Elections as Signal II

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I realize that there is a significant debate around whether Bob Kerrey is a cat’s paw for Clinton campaign race bating directed at Barack Obama — and the Clinton campaign has had some perfidious truck with the right-wing sewer. But again, there’s debate about whether what he said was sincere or really a backhanded compliment (see e.g. Kleiman, Mark, “Kerrey and ‘Barack Hussein Obama’,” The Reality-Based Community, 16 December 2007). I think there’s reason to think that he’s sincere, but whatever the case, since he expresses the internationalist potential of Obama qua icon — or as Frank says, as signifier — so well, I’m going to excerpt it at my own risk:

I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.

Kevin Drum wrote a very well expressed explication of this sentiment at the time (“Fighting Terrorism,” Political Animal, Washington Monthly, 17 December 2007):

Kerrey wasn’t suggesting that electing Obama would have any direct effect on hardcore al-Qaeda jihadists. It wouldn’t. But terrorists can’t function unless they have a critical mass of support or, at a minimum, tolerance from a surrounding population. This is Mao’s sea in which the jihadists swim. Without it, terrorists simply don’t have enough freedom of movement to be effective, and their careers are short. It’s why the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany lasted only a few years, while the IRA in Ireland has lasted decades.

What Kerrey was getting at was simple: in the long run, the only way to defeat the hardcore jihadists is to dry up their support in the surrounding Muslim world. And on that score, a president with black skin, a Muslim father, and a middle name of Hussein, might very well be pretty helpful.

For today’s jihadists, the answer is hard power. There’s no other way to stop them. But for tomorrow’s jihadists, the answer is soft power. As long as a substantial fraction of the Islamic world supports or tolerates jihadism, we’ll never stop the production of new terrorists or seriously reduce their effectiveness. But if that support dries up, we can win. This is where our foreign policy should be focused, and the fact that it hasn’t been for the past six years — that, in fact, we’ve gone backward on this score — is by far the most calamitous aspect of George Bush’s disastrous war on terror.

One of the amazing things about the six years since 11 September 2001 is that the importance of tamping down support for extremists among moderate Moslems is something that George W. Bush, at least in speech, understands. When it comes time to execute policy, it all goes out the window — actually a common feature of the Bush presidency. It’s time to address this central shortfalling.

The Election as Signal to the World

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Over the Christmas weekend Frank advanced an argument in favor of Barack Obama that remains to my mind the top-line argument in his favor: that the simple fact of his election president of the United States will have a dramatic effect on the world’s perception of the U.S. Born in one of the middle provinces of the American empire (Hawaii) to a Kenyan father and a white mother, doing part of his growing up in Indonesia, with a name like Barack Hussein Obama, may people of the world may look at the new U.S. president and see something of themselves and of an America beyond the arrogant frat-boy entitlement of the Bush administration.

On the first episode after being strong-armed back from the writers’ strike, Stephen Colbert had Andrew Sullivan on to make the same argument (Colbert Report, Comedy Central, Monday, 7 January 2008):

If you show just that face of Barack Obama on television to some teenager in Lahore, Pakistan who has this vision of America that has been determined by the Bush-Cheney years, suddenly more than any word his opinion and view of this country will change. We have a chance to win those people over and make the world love America again.

With his cover feature in last month’s Atlantic Monthly (“Goodby to All That,” vol. 300, no. 5, December 2007, pp. 40-54), Andrew Sullivan perhaps the Senator’s most outstanding booster in the commentariat. But he is also about the most naïve of the astute political commentators, prone to enthusiasms that in retrospect look premature so I’m going to keep my own counsels.

The campaign for the presidency doesn’t end at the convention and the presidency is not just election night. After convention one has to face the Republican machine and after the inauguration there are another 1,460 days and I just don’t know that Senator Obama has what it takes in either arena.

Considing that the entire world expected a repudiation of George W. Bush on election night in 2004 and that we did not deliver, a more dramatic gesture is now in order. I like John Edwards because he is the most liberal of the top three, but with a woman and an African-American within striking distance, it would be a shame to send another white man to the White House.

Interesting Politicians

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Following on K.’s most recent post (“Musical Offering: Introducing France’s Future First Lady,” 13 January 2008), I have been stewing over Matthew Yglesias’s dinging of the prudery and narrow-mindedness of U.S. politics (“A Different World,” TheAtlantic.com, 9 January 2008):

French President Nicholas Sarkozy got divorced early in his term, is dating a supermodel and his son’s writing songs for radical French rappers. Not only does American politics seem remarkably focused on relatively unimportant personal trivia, but our politicians don’t even have interesting trivia.

Polymorphous Personae

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The thing that Hillary Clinton doesn’t get about campaigning — and that John Kerry and Al Gore didn’t get either — is that you need to pick a persona early and stick with it. There is an analogue in creating a persona to framing around an issue. Framing works by repetition over a long period of time. This is probably the one thing that Democrats at large don’t get.

