Category Archives: Election 2008

Playing Into bin Laden’s Hands

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Last week President Bush (remember him?) took his message somewhere that people might listen without creating a media spectacle, the Israeli Knesset, where he made his now infamous, implicit criticism of Barack Obama (“President Bush Addresses Members of the Knesset,” The Knesset, Jerusalem, Israel, 15 May 2008):

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Yes, yes, appeasement has been discredited, except in all those other instances where its opposite, belligerence or intransigence has been discredited too (“The Contradictory Lessons of the Twentieth Century, smarties, 28 August 2004). The fact is that there is no diplomatic panacea — firm resolve always works — and what is required is that ever so subtle virtue, judgment, exactly what this administration has been lacking.

This all reminds me of the passage from Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine in which he describes the assessment of the CIA as to the meaning of Osama bin Laden’s 29 October 2004 statement , made just days before the 2004 presidential election:

Inside of the CIA, of course, the analysis moved on a different track. They had spent years, as had a similar bin Laden unit at FBI, parsing each expressed word of the al Qaeda leader and his deputy, Zawahiri. What they’d learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons — and those reasons are debated with often startling depth inside the organization’s leadership. …

Today’s conclusion: bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reelection.

At the five o’clock meeting, once various reports on latest threats were delivered, John McLaughten opened the issue with the consensus view: “Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.” (p. 335-336)

The fact is that the policies of President Bush and his administration have been an irreplaceable gift to al Qaeda. As Osama bin Laden himself said in the afore mentioned statement,

[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note …

Osama bin Laden essentially told the world that he loves George Bush for playing right into al Qaeda’s hands.

Barack Obama and the left more generally have responded to the President’s implicit criticism, but it’s been entirely meta. It’s beyond the bounds of fair politics, the President shouldn’t make such criticisms while abroad, etc. The left should deal squarely with this issue. Appeasement — were it even true — would be one thing, but George Bush is America’s gift to Osama bin Laden. Senator Obama is not bin Laden’s candidate: George W. Bush is. For seven years now the West has danced to bin Laden’s tune. On 20 January 2009 that ends.

Ouch! 2008 as 1972

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Among all the other things they’ve lost, at least The Economist hasn’t lost their edge. In review of Rick Perlstein’s new book, Nixonland, they have the following to say about the present election season (“The Fuel of Power,” vol. 387, no. 8579, 10 May 2008, pp. 93-94):

It is hard, in the current political season, to read this book without hearing the sound of history rhyming, to paraphrase Mark Twain. George McGovern’s promise of “post-partisanship” galvanised America’s youth. He trumpeted his opposition to the Vietnam war under the slogan of “right from the start”. He went on to suffer one of the biggest defeats in the general election in American history. “Dirty politics confused him,” Hunter S. Thompson sighed. Nixon chose “experience counts” as his campaign slogan in 1960 and boasted that he had spent “a lifetime getting ready”. He made up for his lack of personal charm by an almost deranged relentlessness. But this week’s result suggests that these are only half-rhymes at best: Barack Obama has already met his Richard Nixon and slain her.

The entire media establishment this week is touting the demise of the Clinton campaign, and the whole thing has been rather unseemly for Senator Clinton, but no one says it in quite such a wince-inducing fashion as The Economist.

A Concession Speech?

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Regarding the Clinton campaign continuance clear to convention: On the other hand, Senator Clinton’s speech last night sounded surprisingly like a concession speech — especially this part (“Hillary’s Election Day Remarks in Indianapolis, Indiana, 6 May 2008):

And I especially want to thank my family for their incredible love and support. Bill and Chelsea. People ask us all the time, how do you keep going? We love getting out and meeting people. We love having a chance to be with all of you, and didn’t Chelsea do a great job? I know a lot of people enjoyed seeing my husband again out on the campaign trail.

And I’m not the only one. A coworker commented to the same effect to me this morning. And Tim Russert couldn’t control himself over a rumor that the Clinton campaign had cancelled all morning press appearances. It seems to me like she was leaving the door open to an announcement later today. If nothing else, there’s got to be some somber strategy sessions this morning among the Clinton people.

And upon some reflection, the thing that I see that could be really convincing to the Clinton campaign could turn out to be the money game. The fundraising pattern looks even more bleak than the electoral one.

To the Bitter End

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Unless something completely unexpected happens it’s going to be a convention fight. With primaries like West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota remaining it’s just going to be more of the same. That list of states looks like more tit-for-tat wins and loses. There is nothing left that can serve as that defeat from which there is no coming back. Senator Clinton now has all the momentum, meager as it may be, to carry her through the last one on 3 June. Where things stand now is where they’ll be on August 25th, the opening day of the nominating convention.

