An invocation and an injunction...

The progressive left and the gay and lesbian community have risen in outrage at President-elect Obama's choice of the evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration next month, noting that Warren is against abortion and also supported the California referendum prohibiting gay and lesbian marriage. As one example of this outrage, on the much-respected blog Hullabaloo, its creator digby claimed that Obama's choice of Warren was "validating the views of the Christian Right" and suggested sarcastically that Obama was now happy to dispose of support from liberals and to replace it with what he could get from social conservatives. This misinterprets the nature of a presidential inauguration and misreads Obama's mind.

A presidential inauguration is the one official ceremony of American government that traditionally has been conducted so as to unite, if only briefly, the entire nation in a moment of respect for our democracy and our shared civic life. If those who've denounced Rick Warren for his stands on social issues are raising a new standard for inaugurations -- that only individuals who agree with the policies of the new president should be allowed a visible role on the historic day -- then they might also need to exclude the outgoing president as well as congressional leaders of the other party. Inaugurations have traditionally been used to try to heal partisan and ideological divisions, not cement them.

Rick Warren has, apparently, treated Barack Obama with great respect, listened to his views, refrained from endorsing his opponent (though he appeared to agree with McCain on more issues), and permitted Obama to address his congregation on more than one occasion. The full number of Warren's followers isn't limited to those who share his religious views. They also include the 20 million purchasers of Warren's spiritual self-help book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." Warren's constituency is vast, and it's not limited to social conservatives, much less opponents of abortion or gay and lesbian rights. Unless Warren is to be branded as representing only two of his positions on social issues, giving him an inaugural role would seem to fit easily within the typically ecumenical, inclusive frame of the occasion.

But let's also look at what are likely to be the broader political reasons for such a choice by Obama, which may ultimately benefit and not harm progressive policies as well as the interests of the gay and lesbian community.

In most of the Western democracies, conservative parties and their allied media have controlled mainstream political discourse for more of the post-war period than their competitors. This includes Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.S. and Australia -- while Canada, New Zealand and the Nordic countries have had a more equal alternation between left and right, and the discourse has not been driven primarily by the right. There has been one main strategy for the left to attain power in the first group of countries: Make rhetorical feints to the right while capturing power in a crisis or recession, and then hold onto power in a centrist disguise while governing as progressively as seems possible. Clinton and Blair were the last two practitioners of this strategy, which did lead to partial re-regulation of markets and more resources for education, health and the environment.

Impatient with this kind of moderate-left governance, the progressive left in the U.S. has frequently marginalized itself, by chasing after fringe Don Quixotes like Ralph Nader or divisive internal challengers like Ted Kennedy in '80. This has always contributed to conservative election victories. In interviews and speeches, Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to terminate both partisan and ideological rancor. Why has he said this? Because the right's discourse is always ready to be more excessive than that of the left, since its victories depend on fear of the left -- they purvey and benefit from the rancor. Obama could not hope to deprive the right of its historical advantage in co-opting the media and political discourse by quickly pushing the most socially contentious progressive-left policies (or by embracing the opposite policies) upon taking power after an election decided on other grounds. The political media would obstruct every other initiative or urgent matter he wished to advance, in their obsession with social issues focused on sex and gender. Just look at how anxious they've been to change the subject of his presidential transition from new people and new policies to the sideshow of a corrupt governor from Obama's state.

This new president will be the first since Franklin Roosevelt to have both the latter's self-confidence and inspirational power and the inheritance of a national crisis so profound as to endanger the very viability of our economy, offering him enormous leverage for change. I think he is going to use this opportunity to try to move the country's discourse -- and with it, the way we even define the nation's purpose -- decisively away from the self-absorbed, intellectually bankrupt frame of reference given to us by an exhausted, frightened and increasingly frightening American right. If you were determined to transform the nation's default political assumptions, which have been largely conservative, would you begin by instantly gratifying everyone to your left and risking being labeled as a social revolutionary, thus reigniting the same kind of intemperate debates which spur the media to inflame political discord even further? Or would you begin by calming and reassuring all those who are alarmed that a highly intelligent, African-American former community organizer was about to assume the White House at a time of supreme presidential power (courtesy of his overreaching predecessor)? The left underestimates the undercurrent of apprehension focused on a man who embodies and doesn't merely articulate the need for dramatic change. Better to lower the temperature of precipitous critics by showing that you're going to govern on behalf of everyone, even those who might be afraid of who you are and what you may do.

Thus far the common traits of Obama's Cabinet appointees have been their competence, political skills and prodigious intelligence, which have impressed the gatekeepers of mainstream thinking. Apart from stagecraft, that is all that's been happening so far in this transition. The new president hasn't been sworn in yet, but those who stand the most to benefit from a new political discourse in America are swearing about who's giving the invocation at the swearing-in. They seem happy to echo unwittingly the acrimony of the old discourse, instead of permitting this unprecedented figure with a great gift of persuasion to fashion a gentler way of introducing the nation to a different way of governing, and a different way of talking about it. One thing certainly to be enjoined now, after a period of extraordinary intolerance by the right, is a little tolerance from the left. That's what the President-elect is offering.

Lincoln and Obama

Politico has an article today quoting the historians Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz as decrying the comparisons of Barack Obama with Abraham Lincoln. The article suggests that Wilentz sees Obama's comments about Lincoln as "brazen", and that Foner says that comparing oneself to Lincoln is "hubris". But neither historian has any real basis for criticizing Barack Obama for comparing himself to Lincoln because Obama hasn't done that. He's only identified Lincoln as having had certain attributes of character and political leadership which he'd like to emulate. There is nothing "preening" about that. What's wrong with Obama taking as his presidential model the greatest president we've ever had? Would we rather he look to Chester Arthur or Warren Harding? And there certainly is a basis in fact for noticing similarities between Lincoln and Obama at the beginning of their presidencies: Each man had spent more time in the Illinois legislature than in Congress before being nominated for president, each man was initially given no chance by political insiders of being nominated, each was a man whose presidential prospects rose dramatically after the extraordinary impact that his speeches had on his listeners, each was known for his writing ability, each was a lawyer who revered the Constitution and the other founding documents, each man emphasized that "reason" rather than passion or prejudice should guide our politics, and each was impressed with the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (Lincoln met him, Obama read him). Neither Sean Wilentz nor Eric Foner are privileged guardians of Lincoln's legacy. That belongs to all of us, and all of us in this democracy are entitled to judge Obama's accomplishments as president by any model we wish, including that of Lincoln. "Let history judge" is not the standard. Let the people judge.

Feathers ruffled on the left

Feathers are ruffled on the left of the Democratic Party about the supposedly insufficient liberal hue of some of President-elect Obama's key appointments so far. Into the fray comes Obama aide Steve Hildebrand, who in a now-famous post on The Huffington Post gently chastises these critics for their temerity. This condescension to his intra-party critics doesn't do any favors for Obama. It's one thing to reach out to your partisan foes who share key concerns with you, i.e. an interest in strong national security. Being gratuitously dismissive of the way that part of your base expresses its concerns is quite another. But the reality is that Obama's appointments so far have tilted toward experience and professional competence at the slight expense of ideological purity, and that's a wise trade-off -- especially when you consider that there are few if any people on the left of the Democratic Party who have experience equivalent to the most critcized appointees, such as Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Gen. James Jones as National Security Advisor. Remember that Obama and the Office of the Presidency itself are both brand new (after the financial "bail out") to the job of managing the nation's financial system -- the new president absolutely needs an insider like Geithner. And remember too that Obama is brand new to the job of managing relationships with the defense and intelligence establishments of the 20 or 30 countries that are our key NATO and other allies -- while Gen. Jones knows that professional landscape like the back of his hand. Obama is not the kind of man who'll be a puppet of his inner circle, and well-traveled heavyweights like Jones or Hillary Clinton have long records studded with various statements that are easy to characterize as insufficiently this or egregiously that on one issue or another. Their past words are not necessarily prologue to their future actions. But Obama needs their tactical expertise. And for their part, the critics are useful in flagging issues to monitor. It's all good.

What John F. Kennedy Represented...

Al Giordano, writing on his blog The Field about the possible appointment of Caroline Kennedy to take Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate, has suggested in essence that it would reinforce the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, replacing a Clinton (whose husband made peace with "corporate interests" during his presidency) with a Kennedy. But I'm not sure that, in any meaningful way beyond networks of people oriented to Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton, there is a "Kennedy wing" in the Democratic Party which is more liberal than a "Clinton wing". Too much is made of left, right and center when it comes to Democrats: What unites them is paying attention to the lives and communities of real people, and taking public action to lift up our whole society -- rather than being mesmerized by party dogma that locks us into various fears and hatreds, as Republicans displayed again during the presidential campaign.

