Panic in Year Zero

The Pathologies of Libertarianism and "Personal Responsibility"

2010-12-20T02:47:00.000-08:00

The first thing you notice about the newly popular phrase “personal responsibility” is that it is spoken almost exclusively by members of the upper-middle class or above. Good judgment, these people assume, is an entirely exogenous trait, unaffected by such factors as education (lower and higher), family income, or adult example. The poor, they insist, lack inner, not outer, resources.

Every reasonably intelligent suburban teenager eventually reflects on the vast discrepancy between what she has and what others—the poor, the working class, the homeless—lack. Some respond to this moment of dissonance by rejecting their station in life entirely and immersing themselves in leftist movements. Others embrace liberalism, religious or secular, silently promising some day to give back at least part of what they and their family have taken. Still others opt for denial, ignoring those in need, avoiding them when possible, stepping around them when not.

The most disturbing response, however, comes from those who stare into the face of injustice and conclude that they are simply better people than those who suffer, serve time, or sleep on sewer grates. Life, they believe, is all about good and bad choices, and those who choose poorly, for whatever reason, are unworthy of respect, much less financial assistance. Some salve their conscience by dumping a few coins in the Salvation Army dish each December, and tell us, against centuries of evidence to the contrary, that private charity is sufficient to make the unfortunate whole.

The most political of these people become libertarians, who—and this must astound historians—have convinced themselves that the early 20th Century was America’s Golden Age, a time before FDR and LBJ made us weak and passive. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again, or perhaps Calvin Coolidge. The New Deal made us flaccid and the Great Society rendered us wards of the state. The natural flow of wealth, away from the irresponsible and toward the responsible, was reversed, and with that reversal, freedom gave way to the soft tyranny of the nanny state.

Libertarianism is, to be sure, a seductive philosophy. Not only does it endow its adherents with a sense of unearned superiority, it also lays a moral foundation for basic, childlike selfishness. It’s not that I want to see the unemployed live in refrigerator boxes; it’s that my handout will only encourage their natural laziness. It’s not that I want grandparents to subsist on Purina Cat Chow; it’s that Social Security incentivizes irresponsible financial decisions and deprives society’s producers of the opportunity to maximize their own retirement income. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. In fact, it’s not even greed.

To the libertarian, the only public goods are civil and national defense, and the only services for which he can reasonably be taxed are those provided by men (or women) in uniform. This, of course, begs numerous questions, not the least of which is how we determine the level at which minimal military and policing needs are met, since any taxpayer money spent above that amount is theft. And the problem with that calculation is that we never truly know the answer until the system fails (the country is attacked, the crime rate rises). So, already, the libertarian dream is a shambles, as defense contractors and police benevolent associations persuade the necessarily ignorant that additional dollars are all that stands between them and violent death.

But beyond that, if it is the government’s sole responsibility to protect us from external harm, then why is it OK for you to tax me to protect you against the rapacious criminal, but not OK for me to tax you to protect me from the rapacious corporation? If the criminal shoots you, you are dead. If the corporation poisons my air and water, so am I, though the link between cause and effect may not be immediate. The ability of my heirs to sue the corporation in that case will do little to compensate me for my rather total loss.

And this is where libertarianism goes off the rails entirely. Even if I—or my heirs—wanted to sue the corporation for poisoning our air and water, we lack the information to press, much less prove, our claim. Absent government mandate, the factory owner has no incentive to provide evidence of her own wrongdoing. Likewise, the coal mine operator can hardly be expected to inform his employees that little provision has been made to guard against a cave-in. Individually, we are powerless to compel information from those who would rationally conceal it. Collectively, however, we can force disclosure and regulate misbehavior. Government is the mechanism which allows us to do this, and only through compulsory taxation can we assure that everyone pays their share. In that sense, the justification for taxpayer support of health and safety regulation is exactly identical to the justification for taxpayer support of the Marine Corps.

So what about health care? Untreated disease is a far more prolific killer than Charles Manson, harvesting more lives prematurely than all the gangsters, hit men, and foreign invaders combined. On the other hand, there is no collective action problem here. Unlike the polluting factory or the terrorist, I can do things to protect my health with no help from you. I can purchase insurance, and if you fail to do so, I will live and you will die. There is, in short, an undeniable element of choice here, and those who make the right choice may find themselves unwilling to subsidize those who make bad lifestyle decisions involving cigarettes or bacon or cheap wine.

