Monthly Archives: January 2008

New Hampshire Postmortems

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Some analyses of yesterday’s vote in New Hampshire. John Judis, The New Republic:

Clinton is still doing well among women (particularly older and married women), traditional Democrats, voters over 40, and among lower-middle income white voters without college degrees who are worried about the economy. Obama is doing fabulously among the young and very well among independents and upscale Independents. Both of these can also be important blocs for a Democrat to win in the fall.

Here are the groups in which Obama enjoyed a significant margin over Clinton: men, young voters (18-24), voters making more than $50,000, voters with post-graduate education (a good indication of professionals), independents, first time voters, voters without religious affiliation, men without children and single men, voters who said they were getting ahead financially, voters who thought the war in Iraq was the most important issue, who wanted change, and who wanted someone who could unite the country.

Here are Clinton’s groups: women, particularly married women, voters over 40, voters making less than $50,000, voters without a college degree, union voters, Democrats, Catholics (an important constituency for the Democrats), people very worried about the economy, voters who thought the economy was most important, voters who valued experience, and voters who evaluated candidates on whether they “care about people like me.”

I think this suggests Obama would be the far stronger candidate in a general election.

Via Skippy — Jeff Fecke at Shakesville speculates that the swing to Hillary among older women — which is what got her the last minute majority — was a backlash to MSM misogyny. He might be right.

Update: Shamanic is more cheerful than I am.

Update 2: The BooMan crunches numbers.

Update 3: One reason to be happy Clinton won New Hampshire.

The Organizer

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David Brooks has a genius for not seeing things even as he looks at them. Today he writes,

Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up.

The key word in any Obama speech is “you.” Other politicians talk about what they will do if elected. Obama talks about what you can do if you join together. Like a community organizer on a national scale, he is trying to move people beyond their cynicism, make them believe in themselves, mobilize their common energies.

Nice. But then the Vegetable writes,

His weakness is that he never breaks from his own group. In policy terms, he is an orthodox liberal. He never tells audiences anything that might make them uncomfortable. In the Senate, he didn’t join the Gang of 14, which created a bipartisan consensus on judges, because it would have meant deviating from liberal orthodoxy and coming to the center.

How do you build a trans-partisan coalition when every single policy you propose is reliably on the left?

Because, dear Vegetable, it’s not about ideology.

For the past several years, “bipartisan” has meant “agreeing with Republicans,” with Republican defined as “an ideologically blinkered whackjob who takes marching orders from Richard Mellon Scaife and who would sell out the Constitution in an eyeblink for the sake of more power and some tax cuts.” And the effect on America — nay, the world — of this “bipartisanship” has been devastating.

Now bobbleheads like the Vegetable are trying to redefine “bipartisan” as a requirement that right-wing ideology must be honored and included in all policy decisions, even though a majority of the American people are rejecting it wholesale. And we must do this because, you know, it’s nice. It’s like when you were seven and your mother made you share your toys with Cousin Maggie even after she deliberately popped the heads off all your Ken dolls.

Brooks’s idea is that, out of some sense of etiquette, politics and policies coming out of Washington must honor some ideological mean. Obama’s idea is that government ought to be responding to what a majority of Americans want it to do.

To me, that’s always been the foundation of progressivism — government that genuinely responds to the will of We, the People. It’s not about loyalty to a menu of policies like cutting or raising taxes or growing or shrinking government. If We, the People, genuinely want to starve government of tax revenues so it can be drowned in a bathtub, fine. If the majority really want our domestic needs ignored for the sake of becoming an unstoppable imperialist might, then so be it.

I have never believed a majority of Americans really wanted those things, though. I think for a time large numbers of people responded to those ideas because, as our national political culture and discourse had been hijacked by right-wing goons, those were presented as the only legitimate ideas patriotic Americans were supposed to have. But I think only a minority of badly socialized malcontents were fully committed to the right-wing agenda.

I wrote yesterday that I believed the mantle of “inevitability” that Hillary Clinton wore these past several years is part of her problem. It fed into the notion that Washington, and the national leadership of both parties, are more powerful than we are, and that we must accept whatever they choose to give us. The Obama phenomenon comes from a growing realization that we shouldn’t have to put up with this.

Many people have pointed out that Obama’s stated positions on policy are vague. I disagree with his approach to health care. But just as his appeal is not about ideology, it’s also not about policy. It’s about democracy that’s not in name only. As Digby wrote the other day,

When people say they want change it’s not because they are tired of “partisan bickering” (which basically consists of derisive Republican laughter.) They’re sick of a government that does exactly the opposite of what they want it to do.

The experience of the past several years is that Republicans expect to be congratulated for making government do the exact opposite of what you want it to do. Democrats may express regret for it, but government still does the exact opposite of what you want it to do. Senator Clinton seems to have found a niche in this environment, churning up a storm of little policies and positions that are incrementally better than what Republicans propose. But she’s not asking the fundamental question — why do we have to put up with the wingnuts and their failed policies at all?