What President Kennedy represented was not some kind of canned liberalism (he was superficially criticized at the time, by the older generation of Adlai Stevenson lovers, for being too conservative). He and his family and followers in the '60s were about far more than political labels; they embodied an intelligent boldness about renewing American leadership -- in science, security through peace, civil rights, and all the other larger and liberating dimensions of our life together as Americans, and as human beings. He incarnated the spirit of leadership. I think that's what Teddy and Caroline Kennedy saw in Barack Obama. And that's what's different from Bill Clinton's way of operating, which was to take existing political beliefs and invent a way of getting elected and surviving within them. What was his vision? A "bridge to the 21st century"? Just what did that mean?

In the 1980's, Gary Hart (who was among those who had originally been propelled into political life by the example of the Kennedys) embodied that spirit of intelligent boldness, and it's unfortunate that his personal indiscretions forced him out of politics. If, as expected, he'd been elected president in '88, Bill Clinton would have stayed in Arkansas and the progressive spirit of Democrats might have been reasserted long before now. In January 2008, Gary Hart unhesitatingly endorsed Barack Obama. He saw the same thing that Teddy saw: This man will grasp the future. Obama is not only about his own political success. He's about our common success.

Pragmatism doesn't preclude dramatic change

An article by the progressive author and media critic Norman Solomon, "The Ideology of No Ideology" (http://www.truthout.org/112608R), notes that many pundits' characterization of President-elect Obama's appointments as reflecting "pragmatism" rather than ideology can't really be accurate, since the people selected certainly have ideas. Then he goes on to shed doubt about the past ideas of some appointees, claiming that Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner and economic advisor Lawrence Summers favored the deregulation of corporate power that brought on the present financial meltdown. In these remarks, Solomon joins many on the left who have begun to measure the ideological inseam of Obama's appointees and question their suitability for service to Obama -- as if Obama were not the best judge of that.

The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama's appointments have -- every one of them so far -- been relentlessly technocratic. He has chosen people who know how the present system works, before assembling a full team with whom he says he wants to change it. If he recruited people who did not know how to restructure the nation's financial system, which is necessarily dependent on private capital formation and private employment, American economic power would go right down the drain -- and nothing progressive would be done for the rest of Obama's time in office, because there would be no public resources to draw upon. The nation is having an unprecedented financial crisis. When you're in a ship and a storm comes up, you want a crew around the captain who've been through storms before. Noam Chomsky is not going to be able to advise Obama about how to revive the nation's mortgage credit system.

But if technocratic appointments are a form of pragmatism in the midst of crisis, it does not follow that knowledgeable pragmatists will merely acquiesce to the prevailing arrangements of economic power or any other dimension of the existing system. That might be the tendency in calm seas, but getting a ship to shore when it otherwise might sink can make pragmatic sailors take extraordinary measures.

To imply that a pragmatic imperative cannot override a decision-maker's favorite ideas or that a true pragmatist may be empty of useful ideas -- both of which Solomon argues -- overlooks the political reasons for Obama's explicit preference for technical intelligence above partisan or ideological attachments in choosing people to help him cope not only with the present economic crisis, but also with the crisis in international confidence in American policy-making, and the decline that has become visible in the nation's scientific, educational and physical infrastructure. The recent election produced a leader who many Americans still regard as startling and largely unfamiliar. Obama knows that better than anyone. In order to enlarge and consolidate his perceived mandate to govern and expand the popular acceptance of the changes that he says he wants to make, it makes perfect sense to enlarge the strategic and tactical capacities of the group he's assembling to govern and thus boost the public's confidence in his government.

Less than a quarter of Americans according to the exit polls on November 4 said they were "liberal", much less progressive. That was markedly less than those who said they are conservative, even though the majority leans toward specific policies that anyone would recognize as progressive (e.g. for public investment in infrastructure and human resources, against involvement in foreign wars unless homeland security is at stake). Obama has said he wants to transcend if not historically subvert the entire mainstream-media discourse about liberal and conservative, left and right -- in order to assemble a new, enduring majority for policies that his most fervent supporters believe are more progressive than they are centrist, much less conservative. One way to do that, until serious change is underway, is to embrace pragmatism -- the determination to "get 'er done" -- which has not only strong roots in popular discourse but also in American political philosophy (and constitutional jurisprudence, with which Obama is not unacquainted). In this context, the larger economic crisis, while painful and fraught with risk to the nation, is a historic opportunity.

Bearing in mind this context, let's examine the political basis of the selections of Joe Biden as vice president, Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Secretary of State, and Rahm Emmanuel as White House Chief of Staff, each of whom has been roundly criticized from the left as being too likely to favor the use of military power in a foreign crisis. Going in reverse order: Rahm Emmanuel is not known primarily for foreign policy expertise. He started out as a fund raiser for Illinois political candidates, became an inside campaign operative, and then decided to run for Congress himself. Lots of people in politics start out as a "process" person, and about lots of them it can charitably be said that they are reliable party line followers, vote so as to please their constituency, or tack toward interests that fund their campaigns. Their votes in Congress tend not to enforce deeply held principles. Rahm Emmanuel has been accused of sympathizing with Israeli hawks. But as an American politician first and foremost, he is extremely unlikely to be a peddler of military intervention for its own sake inside the Obama White House; he's only likely to point out the political consequences of option A vs. option B. That he will be Obama's chief of staff should tell us that Obama does not want substantive foreign policy direction from his chief of staff.

Hillary Clinton has policy interests and great intelligence, sufficient to supply her with a substantive philosophy. Does she have one? Over the years her discourse has been all over the map, having taken political positions that have either given her prominence at the moment or that situated herself in a well-protected spot in the public debate. But because she was excoriated by the right-wing throughout her husband's presidency as being an extreme liberal, she began her service in the Senate wanting to wrap the national-security cloak around herself in order to counteract that charge and, and more importantly, develop the reputation of being tough enough to be president, because she would be the first serious woman presidential candidate in history. If there was going to be a way for her to back a military intervention at about the time of the Iraq war, it's possible that her opportunism would have driven her to it. Does that make her likely to favor war in all circumstances? No. Unlike Joe Lieberman, she never spent time smooching up the neo-cons or writing bellicose op-eds in The Wall Street Journal. If Obama picks her for the State Department, it will be because he thinks her global recognizability and kerosene-and-pitchfork personality will help sober up any ornery dictators or state sponsors of terrorism who he sends her to deal with. She'll make Condoleeza Rice look like a drum majorette. But to become a heroine as Secretary of State will require enormous diplomatic strides, even a major peace agreement. To make history from Foggy Bottom, you can't defer too quickly to wars planned across the river.

Joe Biden is more knowledgeable about foreign policy than Clinton, but also more embedded in the weeds of it to such an extent that his rationales for particular positions and programs often begin to sound incoherent. He knows too much and says too much and can't sell much of it to anybody. He was picked as Obama's running mate for other reasons: (1) Other possible nominees that Obama reportedly liked more would have been pounded by the media as inexperienced on the national stage (Sebelius, Kaine) or too conservative and dull (Bayh); and (2) Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and would therefore be Exhibit A against the expected McCain charge that Obama wasn't ready to be in the White House. Also Obama liked his personal narrative and commitment to family (very big things for Obama). How Biden stood on the war in Iraq or even the overall vector of his views on foreign policy did not seem to factor at all into Obama's choice of him. Biden will be in the room when major foreign policy decisions are influenced or made, but he will not have his thumb on the scale.

Could Obama have chosen people for these positions who would be more progressive on key issues and still have delivered equivalent political advantages? That's far from clear. But what is crystal clear is that as progressives think about opportunities to make their case against any problematic nominees or against particular suggested courses of action by the new president, they should make sure their views are seen as a reasoned and serious analysis, rather than as pique about a loss of ideological purity. Analysis based on criticizing Obama's embrace of pragmatism at a time of national crisis is self-marginalizing. If progressives want to help the inner progressive in Obama to emerge more readily, they should not start their relationship with him by denouncing him for doing things that he may have other, extremely good political reasons for doing and which will not inhibit or preclude an eventual progressive direction from the preponderance of what he does.

Thus far, not only is Obama getting good "process knowledge" in his earliest appointees, he's also scoring so highly with the mainstream media and policy community, that his ability to summon and sustain political force, so as to work his will with Congress, Wall Street and "main street" will be unprecedented for a new president since Lyndon Johnson in January 1965. He is not trying to build such a formidable position of power in order to do timid, incremental things or to do the bidding of those who created the present crisis and did nothing to get him elected. Marxist blogs are alive with charges that Obama is a caged pigeon of capitalists, but Marxist blogs are written in Fantasyland.