All politicians are fake, it’s just that Republicans have a consistency in their fakeness. And when you’re consistent, people don’t catch on. When a politician grabs one persona this week and another the next, it doesn’t take long before voters conclude that such a politician is a fake.

At least with respect to his persona, Barack Obama gets this. He has been positioning himself as a certain sort of person all along so when it came primary time, people had a well cultivated set of beliefs about him that he could easily and naturally play upon. Hence the gentleness of his campaigning style: all the heavy lifting is in the frame. Hillary Clinton was the candidate of experience — until it turned out that that was not what voters wanted. They wanted change, so now she is the candidate of change. I have no doubt that should she dispatch Senator Obama, we will never hear the word “change” from her again in the general election. If she is up against Governor Huckabee then she will be all about compassion rooted in her humble upbringing and her faith. If Senator McCain gets the Republican nomination, she will be boasting about what a maverick she has been all along. If Mitt Romney gets it, well, then she can continue to be the always-yes-saying robot that she has been all along.

The crazy thing about Al Gore is that he had spent years as a Senator cultivating signature issues of the environment, nuclear weapons and high-tech. But when the 2000 campaign came around, the Democratic consultants came in with their everything-to-everybody strategy, told him to pitch his long-standing associations and cycled through a rotating list of Gore personas until everyone in America was left asking who the real Al Gore was. After the beard and paunch growth soul searching and some consultant detox, the real Al Gore is back.

If I could introduce the Democratic party to one concept, it would be opportunity cost. In order to be one thing, you have to foreclose the possibility of being some other thing. You’re going to have to piss someone off. Pick something and come to terms with saying sianora to the rest.

Battle Tested

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One of the characters of mythic proportion here in D.C. is that of the hard old pol: that tough political boss, heavily scarred from many a close-fought election battle. Think Tip O’Neal or Edward Kennedy.

Last night Senator Hillary Clinton showed that she has it. It’s not just a good ol’ boys club. Joshua Marshall points out (“Making Sense of It,” Talking Points Memo, 9 January 2008):

And I do not think that any of Clinton’s critics can say that she won this one by overpowering Obama with money or mobilizing a dominating political machine or by expectations of inevitability and certainly not with the help of a friendly press. However you slice it this was a real victory under pressure. And if she’s the nominee she’ll be a much better one for it.

After last night’s win, everyone should take a long, hard look at Senator Clinton. She’s hard to see because we’ve all been made to see her through the filter of tabloid in this modern world, but after last night, she seems more like something of an other, older tradition. The politicians who make something in this world all end up compromised in some way. There is a proper rule for how and when to hold that against a politician. It makes me think of Auda abu Tayi’s boast in Lawrence of Arabia: “I carry twenty-three great wounds, all got in battle.” Damage or disfigurement is not always a mark of shame.

In the bright light of day people will say that what they want is clarity and principle and happy things like hope for the future and positive vision and big think. But the astute know that what politics really calls for is what Senator Clinton has demonstrated. They call it the greasy pole. To climb it, you have to get a little dirty.

Tears of Victory

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CNN is currently showing Hillary Clinton ahead of Barack Obama at 40 to 36 with 13 percent of precincts reporting. It is pretty early and this could be one of those urabn districts-rural districts thing, where different types o districts report at different rates. Or maybe younger voters still getting off work versus older voters available to vote all day long. Senator Obama’s lead in Iowa didn’t really start to lengthen until later in the evening. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it swing before the night’s end.

It would be hard to figure out what happened so quickly were Senator Clinton to win. Maybe with yesterday’s little tear Senator Clinton pulled off the same thing that happened with Rick Lazio in New York. The big mean man coming on too strong provoked an outpouring of paternalistic sympathy for the hurt little lady. That would be ironic after all the left-blogosphere angst yesterday over the media reaction if it rebounded to her advantage. I half wouldn’t put it past her to have staged the whole thing. Some people have commented on how she has mastered female dog-whistle politics.

Apparently she was answering a reporter’s question all normal then suddenly veered off track and got somber and serious. That’s when the mist happened. It’s not like Hillary Clinton to get off message, to deviate to any place that she doesn’t want to go. I can just imagine her having hatched the plan with her campaign strategist. “Remember what happened to Rick Lazio in 2000 when he got all physically aggressive, and you seemed vulnerable and it turned the electorate? How could we achieve the same effect with Obama?” And then waiting for the right question. Half way through a normal response it occurring to her, “Oh, this is the one to go with!”

The Myth of the Rational Voter

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Kevin Drum on the “bump” phenomenon (“The Pack,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 6 January 2008):

… apparently the flinty-eyed independents of New Hampshire aren’t quite as flinty-eyed as they’d like you to believe. After a solid year of town halls, coffee klatsches, and early morning doorbell ringing — because, you know, New Hampshirites take their electoral responsibilities so much more seriously than the rest of us — all it took was a few thousand Iowans to flip them from one side to the other in less than 24 hours. Feh.

