Because preparing for the future is hard.
Damn
I was out this evening and just got back. Clinton ahead? Even if Obama squeaks it out, she’s going to be Ms. Inevitability again. Thanks loads, New Hampshire.
Update: The Concord Monitor is projecting Clinton to be the winner.
Citizenship
While we’re waiting for New Hampshire results — ABC reports that turnout is “absolutely huge.” Lots of people give a damn. Maybe democracy in America isn’t dead yet.
The Organizer
David Brooks has a genius for not seeing things even as he looks at them. Today he writes,
Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up.
The key word in any Obama speech is “you.†Other politicians talk about what they will do if elected. Obama talks about what you can do if you join together. Like a community organizer on a national scale, he is trying to move people beyond their cynicism, make them believe in themselves, mobilize their common energies.
Nice. But then the Vegetable writes,
His weakness is that he never breaks from his own group. In policy terms, he is an orthodox liberal. He never tells audiences anything that might make them uncomfortable. In the Senate, he didn’t join the Gang of 14, which created a bipartisan consensus on judges, because it would have meant deviating from liberal orthodoxy and coming to the center.
How do you build a trans-partisan coalition when every single policy you propose is reliably on the left?
Because, dear Vegetable, it’s not about ideology.
For the past several years, “bipartisan” has meant “agreeing with Republicans,” with Republican defined as “an ideologically blinkered whackjob who takes marching orders from Richard Mellon Scaife and who would sell out the Constitution in an eyeblink for the sake of more power and some tax cuts.” And the effect on America — nay, the world — of this “bipartisanship” has been devastating.
Now bobbleheads like the Vegetable are trying to redefine “bipartisan” as a requirement that right-wing ideology must be honored and included in all policy decisions, even though a majority of the American people are rejecting it wholesale. And we must do this because, you know, it’s nice. It’s like when you were seven and your mother made you share your toys with Cousin Maggie even after she deliberately popped the heads off all your Ken dolls.
Brooks’s idea is that, out of some sense of etiquette, politics and policies coming out of Washington must honor some ideological mean. Obama’s idea is that government ought to be responding to what a majority of Americans want it to do.
To me, that’s always been the foundation of progressivism — government that genuinely responds to the will of We, the People. It’s not about loyalty to a menu of policies like cutting or raising taxes or growing or shrinking government. If We, the People, genuinely want to starve government of tax revenues so it can be drowned in a bathtub, fine. If the majority really want our domestic needs ignored for the sake of becoming an unstoppable imperialist might, then so be it.
I have never believed a majority of Americans really wanted those things, though. I think for a time large numbers of people responded to those ideas because, as our national political culture and discourse had been hijacked by right-wing goons, those were presented as the only legitimate ideas patriotic Americans were supposed to have. But I think only a minority of badly socialized malcontents were fully committed to the right-wing agenda.
I wrote yesterday that I believed the mantle of “inevitability” that Hillary Clinton wore these past several years is part of her problem. It fed into the notion that Washington, and the national leadership of both parties, are more powerful than we are, and that we must accept whatever they choose to give us. The Obama phenomenon comes from a growing realization that we shouldn’t have to put up with this.
Many people have pointed out that Obama’s stated positions on policy are vague. I disagree with his approach to health care. But just as his appeal is not about ideology, it’s also not about policy. It’s about democracy that’s not in name only. As Digby wrote the other day,
When people say they want change it’s not because they are tired of “partisan bickering” (which basically consists of derisive Republican laughter.) They’re sick of a government that does exactly the opposite of what they want it to do.
The experience of the past several years is that Republicans expect to be congratulated for making government do the exact opposite of what you want it to do. Democrats may express regret for it, but government still does the exact opposite of what you want it to do. Senator Clinton seems to have found a niche in this environment, churning up a storm of little policies and positions that are incrementally better than what Republicans propose. But she’s not asking the fundamental question — why do we have to put up with the wingnuts and their failed policies at all?
Why can’t we just push Cousin Maggie down the stairs, so to speak, and be done with this nonsense?
I suspect the Obama surge isn’t about Obama. I think it’s about long-growing, pent-up frustration with unresponsive government. Obama is becoming the rallying point for people who want real change, dammit, not promises and apologies.
So maybe he is vague about what he might do as President. But it’s not his plans that matter, but ours.
Evil Liberals Eat Babies and Plot Against Jesus
Too funny. See also xan.
Welcome to the Asylum
With time running short on his presidency — and on the eve of a trip to the Middle East — President Bush seems to have overcome his aversion to talking about his legacy and is now speaking fervently about how he expects to be remembered.
As it turns out, the president sees himself as quite the heroic figure.