Why can’t we just push Cousin Maggie down the stairs, so to speak, and be done with this nonsense?

I suspect the Obama surge isn’t about Obama. I think it’s about long-growing, pent-up frustration with unresponsive government. Obama is becoming the rallying point for people who want real change, dammit, not promises and apologies.

So maybe he is vague about what he might do as President. But it’s not his plans that matter, but ours.

Welcome to the Asylum

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Dan Froomkin:

With time running short on his presidency — and on the eve of a trip to the Middle East — President Bush seems to have overcome his aversion to talking about his legacy and is now speaking fervently about how he expects to be remembered.

As it turns out, the president sees himself as quite the heroic figure.

“I can predict that the historians will say that George W. Bush recognized the threats of the 21st century, clearly defined them, and had great faith in the capacity of liberty to transform hopelessness to hope, and laid the foundation for peace by making some awfully difficult decisions,” Bush told Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 2 News. Bush held several interviews with Middle Eastern journalists last week in anticipation of his trip to the region, which starts tomorrow.

“When he needed to be tough, he acted strong, and when he needed to have vision he understood the power of freedom to be transformative,” Bush said of himself to Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

As for the people of the Middle East, Bush told Hisham Bourar of al-Hurra Television: “I would hope that they would say President Bush respects my religion and has great love for the human — human being, and believes in human dignity.”

The Bush record, the president told Nadia Bilbassy-Charters of al-Arabiya Television, is one of liberation — “liberation, by the way, not only from dictatorship, but from disease around the world, like HIV/AIDS or malaria.”

On a personal basis, Bush told Bilbassy-Charters that he hopes that people would know “that he hurts when he sees poverty and hopelessness” and “that he’s a realistic guy.”

I just want to say that I hope he has years of robust good health after he’s out of the White House. I want him to live for many more years. I want him to live long enough to know his great-grandchildren. The longer, the better. I mean that. Because I don’t think that bubble is gonna last long once he’s out of office.

Don’t Be Afraid

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Mike Madden writes at Salon:

First, an enormous orange fireball booms onto the screen. The camera shakes and a crowd runs for cover. Next, sirens wail, as an abandoned car explodes. Paramedics tote bodies away from another blast. Militants raise their AK-47s and parade across the desert, their faces masked.

What’s the next image that fills the screen, in a Web commercial by John McCain that really puts the “attack” in “attack ad”? Mitt Romney’s face, above a quote from a Hannity & Colmes appearance where Romney said “a president is not a foreign policy expert.”

The closer the New Hampshire primary gets, it seems, the more terrified the Republican presidential candidates want you to be. That way, you’ll vote for the guy who scared you the worst, and not that guy who’s going to preside over your death at the hands of jihadists. McCain, who wants to shift the conversation away from immigration and onto foreign policy and security issues, has Web ads like “Experience.” Rudy Giuliani — who never misses a chance to remind voters about 9/11 — is airing a TV commercial in New Hampshire called “Ready” that is even more alarming than McCain’s “Experience.” Released just days after Bhutto’s murder, it features footage of the late Pakistani leader, accompanied by a soundtrack of Middle Eastern music. “Hate without boundaries,” intones a narrator. “A people perverted … A nuclear power in chaos.” Mike Huckabee — no foreign policy maven — answered a press conference question about immigration by invoking the specter of Pakistanis with “shoulder-fired missiles” sneaking across the U.S.-Mexico border. Fred Thompson got into the act at Saturday night’s ABC News/Facebook/WMUR debate, proving that even campaigns that don’t have the money to scare people with ads can still try other methods. “We could be attacked with a biological weapon and not even know it for a long period of time,” Thompson told viewers matter-of-factly. (Now enjoy your late local news.) …

… Ask Republicans about the issue, of course, and they’ll say the only danger in advertisements that focus on terrorist attacks is that they won’t go far enough. “Whether we live or die is obviously the most important issue,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., an advisor to Giuliani’s campaign and the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee.

You readers are from all over the country. Are people where you live really cowering in fear of jihadists? Or are they more worried about their jobs and health insurance?

Apparently they tried illegal immigrant fear mongering — brown people with funny accents will steal your jobs and seduce your women — tactics in Iowa, to little effect. So they’re falling back on brown people with funny accents will blow up your shopping malls.

Paul Krugman writes about fear today, too.

The unemployment report on Friday was brutally bad. Unemployment rose in December, while job creation was minimal — and it’s highly likely, for technical reasons, that the job number will be revised down, showing an actual decline in employment. ..