The second factor here is that one may whish for some party elders to deliver to Senator Clinton her come to Jesus talking-to, but who has the sway over the Clintons? Howard Dean is an enemy that they fought to keep from his current position. Harry Reid has sworn neutrality because he is going to have to cope with at least one, at this rate perhaps both of them come the 111th Congress. The various other Senators are pledged all over the map. On MSNBC they were talking about Al Gore, but at this point there is too much bad blood between the Clintons and Mr. Gore.

There is nothing left now that can stop Senator Clinton from fighting on to the bitterest of bitter ends. Her strategy is clearly to wait it out and see if there are any more Reverend Jeremiah Wrights lurking in Senator Obama’s shadow. Or see if they can drum up some. Something, anything to cause an mass defection of delegate support come convention.

Consider what will happen if Hillary Clinton were to win the nomination in a convention fight? Could that be the end of the Democratic lock on the African American vote? Imagine how chilly the 111th Congress will be under a President McCain. Imagine the recrimination within the Democratic party should the Democrats lose after eight years of George W. Bush. Clearly the darkest days of the Democratic party are not yet safely in their past.

If it comes to a convention fight, I may have to put in for that week off from work.

The Dean Scream Gank of 2008

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I really don’t think I can handle the U.S. political scene and the 2008 election anymore. The right can still get away with their “liberal media” routine, despite it now being quite apparent that the media lies at the ready, waiting to gank any liberal with an even vaguely populist message at the first sign of any traction. Four years ago in what was one of the most amazing, mendacious, mean-spirited attacks on a politician that I have witnessed, Howard Dean was completely eliminated from the running in a single day and night of misfortune following the media pile-on over the Dean scream. This season it fully seems that Barack Obama has been served the same treatment.

The annoying thing is that this is working — at least on me. Maybe I’m too plugged in, whereas most voters are barely noticing, or maybe I’m not steady enough of nerve to weather what is a passing storm. I was in favor of Hillary Clinton throughout most of the primary, but after a few weeks of vague racism, typical Clintonian petty lying and unhinged desperation — doesn’t Bill Clinton really seem like a stroke victim at this point? — as well as a few positives from Barack Obama, I was convinced to switch to advocacy of the inevitable.

But after the whole Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the elitism gaff, Barack Obama seems like a pretty indefensible candidate to me. I mean, if someone took issue with Reverend Wright what would you say? Senator Obama was unfamiliar with these positions? That would be a convenient lie. That Reverend Wright’s opinions aren’t really that important? Do you plan to extend the same curtsey to John McCain regarding his religious wacko supporters? That Senator Obama is a closet atheist and just goes to church out of political necessity? Digging the hole deeper. That Reverend Wright’s points aren’t really that offensive? Let me know how that works out for you. That a politician shouldn’t have to apologize for the opinion of everyone they’ve ever come into contact with? There’s only so much mileage to be had here. Guilt by association is a lament because it has so much cred with common sense-type reasoning. And Senator Obama had been a member of Reverend Wright’s church for how long? Twenty years?

I think this is all stupid on a competitive basis. Despite the fact that John McCain has his own covenant of wacky preachers (Pat “we deserved September 11th” Robertson, John “the Catholic church is a whore” Hagee), has claimed spurious religious affiliation and in the form of national greatness conservatism has his own brand of condescension toward the decadent whims of the American citizenry, he’s getting a free pass from the media. If the media does decide to make an issue of anything about Senator McCain, it will undoubtedly skip over his war mongering and his avowed ignorance of economics to focus on the weakest case against him, that he is short and old., criticisms that will probably redound to further the liberal elitism case.

It pisses me off and I want to know when the DNC is going to dispatch Dean and Carville to the CNN Situation Room to empurple the face of Wolf Blitzer and to the Meet The Press studio to throw Tim Russert down an MSNBC fire escape stair well.

Maureen Dowd Marinated in Bitterness

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Since there is no one more hateable in U.S. media than Maureen Dowd, I pass on the following screed (Kathy G., “My Maureen Dowd Story,” The G Spot, 18 April 2008):

But there’s another problem with the opening sentence of the Dowd column. “I’m not bitter.” Oh Maureen — who the hell do you think you’re kidding? The woman positively soaks in bitterness. Marinates in it. It oozes out of her pen and pours into just about every damn word she writes. Her bitterness has utterly corroded her soul. It’s turned her into a twisted freak whose chief pleasure in life seems lie in vicious, barking-mad attacks on the only people capable of ending our long national nightmare — the Democrats. Seriously, if there is any other single person in the media who’s been a more powerful enabler of Republican high crimes and misdemeanors than Modo, I don’t know who it is.

