Oops!

John Dickerson:

… the ad also raises a new question the Clinton campaign has been stressing over the last few days: Who has been tested? The ad asks which candidate has faced the extended pressure of a crisis that might prepare him or her for the far larger pressures and crises he or she will face as president.

I love this question and am glad the Clinton team raised it. The problem is that they’re not so great at answering. When I asked campaign staffers for examples of Clinton being tested by a foreign-policy challenge, their response was pretty weak. As Patrick Healy reported in the New York Times, Hillary Clinton did not have a security clearance during her husband’s administration, so she wasn’t in the room for the brutal moments he faced. Her aides named the slew of uniformed retired military officials who have endorsed her, including several four-star generals. That’s nice, but it’s not proof of her mettle. When you make an ad like this, your case for your woman should be stronger than a list of endorsements.

Mark Penn pointed me to Clinton’s 1995 speech in Beijing, in which she declared that women’s rights were human rights. A fine speech and a great message, and boy, I bet her hosts didn’t like it one bit, but that doesn’t really constitute the testing that this powerful ad brings to mind. Also, if we’re talking about speeches, then I think Obama has that covered. He has been arguing for some time that he made a speech in 2002 about why the Iraq war was a bad idea. And hasn’t the Clinton team been knocking that back as just a speech?

A Clinton spokesperson on Hardball tonight claimed that Senator Clinton had proved her mettle under fire by attending the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing. I’m serious.

Update: See also Matt Yglesias.

Boo!

I’ve been working at the other blog (you guys might like this; also this), where I’m getting into as much trouble with readers (see comments to this) as I do elsewhere. I must be an awful person.

Anyway, I leave the spiritual world to come back to the political one, and what do I find but this:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., debuted a campaign ad on Friday with ominous undertones.

“It’s 3:00am and your children are asleep,” a voice over says in the ad entitled “Children”. “There’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing. Something is happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call.”

“Whether someone knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead. It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” the ad concludes.

I’d vote for the Dalai Lama, but he’s not running for president.

I don’t have much to say about the ad that Pam of the House Blend and DHinMI haven’t said. I also agree with Steve Benen:

Maybe I’ve become desensitized a bit, but this one didn’t really faze me that much. It feels like a regular ol’ Republican ad, except a) this is from a Dem; and b) the ad doesn’t show any brown people we’re supposed to be afraid of.

Paddy at Cliff Schecter’s place has Obama’s response ad, if you’re interested.

Reactions on the Left Blogosphere are divided between “How pathetic is this?” (Obama supporters) and “Obama is mean, too” (Clinton supporters). Oh, and also Gavin’s take.

So if we end up with a Clinton-McCain general election, is the contest going to come down to which one can scare us the most? And won’t that be jolly?

Elsewhere are stories that the Clinton campaign may sue somebody because the Texas primary/caucus rules are so convoluted. Other stories say the Clinton campaign is putting out advanced spin on the next round of primaries — if Obama doesn’t win states in which Clinton is currently favored, then it’s because people are having second thoughts about him. Ezra Klein explains that this is dumb.

Well, all’s fair in politics. Either these tricks will work, or they won’t. We’ll see.

Which brings me to E.J. Dionne’s column. Dionne compares what is happening in the Democratic Party now with what happened in the Republican Party in 1980 —

The Reagan metaphor explains why Hillary Clinton was in trouble from the moment she failed to knock Obama out of the race in Iowa. During the past two months, Democrats in large numbers have reached the same conclusion that so many Republicans did in 1980: Now is the time to go for broke, to challenge not only the ruling party but also the governing ideas of the previous political era and the political coalition that allowed them to dominate public life.

“This is our time,” Obama says in a short sentence full of meaning. The conservative age is as dead now as the liberal age was in 1980. Jimmy Carter, in many ways not a liberal at all, became the whipping boy for the end of liberalism. George W. Bush, no pure conservative, has come to symbolize the collapse of conservatism. “It is time to turn the page and write a new chapter in American history,” Obama says — exactly the sentiment of the Ronald Reagan who invoked Tom Paine.

The frustration of the Clinton campaign is understandable. Like George H.W. Bush, whom Reagan defeated for the presidential nomination in 1980, Hillary Clinton has worked very hard, knows government from the inside out and would clearly provide the country with a safe set of hands. The Clintonites argue, fairly, that there is no way to know if Obama can live up to The Promise of Obama.

That’s right; we do not know. But will the scare tactics chase voters to Clinton, or will they reinforce the sense that’s it’s way time for something completely different?