There are two problems here, only one of which can be dismissed simply by resorting to vicious Social Darwinism. True, we can close the public hospitals and allow the uninsured—and their children—to die on the street. (Yes, they could seek out charity hospitals, but in a libertarian world without Medicare or public subsidy, those charity hospitals would be few and far between, financially bereft, understaffed, and inadequate. Think homeless shelters during blizzards.) But we must also turn our backs on the working poor whose lives combine copious levels of both personal responsibility and bad luck. I’ve got mine, Jack. Sorry that neither of your two low-wage jobs provides medical coverage. Next time around, make sure you select parents who will send you to college. (Much of textbook libertarianism brings to mind Jim Hightower's defining crack about the first President Bush, that he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.)

This is where we separate the true libertarians from the wannabes, those who memorized John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged from those who read the Cliff Notes version. It takes a special kind of person to experience no tug at the thought of sick, homeless children wasting away in an unforgiving winter. Fortunately, few of our fellow citizens are quite that special. So our taxes just went up again and the nanny state has seeped in through the tears in our conscience.

But even for those individuals who truly divide the world between producers and parasites, a new collective action problem presents itself. Communicable diseases enjoy upward class mobility even when their initial carriers do not. Untreated cases of tuberculosis, whooping cough, or even exotic strains of the flu pass unmolested into both trailer parks and gated communities. If you catch the wrong bug, all of your personally responsible preparations may be inadequate. This, as much as human decency, is why hospital emergency rooms are made available to those who cannot pay, even though that fact raises both taxes and health care costs (and thus insurance premiums).

In the end, of course, nearly all libertarians are hypocrites of a sort. Few turn down Medicare, either for themselves or their parents. Many went to public schools or state universities. All of them drive the interstates, though one could, I suppose, make a rational argument that if they're forced to pay for something, they might as well use it. Instead, the deeper hypocrisy involves the notion that they somehow get to decide which public services are vital and are thus subject to taxation, and which are not. Why, for example, should the working class single mother be required to help subsidize an airport security system that she will rarely, if ever, use? Why am I not free to determine that, say, we don't need a Border Patrol? (And don't get me started on the Tea Party libertarians who wail incessantly about immigration. The difference between legal and illegal immigrants, after all, is simply the will of one group of people enforced against another by the power of the state. By what definition of universal human freedom does a government prevent, at gunpoint, the movement of labor between Tijuana and San Diego? Your home is your personal property; California is not.)

There are, to be sure, hardcore adherents to the philosophy who argue for a fully stateless society. Their nirvana is a system in which all power relationships are voluntary and we hire our own private security and enforce tort judgments through voluntary private organizations such as insurance companies. Nobody lives like this, of course, or they would likely find that their Randian paradise mostly resembles the Hobbesian state of nature in which "life is nasty, brutish, and short". What would our John Galts do, for example, when I direct my private agents to evict them from their property, especially if my army is larger than theirs?

In the end, of course, libertarians are not exactly wrong about embracing the notion of personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is a good thing, and more people ought to try it. What they are wrong about is the possibility of having a successful, livable society in which all irresponsibilities are punished mercilessly. We can generally assume that the very first collective experiments formed because people realized it was impossible to live a purely libertarian lifestyle and maintain a safe, civilized society. This is what Churchill meant when he said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.

Libertarianism is doomed to failure because libertarians are simply wrong about humanity. We are a flawed, impulsive, not-fully-rational race that makes errors in abundance. Their ability to escape unscathed from their own missteps is nearly always a function of their class status and societal connections. They are swaddled in privilege and mistake that protective coating for layers of character.

Reasonable people can certainly argue about just how much taxation should be imposed, and what degree of irresponsible behavior we should choose to subsidize. But anyone who simply passes off every incorrect decision as a character flaw, and every flawed character as a parasite, is fooling himself every morning that he looks in the mirror. And until he stops doing so, he should not be entrusted with any position of public responsibility.

Lost in Space

2009-05-17T18:16:00.000-07:00

A movie review? Sure, a movie review. It's my blog, and I hardly ever use it anymore, so what the hell.

The following is a review of the latest Star Trek movie. If you haven't seen the movie, STOP READING NOW.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!

