of battle, he thinks.
In an Obama administration, George Will will still be an insufferable prick, Peggy Noonan will still mistake her psychological projections for insight, and David Brooks will still be an idiot. Some things will not change. What will change, I believe, is that the Right’s ability to dominate the national conversation and overwrite real issues with its phantasmagorical agenda will be much diminished. This will happen not because they’ve changed, but because the political climate of America will have changed.
The powerful Rabid Right is becoming old and shabby and, like, so last decade.
Please let me be clear that I do not expect to wake up on January 21 living in political utopia. I’m a Buddhist, remember; all phenomena are dukkha. And as I said, there will be massive disorientation while the Powers That Be figure out the new rules — indeed, until they begin to notice there are new rules. And there will be disorientation across the political spectrum, not just on the Right. It will take some time yet before Democrats in Congress stop cringing in fear of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
We see disorientation already in the way the McCain campaign evokes a “real” America that looks like the America they thought was out there somewhere, but which they are finding strangely elusive. Rosa Brooks writes,
The GOP code isn’t hard to crack: There’s the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there’s the “real” America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are … well … white. … But with each passing year, the “real” America of GOP mythmaking bears less and less resemblance to the America most Americans live in.
At the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes that “the tax argument still works.” He lays out the arguments that he thinks McCain might still employ to pull off a win. Remarkably, these are the same arguments McCain has been employing and which are not working.
Meanwhile, Karl’s masterpiece, his personal Frankenstein monster, is a pariah even in his own party. People still listen to Karl … why, exactly?
The GOP is losing because they are marketing to a demographic that doesn’t exist — America circa 1980-2004. The political shift began with Katrina. It is being accelerated by the financial crisis. We are rushing toward something that is very different from where we have been. My hope is that Barack Obama is the leader he seems to be, and will steer us into a soft landing.
See also: Joe Klein, “Why Barack Obama Is Winning.”
Obama in St. Louis
[Update: This photograph moves me deeply, and not just because of the size of the crowd. The blue-domed building in the background is the old courthouse, where the Dred Scott case was tried in the 1840s 1850s.]
There was a massive Obama rally in St. Louis this afternoon. Here’s some coverage from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Watch: Video from the Obama crowd at the Arch
Obama rally: Secret Service puts crowd at 80,000
The Secret Service estimated 80,000 people attended the rally at the Arch today, but St. Louis police estimated 100,000. That’s a lot of people. Missouri recently slipped from the leaning-McCain column into the slightly-leaning-toward-Obama column, I understand, although it will be very close.
And judging by the videos, people at Obama rallies are nicer than people at McCain rallies.
Tigers! Maul those Longhorns!
Update: “All I Can Say Is, Wow“
Collusion
Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press:
Barack Obama’s legal team wants a special prosecutor to determine whether partisan politics is at play in a reported though unconfirmed Justice Department investigation of a voter registration effort which has been the target of numerous complaints of late, including one in Michigan.
With the election just over two weeks away, Bob Bauer, Obama’s chief lawyer, said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon that he is asking U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to to hand over to special prosecutor Nora Dannehy any probe into what Bauer called “bogus claims of vote fraud†that mirror concerns raised by Republicans two years ago.
According to a recent Justice Department report, those issues played a role in the controversy over the forced resignations of nine former federal prosecutors.
Bob Bauer was just on Olbermann’s program saying that there was an appearance of collusion between the McCain campaign and the White House. The Justice Department is engaged in “investigations” to bolster the McCain campaign’s claim that ACORN is destroying democracy as we know it.
Update: More details at Bloomberg.
Obama and the Art of Wu Wei
I keep hearing pundits say that McCain won the three debates “on points” but that Obama won “on style.” I think these guys were watching a different sports event from the one I watched.
The “on points” pundits were scoring a boxing match. McCain was more aggressive. He landed punches. He got in zingers. Last night Pat Buchanan compared Obama to a boxer in the late rounds who was sitting on a lead (doesn’t that mean he was ahead “on points”?) and was dancing around to avoid being knocked out while he ran out the clock.
What I watched was more like kung fu. In the martial arts, aggression for the sake of aggression is more likely to work against you than with you. The master knows how to use his opponent’s energy against him. He lets the more unskilled fighter beat himself.
Martial arts masters employ the principle of wu wei — the action of non-action. This sounds like passivity — it often looks like passivity — but it is the art of channeling the flow of energy around you to accomplish a task or defeat an opponent. Put another way, it is the art of letting action act itself, or letting movement move itself, while you go with the flow.
It’s also the art of knowing when not to act. If your opponent is beating himself up, don’t get in his way.
Those who think Barack Obama should have been more aggressive in his debates with McCain are, IMO, entirely wrong. If Obama had been more aggressive, he risked seeming angry or mean and giving McCain sympathy points. Instead, Obama masterfully let McCain beat himself and didn’t get in the way.
McCain, IMO, lost the debate when he got stuck in whiny, petulant mode and wouldn’t let go of statements by Congressman John Lewis — which were not spelled out in the debate, and I doubt most viewers had any idea what McCain was talking about — and Bill Ayers. Obama actually gave McCain several opportunities to drop the subject, and McCain would not. For that entire sequence McCain was, in effect, punching himself in the face, while Obama stood aside and let him do it.
This was skillful. It also took discipline — a lesser debater would have interrupted McCain to defend himself more forcefully, and I’m sure that’s what Pat Buchanan et al. thought Obama was supposed to do. But Buchanan and McCain are old-style Irish pugilists who stand straight up and punch away. Obama was in crouching tiger, hidden dragon mode.
______
I was struck by the pundits’ reactions to the abortion section of the debate. Granted, I was mostly watching MSNBC — sometimes flipping over to CNN — and I realize reactions may have been different elsewhere. But pundits I saw were shaking their heads over this part of McCain’s argument:
MCCAIN: Just again, the example of the eloquence of Senator Obama. He’s health for the mother. You know, that’s been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything.
That’s the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, “health.” But, look, Cindy and I are adoptive parents. We know what a treasure and joy it is to have an adopted child in our lives. We’ll do everything we can to improve adoption in this country.
McCain spoke of women’s health with a sneer on his face. He made “air quotation marks” around the word “health,” as if the mother’s health concerns were some kind of joke. He can’t stop whining about what John Lewis said about him, but women facing health complications in their pregnancies are just supposed to suck it up.
I realize the “criminalize abortion” movement routinely argues that “health of the mother” can mean a bad hair day, but in the real world pregnancies — including planned and wanted pregnancies — don’t always go well. I think most adults understand that. And most of the post-debate commentary I saw criticized McCain for the “health” comment.
Four years ago, in the Kerry-Bush debates, Bush had a simple message on abortion — he was against it. Poor Kerry had to put together more than two sentences to explain his position — that he opposed it personally but didn’t intend to impose his views on others. The post-debate commenters — including Andrea Mitchell, as I recall — said of this that Kerry doesn’t know how to talk about abortion. (What the hell was he supposed to say? “I’m for it”?)
But now it’s the Republican who doesn’t know how to talk about abortion. Times, I believe, have changed.
And I’m sure you enjoyed this bit —
MCCAIN: I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test
Um, dude? You just imposed a litmus test.