Monthly Archives: January 2008

Changes

Posted on by

Anything I write now might be obsolete by Wednesday morning, but such is opinionating. So here goes …

From today’s Observer:

The New Hampshire Democratic Party’s 100 Club dinner is a staid affair, attracting the main candidates as speakers in an act of shameless fundraising. But on Friday night extraordinary scenes unfolded there that captured the mood of a party suddenly filled with the desire to kick out its old guard.

Barack Obama was so mobbed by supporters that a security announcer begged people surging towards the stage to retake their seats. Many were chanting Obama’s new signature slogan: ‘Fired up! Let’s go!’

In stark contrast, Hillary Clinton had been booed twice. The first time when she seemed to borrow from Obama’s main theme of ‘change’. The second was when she made a veiled reference to her greater experience. ‘Who will be ready to lead from day one?’ she asked the 3,000-strong crowd. But she was forced to pause to let the resulting boos die down. A few weeks ago, such a spectacle would have been unthinkable.

Right now most polls are saying that Clinton and Obama are tied in New Hampshire. And you know that if she wins by even one vote on Tuesday she’ll be re-crowned “Ms. Inevitable.”

But I wonder if that “inevitability” shtick isn’t part of her problem. It sent a subliminal message to rank-and-file Dems that you’ll take what the party gives you, and you will like it. But what the party has been giving us in recent years — well, for a long time, actually — hasn’t been all that wonderful. We put up with it because the other guys are worse. Maybe what happened at the 100 Club dinner is a dawning realization that “Hey, we don’t have to put up with it! We can demand something different!”

It’s called “empowerment,” I believe.

Bob Herbert wrote yesterday:

The Clintons, especially, have seemed baffled by the winds of change. They mounted a peculiar argument against Senator Obama, acknowledging that voters wanted change but insisting that you can’t achieve change by doing things differently.

Ain’t it the truth? If you didn’t see this meltdown moment in last night’s debate, take a look at the transcript:

SEN. CLINTON: Wait a minute now, wait a minute. I’m going to respond to this because obviously — making change is not about what you believe. It’s not about a speech you make. It is about working hard. There are 7,000 kids in New Hampshire who have health care because I helped to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program. There’s 2,700 National Guard and Reserve members who have access to health care, because on a bipartisan basis, I pushed legislation through over the objection of the Pentagon, over the threat of a veto from President Bush.

I want to make change, but I’ve already made change. I will continue to make change. I’m not just running on a promise of change, I’m running on 35 years of change. I’m running on having taken on the drug companies and the health insurance companies, taking on the oil companies.

So, you know, I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change. And we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered. The best way to know what change I will produce is to look at the changes that I’ve already made.

To me, this exemplifies the whole problem with Senator Clinton. She probably has had some impact on some policies, but it hasn’t been good enough. Maybe she did take on the drug companies and the health insurance companies, but seems to me that the drug and health insurance companies won. If she honestly doesn’t see that, then I do not want her in the White House.

I’d be much more comfortable with her if she could admit efforts have fallen short, but if we could get a big Dem majority in Congress and have a Dem in the White House, we could accomplish something significant. But if she defines “significant” by what she’s already done, she doesn’t get it.

Frank Rich’s column today is all about how conventional wisdom fell apart in Iowa.

What was mostly forgotten in these errant narratives were the two largest elephants in the room: Iraq and George W. Bush. The conventional wisdom had it that both a tamped-down war and a lame-duck president were exiting so quickly from center stage that they were receding from the minds of voters. In truth, they were only receding from the minds of those covering those voters…

…It’s safe to assume that these same voters did not forget that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards enabled the Iraq fiasco. Or that Mr. Obama publicly opposed it. When Mrs. Clinton attacked Mr. Obama for his supposedly “irresponsible and frankly naïve” foreign policy ideas — seeking talks with enemies like Iran — she didn’t diminish him so much as remind voters of her own irresponsibility and naïveté about Mr. Bush’s Iraq scam in 2002.