OK, you've been warned. Here goes:

There are two ways to assess this latest contribution to the enduring uber-geek franchise known as Star Trek. First, we can ask whether it succeeds as pure cinema. The answer to that question, sadly, is an unqualified "no". Change the names, alter the uniforms and insignia, remove all references to the iconic 1960s original, and what would you have? You'd have a weak plot, garden-variety special effects, limited character development, and enough contrivances to embarrass George Lucas. The result would be, at best, a second-tier outer space Die Hard sequel, and, at worst, some interstellar Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle. Indeed, so much time gets spent Trekking up the newcomers, that even the action sequences seem rushed and unsatisfying.

The second question, then, assumes greater significance. Does this newest take on the adventures of Kirk, Spock, and crew work as Star Trek? Well, it certainly tries. Lord, does it try. The writers manage to wedge in every character, catch phrase, and in-joke from the original, to the point that when Bones McCoy gripes that "I'm a doctor, not a physicist", you wonder why nobody printed a check-off list so viewers could record each Old Trek cliché as it's delivered.

And speaking of check off, or in this case, Chekov, what the hell is he doing on the bridge? The seventeen-year old Rooskie navigator bounds annoyingly through the corridors, sounding as though he is still navigating, among other things, puberty. His presence is distracting and gratuitous, a gawky Wesley Crusher on steroids. Surely, Chekov's arrival could have awaited his high school graduation, even if that meant that there would be nobody on board to mangle a Russian accent until Episode 2 or 3.

In fact, the inexplicably burning need to gather the entire gang together results in one of the film's more irritating contrivances. Kirk, it seems, has snuck onto the Enterprise without permission, and the Human/Vulcan bromance around which the original series pivots gets off to a decidedly shaky start. Rather than throwing the annoying stowaway in the brig, as any logical commander would have done, Acting Captain Spock pops Jimbo into a shuttle craft and exiles him to the nearest Class M snow planet.

Let the staggering coincidences commence! Not only does this frigid world turn out to be the temporary home of Old Spock from the Future, it also features a neglected Star Base where Scotty just happens to be unhappily marking time, alone save for some mini-me pet Wookie. Sure, none of this offends on the scale of entire alien cultures organizing themselves as Nazi Germany or Gangland Chicago, but shouldn't we expect more from a 21st Century feaure film than we did from a bargain rack 1960s space opera?

(And while we're on the subject of contrivances, no, I haven't forgotten the unlikely, if convenient, placement of a Star Fleet base in Dogpatch, Iowa, just minutes from the farm where the Widow Kirk is struggling to raise troubled, young James Tiberius.)

But none of that, obnoxious though it may be, fully defines the failure of this movie to capture the zeitgeist of the original Star Trek. Instead, defeat, as it so often does, results from indecisiveness. The writers clearly want to retain the essence of the characters even as they update them for a younger and more demanding audience. The problem, however, is that Original Trek was, for better or worse, a non-transferable relic of its era. Regardless of their 23rd Century conceits, the men and women of Star Trek remained, even after a half dozen or so increasingly embarrassing sequels, unmistakable products of the 1960s. The flavor of that era, all the ambivalence about sex and race and militarism, the competing worlds of Cape Canaveral and Haight-Ashbury, the fundamental debates about freedom and justice, informed and indelibly shaped the series and its characters.

Take, for example, James T. Kirk. As portrayed (too often broadly) by William Shatner, Old Kirk offered a simmering stew of contradictions, on the one hand romantic peacemaker, on the other horn-dog cowboy, part MLK and part LBJ. New Kirk, however, perhaps because of his fatherless background, but more likely because of his Gen Y orientation, is all horn-dog cowboy. Old Kirk would never have opened fire on a helpless spacecraft, no matter how much he loathed its occupants. Old Kirk had moments of crippling self doubt, even if he rarely expressed them on the bridge. New Kirk, by contrast, never budges from his one-note cockiness and a level of self-assurance that would have daunted even George W. Bush in his frat-boy-in-full "Mission Accomplished" phase.

The duality of Spock, of course, is written into his DNA, though the mixed race metaphor obviously meant something a bit more profound in the age of Selma and Birmingham than it does in the era of Barack Obama. The idea that a younger Spock would find it periodically difficult to harness his emotions seems in keeping with the character. That he would be knocking boots with Lt. Uhura does not. Even a 20-something Spock would have understood that it's illogical to cavort with a subordinate.