Barack Obama wants to consolidate his electoral mandate and govern from strength -- in an age when a fickle media can pound the living daylights out of the public's perception of a president. Remember how George W. Bush went from Hero of the War on Terror, to Incompetent Buffoon, in two years flat? He was neither -- he simply refused to pay attention to reality, jammed his way forward on the basis of an arrogant ideology, and in the process did historic damage to the nation's economy and world position, which finally not even the mainstream media could ignore. That's one way that ideology can most definitely matter, but perhaps not in the way that Norman Solomon would recommend.

Plea to the chattering class...

The estimable Arianna Huffington has a new post on her blog in which she claims that the rumored nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has had "an enormous effect" on Barack Obama's "brand." She then speculates about what famous novelists of the past might have done with this gripping drama. Excuse me: I think everyone with access to a blog would do well to set aside the "brands", "memes", and "narratives" which they believe define the identity and opportunities of our elected leaders. Barack Obama defined reality on November 4 when he won a popular-vote victory larger than any previous presidential nominee who was not an incumbent. Teeth-gnashing about Hillary Clinton, caterwauling from National Review editors in love with Sarah Palin, post-election tantrums about media coverage from Time magazine's Mark Halperin, and all the rest of the psycho-drama from the chattering political class will have a shelf-life of maybe two hours, if we'd all just start focusing on the concrete realities of what is happening to the American economy and what the newly elected president is going to do about it. The nation has borrowed the price of its future from Chinese banks, the outgoing president is a laughing-stock, and the meter is still running on two wars where Americans are dying on dusty roads. Can we please, then, stop speculating about who leaked what to whom about Hillary -- and stop paying attention to those who do?

Obama's "post-partisan" style helps him, not Republicans

From a Comment on Hullabaloo, digby's blog, 11/24/08, "Crisis Management":

digby is right to reassure us that Obama's pragmatism will not affirm the irrational fears of our friends on the left that he'll govern from the "center right", since pragmatism dictates boldness in clearing away the misguided policies from the right that have created the present crises. But she shouldn't be worried either about Obama's feints to exhibit bipartisanship -- for that is what they are. Commander of the bully pulpit already, he will govern with decisive majorities in both houses of Congress and a probable sky-high approval rating as he takes office. Because he doesn't need to be bipartisan in function or reality, being bipartisan in tone and gesture will make any Republicans who haven't been Palinized grateful to share any photo-ops with him -- because, wanting to be re-elected themselves, they know they will not have any coherent strategy for substantive opposition, in the middle of national crises, for the foreseeable future. They are peering over the edge into a political abyss. To be pulled back by the new president himself will put them in his pocket. It is cost-free for Obama to embrace bipartisanship -- or really, to be post-partisan -- at a time when he dominates the stage, because he can dictate its terms.

The cynicism of Bush's press secretary

From PoliticalWire.com, 11/24/08:

Quote of the Day

"I'll give you eight months." -- White House press secretary Dana Perino, quoted by the Washington Post, on how long the "glowing press" will continue for President-elect Obama.

Comment by Tribunus Plebis:

There is as much cynicism and arrogance as ignorance in this remark by Dana Perino, for these reasons. First, she clearly believes that negative media coverage received by a president is at some point automatic, rather than based on a president's performance. To the extent it's automatic, that means her boss, W., got negative media through no fault of his own. (She'd obviously like to believe that, since her daily veneration of her boss seems to be coming from an alternate universe in which he has not in fact botched most aspects of his presidency.) Second, it's presumptuous if not arrogant for her to assume that Obama's ability to govern in a way that doesn't trigger the usual inside-the-Beltway attacks is no greater than any other politician -- she is essentially devaluing his ability to do better than the norm. Third, given the multiple crises facing the nation, and the consequent greater unpredictability of events, she has utterly no idea what might condition media coverage of Obama (other than his own performance) in eight months' time. So her remark, like most everything else from the Bush White House in the past eight years, was simultaneously glib, dismissive and simply wrong.

Enough About the "Team of Rivals"

The pundits and mainstream media have overworked the "Team of Rivals" meme -- that President-elect Obama might like to copy Lincoln's inclusion in his Cabinet of his former political rivals. This idea comes from Doris Kearns Goodwin's book of that name, which Obama reportedly liked, although the book is not a reason to copy the idea -- it was overwritten, repetitious, and chock full of irrelevant details (e.g. about Mary Todd Lincoln's shopping sprees and the soirees of Salmon Chase's daughter). Moreover, the book's theme -- that Lincoln recruited his former opponents as his advisors -- was first noticed when he did it 148 years ago; it's not some blinding new historical insight.

The reality is that there are huge differences between 1860 and 2008 that limit the relevance of this analogy. First, in 1860, the political class (Governors, Senators, nationally experienced politicians) was far smaller than it is today. The professional talent pool available to Lincoln (a man of towering intelligence, who wanted to be challenged by his colleagues) was by today's standards very modest -- and half of it had just seceded to form the confederacy. Lincoln would have been foolish to overlook his rivals if they were talented, as was clearly the case with Seward. But today enormously talented potential Cabinet secretaries are ten times more numerous.

Second, the U.S. was plunging into a nation-rending internal conflict of unknown duration in 1860: Lincoln had to show that he was doing everything to unite diverse points of view within the remaining Union, if he expected to prevail in that conflict. Today our problems are severe but they are not similarly existential. Given the diverse, direct and instantaneous ways that a president can communicate with the nation, beyond having his statements and actions reported in newspapers (as was the case in 1860), a president doesn't need to use the composition of his Cabinet to show us that we can't allow our divisions to obstruct the effort to solve our problems.

Third, as ambitious politicians, Lincoln's Cabinet secretaries' rivalry with each other was as intense as their previous rivalry with him. Except within the precincts of his own heart, and occasionally with intimates, Lincoln was a man of preternatural serenity, unconcerned about back-stairs criticism from subordinates or their dislike of one another. He simply overlooked his Cabinet's animosities, so long as he could milk from them individually the kind of intelligence and productivity that managing a government in the middle of a civil war required. But today we live in a media-saturated age in which politicians have vast retinues of followers and flunkies who happily feed internal back-biting to an army of reporters and commentators. If Lincoln and his Cabinet had been subjected to this kind of scrutiny, their internal rivalries would have distracted the Union and possibly torn apart his administration's effectiveness.

In addition, because political rivals are politicians, that means they are generalists, usually without great specific expertise. Today the complexity of financial, industrial, environmental and international-security challenges require reservoirs of knowledge that elected politicians simply do not have time to acquire. The Cabinet room should have that knowledge inside the room, not sitting in offices back in the departments.

If one of President-elect Obama's former rivals for the presidential nomination is a superb choice on the merits to head a particular Cabinet department, he or she should be appointed. But not because assembling a "team of rivals" is good for its own sake.

The nation's real calling

Read the core of Vice President Dick Cheney's video endorsement today of John McCain:

"John is a man who understands the danger facing America. He's a man who has looked into the face of evil and not flinched. He's a man who's comfortable with responsibility and has been since he joined the armed forces at the age of 17....the time is now to make him commander-in-chief."

There is little rationale offered for electing McCain other than his supposed experience of looking "into the face of evil." Cheney is declaring that McCain shares his view, that bellicose confrontation with unnamed enemies is the chief role of the president. It is in fact a worldview which, when implemented with continuous use of military force, becomes self-fulfilling. Today the United States has more enemies in the world than at any time in its history, and Mr. Cheney -- through his decisive influence on George W. Bush -- bears much of the responsibility.

It may be helpful at this moment to remember some words from the Christian tradition, which is usually invoked by fearful conservatives to justify belligerent American actions in the world. In Chronicles, God does not urge his people to look into the face of evil, he says "seek my face, and turn from your wicked ways, then...I will heal your land." [emphasis added] St. Paul insisted: "Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good...See that no one renders evil for evil, but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men."

There is also this cautionary passage in Ecclesiastes: "There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, the sort of error which proceeds from the ruler. Folly is set in great dignity...He who digs a pit may fall into it; and whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake." Indeed, throughout the entire Bible, most references to evil have nothing to do with battling or warring against it, but are injunctions to avoid practicing it yourself, promising that those who do justice, will receive justice.

Isaiah is the prophet who coined this memorable line: "Refuse the evil, and choose the good." Let me apply that to November 4: Let us refuse those who talk constantly of evil while ignoring the failures of their own actions. Let's choose those who say we can do better, who know that good will come to us only as we do the good work -- here and abroad -- that is our true calling as a people.

The rail-splitter in 2008...