This country constantly claims the world’s greatest democracy, yet on the systematic side is so riddled with anachronisms (the electoral college), half-functioning institutions (the electoral college again) and just plain bad ideas (the staggering of the primaries) and on the individual side so populated by villainy (the commentariat) and the easily led, that one wonders how we persist in our tolerance of it.

Update (9 January 2008): After the outcome of the primary, Kevin Drum retracts (“Flinty-Eyed Independents,” Political Animal, Washington Monthly, 8 January 2008):

By the way, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the state of New Hampshire for this post on Sunday. Obviously I spoke too hastily.

Whatever the people of New Hampshire did, the system is still considerably less than one would aspire to in a decent system of governance.

Bleak Life Without The Daily Show and The Colbert Report

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Since the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have been off the air owing to the writer’s strike, our television has sat black-screened and unwatched. There was a particularly dark bought of HGTV watching somewhere in there resulting in what one of my colleagues referred to as “a wicked TV hangover,” but I have learned that I am more or less a single-show television watcher.

Unfortunately for the cause of the writers strike, but thankfully for myself and for the nation Messrs. Stewart and Colbert are back. An election season is packed full of too much balderdash to do without them.

Apparently they’re back under some mysterious duress. As amends for knuckling under, both of last night’s shows were devoted to a thumb in the eye of their paymasters. They even got a dig in when conceding their return to air back in December (de Moraes, Lisa, “Stewart and Colbert Won’t Stay Out in the Cold,” The Washington Post, 21 December 2007, p. C7):

“We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence,” the two men said in a joint statement.

It’s always been a bit of a mystery how much the success of those shows are the genius of Messrs. Stewart and Colbert and how much they relied upon their staffs. Last night was bad news for the writers: Stewart and Colbert are good enough to pull it off on their own.

Iowa Speeches II

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Thank Fortuna someone else out there reacted to the Iowa speeches the way that I did. Here’s Hendrik Hertzberg writing for The New Yorker (“A Brave, Lonely Dissent,” 5 January 2008):

I thought that, of the three main Democratic candidates Thursday evening, Hillary Clinton gave the best speech. It was gracious, generous, properly subdued, and surprisingly selfless. Her theme was the overarching imperative that the next President be a Democrat, the implication being that this was more important than that the next President be her (or Obama or John Edwards) — a message that fits the mood of supporters of all three.

…

Obama’s impromptu talks, at their best, have a symphonic structure that starts quietly and builds fitfully to an emotional climax that is all the more impressive because of his own restraint — he coaxes the emotion out of his audience rather than supplying it himself. His prepared speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the speech that rocketed him to national fame, had a similar quality. I didn’t find that quality in the Thursday speech — not enough of it, anyway. I thought the text threw him off his usual musicality, that it dissipated some of the excitement, that it was too general, too abstract, too “speechy” — grandiose and banal at same time.

“Grandiose and banal at same time,” describes just about the entire Obama oeuvre to me. Mr. Hertzberg is aware that there is something wrong with bucking the received wisdom that Senator Obama is anything less than a generation-inspiring genius and so offers a bit of an insincere apology: “it may have been something I ate. The food in New Hampshire is not always reliable.”

Unfortunately events have shown that Senator Clinton was not so steady as she may have seemed that night.

Iowa Speeches

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Perusing the responses to the outcome in Iowa, I think I must be on another planet. My response seems to be nearly the opposite of most. I thought John Edwards’s and Hillary Clinton’s were strong, but that Barack Obama’s was merely okay.

Hillary Clinton, I thought, did an incredible job of handling this loss. She was completely unphased and didn’t say a word conceding it as a loss. This was model framing.

New Hampshire is currently neck-in-neck and South Carolina will be tight, especially after Iowa. It would be dangerous for Hillary Clinton to go three primaries without a win. Loosing South Carolina in isolation could be dismissed, but loosing it as the third in a row may send a signal that could change the dynamics in subsequent states. That being said, Senator Clinton is a candidate that will really start to perform when the primaries break out of the idiosyncratic states and get more normal. Hillary Clinton is presently on track to trounce Senator Obama on Super Tuesday and in delegate rich states like Michigan and New York. And in her speech I heard someone speak with the confidence of knowing this.

Regarding John Edwards, the Democratic party has been a lagging indicator of how far to the left U.S. political sentiment has shifted in the last two years or so. We presently have an electorate that is consistently to the left of the left-leaning party. Listening to John Edwards’s speech I was struck that his is the tone that I would expect in such an environment: fiery, strongly liberal, naming a list of villains and not afraid to make enemies in staking out his positions.

Senator Obama’s speech was exciting in some respects in that it did contain some dramatic lines, most outstandingly the first one, and the poses he struck, the expressions on his face, his intonation were all very strong and dramatic. But I kept on spacing out because most of what he actually said was the usual kissing babies, better world for out children, petting puppydogs political rhetoric. I’ve said it before (“Where’s the Hate?,” 9 March 2007), but I find Barack Obama every bit as vacuous as Hillary Clinton.