In the end, Paramount's latest milking of their venerable cash cow fails its own test of duality. The writers want it both ways. They intend to erase the entire history of the original five-year voyage of the U.S.S. Enterprise, which they do, thanks to time travel, a crazy Romulan, and the galaxy's most astonishingly equipped mining vessel. But they also wish to recapture the core relationships and tensions that characterized the old show. They seem, from beginning to end, unaware that they cannot do both. And, as any fan of the 1960s Star Trek could have told them, unresolved duality rarely leads to anything good.

Six Waterboardings a Day Keep bin Laden Away

2009-04-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

I know it's been a while, and I obviously don't have the time to keep up a decent blog anymore, but occasionally something needs to be said.

We have now learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times during just one month in 2003. Since that month was March, that works out to just under six administrations of torture each and every day, assuming the barbarians didn't tempt both irony and fate by taking Sundays off. You wonder if they had a schedule posted somewhere, maybe in the breakroom. "Hey, guys, gotta run, or I'll be late for the 6 o'clock waterboarding,"

Anyway, here's my point. A decade or two may have passed since I took freshman logic, but I don't think you can absorb this news without determining that one of the following three statements must be true. Either:

1) torture works, but only on the 183rd try (not only does this seem unlikely, but it would also negate any further talk of a so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario); or

2) torture doesn't work, and after 183 waterboardings, they finally gave up; or

3) torture works within the first three or four times it is administered, and the remaining 180 or so waterboardings were simply proof that Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the rest are unambiguously depraved brutes who gratuitously tortured a man nearly two hundred times because they derived some sort of twisted sense of empowerment from the practice.

If #1 is true, waterboarding should be abandoned as a hopelessly inefficient methodology, particularly if information is needed immediately. If #2 is true, waterboarding should be abandoned because it is futile as well as barbaric. If #3 is true, we are dealing with some world class war criminals who need to answer for their deeds in a court of law.

So which is it?

The End of Libertarianism

2008-09-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

OK, I get it. We have to bail out Wall Street or face the wrath of Herbert Hoover. Ultimately, a trillion dollars will change hands and sleazebags everywhere will sleep easier.

At the moment, Congress is debating the conditions under which they will entrust the failed Bush administration with the money to undo its third greatest failure (after Iraq and Katrina).

So here's my condition. If we do this--and you know we're going to--I want Congress to pass a law enjoining libertarians from ever again showing their faces in polite society. Shutter the Cato Institute. Ship the collected works of Ayn Rand over to the comedy section at Barnes and Noble. Treat Phil Gramm with the same contempt reserved for the Marxist college professor who still defends Joe Stalin and the USSR.

My libertarian friends, we have tried it your way and your way is a failure. Your invisible hand mocks us with its large middle finger. The Reagan Revolution has ended, utterly discredited and beyond redemption. Time to re-re-name National Airport. Time for Grover Norquist and all the other proponents of radical deregulation to book their rooms in history's dustbin.

The era of small government is over.

How Not to Act Like a Real University

2008-09-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

This morning I was looking for the latest polling data on www.electoral-vote.com. But I accidentally typed www.electoral-college.com. When I did so, I was directed to the website of the University of Phoenix. I know it's common practice for some people and groups to buy up various url's and use them to direct unwitting web surfers to a specific (usually for-profit) site. But it never occurred to me that an institution claiming to be in the higher education business would consider it appropriate to do so.

I could add a comment here, but some things just speak for themselves.

No Idea is Ever Original

2008-09-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

Just found this from the front page of Daily Kos:

"The Obama campaign responds to Tracy Flick's speech:"

And as always, it is impossible to mention Kos without thanking him and his followers for helping to create the monster that Joe Lieberman has become. Their efforts in support of the Dukakis-like Ned Lamont, along with their pitiful ignorance of Connecticut election law, have combined to make the embittered Lieberman the most effective pitchman the Republicans have.

Don't get me wrong: I consider Lieberman to be a sanctimonious jackass, but at least he was our sanctimonious jackass. Now he's Exhibit A in the McCain effort to affect bipartisanship and to separate himself from Bush. Good job, guys.

Now I Know Who She Is...

2008-09-03T20:20:00.000-07:00

I watched Sarah Palin tonight, and she reminded me of someone. But I couldn't place it. Then it suddenly struck me. She's Tracy Flick, the Reese Witherspoon character from "Election".

