Cartoon Candidates

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Today I heard someone say, earnestly, that if John McCain wants to win in November he should give up the silly “celebrity” attack ads and run on his positions on issues. What a charming idea!

Of course, it’s not going to happen.

McCain cannot run on issues because (1) he genuinely doesn’t want the American people to know his stands on issues, because he is way to the right of most people on most issues; and (2) Republicans don’t run on issues. Not for president, anyway. They run by smearing the Dem and turning him into a cartoon.

Some of you may remember that at one point during the 2004 campaign, several of us bloggers noticed that Kerry’s web site featured Kerry’s positions on issues, whereas the Bush web site was saturated with several cartoon drawings of Kerry. (I made a screen capture of this that I cannot find now. It seems to have disappeared from my archives, alas.) Not a single substantive policy position could be found, beyond “stay the course.”

And, notice who “won.”

As I remember it, about 95 percent of the Bush 2004 campaign consisted of ridiculing John Kerry. Republicans wore band aids to the Republican convention to ridicule Kerry’s Vietnam War injuries. GOP operatives were sent to Kerry rallies to wave “flip flops.” (Dem operatives, of course, were locked out of Bush rallies.) Once, after a story came out about Kerry going duck hunting, I recall Karl Rove and Karen Hughes popping out of Air Force One wearing duck hunting gear, complete with “Elmer Fudd” ear flap hats.

And, of course, the lazy sots that comprise “U.S. news media” covered the buffoonery and not the issues.

This strategy almost backfired. Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post (“Bush’s Cartoon of Kerry Failed to Show Up,” October 15, 2004):

By turning Kerry into a cartoon, the Bush campaign created such low expectations for the senator that he easily exceeded them in the debates.

Leading up to the first debate, the Bush campaign very effectively defined John Kerry as a wishy-washy flip-flopper who never knew where he stood, and then they get on the stage and here’s a John Kerry who differs from the perception,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster.

Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) now with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said Bush had gone “over the top” in making Kerry seem ridiculous.

“It was a case of taking a caricature to such an extent and not realizing the caricature could be disassembled by the candidate himself in the debates,” he said. “You would have expected a hybrid of Jane Fonda and Ted Kennedy would walk on stage. . . . People expected to see a left-wing, beaded radical.”

If the election had been held immediately after any of the three debates, I believe the outcome would have been different. However, by the time election day came, the GOP successfully had re-booted the cartoon Kerry in enough of the public’s mind to keep Bush in the White House. (With some help with the shenanigans in Ohio, of course.)

So, expect McCain ads to do little else but lie about and ridicule Obama. Why tamper with success?

The swift boaters are back, too. Jerome Corsi has a new book out called Obama Nation (cute) that promises to do to Obama what Unfit for Command did to Kerry. Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman write for the New York Times:

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday — at No. 1.

The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday.

That’s the plan. Write a book full of reckless and unsupported charges, kick it up the bestsellers lists with bulk sales by right-wing interests, then make the rounds of cable television and talk radio to “discuss” the book. It’s an effective way to spread lies and propaganda.

Interconnections

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James Fallows explains why David Brooks is an idiot so I don’t have to. Links are such a time-saver.

In a nutshell, Brooks’s column today is all about China’s “collectivist” mindset versus the West’s “individualistic” mindset. Fallows, who has been living in and reporting from China in recent years, explains why Brooks’s column is over-simplified hooey.

Certainly, Chinese culture has emphasized social harmony at least since Confucius (551-479 BCE). But that doesn’t mean that Asians are non-thinking automatons.

Brooks writes, for example,

If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

Brooks builds on this to explain why Asians don’t value rights and privacy as much as we Westerners do — Westerners focus on the individual fish, see. But fixating on the biggest fish is not necessarily a sign of individuality, IMO. It more likely indicates that the observer identifies with or admires dominance.