“I can predict that the historians will say that George W. Bush recognized the threats of the 21st century, clearly defined them, and had great faith in the capacity of liberty to transform hopelessness to hope, and laid the foundation for peace by making some awfully difficult decisions,” Bush told Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 2 News. Bush held several interviews with Middle Eastern journalists last week in anticipation of his trip to the region, which starts tomorrow.
“When he needed to be tough, he acted strong, and when he needed to have vision he understood the power of freedom to be transformative,” Bush said of himself to Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot.
As for the people of the Middle East, Bush told Hisham Bourar of al-Hurra Television: “I would hope that they would say President Bush respects my religion and has great love for the human — human being, and believes in human dignity.”
The Bush record, the president told Nadia Bilbassy-Charters of al-Arabiya Television, is one of liberation — “liberation, by the way, not only from dictatorship, but from disease around the world, like HIV/AIDS or malaria.”
On a personal basis, Bush told Bilbassy-Charters that he hopes that people would know “that he hurts when he sees poverty and hopelessness” and “that he’s a realistic guy.”
I just want to say that I hope he has years of robust good health after he’s out of the White House. I want him to live for many more years. I want him to live long enough to know his great-grandchildren. The longer, the better. I mean that. Because I don’t think that bubble is gonna last long once he’s out of office.
Wingnut Wisdom
In the mood for something jaw-dropping stupid? Get this: The reason we lefties don’t support pointless and counterproductive wars in Muslim countries is that we’re atheists. See, if we were all Christians we’d understand why we’re supposed to be afraid of Muslims. Or something.
It’s a pathetic thing to watch a wingnut try to think. They fuss and strain, and eventually a moth pops out of their ear. Very sad.
Don’t Be Afraid
First, an enormous orange fireball booms onto the screen. The camera shakes and a crowd runs for cover. Next, sirens wail, as an abandoned car explodes. Paramedics tote bodies away from another blast. Militants raise their AK-47s and parade across the desert, their faces masked.
What’s the next image that fills the screen, in a Web commercial by John McCain that really puts the “attack” in “attack ad”? Mitt Romney’s face, above a quote from a Hannity & Colmes appearance where Romney said “a president is not a foreign policy expert.”
The closer the New Hampshire primary gets, it seems, the more terrified the Republican presidential candidates want you to be. That way, you’ll vote for the guy who scared you the worst, and not that guy who’s going to preside over your death at the hands of jihadists. McCain, who wants to shift the conversation away from immigration and onto foreign policy and security issues, has Web ads like “Experience.” Rudy Giuliani — who never misses a chance to remind voters about 9/11 — is airing a TV commercial in New Hampshire called “Ready” that is even more alarming than McCain’s “Experience.” Released just days after Bhutto’s murder, it features footage of the late Pakistani leader, accompanied by a soundtrack of Middle Eastern music. “Hate without boundaries,” intones a narrator. “A people perverted … A nuclear power in chaos.” Mike Huckabee — no foreign policy maven — answered a press conference question about immigration by invoking the specter of Pakistanis with “shoulder-fired missiles” sneaking across the U.S.-Mexico border. Fred Thompson got into the act at Saturday night’s ABC News/Facebook/WMUR debate, proving that even campaigns that don’t have the money to scare people with ads can still try other methods. “We could be attacked with a biological weapon and not even know it for a long period of time,” Thompson told viewers matter-of-factly. (Now enjoy your late local news.) …
… Ask Republicans about the issue, of course, and they’ll say the only danger in advertisements that focus on terrorist attacks is that they won’t go far enough. “Whether we live or die is obviously the most important issue,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., an advisor to Giuliani’s campaign and the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee.
You readers are from all over the country. Are people where you live really cowering in fear of jihadists? Or are they more worried about their jobs and health insurance?
Apparently they tried illegal immigrant fear mongering — brown people with funny accents will steal your jobs and seduce your women — tactics in Iowa, to little effect. So they’re falling back on brown people with funny accents will blow up your shopping malls.
Paul Krugman writes about fear today, too.
The unemployment report on Friday was brutally bad. Unemployment rose in December, while job creation was minimal — and it’s highly likely, for technical reasons, that the job number will be revised down, showing an actual decline in employment. ..
…It’s not certain, even now, that we’ll have a formal recession, although given the news on Friday you have to say that the odds are that we will. But what is clear is that 2008 will be a troubled year for the U.S. economy — and that as a result, the overall economic record of the Bush years will have been dreary at best: two and a half years of slumping employment, three and a half years of good but not great growth, and two more years of renewed economic distress.
This should be good for Democrats. But then …
But the opponents of change, those who want to keep the Bush legacy intact, are not without resources. In fact, they’ve already made their standard pivot when things turn bad — the pivot from hype to fear. And in case you haven’t noticed, they’re very, very good at the fear thing.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that for the past seven years, conservative bobbleheads have wondered why the American people aren’t more appreciative of the great economy Bush has given them. (Professor Krugman provides some graphs on his blog that tell us why.) Very recently the Bushies have begun to notice the economy may be less than great. And the rhetoric, as Krugman says, has swung from hype to fear.