It would be one thing to be relentlessly critical of the Democrats — I am and they deserve every bit of abuse they get — if it seemed as if it were in the service of some principle. But the amazing thing about Maureen Dowd is that she doesn’t seem to have anything approaching a positive agenda or even the most remote interest in issues of policy. Her column is just a wasteland of the rote application of the worst of yesterday’s discarded pop psychology to the politician de jour. Her entire oeuvre consists of little more than pulling the wings off of political flies.

When will a shakeup at the New York Times Op-Ed page deliver us from this twice weekly phantasm? Probably never. I wonder at the wisdom of associating myself with fellow leftists every time I see that Maureen Dowd’s column is the most e-mailed of the day — as it is twice a week. It just might provoke a Christopher Hitchens-like bolt for the door.

Courtesy of Kevin Drum (“Who’s Not Bitter,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 18 April 2008).

Voting Your Anxiety

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In light of recent debate surrounding Barack Obama’s comments about rural bitterness being the cause of gun culture and fundamentalist religion, I have been wanting to locate a certain passage from an article and fortunately Kevin Drum turns it up for me (“The Culture Wars,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 15 April 2008). Turns out it was Garance Franke-Ruta (“Remapping the Culture Debate,” The American Prospect, 16 January 2006):

Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to. People in states like Massachusetts, for example, which has very high per capita incomes and the lowest divorce rate in the country, are relatively unconcerned about gay marriage, while those in Southern states with much higher poverty, divorce, and single-parenthood rates feel the family to be threatened because family life is, in fact, much less stable in their communities. In such environments, where there are few paths to social solidarity and a great deal of social disruption, the church frequently steps into the breach, further exacerbating the fight.

We’re still in the realm of arguing that ideology follows material circumstance. People vote their confidence and their insecurity. I loved Thomas Frank’s book, but have had reservations that it’s too facile. He argues that people don’t vote their material interest owing to effective right-wing propaganda, but he fails to take into account certain aspects of people’s material situation.

This also sweeps in the George Lakoff-type point insofar as this interpretation poses problems for the model of liberals chafing for the nanny state and always eager to swoop in and save everybody from everything versus strongly independent conservatives just wanting to be left alone to live their lives. People on the right socially are every bit as eager for the government to prop up their lives and communities and offer all sorts of inducements, it’s just that they want their government support to be punitive and compulsory.

The Destruction of Barack Obama, Part III

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Some might characterize Barack Obama’s 6 April 2008 comments as standard What’s the Matter With Kansas sort of stuff. Not William Kristol. For him it rings more reminiscent of Karl Marx (“The Mask Slips,” The New York Times, 14 April 2008):

I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn’t take me long this weekend to find my copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader,” edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.

My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion in the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

This isn’t completely inconceivable. When I read What’s the Matter With Kansas I was struck by a certain Dialectical Materialist tendency, but similarity is not identity. Barack Obama as Marxist dialectician? Can Denish D’Souza be far behind with a comparison between the Senator’s remarks and some musings from one of Osama bin Laden’s videos?

The grounding in sound judgment of the imaginings of the right aside, at this point I would say that whatever crossover appeal Barack Obama once had is gone. The vitriol towards him on the right is now every bit as unhinged and hysterical as that over Hillary Clinton. I regularly get forwards from my tap into the right-wing psyche describing his as “scary” and a socialist with lurid scenarios about how he will wreck everything that is decent about the U.S.

I argued early in the primaries that anticipated perceptions of the right shouldn’t be a factor in Democratic deliberations about their candidates because the right wing mentality is not one with which there can be any negotiation (insofar as the personal characteristics and voting record of a candidate are our negotiating position). The tactic presently on display is not one that takes careful stock of the facts about a Democratic candidate and reacts accordingly, but a stock tactic which, when the facts of the matter don’t fit the stereotypes on offer, simply doubles down on the demagoguery and looks twice as hard for minutia to link candidate to cliché. It was inevitable that eventually Barack Obama would end up looking about as attractive as Hillary Clinton. Lest anyone need any reminding, in 2004 a Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart and a conscience was made the dishonorable one and a cocaine using draft dodger was lifted up as the one whose record honored the military.

This is perhaps the central point that Democrats need to learn about the operation of the right today. It doesn’t matter what candidate we choose: the resultant smear campaign will be the same. The thing is that the Republicans are a one trick pony, so you might think that Democrats would have caught on and developed a counter strategy by this late date. Apparently we don’t even have one trick.