Awhile back I complained that right-wingers don’t see the interconnectedness of things. One of the differences between progressives and non-progressives is that the progressives perceive how the lives and personal fortunes of individual citizens interconnect, and how events and issues connect to and impact other events and issues. Righties, on the other hand, have rigidly linear thought processes and cannot see beyond their own personal interests. Does that make them more “individualistic”? or just more “selfish”? And “narrow minded”?

Years ago I stumbled into a virtual nest of Objectivists. These are Ayn Rand culties who have made a religion of individuality. The peculiar thing about them is that none was a particularly original thinker. They all tended to quote the same passages of The Fountainhead to make the same points and show how “individual” they were.

One guy in particular, who kept going on and on about how he didn’t need anyone else, finally got to me. Do you realize, I said, that your entire environment is a web of interconnection with other people? The roof over your head, the chair you’re sitting in, the utilities you use, the food you eat, your bleeping Internet connection are all the creations of other people.

He snapped back, I paid for these things. Of course. An economy is a facilitator of interconnection.

Righties drop by here from time to time and accuse us liberals of being “statists” and “collectivists.” Righties make a big show of loving liberty even while they support giving the Bush Administration unlimited power to violate individual rights and bully anyone who dares disagree with them. So much for “individualism.” As with the Objectivists, they like to fancy themselves rugged individuals when most of the time they are just tools, believing what they think they are supposed to believe.

I’m Buddhist enough to understand individuality as an illusion. We’re all more part of each other than we realize.

The three major philosophy-religions of China — Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism — all in different ways emphasize interconnection. Zen Buddhism — Zen Buddhism originated in China, as Ch’an Buddhism — was heavily influenced by an Indian philosophy called Madhyamika, which argues that nothing has intrinsic identity, and phenomena take identity only from other phenomena. There is neither reality nor not-reality; only relativity.

Another Chinese school of of Buddhism called Huayan came up with the metaphor of Indra’s Net. The net extends in all directions without end, and in each “eye” of the net is a multifaceted jewel. Each jewel, although existing separately, also reflects every other jewel in the net. And the jewels in the reflection reflect all other jewels in the reflection, to infinity. This represents how beings and phenomena exist. Simultaneously, we are individuals and not-individuals.

Yes, China has a totalitarian government. The form of that government is based on an economic and political philosophy originally dreamed up by Europeans, as I recall.

Robert Louis Chianese writes in the Los Angeles Times,

Without a tradition of individualism and personal rights, Chinese society represents the perfect counterbalance to our own rights-emphatic culture. If we find fault with the suppression of the individual in China, we also might fail to see the disadvantages in the West of devaluing social harmony. We in the U.S. seem to be going off in 330 million directions at once. Contrariwise, our current administration wishes to overrule the Bill of Rights in the name of security, our debased form of “harmony.”

I would say that without a tradition of social harmony, we often cannot reach consensus without devolving into schoolyard taunts and bullying. Or, that great favorite of dictators — fear.

I’ve come to appreciate more and more that “social harmony” and “individualism” are not opposites. When kept in balance, they enhance each other. When only one is valued, too often you have neither.

Bush Blows It Again

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Yesterday President Bush attended a worship service at a Protestant Church in Beijing. This was supposed to be an act of standing up to Beijing’s policies on religion, but it wasn’t. If anything, it reinforced Beijing’s position that people are free to practice religion and worship as they choose in China. I explain why on the other blog.

Believe

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Paul Krugman assesses the chances that maybe, someday, the United States will join the rest of the First World and provide universal health care for its citizens.

What’s easy about guaranteed health care for all? For one thing, we know that it’s economically feasible: every wealthy country except the United States already has some form of guaranteed health care. The hazards Americans treat as facts of life — the risk of losing your insurance, the risk that you won’t be able to afford necessary care, the chance that you’ll be financially ruined by medical costs — would be considered unthinkable in any other advanced nation.

Most Americans don’t know that these risks would be considered unthinkable in any other advanced nation. As soon as one says “guaranteed health care” in the U.S., someone will say, oh, you mean like in Canada? As if that were the only other nation on earth that provides for health care for its citizens. Occasionally someone will bring up the British system, which has serious problems because for many years the British government has underfunded it.