Again, it’s a bit clumsy to run on “experience” if your track record is spotty.

As for Senator Obama, there’s no way to know if he’s for real or just packaging. At the Guardian, Armando Llorens (yeah, that Armando) expresses doubt that a President Obama would actually move the nation in a progressive direction.

But I don’t think that’s the way to look at it. It’s not as if America is sitting on its hands waiting for the next President to lead it somewhere. After having witnessed the colossal failure of “movement conservatism” I think the nation is poised to move in a more progressive direction. The question is, how will the next Congress and the next President respond to this? And I don’t think there is any way to predict that.

Historically, presidents in particular often turn out to be very different products from what was advertised. Often they are disappointing — I certainly think the Clinton Administration promised more than it delivered, except on the economy. Woodrow Wilson ran on a “he kept us out of war” platform, then sent troops to Europe.

On the other hand, in the 1860 campaign, Abraham Lincoln tried to defuse the secession crisis (and possibly pick up southern votes) by promising to support a constitutional amendment that would have protected slavery in the slave states. Many northern abolitionists refused to support Lincoln because he wasn’t tough enough on the slavery question. You might remember how that turned out.

Let’s face it — we’re buying a pig in a poke, no matter who wins.

There are only two things I can say with any certainty. One is that if a politician is tone-deaf to the nation’s mood as a candidate, winning an election is unlikely to improve his or her hearing.

And the other thing is that real, substantive change will be driven by the empowerment of the people, not from leadership in Washington.

Billo Out of Control

Posted on by

Faux News’s Bill O’Reilly had to be subdued by Secret Service agents. Lynn Sweet reports:

NASHUA, N.H.– Fox News host Bill O’Reilly got into a confrontation with an Obama aide after O’Reilly started screaming at him as he tried to get Barack Obama’s attention following a rally here. O’Reilly eventually did chat briefly with Obama and asked him to be a guest on his show.

The incident was triggered when O’Reilly–with a Fox News crew shooting–was screaming at Obama National Trip Director Marvin Nicholson “Move” so he could get Obama’s attention, according to several eyewitnesses. “O’Reilly was yelling at him, yelling at his face,” a photographer shooting the scene said.

O’Reilly grabbed Nicholson’s arm and shoved him, another eyewitness said. Nicholson, who is 6’8, said O’Reilly called him “low class.”

“He grabbed me with both his hands here,” Nicholson said, gesturing to his left arm and O’Reilly “started shoving me.” Nicholson said, ” He was pretty upset. He was yelling at me.”

Secret Service agents who were nearby flanked O ‘Reilly after he pushed Nicholson. They told O’Reilly he needed to calm down and get behind the fence-like barricade that contained the press.

Obama had his back turned at this point and did not see any of this.

Huffington Post is promising a video later today.

Update: John Dickerson’s account of the same incident.

Repudiations

Posted on by

Conventional wisdom is growing among the bobbleheads that Barack Obama’s Iowa Caucus win was a repudiation of us liberal bloggers and the “angry left.”

I guess that’s why there’s been so much jubilation about the caucuses among us liberal bloggers–we enjoy being repudiated. (My blogger buddy LowerManhattanite didn’t exactly feel repudiated, however.)

Time‘s Joe Klein, who remains very high on my “people I want to smack real hard” list, wrote,

Iowa’s decision was about style, not substance. Obama didn’t offer many new ideas and precious few that were different from his opponents’. He offered civility. At one point, Clinton tried “Turn Up The Heat” as her slogan and, throughout, John Edwards’ rhetoric was so hot that it eventually burned him to a cinder. Obama’s unspoken slogan was “Turn Down the Heat.” The blogger Daily Kos endorsed Obama at first then, frustrated by the lack of fire, un-endorsed him. The far left wing of the Democratic Party may have to rethink the value of vitriol now.

Putting aside the fact that “Daily Kos” is a site, not a blogger — the blogger Great Orange Satan Kos responds to Klein here. Kos says he never endorsed anybody, and further —

My frustrations with Obama had nothing to do with “lack of fire” from Obama, but from my perception (arguable, of course) that he was directing his fire at progressives and progressive institutions. But again, I’m well aware that expecting the truth and accuracy from you is a fools errand.