Hillary Clinton: Reloaded

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Hillary Clinton throwing back a brew, Bronko's Restaurant and Lounge, Crown Point, Indiana, 12 April 2008

Hillary Clinton hesitating over a shot of Crown Royal, Bronko's Restaurant and Lounge, Crown Point, Indiana, 12 April 2008

For the last few years it’s been kissing your way to the White House. This year for a few days it seemed like it might be sobbing your way to the White House. My hope is that it might now turn to drinking your way to the White House. After a dry drunk as president, this is a welcome change. Words won’t help you now Obama. Time to pony up. You’ve done coke so showing this old lady up should be no problem. Or maybe it’ll be like Marion Ravenwood drinking a bunch of Nepalese tough guys under the table at her bar, The Raven, in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Campaigning at Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Indiana, Senator Clinton was polishing of a brew when someone offered “You want a shot with that?” John Stewart mocked her for her choice of Crown Royal. But if you watch the video, when it’s suggested that she drink a shot she says, “I want something sweet.” It turns out that her idea of something sweet is actually the sweat end of bitter. When most people say “something sweet” what they mean is a Mellon Ball or a Lemon Drop. When Hillary Clinton say “something sweat” what she means is a sweat whiskey. I’m sold.

I was so amused by this that I actually can’t decide which picture I liked the most. So here she is, both a beer and a whiskey. More at The Gawker (“A Shot in the Dark: Hot Hillary Clinton Party Photos!,” 14 April 2008).

How to Destroy Obama, Part II

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With this most recent gaff, following on the press stampede over his bowling abilities, I’d say that all the pieces are in place to plop Senator Obama firmly into the standard media narrative of the elitist liberal. Last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine story (Sokolove, Michael , “Change Makes a Call on Levittown,” 6 April 2008) was essentially sympathetic and by a liberal supporter, but it was a toe in the water of the narrative.

Now we just need a story associating the Senator with some characteristic liberal elitist consumer good. Sacre bleu! Senator Obama welds a mean crocket mallet! Or that Malia Ann and Natasha were raised on Baby Einstein when heartland kids were running around in the woods with bb guns. Or hell, there’s nothing like the golden oldies: maybe there’s a picture of him windsurfing somewhere. Crocket playing, Baby Einstein watching, windsurfing liberal elitists! Then all that will be left is for Maureen Dowd to bless it with a few of her trademark witticisms and it will be off to the races.

Combine the Reverend Jeremiah Wright story, the budding liberal elitist story has got to be causing a lot of relief over at the McCain campaign. For the first time since his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Senator Obama is looking beatable.

What supporters of the Senator don’t get is that an election is not an occasion for a candidate to speak truth to electoral power. It is a contest to see who can flatter the electorate most vociferously without going so far as to sound insincere (special thanks to Mitt Romney for helping to demarcate the outer limits of this phenomenon). Every prejudice in the country must be honored, no matter how ill-founded or small-minded and no matter how much in conflict with the interest group to whom the candidate read a litany of promises just last week.

This is the problem with young, idealistic and first time voters as your base. They have no idea why it is that old politicians are so bland and cynical. It’s because that’s how one gets to be an old politician. The problem with Senator Obama is that he has had too many positive experiences telling the truth — or, honestly, well hedged and carefully parsed truth — he’s not exactly getting up in your face with it — and it has gone to his head. He started to think that he was invincible, that the sort of stuff that liberals say in their publications or to each other in closed-door strategy sessions could be said for mass consumption too. He hasn’t had enough chastenings like the one that he is presently receiving. These are lessons that most politicians learn on the small stage, before acceding to the national stage. This is what people mean when they say that Senator Clinton has superior experience.

It’s quite possible that this was the inevitable story that a month in Pennsylvania was going to generate and he would have been better off to have avoided the state altogether. But he’s in, so now he’s got to do something. The primary night election analysts are going to be zeroing in on the class, income and race demographics of returns and it will be the primary story of the night, even before the Clinton campaign begins to spin this aspect of the story hard the next day. One can already see the rumblings of the liberal elitist narrative, but the actual voting could be the story that finally gives it legs.

Now this is me playing instapundit. It’s the perception of the hour and one of the phenomenal aspects of Senator Obama so far has been his ability to come back strong. On the other hand, a similarly surprising aspect of the Senator has been his excess of conciliation with mortal opponents — witness the Samantha Power imbroglio.

Hillary Clinton’s pending win in Pennsylvania is going to do a lot to resuscitate her campaign. If she can plausibly dovetail it to a narrative about how she can win in the difficult states, that’s going to pose a real threat. Senator Obama has got to kill this. Apologies and some words about how he misspoke aren’t going to cut it.