It's Keating Time

2008-08-22T04:36:00.000-07:00

With the faultless logic of a third grader, John McCain's campaign now argues that Barack Obama's comments about the number of houses McCain owns has opened up the floodgates to all manner of personal attacks. Evidently, the presumptive GOP nominee has been holding back, though one would think that charging an opponent with putting his own electoral ambitions ahead of the security of the nation, as McCain did, would represent a more serious charge than anything Obama has concocted to date. Regardless, the Republicans are now promising to go nuclear, linking Obama to some guy named Rezko, an allegedly corrupt Chicagoan who once had close ties to the Illinois senator.

Corruption? Did someone mention corruption? If that's the route John McCain wants to travel, then it's time for Obama to make McCain answer for Charles Keating and the Lincoln Savings scandal of the late 1980s. Sure it was a long time ago, but I bet there are still a few people around whose life savings were wiped out by Keating's chicanery and have not forgiven McCain for his role in the affair. This seems like as good a time as any to demonstrate that, sadly enough, the experience of torture in a Vietnamese prison does not guarantee the development of an unassailable character.

It's Keating Time! (And it's about time.)

Why Obama Needs Biden

2008-08-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

The last vice presidential nominee to make a positive difference in a U.S. election was probably Lyndon Johnson in 1960. But that was another time, another world. To be sure, the vice presidency itself has become more important over time. Walter Mondale and Al Gore were key players in the Carter and Clinton administrations, and entire books will someday be written about Dick Cheney's central role in defiling nearly everything admirable and decent about the United States of America during the early years of the 21st century. Nevertheless, little evidence exists suggesting that vice presidential nominations move the electorate in any meaningful way.

That said, Barack Obama's candidacy has consistently defied conventional wisdom , and Obama has the opportunity to do so yet again in his selection of a running mate. It is critical, however, that he move past traditional notions of balancing a ticket, either by geography, experience, or ideology. Those white voters in Appalachia and elsewhere who reject Obama because of some combination of fear and bigotry will not be assuaged by the addition of Evan Bayh or Tom Kaine to the Democratic ticket. Nor would the resurrection of that crotchety old gay-baiter, Sam Nunn, reassure those who consider the presidential nominee too green and timid to be trusted with defending the nation. In the end, Barack Obama will win or lose based on his own ability to persuade voters that he is up to the job.

Regardless, at the moment, Obama's biggest problem remains the aura of heroism and rugged authenticity that surrounds his opponent. If voters go into November still believing that John McCain is a man of proven and unassailable character, a bipartisan maverick who puts country ahead of party and personal ambition, Obama will lose the 2008 presidential election. It is as simple as that. Either the Democrats find some way to raise doubts about McCain's character or they will fail to capture the White House during the worst Republican year since 1974. Since Obama seems unwilling to do the gut fighting necessary to save his faltering candidacy, he needs to find someone who is up to the job.

Enter Joe Biden. Sure, Biden has impressive foreign policy chops, but that's not really the point. Rather, the veteran Delaware senator possesses the ability to make the necessary attacks, and to do so in a style that suggests that he's really just joshing. It was Joe Biden who delived the coup de grace against another supposedly untouchable hero, Rudy Giuliani, hitting the smarmy New Yorker where it hurt the most. Every one of Giuliani's sentences, Biden joked, contains a noun, a verb, and 9/11. Clearly, Rudy created many of his own problems, and his presidential ambitions would have petered out with or without anyone else's help, but Biden's jab nevertheless drew blood.

It is this ability and willingness to wield the shiv--and to do it with a wink and a smile--that would make Biden invaluable to a presidential nominee who needs to even the playing field on the character issue. Evan Bayh can't do this. Nor can Tom Kaine or Kathleen Sebelius. Hillary Clinton probably can, but her own persistent ambitions would likely make her unwilling to play bad cop for a former rival whose success would defer her dreams for eight long years.

Barack Obama needs Joe Biden.

Obama's Unwise Visit to the OC

2008-08-18T04:17:00.000-07:00

I can tell you at least one difference between John McCain and Barack Obama. Had a left-wing Unitarian minister in San Francisco invited McCain to attend a nationally televised interview from her Tenderloin mega-church, the senior senator from Arizona would have had the sense to say "no". Senator Obama, on the other hand, inexplicably accepted an offer from evangelical heavyweight Rick Warren to come to the heart of Republican Orange County, California, to be interviewed by a man whose affection for GOP politicians and their causes is rarely far from the surface. Worse yet, the agenda called for Obama to play warm-up for McCain, whose own conversation with the rotund reverend would immediately follow.