But in the American public consciousness, the national health care systems of 30 other industrialized nations — most of which provide excellent care, without waiting lists for procedures, at a lower per-capita cost that in the U.S. — do not exist.

I agree with Krugman that if we could get a true national health care system in place that would provide care for all citizens and eliminate the risk of financial ruin, Americans would love it. It would, like Social Security and Medicare, be beyond the reach of the Right to take it apart no matter how hard they try.

That, of course, is what the Right fears.

Krugman points to three hurdles to getting any kind of program in place.

  1. Democrats, who have made health care reform the center of the 2008 platform, have to control the White House and Congress.
  2. Reformers would have to overcome the public’s fear of change.
  3. Once in control of the White House and Congress, the Dems would have to keep their focus and not be distracted by the many other issues screaming for their attention after 8 years of grotesque mismanagement of the government.

Prairie Weather has another one: “Smugness, greed, and ignorance will pull together, forming an army which will fight viciously to keep things just as they are. ”

Ironically, given the “fear of change” issue, McCain’s “health care plan” would change the current system more than Obama’s. This is according to Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health politics and policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Julie Rovner reports for NPR:

Of the two candidates, McCain is arguably the one whose plan would change the health system the most. Right now, if you get insurance from your employer, you don’t pay taxes on the value of that benefit.

[As alert reader k pointed out, this is not true. My understanding is that the McCain plan would eliminate tax incentives that employers get for offering health benefits to employees. Meaning that most of ’em would drop health benefits. The ideal, in McCainLand, is to shove everyone into one big private market system, which would leave even more people uninsured than there are now. — maha]

But if you have to buy your own insurance and you’re not self-employed, you don’t get any tax help. McCain would change that: He’d make employer-provided insurance taxable, but then give everyone a tax credit.

“Our proposal is to give every family in America a $5,000 refundable tax credit, and they take that tax credit and that money — a refundable tax credit — to go across state lines, to go any place in America, and go online, and pick out the insurance policy they want,” McCain said.

There are lots of questions about McCain’s plan. How hard will it be for people who are already sick to buy insurance? Will people really be able to find policies they can afford when the average family policy now costs more than $13,000? And does the public really want to move away from a system in which employers provide most people’s health insurance to one where most people buy their own?

I still don’t think the “crossing state lines” thing is going to work. There are differences in cost of policies from one state to another, but those costs vary in part according to cost of running a medical practice — more expensive in some states than in others, if only because overall cost of living varies — and how easy or difficult it is in that state for insurance companies to dump “customers” who actually get sick.

McCain’s plan no doubt would cause many employers to dump health benefits for their employees. I think this is something people need to be told. They also need to understand that McCain is making no provision for people with pre-existing conditions or health risk factors to be able to purchase private insurance. I believe his plan would cause millions more Americans to become uninsured and cut off from all but third-world level health care.

My problem with Obama’s plan is that it doesn’t go far enough, and could end up being not much more than a tweak of the current system. If he’s elected, I hope Congress pushes him to go further than what he’s proposed so far.

Fixed Noise

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Fox News Host Refuses To Talk About Russia-Georgia War, Insists On Covering Edwards’ Affair»

Of course. The Carpetbagger:

After noting why the Edwards affair will probably have no bearing on the presidential race, Erbe said, “On the other hand, we have these huge stories going on like the one you’re reporting in Georgia, where you have both candidates, McCain and Obama, taking positions that the American public wants to know more about.”

Jarrett ignores Erbe’s response, and starts bashing Edwards again, asking Erbe to note whether Edwards might still be lying about the circumstances of his affair. Ebre said it was possible, and suggested Edwards could go on Maury Povich’s trashy daytime talk show to talk about it. “The American public have told pollsters, this political season they want substance,” Erbe insisted. “Both these candidates have expressed support for allowing Georgia into NATO, for example. We are bound by treaty to attack anybody who attacks a NATO member. We could have been on the verge of nuclear war. Those are the kinds of the things that the American public wants to see discussed.”