IRS Investigates Obama’s Church

At the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” site, The Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite writes,

The Internal Revenue Service has notified the United Church of Christ that the IRS has opened an investigation into Senator Barack Obama’s address at the UCC’s 2007 General Synod. The IRS is accusing the UCC of engaging in “political activities.”

I believe the “political activities” are on the other foot. The UCC General Synod was in June of 2007, celebrating that denomination’s 50th Anniversary. It is only now fully nine months later, when Senator Obama has become the front-runner in the race for President, that this investigation is launched. Further, the IRS did not contact the UCC or communicate with them while coming to this decision.

I was present when Senator Obama gave this speech at General Synod (along with 10,000 of my closest church friends and neighbors). There were no campaign buttons, signs, electioneering or other such politically related activities. Indeed, the UCC leadership took care to instruct the assembled about the fact that this was a faith event and we were welcoming a member of our church to talk to us about his personal faith in the public square.

John Wilson writes at Huffington Post:

The national United Church of Christ is under attack from the IRS, the AP reports, because the church invited one of its members, Barack Obama, to speak at the church’s national conference last summer. The invitation came before Obama had decided to run for president. What’s at stake here is not just religious freedom, but the freedom of speech of all nonprofit groups. The danger is that when nonprofit groups are silenced, corporate America will be able to dominate even more thoroughly the public debate.

The IRS letter to the United Church of Christ is particularly disturbing, threatening to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status. The sole basis for the letter is that Obama gave a June 23, 2007 speech to the church’s members (he was invited before he decided to run for president), and Obama campaign staffers had tables outside the building promoting him. Inside the building, the church actually banned all Obama signs and literature, and announced that it was not a campaign speech.

If this rule is taken literally, it might ban all politicians from speaking at any nonprofit location.

He wasn’t even officially running for President yet. Please. This is nothing but political harassment.

Unity at Last!

I’ve been reviewing the reviews of last night’s debate, and I’m happy to report the Left Blogosphere has come to a consensus:

Tim Russert is a jerk.

This is not a new consensus, but it’s nice to see everyone coming together on something.

Kevin Drum:

Seriously, though, can someone please put a sock in Tim Russert? I didn’t even see the entire exchange, but his badgering of Obama on the Louis Farrakhan issue was pretty wretched. It was maybe legitimate to bring it up in the first place, but to keep at it well after Obama had made his position crystal clear was beyond the pale.

Mustang Bobby:

Tim Russert asks a lot of questions he thinks everybody in the world wants to know the answers to, but in fact they are high-school forensics exercises in gotchas. The one about Louis Farrakhan to Senator Obama was just lame. What did he expect Mr. Obama to say, that he’s doing his own version of “I’m F***ing Matt Damon” with Mr. Farrakhan?

Digby:

From tax returns to Farrakhan to footage shown by “mistake” to the endless, trivial, gotcha bullshit, this debate spectacle tonight was a classic demonstration of what people really hate about politics. It isn’t actually the candidates who can at least on occasion be substantive and serious. The problem is Tim Russert and all his petty, shallow acolytes who spend all their time reading Drudge and breathlessly reporting every tabloid tidbit and sexy rumor and seeking out minor inconsistencies from years past in lieu of doing any real work.

Judging by their silly questions tonight, Russert and Williams obviously know nothing about health care policy, Iraq, Islamic terrorism, economics, global trade or any other subject that requires more than five minutes study to come up with some gotcha question or a stupid Jack Bauer fantasy. It’s embarrassing.

As for the candidates, opinions seem to be highly colored by the commenters’ preferences — Clinton supporters believe Clinton won; Obama supporters believe Obama won. Even those commenters who thought the debate was a draw are split between those who think both candidates were sharp and those who think both candidates needed a nap, followed by a long vacation and possibly retirement.

My opinion is that I hope this was the last Clinton-Obama debate. By now what few substantive differences these two have on policy have been discussed. The only reason to continue debating is in the hope that one of them really screws up and makes a total fool of him- or herself. You know that’s what Russert et al. want.

Is it me, or does it seem we’ve gone overboard with debating? I think some debates are grand, because it forces the candidates to come out from behind their packaging and marketing strategies. But at some point this year we’ve crossed the line from informing the voters to reality television — who’s going to screw up and be sent home?

Enough, I say.

Reviews

On Tuesday nights I go to rehearsals of the community chorale I belong to. So I miss political events that take place on Tuesday nights. I did not watch tonight’s debates, and between bloggers and the television bobbleheads, I’m not getting a clear picture of how it went down. If you watched, you are welcome to leave your impressions here.

Dodd Endorses Obama

Chris Dodd, who over the past few months earned much respect if not the nomination, has endorsed Barack Obama.