A lot of us have been frustrated with Obama these past few months over one issue or another, but his not being nasty enough was never a problem. Ezra Klein wrote last week of the Obama campaign:

On the down side, some of his closing-weeks attacks are a bit, err, worrisome. Going after trial lawyers, for instance? Flooding the radio with ads claiming “Clinton would force people to buy insurance even if they can’t afford it” and “Barack Obama will cover everyone”? Suggesting that nominating Al Gore was a mistake and suggesting, wrongly, that Kerry was a divisive figure when he was nominated? Some of those statements are simply conservative arguments being uttered by a progressive. Some simply aren’t true.

On one level, this is politics, and all these folks are trying to win, and you’re not going to find any candidates pure as the driven snow and innocent as the newly-born. But Obama’s comfort attacking liberals from the right is unsettling, and if he does win Iowa, it will not be a victory that either supporters or the media ascribe to the more progressive elements of his candidacy. Instead, they will search for the distinctions he’s drawn, and, sadly, a number of those distinctions point away from the heart-quickening progressivism of much of this race, and back towards the old politics of centrist caution and status quo bias.

The truth is, our greatest fear is that Barack Obama will turn out to be another Hillary Clinton — all centrist caution and status quo bias. (Note that Clinton now is attacking Obama for being too liberal.”)

Another twit pushing the “repudiation” angle is the ever-brainless Dean Barnett, who says,

Here’s a dirty little secret that the liberal blogosphere will probably try to flush down the memory hole in the coming weeks – they didn’t like Barack Obama. They had reason not to. When they stamped their little feet over Obama doing something like having a Gospel singer with decidedly non-progressive views on social issues campaign for him, Obama ignored them. That particular storm caused Markos Moulitsas to declare the Obama campaign in the throes of a full meltdown.

The gospel singer was a rabidly anti-gay bigot named Donnie McClurkin, and yes, many of us took great offense at an association between McClurkin and Obama. The Obama campaign scrambled to add an openly gay minister to the program to quell the complaints, and Obama issued a statement repudiating (today’s word) McClurkin’s toxic views. It was a nasty blunder on the part of the Obama campaign.

However, these past few months nearly everyone running for the Dem nomination has been hit with criticism from us bloggers. We are equal-opportunity critics.

Obama incurred the wrath of the progressive blogosphere, and good God, a miracle occurred – he won anyway. Unlike his principal contenders who sucked up to the liberal bloggers at every available opportunity, Obama showed indifference or even hostility to their agenda. His success reveals the liberal bloggers’ lack of king-making ability. This particular emperor has no clothes.

The fact is that the liberal blogosphere has most definitely not tried to play at being king-makers in this election. Hardly any of us have endorsed any one Dem candidate. There was much affection for Senator Dodd, and I suspect John Edwards is the first choice for many, but most of us have not endorsed.

A progressive blog-reading audience of roughly 100,000 people has alternately enthralled and frightened the Democratic party for a couple of years now.

A recently compiled list of the top 100 liberal blog sites by traffic (of which this blog came in at number 97, although that was before my site went down for days and messed up my stats) has the top sites getting 600,000 – 300,000 visits a day. But Barnett was never one to let his biases get bogged down by facts.

Obama either saw that foolishness for what it was, or was sufficiently committed to his principles that he refused to pander. If he paid a price at the Iowa caucuses for this “gamble,” it was one he could afford. More likely, he paid no price, as the progressive blogosphere is deeply unrepresentative of the Democratic party rank and file. We learned that much last night.

I’m not sure yet what we’ve “learned” from this campaign — it’s too early — but more than anything else I was thrilled by the young people and independents who came out for Obama. If that amounts to a repudiation of the “Democratic party rank and file,” so be it. The young folks in particular may be showing us where the Dem party needs to go, and it ain’t back to the DLC.