President Bush is warning that given the economy’s problems, “the worst thing the Congress could do is raise taxes on the American people and on American businesses.â€
And even more dire warnings are coming from some of the Republican presidential candidates. For example, John McCain’s campaign Web site cautions darkly that “Entrepreneurs should not be taxed into submission. John McCain will make the Bush income and investment tax cuts permanent, keeping income tax rates at their current level and fighting the Democrats’ plans for a crippling tax increase in 2011.â€
What “crippling†tax increase, which would tax entrepreneurs into submission, is Mr. McCain talking about? The answer is, proposals by Democrats to let the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year expire, returning upper-income tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the Clinton years.
I wonder if anyone but the entrenched ideological Right is buying this bilge, but we can’t be too careful.
Finally … if Barack Obama wins the Dem nomination we’re going to be spending a lot of time discussing racism in America. But for now I just want to say that if Senator Obama is the nominee, there’s one thing we can count on: The GOP will stop at nothing to prevent African Americans from getting to the polls.
The chief way this is done is to stir up fear of voter fraud, enabling the GOP to apply “remedies” that keep legitimate voters from voting. And in the current New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes that the Supreme Court is about to hear a voter ID law challenge from Indiana, and the decision could have an impact on which citizens will be allowed to vote in the November elections.
“Let’s not beat around the bush,†Terence T. Evans, the dissenting Court of Appeals judge in the Indiana case, slyly wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.†He’s not the only one to notice: the three federal judges who approved the Indiana law were appointed by a Republican President; the lone dissenter was appointed by a Democrat. It was also Republican-dominated legislatures that produced the Indiana and Georgia laws, both of which were signed by Republican governors.
Who are the “certain folks,†in Judge Evans’s delicate phrase, that the Indiana law is trying to discourage? The best answer can be found in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case filed by twenty-nine leading historians and scholars of voting rights. They concluded that the Indiana law belongs to a malign tradition in “this nation’s history of disfranchising people of color and poor whites under the banner of ‘reform.’ †Such measures as the poll tax and literacy tests, they write, were “billed as anti-fraud or anti-corruption devices; yet through detailed provisions within them, they produced a discriminatory effect (often intended) within the particular historical context.†So it will be in Indiana, where the law creates a series of onerous barriers to voting. Consider one: you can get a government photo I.D. by showing your birth certificate, but you can’t get a copy of your birth certificate unless you can produce certain official photo I.D.s. And, with up to twenty million Americans of voting age lacking government-issued identification, the matter of requiring photo I.D.s has broad implications.
Let’s face it; today’s Republicans hate democracy.
Updates
Some polls are starting to show a big post-Iowa bounce for Obama. On the GOP side, Huckabee trails McCain and Romney.
Mike Allen and Ben Smith of The Politico write that Clinton advisers are fearing a New Hampshire loss.
Great bit from Niall Stanage at The Guardian:
Much of the punditry immediately following last night’s debate focused on her [Clinton’s] angry response to a comment by Edwards that cast her as the candidate of the status quo.
But one important sentence near the end of her reply was largely overlooked: “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.”
She sounded the same note again towards the debate’s end. When Obama began speaking about people’s feeling of being frozen out of politics, and about the need to bring those people back into a “working majority” for change, Clinton interjected.
“Can we just have a sort of a reality break for a minute?” she asked contemptuously.
This kind of calculated attempt to encourage cynicism now seems to be the best the former First Lady has to offer.
Tom Schaller says the Clinton Era ended last night at 9:34 p.m. EST. This is followed by an interesting discussion among commenters on the nature of anger in political campaigns.
Unrelated but weird:
Great Moments in the Bush Presidency, or other stuff you only learn by reading UK news sites:
Early in his first term, President Bush introduced a visiting President Putin to his Scottish terrier, Barney, and the Russian made no secret of his disdain for the small dog. When Bush later visited Russia, Putin showed off his much larger dog, Koni, a black Labrador, and suggested it could dispatch Barney with little effort. “Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner,” Putin is said to have boasted, “than Barney”.
Don’t call him “Pootie-Poot.”
Changes
Anything I write now might be obsolete by Wednesday morning, but such is opinionating. So here goes …
From today’s Observer:
The New Hampshire Democratic Party’s 100 Club dinner is a staid affair, attracting the main candidates as speakers in an act of shameless fundraising. But on Friday night extraordinary scenes unfolded there that captured the mood of a party suddenly filled with the desire to kick out its old guard.
Barack Obama was so mobbed by supporters that a security announcer begged people surging towards the stage to retake their seats. Many were chanting Obama’s new signature slogan: ‘Fired up! Let’s go!’