Today The New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for President. The editorial was thorough, workmanlike and unequivocal. But of equal interest today is the editorial in which The New York Times endorsed Abraham Lincoln for President in 1860. Without seeing any of the eventual greatness in the man, the editorial was a bit condescending in tone – but summed up its appreciation of Lincoln by describing, tongue-in-cheek, the habits of mind of a “rail splitter” (which is how Lincoln’s campaigners described him, referring to one of his first jobs as a young man). The Times said this about the man from Illinois:

“Rail-splitting is not an exciting occupation. It does not tend to cultivate the hot and angry passions of the heart…It teaches a man to strike heavy blows, and to plant them just where they are needed – but he learns, also, to deal them only when they are needed. A skillful professor of this science will not be likely to go around splitting things in general – putting a wedge into every crack he sees and driving it home merely for the love of the thing. He has an eye to utility. It is only when things have fallen into decay a little – when the fences are down and the cattle and swine wandering into forbidden territory, rooting up useful crops and doing more harm in a day than a careful farmer can remedy in a week, that he splits rails to repair the breach and fence in the troublesome brutes.” It would have been hard to give a clearer assessment of how Lincoln actually governed in the ensuing years, navigating the country through the worst crisis of its history.

Today The New York Times said that “leading America forward will require…sober judgment and a cool, steady hand. Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance.” In contrast, during the week last month when the Congress at first rejected the financial crisis bail-out package and John McCain suspended his campaign and rushed to Washington, USA Today editorialized: “The Republican candidate's erratic performance this week was far from reassuring.”

But fortunately there is a rail-splitter available again…

What the Election Has Come Down To...

If we take seriously the language of presidential candidates and their running mates, then what the outcome of this election has come down to -- according to John McCain -- is whether a majority of white Americans in swing states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Missouri is prepared to believe his campaign's insinuations that Barack Obama is (a) a terrorist, or at least the friend of terrorists, (b) a "socialist", (c) a racist, because he hasn't disavowed his friend Rep. John Lewis's criticism of racist language used by people who go to McCain and Palin rallies, and (d) a Muslim. None of these claims and insinuations are true, although the first three are subtly or directly interwoven into McCain's and especially Palin's remarks at campaign rallies, as well as illustrated in sinister, shadowy television ads. That some of their supporters have absorbed and begun to regurgitate these lines is readily apparent: http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/10/note-to-palin-crowd-your-roots-
are.html

That video was broadcast worldwide on Al Jazeera, and it's a perfect example of what Colin Powell was talking about on "Meet the Press" last Sunday: That the words and images of some Americans' prejudice against Muslims and people of color are "killing us" around the world -- meaning that a big chunk of our political discourse is reinforcing the image of America as a mean-spirited, religiously antagonistic and racially bigoted nation of people which has, by the way, dumped the world into an economic crisis caused by our egregiously leveraged credit practices.

The final round of campaign rhetoric on which Senator McCain and Governor Palin are now embarked is rife with these images and themes of race, violence and radicalism. They are attempting to win an election based on making less well-educated, undecided white voters afraid of a black man who is a former University of Chicago constitutional law professor distrusted by the left-wing of his own party because it suspects he is too moderate. Inasmuch as many privileged political pundits who have known McCain well for many years say that he is a swell guy who would never really think these odious things about an opponent, then the intellectual premise of his campaign, at its 11th hour, is based on hypocrisy and cynicism. His strategy has come down to pandering to the worst residual forms of intolerance in order to try to eke out a plurality in a handful of socially conservative states that, in a close election, might theoretically be enough to give him a victory in the Electoral College -- an antiquated, undemocratic mechanism for electing a president -- although most pollsters now expect that Barack Obama will win a substantial popular vote victory. If this were to occur, the world would see that the United States had elected a president based not on "the better angels of our nature" but instead on our worst instincts. It would have every right to dismiss our pretensions to promote civil society and democratic principles elsewhere in the world.

We are better than that.

McCain and Palin call Obama's ideas "socialist"

The intellectual progenitor of most modern socialist parties was Karl Marx, whose philosophy was broad, ramshackle but ruthless. You could plow through thousands of pages of his writings without finding a single idea for government that would work in 21st century America or be happily embraced by many Democrats. But you don't have to do that research, to prove that Barack Obama isn't a socialist. Strip away all the ornate antechambers and upper stories of Marx's ideological palace -- which when imposed on modern nations always leads to their decline -- and you find one elemental, insistent idea: The state should own the means of production, all of them. Meaning that except for Korean laundries and unlicensed plumbers, the state should own every damn productive unit in the economy. No American presidential candidate has ever subscribed to that idea, least of all the unexcitable, distinctly unradical Barack Obama. So the McCain-Palin flaming steak of rhetoric about Obama being a socialist is just another piece of Flying Wallendas exaggeration. It's a lie if they know what socialism actually is, and if they don't, then it's clear they're at the stage of the campaign where they will say anything that might generate a headline which two or three voters will actually believe, while simultaneously driving their "base" absolutely hysterical with fear and hatred. That won't only create a long hang-over for the conservative faithful. In an age of political polarization and partisan animosities, it's irresponsible.

The perversity of the McCain-Palin attacks on Obama

Whether intentional or unintentional, there's a perverse psychology behind the false allegations about Barack Obama made in recent days by John McCain and Sarah Palin, in public speeches as well as television ads. They've accused Obama of friendship with a terrorist, on the basis of his having been present at a few fundraisers and foundation board meetings with William Ayers, who'd been in the domestic revolutionary group Weathermen almost 40 years ago but is now a respected member of the Chicago educational community. In return, McCain-Palin supporters at rallies have shouted "kill him" (meaning Obama) and have expressed fear about Obama being a Muslim (which he is not). Considered together and in the context of American history, the content of McCain's sinister-looking ads and Palin's exaggerated remarks in fact are tantamount to an incitement to hatred, and potentially an incitement to violence.

Claiming that Obama is "not who he claims to be" cues many fundamentalist Christians to believe that Obama is a Muslim (since many of them already believe that Muslims are barbaric). Insinuating to entirely white audiences that Obama's identity is ambiguous ("Who is he really?") can easily tap racial uneasiness from those who harbor such feelings. Claiming that Obama consorted with a terrorist amalgamates what has already been encouraged -- fear of a black presidential candidate -- with many white Americans' long-standing bias or resentment toward blacks generally, and combines that with fear of terrorists. This in turn blends the historically toxic prejudice against African-Americans with the new fear and loathing of foreign enemies like Osama bin Laden.

Similar combinations of false beliefs, when summoned by self-serving, unprincipled politicians before in American history, have led to social upheaval, riots and killing. However indirectly, by encouraging people to sip this lethal cocktail of prejudice and fear, the McCain campaign is resorting to a depraved kind of political rhetoric that has never before been used in modern presidential campaigns by any major party. They are bringing the radical, twisted fringe of American political conflict into the center of their language and are thereby polluting our public debate and disgracing themselves.

The financial crisis and the election...

None of us who favor the election of Barack Obama should take satisfaction in the carnage on Wall Street, however much it creates the possibility of an Obama landslide. The 401(k)'s and pensions of everyone are suffering, and the credit freeze is leading to lay-offs of workers, today. The now-failed "bail-out" package was a technical mechanism to extract bad debt from threatened financial institutions, as well as an emergency psychological measure to reassure world credit markets that the U.S. government would act to stop the domestic panic and prevent a major global economic implosion. Without some sort of legislation out of Congress in the next week of equivalent size, more American financial institutions (including small local banks) will fail, the Fed will have no choice but to print more money, and inflation and unemployment will rise simultaneously. How many more points on the unemployment and bank failure numbers are Obama enthusiasts willing to accept, for a few more electoral votes for him on November 4? The reality is that if there is no decisive government action to halt the credit crisis before the election, President Obama will inherit a much more seriously weakened economy and be digging out from a deeper hole for far longer into his new administration. What happens this fall can affect his ability to govern progressively. Let's hope that some sort of systematic U.S. government action proportionate to the world credit crisis is taken soon, because we all want this new president to be able to act on the plans and priorities he's talking about. You do not want his entire first term to be digging out from under more debris left by the fecklessness of Bush and the obduracy of congressional Republicans.

McCain's disrespect...

Today Arianna Huffington commented about last night's debate between McCain and Obama that McCain's best moment was when he said he saw "KGB" when he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes. Just why is it a good moment for a presidential candidate when he essentially calls the leader of Russia a spy and a thug (which is the common image in the West of a KGB agent)? This was another example of something we've seen before during this campaign: McCain's tendency to be belligerent toward other leaders who deviate from some aspect of his worldview. It was also a brash, foolhardy thing to say about the leader of a country with whom the U.S. must work on a range of serious global problems. Are we to believe that Putin will forget this, or dismiss it as campaign rhetoric, if McCain were to be elected?