Update: The Weekly Standard needs to get its story straight. The blog post before Barnett’s — in which he chuckled because Obama’s win “repudiated” us — says that we leftie bloggers are furious with Keith Olbermann for “belittling” Barack Obama’s Iowa Caucus win.

I watched the MSNBC coverage, and hadn’t noticed this belittling. Olbermann’s anti-Obama bias seems to exist in the mind of one diarist in desperate need of a reality check. As one commenter said,

some hardcore Obama fans simply cannot let go of the idea that their candidate must not be criticized or anything negative said about him.

Jesus Christ, you WON, get a fucking grip. Calling Olbermann, Krugman and any progressive that has been sticking his neck out for YOU in a sea of Republican media propaganda a “hack” and worse is exactly why people like me could not support Obama in the primaries.

He was just pointing that FACT out to make a point that not all state primaries allow independents; yet fanatic Obama supporters see it as a conspiracy and then try to smear Olbermann like they did Krugman. If there is anything worse than a sore loser, it’s a paranoid gloating winner. Get over yourselves.

Update 2: The Right, of course, is never angry.

Questions

Posted on by

There is so much good commentary floating around, and so many thoughts in my head, I hardly know where to start. So I’ll just jump in with a list of still-unanswered questions.

Is Barack Obama for real? He makes a good speech, but his record as a junior senator from Illinois is not all that inspiring. Even so, Charles Peters writes in today’s Washington Post that he accomplished remarkable things in the Illinois legislature.

Is George Bush relevant? Dan Froomkin writes,

In his 30-minute Reuters interview, Bush also explained his strategy to remain relevant in the coming year, as attention shifts to the question of who will succeed him. The strategy involves making sure Republicans in Congress don’t break ranks. (See my Dec. 13 column, Congress Goes Belly Up.)

Said Bush: “[M]y challenge is to remind the American people that while they’re paying attention to these primaries there is a President actively engaged solving problems. …”

Yeah, he figured out how to change the light bulb in his desk lamp.

Has Ann Coulter flown home to Planet Ogle-TR-56b? Her web page today as of 2 pm features a rerun of her infamous Kwanzaa column. Nothing about current political news.

Who’s in denial? Michael Gerson says Democrats are in denial because they want to undo all of George Bush’s popular and successful policies. Um, who’s in denial, Mr. Gerson?

Will the real next Ronald Reagan please stand up (and then sit down)? All of the GOP candidates claim to be the next Ronald Reagan. One says he will cut taxes just like Ronald Reagan did (before he raised them). Another says he will stand up to foreign enemies, real and imaginary, just like Ronald Reagan did. But John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin write at The Politico:

Huckabee’s message will be the most unorthodox, at least as the Bush-era GOP goes.

He’ll use class-based rhetoric to reach out to disaffected members of his party and those “Reagan Democrats” who are socially conservative but economically more populist. But his lynchpin is social issues — Huckabee’s success will validate the role of Christian conservatives in the GOP tent.

Certainly a lot of Reagan’s initial appeal was that he played the role of Wyatt Earp, riding into town and cleaning up the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The part Reagan actually played in that sorry episode is another matter entirely. But the Reagan mythos and the Reagan reality never did live in the same neighborhood. The myth is that his tax cuts brought about the best economy the nation ever saw and that he single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union. The truth is that he raised taxes as much as he cut them, his economy was based mostly on a housing bubble, and the Soviet Union brought itself down, more or less, after Reagan had left office.

Reading what Harris and Martin wrote, it struck me that Reagan’s appeal really never was about what he accomplished in office — his record overall was not bad, but not outstanding either — but about his persona. He was very good at playing the role of POTUS. His genius was in reading the public mood and giving the people the performance they wanted at the moment. And white working-class Americans embraced him as their friend and champion, even though (based on his record) he really wasn’t. He communicated to them that he understood — and thereby validated — their fears and their anger and their biases. He reached out to the disaffected.

That’s not a role Mitt Romney can ever play, no matter how many taxes he promises to cut.