“It’s now the hour to come together,” Dodd said, in an appearance with Obama at a news conference in Cleveland. “This is the moment for Democrats and independents and others to come together, to get behind this candidacy.”

Dodd also made it clear he’d rather serve in the Senate than be Veep. May he long serve in the Senate.

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Cliff Schecter crunches numbers so I don’t have to. Be grateful.

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Right-wing bloggers and some leftie pro-Clinton bloggers are flogging a story that suggests Obama was involved in a shady land deal, as described in this somewhat turgid news story (I love the way Antoin “Tony” Rezko is referred to as “Mr Obama’s bagman” — biased, much?). The story implies that Rezko got Obama a hefty price reduction for a house, but the sellers say that was not so; Obama’s was the best offer. I suspect we’ll hear more about this.

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The shriek you hear is coming from Little Green Footballs: Obama says that pro-Israel doesn’t mean pro-Likud.

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I hope Andrew Sullivan is right:

I’m struck at how many of my fellow pundits still haven’t grasped what is going on out there. They keep using their old devices and tropes to describe something actually new. Last night, I watched Hannity say the word “black” pejoratively about half a dozen times in expressing his fear and loathing of the Obama phenomenon. It was like listening to Lou Dobbs talk about Hispanics. You could see he thinks this is going to work. When Kristol is reduced to actually saying “the politics of fear” rather than simply exploiting it, you realize that the Obama campaign has not just discombobulated Clinton. It has discombobulated the pundit class elsewhere. You even hear long-time defenders of the Bush Republicans talk darkly about big government – as if they didn’t love it for the past seven years, as if they give a shit about the size of government outside election campaigns.

They didn’t see it coming. They still have no clue what they’re grappling with. By the time they do, it may well be over.

We’ve got a long way to go, so I’m trying not to go all gushy yet, but so far I’ve been impressed with the way Obama has handled the smears (see John Aravosis on this).

What Sullivan says reminds me so much of the Dems and Reagan in 1980, and 1984, and the rest of the 1980s, for that matter. Whatever you think of Reagan as president, the man had a native genius for politics, and he pulled the whole GOP along with him. Even in 1988 I don’t think the Dems realized what they were grappling with. Bill Clinton, another political genius, knew how to finesse the game and stymie the Right, but for all his charm and appeal he couldn’t help his party.

I’m not saying Obama is unstoppable, as we’ve got a long way to go. But if Sullivan is right, we could be on the edge of something bigger than one election.

Religion News

Being a bit burned out by the elections and nefarious Bushie plots, I searched for something else to write about and found an interview in Salon of the ever-dreary Amy Sullivan. Amy is once again lecturing us that white evangelicals might vote for Democrats if only Democrats could learn to talk about abortion correctly.

I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.

If you don’t believe abortion should be illegal, the standard label for you is “pro-choice.” And wouldn’t it be nice if someone who gets as much attention on the abortion issue as Amy Sullivan actually had a bleeping clue what she was talking about.

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Also at Salon, former evangelical John Marks predicts that more white evangelicals will be voting for Democrats in the future, anyway. Marks told interviewer Louis Bayard,

When George W. Bush came along, there were a number of issues — gay marriage, repeal of sodomy laws, the Ten Commandments on the courthouse — all those issues allowed activists to go to pastors and say, “Look, this is coming right into your own backyard. These new laws are going to change your world, and they’re going to lay the groundwork for the America your children will inherit. So either you vote or you let the country go and you lose your place it.”

It was a moment of both political awakening and political naiveté. Because all of a sudden there was a sense of power that the evangelists could have as one bloc. But then they began to look at what they got for their vote, and they began to look more closely at the policies of the president that they had rallied behind.

The war didn’t turn out well, and that had been seen, in some quarters, as an ordained venture. People said, “If we’re really going to look at the Bible and Jesus as a model for our political involvement, what are we talking about? Christ never talks about homosexuality and talks a great deal about poverty. What about that?” Rick Warren, the most influential evangelist in America right now, is talking about AIDS in Africa. That has to do with a whole different part of the teachings of Christ.

We’ll see.

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I want to give a shout out to my brother About.com Guide Austin Cline, who covers the agnosticism/atheism beat. He has an article up on “Barack Obama’s Religious Beliefs & Background” that I think, praised be, is accurate and unbiased. Wow.

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Yesterday the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey that said nearly half of American adults leave the “faith tradition” they were raised in to either join another religion or drop out of organized religion altogether.

Some of this is old news. The old “mainline” Protestant congregations continue to shrink, while the membership of non-denominational churches and the ranks of the unaffiliated continue to grow.