But John McCain has denounced one foreign leader after another all year: the Iranian leaders, Hugo Chavez, various other dictators -- and he cast an aspersion at the prime minister of Spain. Now the U.S. has great differences with most of the leaders that McCain doesn't like, and some of them may have said incendiary things. But America's leaders shouldn't parrot their style. Unless the president of the United States and those running for the office maintain some semblance of decorum in talking about the people with whom they are forced to deal once in office, the present reputation of the United States for bullying other nations will be compounded with the additional problem of American leaders becoming known for insulting other leaders. This is exactly what we do not need as a president: someone who personalizes our national interests and invests his likes and dislikes with gratuitous hostility.

It may also be clear now, on the evidence of the first debate, that McCain has a general tendency to denounce or ridicule those with whom he disagrees. His condescension and lecturing tone toward Senator Obama in the debate was a form of disrespect for a fellow member of the Senate and, by extension, for the millions of Americans whose votes for Senator Obama in the primaries won him the nomination of his party. If McCain can't practice simple courtesy on a program watched by 60 million Americas, why should we think he will be able to enlist the trust and goodwill of those whose cooperation he'll need to govern effectively?

McCain campaign blames Obama (and his black "advisor") for the financial crisis

Today it became clear that the McCain campaign is trying to suggest that if it weren't for black people like Barack Obama and Frank Raines (past head of Fannie Mae, the privatized former federal agency which helps insure the flow of mortgage funding), the financial crisis wouldn't have happened.

This afternoon on C-SPAN radio, an economic advisor to John McCain argued that the financial meltdown this past week was caused entirely by Fannie Mae (rather than by the Bush Administration's deregulation, Wall Street's credit default swaps -- called "financial weapons of mass destruction" by Warren Buffett -- or by irresponsible practices by investment banks, cited by Secretary Paulsen).

Lately a McCain television ad has been running, showing shadowy pictures of Obama and Frank Raines, who is African-American and whose Fannie Mae bonuses were the subject of a civil lawsuit. The ad said that Raines was a major economic advisor to Obama, though the Obama campaign swiftly denied that, and various media outlets challenged the facts of the McCain ad.

Take a look at the Raines-Obama ad yourself, with the Washington Post's refutation of its claims:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/09/obamas_fannie_mae_connection.html

On Friday, McCain himself claimed that the financial crisis was somehow caused by corrupt lobbying, in which Obama was entangled, though he offered no proof of the latter (because of course there is none).

When you view these things together, it looks like McCain is trying to insinuate that Obama and his black cronies created the financial crisis. This amalgamates distortion and lying by a presidential campaign with racist insinuation, trying to connect white voters' anxiety about the financial crisis to supposed latent doubts about Obama because he is black. It is utterly outrageous and frankly suggests that McCain is completely unfit for the presidency.

Outflanking McCain on "Reform"

While it no longer seems as if John McCain's media-sensation VP pick Sarah Palin can pull enough white women voters to the Republican ticket to prevent Barack Obama from being elected, there is one more gambit that he could attempt, to lend superficial credence to his claim of being a "reformer" -- in his apparent strategy to out-change Obama, the inventor of the "change" brand in this cycle. He could give a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and propose significant structural reforms in the federal government itself, in order to bring "real change" to Washington. I predict that unless Barack Obama outflanks McCain in proposing a major package of changes in the way that our government represents the people, McCain just might try something like this. While it would be recognized by the political class as a campaign gambit rather than a sincere initiative, it could work with independent voters who dislike both parties and want a real shake-up in Washington.

From Obama, a serious proposal for significant changes in the way government functions would put beef on the plate of his claim to represent real change, and he'd be offering a solution that's proportionate to the indictment he's made about government today. A majority of Americans believe that an increasingly corrupt and ineffective Congress and executive branch – which mainly serve the interests of those who can buy access to policymakers – should be returned to the control of the people. That requires changes not only of personnel in Washington, but of how and when voters pass judgment on candidates for federal office.

Here's my proposed package, of statutory and constitutional changes: (1) Each citizen must be given the right to vote for president (a right they do not now possess, according to the Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which said that state legislatures make the rules for presidential elections), to have each person's vote counted, and to have that vote counted equally (requiring direct election of the president by national popular vote and abolition of the Electoral College); (2) All contributions for campaigns for national office (president and congress) must be limited to citizens – no organizations of any kind should be permitted to contribute money -- so that people, not interests, control Washington; (3) A recountable paper trail must be established nationally for all electronic voting systems, and such systems should be standardized nationally for federal elections; and (4) Concurrent presidential and House terms of four years should be created, with a four-term limit on House members and a three-term limit on members of the Senate, with a procedure for mid-term special-recall elections for the House and the President. The people themselves must be given the means of breaking the influence of special interests. The breakdown of democracy can only be fixed by strengthening the central position of the people in how our system works.

The announcement of such proposals by either candidate would surprise the media, galvanize the support of undecided independent voters, and dramatically establish that candidate as the unquestionable leader in bringing more change to American elections and American government since at least the time when women were given the right to vote.

The urgency of defusing Sarah Palin

The Obama campaign wizards are whistling past the graveyard if they think they can ignore Sarah Palin, because her telegenic impact will help sell her fallacy-filled attacks on Obama to a wide swath of independent, working-class white voters in swing states, and that could be the difference in this election. Right now she is back in Alaska to undergo briefings on foreign policy and a vast range of issues about which she knows nothing, since she is the least well-educated and least politically experienced nominee for the vice presidency since the erstwhile poet William Orlando Butler in 1848 (he had served only 4 years in Congress, before winning notoriety in the war against Mexico). The Obama campaign should take advantage of the hiatus in Palin mediamania afforded by her cramming sessions at home, by running very hard but entirely factual ads debunking her supposed reformist record in Alaska and insuring that voters in swing states know that as a mayor she tried to fire the city librarian for refusing to censor books, has said that she believes the war in Iraq is part of God's plan, and has repeatedly misrepresented her own record and that of Barack Obama in the past few days. If the tone of these ads is "more in sadness than in anger," and they build an accurate picture of this person's unfitness for national office -- based on her alarming views on energy, climate change, and civil liberties, as well as her penchant for trashing her opponents -- the skepticism of a majority of the electorate about her readiness for the vice presidency will harden into rejection, and John McCain's media-mesmerizing attack 'babe' (the word that right-wing talk radio hosts are using for her) can be disarmed.

Vainglory and venom...

Comment on "The Field", http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/shockingly-bad#comments

John McCain's speech last night was about two things: fighting against enemies, and his own past. It was as if he believed his personal history should be sufficient reason to drape the presidency on his shoulders, as if it were an honorary degree -- as if he felt he deserved to be president for what he'd already done, rather than for his spirit and proposals for the future. But there was also a logical fallacy at the heart of this speech: He insisted that he was serving a cause greater than himself, even as he talked primarily about himself -- as if he saw himself as a kind of Mother Teresa of martial selflessness. In a word, he was vainglorious. And the night before, Sarah Palin delivered a speech that one pundit called "venom-filled". In light of the Republicans' constant invoking of the Christian faith, perhaps they and their nominees should remember the gently sarcastic rebuke that St. Paul gave to himself and some of his followers: "Do we begin again to commend ourselves?" The great apostle knew that overweening pride -- much less ridicule of those who disagree with you -- is not the way to persuade others to join a cause beyond themselves. This week neither McCain nor Palin practiced the values they preached.

Reality-free Palin...

The chief problem with Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention tonight is that it gave absolutely no indication that she was aware that the nation's economy and standing in the world are in tatters, and that a large majority of the electorate is vividly aware of those realities. The America of snowmobiling Dads and families that love babies with special needs, which she says she represents, is also an America that has spent -- under her party's leadership -- close to $1 trillion on wars that haven't improved our security, and that has a currency in international free fall as well as a housing market which has cratered. Those problems are what the next president will face, though she showed no awareness of them. And let's not forget that the president whose ex-speechwriter wrote the words she spoke is issuing executive order after executive order expanding domestic spying, legalizing the invasion of data privacy by customs officials, and otherwise constricting Americans' civil liberties. That happens to be the America we live in, not the air-brushed postcard we got from Sarah Palin tonight. The Republicans can show a photo of Mount Rushmore above her head to try preposterously to lend an historical reference to a vice presidential candidate who is egregiously unqualified for national office, but this entire act tonight falls flat. We will not be fooled -- or insulted, as Governor Palin did repeatedly to Senator Obama. Her condescension was appropriate only in the context of a convention where personal invective was hurled at opponents by politicians who routinely claim to have some higher brand of morality than the other party. Tonight Ms. Palin, Mr Guiliani and other speakers spent more time reinforcing their party's richly deserved reputation for hypocrisy than they did actually finding substantive reasons to object to the election of Barack Obama.