At that point, Fox News’ Jarrett responded, “Right. You know, but getting back to Edwards, during the Monica Lewinsky affair, Edwards absolutely ripped into Bill Clinton….”

War Over Ossetia

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CNN reports that Georgia’s parliament approved a request by President Mikhail Saakashvili’s to declare a “state of war” with Russia. This is not the same thing as declaring war itself, apparently, nor does it impose martial law. However,

It gives Saakashvili powers he would not ordinarily have, such as issuing curfews, restricting the movement of people, or limiting commercial activities, those officials said.

Whatever. This is a serious matter, and you know the cable news channels will be covering …

John Edwards. Cernig writes,

Unbe-fricking-leivable! I am now officially disgusted with America’s insular and navel-gazing punditry. En masse and on a bipartisan basis the media, commentators and bloggers have decided that the Edwards Affair story is more important than events in South Ossetia. What happened, folks, did your minds cloud over at contemplation of events beyond these hallowed shores?

See also “Why TV news in the US is utter rubbish.”

Dumb and Dumber

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Paul Krugman:

… know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

As Senator Obama said, “It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” Truly, to a wingnut, Ignorance Is Strength.

Thomas Frank has a new book out called The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. There’s an excerpt in the August issue of Harper’s and also one at Salon. This is from Salon:

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington. …

… The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Too many Democrats have been in on the scam, of course. But, basically, we’re looking at the anti-government right wing; the descendants of Richard Hofstadter’s pseudo-conservatives. These are the people of whom Hofstadter wrote back in the early 1960s,

The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference in nuance, but of fundamental substance.

And also,

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

And quoting Theodore W. Adorno:

The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

You can argue that there are two kinds of wingnuts — those who are in on the take, and those who are merely dupes. But I suspect a large part of those who have a personal vested interest in wingnut causes also are True Believers who can no more see the harm they do than they can fly to the moon on a pig. So, how much of what they do is calculated, and how much is social pathology, is very hard to measure.

The True Believers are a minority, but they are a minority with a lot of power because they’ve been underwritten by the Big Money interests that benefit financially from the destruction of government. (This, I take it, is the subject of Frank’s book, and also ties in with much of what Naomi Klein has been writing lately.) So, their point of view, if you want to call it that, has been vastly overrepresented in mass media, to the point that large parts of the population hardly know there is any other point of view.

There’s no more important task ahead of us than to discredit whatever you want to call “conservatism” these days in the minds of that part of the population capable of seeing reason. And I believe there is a substantial population capable of seeing reason if reason is ever presented to them. They can be bamboozled about foreign policy, but we see time and time again that when the Right tries to sell the American people on an idea that runs counter to their personal experience or something they’ve seen with their own eyes — on Social Security, New Orleans, Terri Schiavo — the American people on the whole are capable of seeing lies as lies.

From now until the November election, lots of progressives are going to be complaining about Dem politicians, especially Barack Obama, and how they are no different from the Right for this or that reason. And I agree ain’t nobody in politics who is pure. But, although we all may disagree with Obama sometime, on the whole he is less about “simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem” than any presidential candidate I can think of in a very long time. He’s not the whole answer, but he’s a step in the right direction. Er, away from the Right.

On a related note: Some “creative agency” in Los Angeles came up with an “Obama salute,” which looks stupid to me. Gavin at Sadly, No says the “salute” is a joke. (I didn’t get very far into his links before I decided I did not want to know what the joke is.)

As Gavin says, “So an ad agency not affiliated with the Obama campaign has released a joke logo.” But the word from Wingnutland os that the “salute” has already been embraced by the Obamabot Cult. The wingnuts are all over this, as Dave N. says, like stink on shit. It’s the sort of issue wingnuts, who are stuck in pre-adolescence emotionally, just love — trivial and easy to ridicule.