In stark contrast, Hillary Clinton had been booed twice. The first time when she seemed to borrow from Obama’s main theme of ‘change’. The second was when she made a veiled reference to her greater experience. ‘Who will be ready to lead from day one?’ she asked the 3,000-strong crowd. But she was forced to pause to let the resulting boos die down. A few weeks ago, such a spectacle would have been unthinkable.
Right now most polls are saying that Clinton and Obama are tied in New Hampshire. And you know that if she wins by even one vote on Tuesday she’ll be re-crowned “Ms. Inevitable.”
But I wonder if that “inevitability” shtick isn’t part of her problem. It sent a subliminal message to rank-and-file Dems that you’ll take what the party gives you, and you will like it. But what the party has been giving us in recent years — well, for a long time, actually — hasn’t been all that wonderful. We put up with it because the other guys are worse. Maybe what happened at the 100 Club dinner is a dawning realization that “Hey, we don’t have to put up with it! We can demand something different!”
It’s called “empowerment,” I believe.
The Clintons, especially, have seemed baffled by the winds of change. They mounted a peculiar argument against Senator Obama, acknowledging that voters wanted change but insisting that you can’t achieve change by doing things differently.
Ain’t it the truth? If you didn’t see this meltdown moment in last night’s debate, take a look at the transcript:
SEN. CLINTON: Wait a minute now, wait a minute. I’m going to respond to this because obviously — making change is not about what you believe. It’s not about a speech you make. It is about working hard. There are 7,000 kids in New Hampshire who have health care because I helped to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program. There’s 2,700 National Guard and Reserve members who have access to health care, because on a bipartisan basis, I pushed legislation through over the objection of the Pentagon, over the threat of a veto from President Bush.
I want to make change, but I’ve already made change. I will continue to make change. I’m not just running on a promise of change, I’m running on 35 years of change. I’m running on having taken on the drug companies and the health insurance companies, taking on the oil companies.
So, you know, I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change. And we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered. The best way to know what change I will produce is to look at the changes that I’ve already made.
To me, this exemplifies the whole problem with Senator Clinton. She probably has had some impact on some policies, but it hasn’t been good enough. Maybe she did take on the drug companies and the health insurance companies, but seems to me that the drug and health insurance companies won. If she honestly doesn’t see that, then I do not want her in the White House.
I’d be much more comfortable with her if she could admit efforts have fallen short, but if we could get a big Dem majority in Congress and have a Dem in the White House, we could accomplish something significant. But if she defines “significant” by what she’s already done, she doesn’t get it.
Frank Rich’s column today is all about how conventional wisdom fell apart in Iowa.
What was mostly forgotten in these errant narratives were the two largest elephants in the room: Iraq and George W. Bush. The conventional wisdom had it that both a tamped-down war and a lame-duck president were exiting so quickly from center stage that they were receding from the minds of voters. In truth, they were only receding from the minds of those covering those voters…
…It’s safe to assume that these same voters did not forget that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards enabled the Iraq fiasco. Or that Mr. Obama publicly opposed it. When Mrs. Clinton attacked Mr. Obama for his supposedly “irresponsible and frankly naïve†foreign policy ideas — seeking talks with enemies like Iran — she didn’t diminish him so much as remind voters of her own irresponsibility and naïveté about Mr. Bush’s Iraq scam in 2002.
Again, it’s a bit clumsy to run on “experience” if your track record is spotty.
As for Senator Obama, there’s no way to know if he’s for real or just packaging. At the Guardian, Armando Llorens (yeah, that Armando) expresses doubt that a President Obama would actually move the nation in a progressive direction.
But I don’t think that’s the way to look at it. It’s not as if America is sitting on its hands waiting for the next President to lead it somewhere. After having witnessed the colossal failure of “movement conservatism” I think the nation is poised to move in a more progressive direction. The question is, how will the next Congress and the next President respond to this? And I don’t think there is any way to predict that.
Historically, presidents in particular often turn out to be very different products from what was advertised. Often they are disappointing — I certainly think the Clinton Administration promised more than it delivered, except on the economy. Woodrow Wilson ran on a “he kept us out of war” platform, then sent troops to Europe.
On the other hand, in the 1860 campaign, Abraham Lincoln tried to defuse the secession crisis (and possibly pick up southern votes) by promising to support a constitutional amendment that would have protected slavery in the slave states. Many northern abolitionists refused to support Lincoln because he wasn’t tough enough on the slavery question. You might remember how that turned out.
Let’s face it — we’re buying a pig in a poke, no matter who wins.
There are only two things I can say with any certainty. One is that if a politician is tone-deaf to the nation’s mood as a candidate, winning an election is unlikely to improve his or her hearing.
And the other thing is that real, substantive change will be driven by the empowerment of the people, not from leadership in Washington.