Behind the Palin gambit: trying to destroy a rational election

It's now commonly assumed that the principal reasons that John McCain selected one-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate were to excite the religious right and tempt undecided women voters to embrace the Republican ticket, since they now have one of their own to turn out for. But there was more to picking Palin than that.

The predictable volume of the blogosphere storm about Palin shows that McCain is achieving at least one of his objectives in selecting a sure-to-be-controversial nominee: diverting attention away from Obama in the wake of the Democrats' terrific convention and Obama's solid acceptance speech. Morever, the paladins of the mainstream media -- believing that unfavorable information about politicians must first come out of the mouths of their quotable foes -- are bending over backwards to avoid noticing anything questionable about Palin. This will force Democrats to start pointing out the enormous problems with her being one step away from the presidency.

Mark my words, as soon as Democrats turn their fire on her, they'll be accused of being anti-women. Obama himself is right to steer around making remarks about her, but Biden needn't do so. Her various hard-right positions and her admissions of ignorance about government (such as saying last month that she had no idea what a vice president does) should be turned into campaign ads against her immediately, or else the Republicans may succeed in defining her as just a colorful frontier-state straight-talker.

They will be doing that to frame the second wave of attention to Palin, which McCain's people surely realized was inevitable: media investigations into her firing of the head of the Alaskan state police, for resisting her attempts to get him to dismiss her state-trooper ex-brother-in-law. The Alaskan legislature started an investigation of this apparent abuse of power, and the report is due eight days before the November election. The McCain campaign was probably untroubled by this scandal -- because it could be portrayed as partisan (again, "unfairly attacking a woman"), and would deny more media time to Obama.

This hints at significant new negative ads about Obama coming soon from the McCain campaign. Combined with feigned but towering outrage at criticism of Palin's dearth of relevant experience for national office, the McCain campaign will be trying to manipulate and distort the nature of news coverage over the next several weeks -- to embroil the fall election campaign in a storm of negative attacks, counter-attacks and media insanity, to distract voters from anything substantive, since on substance, McCain loses.

Palin in power: the end of rational government

By nominating Sarah Palin for vice president, the Republicans will cease to be a serious political party contending for professional leadership of the most prominent democratic nation on earth. By selecting, as the would-be second-in-command of this nation, a person who believes that religious creationism should be taught in public schools, that all men and women should not use contraception, that human beings have played no role in global warming, and that it's appropriate for elected officials to intimidate police officers, they will have exhibited to everyone watching this election that they have contempt for science, the rule of law, and individual rights. Ms. Palin's access to power would be the symbol of the death of rationality in American public life that would be the logical end of continued Republican rule. The election of Obama has now become an existential necessity for this country, if Americans wish to have any hope not just of continuing to lead the secular democratic West, but of remaining in any position to compete in the open global technological society of the 21st century.

Playing it safe with his VP choice will downsize Obama himself...

"My friends", unless you want to hear that phrase every day after next January 20, please hear this: The credentials of Obama's VP choice will have no effect on the election, because the VP's credentials have not ever been the reason why a presidential nominee won in November. The only two effects are the subjective effect that it has on the nominee's base and the media when it's announced, and what the choice says about the nominee.

Kathleen Sebelius is the only conceivable VP selection at this point who would both excite the Democratic grass roots and electrify the news media. (Selecting a woman VP did not have that effect in 1984, because Mondale had no chance to win, and Ferraro was plucked from obscurity in the House as a Hail Mary pass. But any woman that Obama picked might actually be one step away from the presidency.)

To those who ask if selecting a woman other than Hillary will alienate Hillaryites, I say this: Not if he announces the choice before Saturday of this week, because that will turn the next several days into the Coming of Kathleen. Striding together into Denver, they would be embraced by countless Democratic women politicians eager to be seen with them, praising Sebelius to the rafters. Hillary would have no choice but to join the chorus, because any damning by faint praise would be seen as focus on her own interests rather than the party's.

In contrast to the media frenzy that such a VP choice would create, Bayh, Biden, Kaine or any other traditional white male politician would entail no surprise and deliver no excitement; the sense of deflation would be palpable in less than two days. In what now looks like an unnecessarily close election from Democrats' perspective, and with a qualified progressive woman governor of a Republican state (with great media sparkle) available, any more conventional choice would contribute nothing to Obama's momentum.

He can't win this election by making safe choices and hedging his bets, or else he'll seem more conventional himself. Since returning from Berlin, Obama has frittered away the summer weeks as if he were expecting to saunter to victory in November. But that won't happen. In the first five months of this year, he raised the nation's expectations by unexpectedly capturing this nomination. He has to renew and meet those expectations with a bold VP selection that seems proportionate to the urgency of the stakes in this election. (And he will inoculate himself against an unfavorable comparison if, as seems likely now, John McCain springs his own surprise to great media effect when he announces his VP pick.)

There has not been such interest in the vicissitudes of a presidential campaign in American politics since 1992 or perhaps 1960. Obama needs to increase the tempo and not dampen it, if he's to retain the upper hand in this election.

Clinton's comparison of the Florida primary dispute to Zimbabwe

Hillary Clinton abandoned any respect for the truth when she compared the Democratic Party’s refusal to accept the results of the Florida primary (held in violation of the party's rules) to the Zimbabwean dictator Roberto Mugabe’s falsification of election returns a few weeks ago. For the past five years, brave democratic dissidents and protesting Zimbabweans who are both white and black have been arrested and beaten by Mugabe’s security forces, women activists have been raped and killed, and entire neighborhoods known to be politically opposed to Mugabe have been bulldozed. Nothing approaching such repression has happened in the United States since the lynchings and killings of blacks in the South, at the height of segregationist fury in the early 20th century. For Senator Clinton to equate the Democratic Party’s actions on the Florida primary dispute with the murderous brutality of an anti-democratic tyrant is more than an exaggeration, it’s an insult to the party she wants to lead and the intelligence of her listeners -- and indirectly it disrespects the truly portentous stakes in Zimbabwe, whose people who are struggling to surmount infinitely worse abuses of the democratic process than could have occurred in Florida.

Clinton as Obama's Vice Presidential Running Mate?

Comment on The Field, 5/7/08,

http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=1171#comments

There is only one characteristic that Senator Clinton would bring to the Democratic ticket that’s been proven by the 2008 primaries to work in drawing significant numbers of additional voters to the polls: she is an articulate, intelligent woman, who plausibly could be president. That’s why older women have been her most stalwart constituency.

However, the Democratic Party is no longer short of women with gravitas at the national level; Clinton is not unique. And the most compelling one, by far, is Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. More feminine than ferocious, she is endearing on camera but also visibly intelligent and calmly articulate, is natural in manner and not a self-absorbed performance artist like so many politicians, has captured the hearts of her Republican state, was raised in a politically savvy family (her father was governor of Ohio), and would terrify any strategist for the McCain campaign, since she would immediately put in play Midwestern states that would otherwise be safely Republican and reinforce Obama’s appeal to independents and moderate Republicans everywhere. Had Bush lost just the state of Kansas in ‘00, he wouldn’t have been president, and McCain is very unlikely to have any greater margin of error. A great offense gains yardage on the other team’s turf and doesn’t merely defend its own.

Take another look at her endorsement of Obama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nHp90Z2NJk, and try to tell me you can’t see that there’s some special political chemistry at work here, in such a ticket.

The only obvious objection is that a governor with no national security or foreign policy experience wouldn’t strengthen the ticket in that respect. But Obama will not be elected because a vice presidential candidate has more such experience than he does; indeed, it might be seen as a concession that he himself is under-qualified if he chose a running-mate who had that experience. And just how empathetically and knowledgeably would a retired general, or Senator Webb of Virginia whose sole expertise is defense, answer questions from a nurse whose house is being foreclosed? Obama will dissolve any qualms about his knowledge of national security with how he answers questions about such issues in the debates against McCain, or he won’t — and if he doesn’t, his vice presidential running mate won’t be able to bail him out.

Visualize these two people together on the podium in Denver, and try to imagine a more attractive ticket, a more natural pair with nevertheless different characteristics, or two candidates who could better model the ethnic, age and gender diversity of America while still being from the Heartland and not from Washington. “Change You Can Believe In” would have an even bigger meaning after this Illinois man and this Kansas woman, this sensational senator and this seasoned governor, were nominated in Denver.

