The Kaine mutiny (of Virginia moderates)...

Based on a comment on the blog, The Field, 1/8/09:

Barack Obama has appointed Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to be the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This wouldn't have happened if former Virginia governor Mark Warner and then Governor Kaine hadn't turned the state from red to blue in recent years (preparing the way for Obama's capturing its electoral votes in '08). This was one of those things that seemed impossible at the outset -- and then inevitable once it was done, given the sudden discovery of demographic change in northern Virginia. But social statistics don't turn themselves into votes, without a political strategy to win those votes.

The strategy was deceptively simple: the Democratic aspirant for governor would stipulate the importance of good social values and campaign doggedly in socially conservative areas of the state, embracing and getting happy with everyone who'd turn out for a rally. Southwest Virginians couldn't believe the amount of time that Warner and Kaine spent down there. Each of them won just enough of that formerly hard-right base to require the Republicans to hold every last northern Virginia moderate suburban taxpayer.

Then the Democratic candidate would campaign heatedly in northern Virginia, emphasizing his pragmatic invest-in-education and invest-in-roads programs. This was catnip to moderate Republican businesspeople and distressed soccer moms who saw the grip on the state capitol held by anti-tax, anti-anything conservatives, who'd let the suburbs' traffic dissolve into gridlock and insufficient school budgets create visible angst at the local level. It didn't hurt that Tim Kaine was married to the daughter of one of Virginia's most beloved Republican governors. Caricatured by the right as a smiling socialist-in-disguise (heard that one before?), Kaine sailed right by those tactics and pulverized the right with pragmatism.

Now if you know Tim Kaine, you know that he comes equipped with a passionate social justice commitment, deepened by his time working with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras (and if you want deep history about that, see the terrific movie, "The Mission", with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro). So this improbable, cherubic-faced, balding, eyebrow-cocking nerdy guy who wants to remake the world followed in the footsteps of his telegenic precedessor Mark Warner, and completed the destruction of the time-tested electoral model for eternal control of Virginia by conservative Republicans. All that Barack Obama had to do in Virginia in '08 was paint by the same numbers.

The Virginia legislature still has a lot of John McCain types from Newport News, and Sarah Palin-loving types from down in Southside. But their comfy political tyranny in Virginia is history. No one should wonder why Barack Obama thinks a lot of Tim Kaine.

Blagojevich, Burris, the U.S. Senate, and Corruption

Those who believe that the U.S. Senate doesn't have the authority to refuse to seat Roland Burris, the former Illinois state official who was appointed to the seat by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, or who believe that it's embarrassing to refuse to seat a nice man who would be the only African-American Senator, are ignoring two crucial realities.

First, a seat in the United States Senate is not the property of any governor who has the authority to appoint a person to fill a vacancy, and any person so appointed has no "right" to occupy that seat on such authority. The seat belongs to the people. This is a political process, and as the Supreme Court has said on many occasions, the Congress needs to be given ample leverage as a body representing the people and as a separate branch of government to conduct its affairs, unless some egregious violation of rights is being committed.

Moreover, the Senate is entitled to act reasonably topreserve its integrity as an institution. The governor who made this appointment was only a few weeks ago arrested by the FBI because a federal prosecutor believed he had sufficient evidence to indict him for making such an appointment in exchange for campaign donations or other favors, and the timing of the arrest was dictated by the prosecutor's fear that the governor could imminently make a Senate appointment after having solicited such donations or favors. The Illinois political process has not had sufficient time to impeach the governor and remove him from office, but that is predicted to occur in a few weeks. Defiantly, the disgraced governor has gone ahead and made an appointment. It is impossible to know whether or not Blagojevich obtained any consideration from Burris for appointing him, but if the Illinois attorney general and secretary of state don't trust this appointment, why should the U.S. Senate? The Senate has every right to defend the integrity of its membership from any appointment made by this governor.

Second, no federal office should be occupied by someone appointed by an executive who is accused by a federal authority of extorting bribes from prospective occupants of the office. If our political leaders cannot prevent such an executive from using this kind of appointment for his own purposes, forget about discouraging corruption in our national political affairs. There is something much larger at stake here: the public's confidence in our democratic institutions. They will not believe that our politics is free from the suspicion or the fact of corruption unless and until it is.

Roland Burris is being used by Rod Blagojevich to enable him to cling to some appearance of political authority and effectiveness, in the face of impending impeachment. The Senate is not obligated to follow suit. This farce must end, without Blagojevich's appointee being accepted. If that is not the outcome, the public should assume that it will take much longer for our politics to undergo fundamental change.

Redefining the political narrative...

Comment on the blog Hullabaloo, 1/4/09

Unless President Obama or the activists, writers and political leaders who support him succeed in redefining the narrative of contemporary political history early in his presidency, any programmatic gains are likely to be short-lived. Bill Clinton's biggest failure as president was deliberately to avoid trying to refute Ronald Reagan's inaugural nostrum that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Clinton bragged about outdoing Republicans in trying to make government smaller while making it more effective. He seemed happy to flail about in the ideological strait-jacket with which Reagan had fitted all Democrats: Government was an evil to be minimized -- it was a kind of theft, of money earned by good people (mostly white) but taken by government and given to bad people (mostly not white). This was the toxic brew that helped Reagan -- famous for emblematically attacking one particular black "welfare mother" -- to attract working-class Democrats. Given the flaccid, exhausted state of the intellectual right now, and the freaky guns-and-oil, states-rights hollering of the Palin faction (the only part of the GOP now with any energy, albeit negative), the time is perfect for a new framing narrative.

That narrative has to restore the idea that the people themselves, on whose power the Constitution is based from its very first line ("We the People"), should demand that government actually do what the Constitution says it must do -- "promote the general welfare" -- and if that means reinventing the health care system, regulating polluters as harshly as they poison the environment, and punishing Wall Street titans who use public bail-out money for personal bonuses, then such policies shouldn't merely be defined as pragmatic given the present crisis, they should be explicitly and repeatedly justified as supported by the people in having elected a leader from the other party and also as normal, positive uses of public power. That Obama is trying to transcend partisan rancor actually helps the work of constructing this narrative, since no enduring historical narrative can survive the inevitable vicissitudes of elections every two years unless it transcends party fist-fights on the Sunday talk shows. Let Obama trumpet a new era of tolerance, unity, and a kind of domestic patriotism tied to regenerating our economy and reconstituting our society. The greatest presidents were those who used government vigorously to fight back crises and build national strength by what were considered unprecedented means (Lincoln was the first president to institute an income tax, albeit temporary, and the first to have the federal government invest in universities). National majorities don't rally around minimalism in the face of huge challenges, quite the opposite.

Don't underestimate Obama's ability to summon this kind of spirit and elicit a sense of enthusiasm for a new bow wave of reform. But it won't be sustainable unless there is a new narrative. That narrative should certainly explain why the country has been driven into a ditch, and the predicate of that is simple: If we elect presidents who spend almost 30 years abusing the idea of government, and they appoint incompetent or corrupt people to run the government, we will get wretched government. Yet this shouldn't be a narrative in narrow partisan terms, but rather a narrative that subsumes progressive goals in a new definition of what it means to love and work for our country and of what we should expect our government to do.

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.