…It’s not certain, even now, that we’ll have a formal recession, although given the news on Friday you have to say that the odds are that we will. But what is clear is that 2008 will be a troubled year for the U.S. economy — and that as a result, the overall economic record of the Bush years will have been dreary at best: two and a half years of slumping employment, three and a half years of good but not great growth, and two more years of renewed economic distress.

This should be good for Democrats. But then …

But the opponents of change, those who want to keep the Bush legacy intact, are not without resources. In fact, they’ve already made their standard pivot when things turn bad — the pivot from hype to fear. And in case you haven’t noticed, they’re very, very good at the fear thing.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that for the past seven years, conservative bobbleheads have wondered why the American people aren’t more appreciative of the great economy Bush has given them. (Professor Krugman provides some graphs on his blog that tell us why.) Very recently the Bushies have begun to notice the economy may be less than great. And the rhetoric, as Krugman says, has swung from hype to fear.

President Bush is warning that given the economy’s problems, “the worst thing the Congress could do is raise taxes on the American people and on American businesses.”

And even more dire warnings are coming from some of the Republican presidential candidates. For example, John McCain’s campaign Web site cautions darkly that “Entrepreneurs should not be taxed into submission. John McCain will make the Bush income and investment tax cuts permanent, keeping income tax rates at their current level and fighting the Democrats’ plans for a crippling tax increase in 2011.”

What “crippling” tax increase, which would tax entrepreneurs into submission, is Mr. McCain talking about? The answer is, proposals by Democrats to let the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year expire, returning upper-income tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the Clinton years.

I wonder if anyone but the entrenched ideological Right is buying this bilge, but we can’t be too careful.

Finally … if Barack Obama wins the Dem nomination we’re going to be spending a lot of time discussing racism in America. But for now I just want to say that if Senator Obama is the nominee, there’s one thing we can count on: The GOP will stop at nothing to prevent African Americans from getting to the polls.

The chief way this is done is to stir up fear of voter fraud, enabling the GOP to apply “remedies” that keep legitimate voters from voting. And in the current New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes that the Supreme Court is about to hear a voter ID law challenge from Indiana, and the decision could have an impact on which citizens will be allowed to vote in the November elections.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” Terence T. Evans, the dissenting Court of Appeals judge in the Indiana case, slyly wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.” He’s not the only one to notice: the three federal judges who approved the Indiana law were appointed by a Republican President; the lone dissenter was appointed by a Democrat. It was also Republican-dominated legislatures that produced the Indiana and Georgia laws, both of which were signed by Republican governors.

Who are the “certain folks,” in Judge Evans’s delicate phrase, that the Indiana law is trying to discourage? The best answer can be found in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case filed by twenty-nine leading historians and scholars of voting rights. They concluded that the Indiana law belongs to a malign tradition in “this nation’s history of disfranchising people of color and poor whites under the banner of ‘reform.’ ” Such measures as the poll tax and literacy tests, they write, were “billed as anti-fraud or anti-corruption devices; yet through detailed provisions within them, they produced a discriminatory effect (often intended) within the particular historical context.” So it will be in Indiana, where the law creates a series of onerous barriers to voting. Consider one: you can get a government photo I.D. by showing your birth certificate, but you can’t get a copy of your birth certificate unless you can produce certain official photo I.D.s. And, with up to twenty million Americans of voting age lacking government-issued identification, the matter of requiring photo I.D.s has broad implications.

Let’s face it; today’s Republicans hate democracy.

Updates

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Some polls are starting to show a big post-Iowa bounce for Obama. On the GOP side, Huckabee trails McCain and Romney.

Mike Allen and Ben Smith of The Politico write that Clinton advisers are fearing a New Hampshire loss.

Great bit from Niall Stanage at The Guardian:

Much of the punditry immediately following last night’s debate focused on her [Clinton’s] angry response to a comment by Edwards that cast her as the candidate of the status quo.

But one important sentence near the end of her reply was largely overlooked: “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.”

She sounded the same note again towards the debate’s end. When Obama began speaking about people’s feeling of being frozen out of politics, and about the need to bring those people back into a “working majority” for change, Clinton interjected.

“Can we just have a sort of a reality break for a minute?” she asked contemptuously.

This kind of calculated attempt to encourage cynicism now seems to be the best the former First Lady has to offer.

Tom Schaller says the Clinton Era ended last night at 9:34 p.m. EST. This is followed by an interesting discussion among commenters on the nature of anger in political campaigns.

Unrelated but weird:

Great Moments in the Bush Presidency, or other stuff you only learn by reading UK news sites:

Early in his first term, President Bush introduced a visiting President Putin to his Scottish terrier, Barney, and the Russian made no secret of his disdain for the small dog. When Bush later visited Russia, Putin showed off his much larger dog, Koni, a black Labrador, and suggested it could dispatch Barney with little effort. “Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner,” Putin is said to have boasted, “than Barney”.

Don’t call him “Pootie-Poot.”