The reality behind the Obama "religion and guns" flap

Comment on The Daily Kos, April 13, 2008

The reality is that the Clinton campaign has traction at this point only insofar as it receives or invents another opportunity to hyperventilate about wedge issues -- which aren't substantive but are really rhetorical distractions. And that's what Hillary is doing now, by taking a new ride on her Let's-Bash-Barack bandwagon, in reaction to Obama's "clinging to religion and guns" remark about working-class voters who feel threatened.

Substantively, Senator Obama was describing reasons why people who've been left behind by the economy and been forgotten by government turn bitter -- and he was right: When they're down and out, people take comfort in what gives them a sense of strength and self-reliance, and in many parts of America, that means turning to God and falling back on the old stance of "don't tread on me" (sometimes signified by the rifle your father gave you, hanging in the back window of the pick-up you drive to church).

Obama didn't say that being religious or liking guns was a function of bitterness or fear. "Say a prayer and pass the ammunition" is not just a wartime expression, it's an attitude based on circling the wagons and hunkering down, and Americans have had plenty of crises in their history when they felt like doing just that. But it's not just an American instinct -- it's a common response anywhere chaos looms, and many Americans may be facing the worst economic disarray of their lifetimes. They didn't produce the conditions that are now battering the economy, but they've got to cope with them -- which government has failed to do.

And that's what Obama was saying. His words showed no condescension or elitism, only an attempt to understand what people are feeling. What he hasn't done is to pander to their fears, or try to alienate them from his opponents, something Senator Clinton seems unable to resist doing.

To Fix the Economy, Fix Washington

Comment on The Field, 3/29/08 - http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=962

Nothing builds (or rebuilds) the appeal of a political candidate more than having a superior public argument in the thick of a campaign. Barack Obama may not survive Hillary Clinton in shape to win in November, unless she is forced out by one or two decisive Obama victories soon, and that won't happen unless he makes a fresh, commanding argument at this point in the campaign.

None of his people should be lulled into any sense of inevitability just because the pundits are now saying she is highly unlikely to win. He can't wait for party bigwigs to pull her offstage. He has to take this nomination by main force. To do that, he needs to make a new argument, which is consistent with his innate identity as a powerful voice for change and as a personal harbinger of it.

Because Obama has had a good two weeks now tactically -- thanks to the Philadelphia speech which pretty much got the Wright affair behind him, the Richardson endorsement, and now the endorsement by Senator Casey of Pennnsylvania -- Obama can afford to go on the offense. And he should, or else he'll find himself in the final weeks before Pennsylvania responding to more Hillary attacks. But if he succumbs to the conventional wisdom about the politics of this primary and tries, tactically, to outbid Hillary on economic issues of concern to the white working-class, it won't work: The perception of her strength on that has hardened in the media, and that reinforces the general perception that she's a fighter for them -- which they now appear to believe.

It would be harder for Obama to dislodge that perception, than to jump over it and drive home another issue as decisive -- an issue on which he's perceived as naturally stronger. He has enough media money and enough free media to give visibility to any issue he wants to. But it has to be an issue that dovetails with the cumulative, valid, existing perceptions about what motivates him -- and that issue is this: fundamentally changing a broken political system.

Here's the strategic logic behind why this could translate into fresh new victories in the upcoming states. The white working class is indeed worried about losing jobs and now also worried about either losing their homes or losing sufficient resale value to have enough for retirement. But Obama cannot win a bidding war with Clinton by promising to apply more money to these problems, because he will never top her on pandering to those fears. And if he tries, he will rob himself of the comparative advantage that makes him far more appealing to independents than another redistributionist Democrat.

He must change the way that economic issues are perceived by asking why the economy has been brought to the precipice. And the answer is that the political system has been sold to the highest bidders, which has shifted opportunities away from those who work for a living, to those who can afford to buy access to politicians in Washington. It's not that factory workers can't be productive or don't have the capacity to compete. It's that the tax system and the mortgage finance system and the regulatory system have been mismanaged or corrupted by the way our political system has been rigged.

So changing the impact of the economy on working-class people in Johnstown or Scranton or Bethlehem or Allentown has to start with changing politics in Washington. And then Obama could say: "Let me tell you something that my opponent cannot: No one owns me -- just look at my tax returns. And I don't owe anything to anybody who profits unfairly from what goes on in Washington. I hate that system as much as you do. And if I do nothing else when I get to the White House, I promise that I will change it. It's time not only for equal economic treatment in America, it's time for equal political treatment -- because we will never fix our economy once and for all, unless we fix our political system once and for all. And we can't do that, without someone completely new in the White House."

This is an argument that renders Clinton's language and indeed the premise of her candidacy obsolete. It overrides any constituency-based appeals based on promising more breaks or programs or benefits. People have heard those appeals for election after election after election. They know that politicians promise to do more, and then they don't. The reason they don't is simple: The political system no longer works for ordinary Americans. And that's what Obama can change, and Clinton won't.

If he makes this kind of argument, and makes it passionately, he has a legitimate chance to win in Pennsylvania and will almost certainly win decisively in North Carolina and Indiana -- and thereby end the contest for the nomination.

Obama as the Voice of Public Reason

Comment on The Huffington Post, 3/22/08 - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erica-jong/why-am-i-so-afraid_b_92876.html

If Erica Jong doesn't know why she is "so afraid" of what is happening in this election year, she shouldn't be pop-psychoanalyzing a serious, fearless political figure like Barack Obama. To call this man a "stallion...drunk on his own rhetoric" is not only completely inconsistent with Obama's public demeanor, which is consistently cool and self-controlled, it is personally demeaning. Ms. Jong seems to have no realization that the language of presidential candidates conveys the argument of their propositions to the nation, about why people should follow their leadership, and in that sense all "rhetoric" should be powerful if it is going to be effective in a democracy. Rhetoric is not merely "words", as Senator Clinton constantly suggests. It is at the heart of functioning self-government, because without a sensible analysis of the current predicament and a vision of tomorrow offered to those who vote, the nation's decision-making about the future cannot be rational. "Rhetoric" is the vehicle of public reason, and Senator Obama is modeling the use of such reason as no other presidential candidate has done since Franklin Roosevelt. That is why he is headed toward his party's nomination.

Buckley the Dissident

Comment on The Huffington Post, 3/12/08, Reply to "Ira Glasser Remembers William F. Buckley, Jr." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-glasser/ira-glasser-remembers-wil_b_91175.html

As Ira Glasser attests, William F. Buckley, Jr., was the kind of conservative who liberals could like -- not only because he was personally gracious, but because unlike many on the right, he actually listened to those he was debating. He did that because he relished ideas, he respected democracy, and he distrusted conventional wisdom.

In the 1960s, I had read "Up From Liberalism," Buckley's book that challenged liberal orthodoxy. As a young student who had done precinct work for Republicans but probably couldn’t tell you why – other than loyalty to my family’s political roots – Buckley spoke like lightning to my fatigue with all the stereotyped arguments of the era.

Then I plunged into the intellectual crises of the ‘60s with my Baby Boomer friends. One thing I couldn’t do, however, was fall in line with the gung-ho, pro-Vietnam War enthusiasm of many conservatives. I was appalled at their cavalier disregard for the costs of that war, as I am today about the Iraq misadventure. When Republicans fell into line with Richard Nixon in ’68 – a man whose campaign that year was philosophically inert and substantively disingenuous -- I realized that the party's establishment would swallow and digest any idea or leader, so long as elections were won and the system didn’t change. By ’72 I was for McGovern, because at least he “spoke truth to power”, as Buckley had in the ‘50s. And I never looked back -- still preferring maverick outsiders like Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, because they too challenged the group-think of those who were inured to the system as it was.

I only saw Bill Buckley in person once -- at a 2003 conference and celebration of the life and work of the late Malcolm Muggeridge, the great British journalist and television host. Muggeridge had reported from Stalin's Russia, edited "Punch", and was the man who'd brought Mother Theresa to the world's attention, through the BBC. Like Buckley, Muggeridge was an entertaining raconteur, a foe of the reigning establishment of his youth -- and also a thoughtful, tolerant Christian. Like Muggeridge, who was his friend, Buckley was a bit of a rebel, a bit of a knave, and loved the friendly clash of ideas. He was a natural dissident with a dash of dry sherry, topped up with cackling good humor. He was a good man.

A Foreign Trip for Obama? Not now....