Huckabee has stumbled badly in the foreign policy area, true, but other than bringing their sons and daughters home from Iraq I don’t know if most working-class Americans give a bleep about foreign policy at the moment. And, yes, the Republican establishment hates him because of the populism angle. Even suggesting that government might be put to use to make life more fair and secure for average Americans is the blackest of heresies among the GOP elite.

But Molly Ivors writes at Whiskey Fire that evangelicalism has become the refuge of the disaffected.

Religion, specifically the evangelical religion which replaces all sorts of community and cultural structures, has a pretty clear appeal for a lot of people who see in it an answer. Our own brilliant chicago dyke, who posts at corrente, once explained how this works:

    … Republicans have spent the last 25 years doing away with all the things that once made America a great place for the working class: decent public education, secure manufacturing and farm jobs, responsible government that meets the basic needs of the people, a critical media that calls out politicians who don’t, and balanced public political and social discourse that addresses the concerns of the little guy. These things are effectively dead in rural America today, and if you’re in Kansas or upstate Wisconsin or delta Mississippi, times are tough, and have been for a long time. I grew up in the country, and I cringe every time I go back, to see just how poorly a lot of folks are doing these days. The problem is that for many, they don’t even really know that once, life in rural working class America was much, much better.

The evangelical movement, in providing an identity and community for the hard-pressed, has essentially replaced American civic life for a lot of people. And Huckabee is the result.

Evangelicalism and civic life have been wound up together for generations in most Bible Belt communities, but I agree something seems different now. And I also think that what Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh and Rich Lowry never understood is that working-class Americans never really took their corporatist/imperialist brand of conservatism to heart. All along, they were just looking for a leader who could understand and validate their fears and anger and biases.

Thus, I think it can be argued that Huckabee is filling that part of the Ronald Reagan role better than anyone else at the moment, and that’s why he won in Iowa.

The question is, how much of the electorate is still looking for the next Ronald Reagan?

Well, Well

Posted on by

Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.

The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.

As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?

There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.

There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.

___________________

Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.

___________________

Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:

With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.

It Begins

Posted on by

It’s Iowa Caucus Day. The circus has begun. Gail Collins writes about how absurd the Iowa Caucuses are and why no one should take them seriously. However, they will be taken seriously.

I got a kick out of David “Bwana” Broder’s take on Iowa versus New Hampshire:

That system empowers the activists and those with built-in organizational ties who can mobilize people to leave their homes for a couple of hours on a weeknight and motivate them to declare a public — not private — preference for a candidate.

On the Republican side, those networks belong principally to conservative Christian groups, antiabortion organizations, home-school advocates and some economic interests.

On the Democratic side, organized labor and the teachers boast the best networks, but the main impulse is a broader populist tradition that tugs the Democratic Party of Iowa to the left. That tradition may go back to the days of Henry Wallace, the Iowa-born vice president under FDR. But it has been embodied in recent decades by Tom Harkin, the longtime Democratic senator who ran for president himself in 1992 and quickly fell behind the more moderate Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas.

Harkin has accustomed Iowa Democrats to a red-meat diet of anti-corporate rhetoric, a tradition he shared with the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. That theme was echoed this year and in 2004 by John Edwards and was imitated — with varying degrees of conviction — by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the closing stages of the Iowa race.

It has been an Iowa pattern to tilt the Democratic race leftward and the Republican race to the right. And often it has been New Hampshire, where the primary turnout approximates the pattern of the overall electorate, that restores the balance and corrects for the distorting effects of the Iowa dynamic.

Populism clearly is distressing to Bwana. How he longs for the days when well-bred aristocrats in powdered wigs and satin coats gathered in tastefully decorated drawing rooms to make decisions on behalf of the simple peasants.

Mahatechnodukkha

Posted on by

Well, I’m back. I bet you’d given up on me. My web host has been having massive technical problems.

I have to turn off comments for a little while, because I had to eliminate spam filters. It’s complicated. I hope to post something tomorrow, if I can remember now.

Update: Well, I tried to turn off comments, but there’s still a comment box. I have to keep moderation on.