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 The Republicans can show a photo of Mount Rushmore above her head to try preposterously to lend an historical reference to a vice presidential candidate who is egregiously unqualified for national office, but this entire act tonight falls flat.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.