Comment on The Field [edited], 3/10/08 - http://ruralvotes.com/thefield/?p=870#comments

A foreign trip by Obama before the Pennsylvania primary (which is now rumored) would be a disastrous idea: First, it would appear to many as if he were conceding that he didn’t have enough foreign policy experience, and were doing a last-minute, cram-for-the-exam trip. Second, it would concede Pennsylvania to Clinton, and friends, Pennsylvania is NOT Ohio. Philadelphia is Atlanta, which Obama won decisively: a huge African-American core population, surrounded by well-educated, upscale white suburbs. Pittsburgh has a blue-collar image, but has been strikingly prosperous in the last decade. The rest of the state is socially not unlike parts of Wisconsin or Iowa, in which Obama did quite well. Third, a foreign trip would be reported by the media as if it were either a stunt or a rock-star tour. Neither image has anything to do with the issues faced by hard-working Americans who are staring into the abyss of a financial collapse. Fourth, Hillary would barrel through Pennsylvania, channeling John Edwards, asking “Where’s Barack? Why isn’t he here, answering your questions and listening to your problems?” She’d be on the scene, and he’d be AWOL from American democracy in action — that’s how it would be spun. Fifth, remember, it’s about delegates. Every one in Pennsylvania counts.

What Obama has to do is stay home, reframe the election, and refreshen our sense of what he stands for -- this way: “What kind of government are we going to have? A government of, by and for the special interests? A government in which the oil industry writes energy legislation and drug companies write health care laws? A government run by people who make negative attacks and refuse to release their tax returns? And how do we change government? Certainly not by returning to the past, by asking those who already had their chance to come back again and try one more time. No, it’s time to change the way we do government in America, and that can only be done by making a clean break from the past, from all those who are comfortable with Washington and have benefited from business as usual. It is not merely time for a change. It is time to remake our government altogether, in the image and in the interests of those who’ve been left out. This election is for you — the ones whose voices have been ignored, and whose votes have been taken for granted, and who were promised prosperity but instead got war and recession. The incompetence, the dishonesty, the negative attacks, the stranglehold of money on our government: All that comes to an end, when I walk through the front door of the White House, and take its power, and use it for you…”

About the calls for unity in the Democratic race...

High-minded calls for unity coming from Mrs. Clinton's supporters or Democratic big-wigs, now that many assume she will win the Pennsylvania primary and therefore the nomination, are only thinly veiled attempts to end the contest before all voters have been heard from or to distract us from this reality: The cause of bitter division within Democratic ranks at this point is Hillary Clinton, whose continuing distortions of Senator Obama's record and whose mocking and denigration of his speeches and experience have far exceeded the level of negative politics in any previous race for the Democratic nomination in the modern period. If she is nominated, and if Obama supporters sit on their hands in the fall, it is because they'll have reached the conclusion that someone capable of such disingenuous accusations and derogatory campaign tactics shouldn't be president. If she is nominated after this kind of campaign, she will have only herself to blame if the party cannot be unified. So the first precondition of unity is an end to Mrs. Clinton's attacks.

Obama v. Clinton: The Right Kind of Critical Campaign

Comment on The Daily Kos, 3/8/08 [edited] - http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/8/11633/01082/747/472168

There has been a tide of advice to Barack Obama about what he should emphasize from now until the Pennsylvania primary. But now is the time to focus voters' minds on questions that frame the entire election, in a way that favors him and disadvantages his opponent.

To anyone not programmed to believe everything she says, Mrs. Clinton's behavior has lately been over the top, distorting Obama's record and belittling his eloquence. Since the means you use affect the ends you get, it's likely that this is how she would govern -- denouncing those who get in her way, and twisting and belaboring every point in order to drown out other voices. "She will wear a great nation down," Peggy Noonan has aptly predicted. And in Washington or anywhere else, you don't make problems easier to solve by poisoning the atmosphere in which problems are discussed.

Since Obama stands for changing the way we do politics, he's obligated to make this a major issue -- and it can win the nomination race for him. He can simply say: High-spin, take-no-prisoners politics damages our democracy. It substitutes noise for reason, and accusations for arguments. Distracting and dividing the people is how Bush has governed. Is that what we need more of?

One example: the Clintons' dragging their feet on releasing their income tax returns means they don't want to be held easily accountable for who owes them and who owns them -- and we cannot change politics unless we have leaders who are accountable.

Summing it all up, he could say: Aren't we all sick of the system in Washington? How much longer do we have to wait, to have a president who believes that too? We presume to preach democracy to everyone else in the world, while refusing to make it rational and honest in America. We say we are patriotic, but patriotism means insisting that we have the kind of government that's worth our patriotism.

This would turn the dross of Clinton's attacks into the gold of a higher purpose for Obama, by calling voters to the cause of regenerating our democracy -- and rejecting Clinton's tactics of stooping to conquer.

by Tribunus Plebis on Sat Mar 08, 2008 at 09:24:27 PM PST

The Obama phenomenon: It's the message, not the man

Comment on The Huffington Post, 2/24/08

John Tomasic is wrong when he says that "Obama mania, like Reagan love, has to do with faith in the person..." Although Barack Obama is a confident speaker, with as low a center of gravity and as calm a demeanor as any presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower, he could not be generating the response that he has, if he were merely a "rock star". Politics is different than entertainment, because it concerns reality -- the national reality, which most people believe is now as distressing as it has ever been in their lives. The mortgage debt crisis, the endless wars in the Middle East, the collapse of the value of the dollar, the failure of major parts of our national infrastructure, as wide a chasm between the rich and the poor as seen since before the Great Crash of 1929, and a titanic wave of anti-Americanism from Bolivia to Belgrade to Beirut: The alarms are going off on every side.

Only Barack Obama is offering a call to national action that is proportionate to the alarm that people feel. Both Clinton and McCain are walking advertisements for business as usual, and the majority is distinctly uneasy with that choice. This is not about personality, it is about the central message that Obama is delivering: You have to take back your government, we must unify our people, and we can overcome every one of these challenges – “yes, we can.” This primal desire to defy the size of the coming apparent general crisis, to rise to overcome these threats to the American promise, is what is manifested in the response to the clarion call for commitment and sacrifice that Obama is making. His eloquence is merely the means to the end of rallying and redefining patriotism, married not to war but to national renewal. We already knew that something of that scale would be needed. We only needed someone to summon it from us.

The major shifts we need...

Two major shifts are necessary in the governing ideas and actions of the United States, at home and abroad:

First, the national government is failing America. It no longer works for the American people. An increasingly corrupt and ineffective Congress and executive branch – which now only serve the interests of those who can buy access to policymakers through the political-campaign process – must be returned to the control of the people. That requires changes proportionate to the government’s corruption and ineffectuality: (a) each citizen must be given the right to vote for president (a right they do not now possess, according to the Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore), to have that vote counted, and to have that vote counted equally (direct election of the president by national popular vote; abolition of the Electoral College); (b) all contributions for campaigns for national office (president and congress) must be limited to citizens – no organizations of any kind should be permitted to contribute money -- so that people, not interests, control Washington; (c) free broadcast air time must be given to all general-election candidates for national offices -- so that they need not spend inordinate time on fundraising rather than the people's work -- although that air time must consist solely of candidates themselves, not theatrically produced commercials; (d) a recountable paper trail must be established nationally for all electronic voting systems; and (e) concurrent presidential and House terms of four years should be created, with a four-term limit on House members and a three-term limit on members of the Senate, and a procedure for mid-term special-recall elections for the House and the President should be created.

Second, to restore America’s influence in the world, the money and resources that our government distributes all over the world must be provided to the people of countries that suffer from dictators, enormous inequalities, and massive violations of human rights, rather than this aid going to governments. Help must flow to nongovernmental organizations and indigenous groups working for the people’s rights, and all assistance to undemocratic governments must cease. Our assistance should focus on strengthening the democratic means by which people solve their own problems, not particular outcomes in terms of regimes or economies. We must help people develop the capacity to fight for and obtain their rights, develop their own societies, and govern themselves – not coerce or manipulate them, much less use violent force as a way to produce political outcomes that we want.

These changes amount to a simple proposition, which is the same at home and abroad: The United States will stand with people who are working to achieve their rights and freedom – and it will help strengthen their capacity to have a “fair start in the race of life”, in the words of Abraham Lincoln.

The limits of military force in national security

Military force abroad can only secure what a domestic and international political environment can tolerate. The United States is reviled today around the world because it started a war of choice (not demonstrably related to the terror threat to its own homeland) that was a total fiasco for several years, opening the door to chaos and killing over a hundred thousand Iraqis in the process -- and, not so incidentally, costing the American people a trillion dollars by some estimates.

If we believe that represents a viable way to produce rights and democracy, notwithstanding the world's rejection of the method, then we are out of step with what George Washington called on Americans to have: "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Americans do not have their freedom solely because they have military power, as if they lived in a fortress. We have our freedom primarily because our values, our diplomacy, our commerce, and our culture have largely created the kind of global society --developing now for a generation -- in which we can and must necessarily live, at peace, in the future. If we use our military power in a way that makes the rest of the world disregard all those other things that we offer to the world, and distrust us because we shoot first and ask questions later, we will indeed be in constant peril.