This is new: The unaffiliated — people who say they are religious but don’t claim allegiance to any particular institution or tradition — are now the fourth largest religious group in America.

Also, from the report:

Groups that have experienced a net loss from changes in affiliation include Baptists (net loss of 3.7 percentage points) and Methodists (2.1 percentage points). However, the group that has experienced the greatest net loss by far is the Catholic Church. Overall, 31.4% of U.S. adults say that they were raised Catholic. Today, however, only 23.9% of adults identify with the Catholic Church, a net loss of 7.5 percentage points.

However, the number of Catholics in America remains fairly steady, mostly because of Latino immigration.

Neela Banerjee writes in the New York Times:

Prof. Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, said large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity pointed to the same desires.

“The trend is towards more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” Professor Prothero said, explaining that evangelical churches tailored much of their activities to youths.

“Those losing out are offering impersonal religion,” he said, “and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

I’m not sure what Prothero says about smaller ministries makes sense, but I agree with what he says about “impersonal” religion. Someow just getting dressed up on Sunday morning and going to church just to hear a sermon and sing a couple of hymns ain’t workin’ for people.

But I think there are other factors. The time crunch experienced by two-income families with children might make “going to church” just one more burdensome thing on an already full plate. The breakup of communities possibly makes church attendance seem less compulsive. After years of televangelism, maybe people just expect church services to pack more of an emotional wallop, or at least be entertaining.

What Pew says about Buddhism is discussed on the other blog.

Let’s Get Real

Today’s Frank Rich column:

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

What has struck me about the Clinton campaign is that the candidate seems to confuse “effort” with “accomplishment.” She tells us she has “fought for” this and that for many years — true enough — but how many of those battles have been won?

Last week there was much hoo-hawing among the Clintonistas about a fellow on MSNBC’s Hardball who could not list any legislative accomplishments of Senator Obama. The Clinton campaign pushed that episode hard, to contrast it with Senator Clinton’s glittering legislative record. But notice, no one actually challenged Senator Clinton to list her legislative accomplishments.

Last week Adam Hanft took a look at Senator Clinton’s legislative record, and found it to be “a track record of legislative failure and futility.”

I headed straight for her campaign website to see what glorious aspects of her vaunted experience I was missing.

Actually, I was missing nothing. There is not one single example of any legislation with her name appended to it. In fact, the page devoted to her Senate biography is a mush-mash, a laundry list of good intentions. When she talks about “sponsoring” and “introducing” and “fighting for” legislation that obviously hasn’t passed, that’s a smokescreen for failure. By introducing all that legislation that never makes it out of committee, she’s guilty of what she accuses Senator Obama of: confusing “hoping” with doing. [emphasis added]

This is what continues to drive me bats about Clinton supporters. They have bought the line that Obama and his supporters are space cadets who don’t appreciate substance. Yet Clinton’s record of accomplishment is nothing but padding, and they don’t notice.

Back to Adam Hanft:

Consider these examples:

• “…{she} worked with her colleagues to secure the funds New York needed to recover and rebuild.”

• “…she fought to provide compensation to the families of the victims.”

• “She is an original sponsor of legislation that expanded health benefit to members of the National Guard and Reserves.”

• “Some of Hillary’ proudest achievements have been her work to ensure the safety of prescription drugs for children, with legislation now included in the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act.” (What in God’s name does that mumbo-jumbo mean?)

Yes, it’s true that for many years, she was in the minority. But if she is the effective legislator she claims to be, she’d be able find co-sponsors across the aisle who share her commitment to specific issues, in the same way that John McCain found his doppelganger, Russ Feingold.

David Knowles wrote in January that in 2007, Senator Clinton introduced 100 pieces of legislation. Of those, six were enacted. These are:

1. support for the goals and ideals of “National Purple Heart Recognition Day”
2. a concurrent resolution recognizing the 75th anniversary of the Military Order of the Purple Heart
3. a bill to recognize the goals of Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month
4. a bill to urge a international organization to allow access to Holocaust archives
5. a resolution calling for Hamas and Hezbollah to release Israeli soldiers held captive
6. recognition of the uncommon valor of Wesley Autrey, the man who jumped on to the subway tracks and saved a man’s life

Obama’s legislative record is similarly light. The plain fact is that both Clinton and Obama are junior senators, and their legislative accomplishments, or lack thereof, reflect that. Yet Clinton supporters continue to insist that their candidate is the one with experience and accomplishment who knows how to get things done. And Obama supporters are just caught up in a cult of personality.

On top of which, some Clinton supporters are still arguing that she would be the stronger candidate in the general election, even as her campaign for the nomination flounders.

Right. Um, who’s getting real, dears?

Update: Read Jeff Fecke.