The result, of course, was preordained. Obama faced a barrage of questions on morality and social issues to which his answers were, to anyone who has watched him in this sort of format, predictably pedantic. McCain, obviously the crowd's darling, then proceded to knock nearly every softball query out of the park, his prefab responses punctuated by often-thunderous applause. Warren gave the soon-to-be Republican nominee endless opportunities to recount his Vietnam POW experience and well as numerous chances to reassure right-wing Christians that his election-year conversion to radical social conservatism is complete.

And this, my friends, is why Barack Obama will probably lose the 2008 presidential election. First, the eloquence and inspiration that characterize his speechmaking fail him entirely in more intimate settings. Hillary Clinton beat him in almost every one of their primary season debates, and McCain may well do so in the fall. Without a prepared text and an audience of hundreds, Obama becomes not just a law professor, but a practicing attorney, weighing each thought carefully, as though afraid of being called out in cross-examination. The hemming and hawing often strike the audience not as thoughtful, but evasive.

Second, Obama may lose because he seems truly to believe in his transformative power as a politician. It is that self-confidence--or self-delusion--that motivated him to travel to Southern California on Friday night regardless of any sensible cost-benefit analysis. For some reason, he still seems to believe that white evangelical voters are in play. Well, they aren't, and that's hardly likely to change in the wake of Obama's leaden attempts to parse such deal-breaking issues as abortion and gay marriage.

Finally, futile efforts to court "values voters" (and has a more offensive term ever been invented?) will only further delay the necessary decision to back away from his pledge to apply the Marquis of Queensbury rules to American national elections. The McCain campaign and its surrogates have wisely decided to make this election about Barack Obama. Unless Obama finally decides to turn the tables, the assaults will eventually wear down and defeat the Democratic nominee just as they did Michael Dukakis and John Kerry before him.

John McCain is competitive in the national polls despite the overwhelming unpopularity of his party and the popular rejection of most of his positions on key issues. He remains essentially tied with Obama even though he is a wooden on-stage performer with a tenuous grip on most major issues, foreign and domestic, and a disturbing penchant for embarrassing gaffes. He is Bob Dole without the depth and compassion (and yes, that's damning with nearly invisible praise).

The ONLY thing John McCain has going for him is his personal image. His experience in Vietnam has allowed him to claim the mantle of "character". His highly visible, but relatively rare, breaks with Republican orthodoxy have resulted in an unearned reputation as a maverick. His relentless self-promotion is celebrated by the media as straight talk.

If Barack Obama wants to be President of the United States, he simply must tear down John McCain's personal image. Attacking his policies is not enough. Moderate and independent voters who support McCain do so in spite of his positions on the issues. Rather, they thirst for an authentic hero who will put principle over party and tell the truth regardless of the consequences.

As anyone who has studied his record and his post-war history well knows, John McCain is not that man. He was not only at the center of one of the most costly corruption scandals of the 1980s (the Keating Five affair), he remains even to this day a tool of lobbyists and business interests. Despite a few high-profile splits with his party, he has been a remarkably consistent right-wing enabler of nearly all of the Bush administration's excesses. His vaunted straight talk is little more than media manipulation; the man has flip-flopped more often than a land-bound minnow.

Obama himself doesn't have to go negative, but he simply must allow his campaign and his surrogates to do so. At the very least, he should make Charles Keating the Willie Horton of 2008. He should allow the story of the real McCain to be told, the unappealing tale of a rage-fueled, reflexively sexist hypocrite whose belligerence extends from personal relationships to senatorial duties to America's relationship with its allies and adversaries. He must, in short, make McCain the risky choice.

Or he can be one of those honorable Democrats who always seem to lose in November.

Alanis Morrissette Watch

2008-08-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

Here's an occasional feature of this occasional blog: Alanis Morissette Watch. It is, of course, named after the Canadian singer/songwriter whose song "Isn't It Ironic?" presents a number of situations (e.g., rain on your wedding day), none of which is actually ironic. In Alanis's honor, we will feature examples of writing that misunderstands the concept of irony (hint: it is not the same thing as coincidence).

Today's spotlight is on CNN.com's "Political Ticker", which writes about John McCain's decision to cancel a scheduled appearance in Miami due to concerns over Tropical Storm Fay:

"Ironically, McCain had his plans changed by Hurricane Dolly last month. He was supposed to go by helicopter to an oil rig off the Louisiana coast for a high-profile drilling event at the same time Obama was in Europe. But the effects of Dolly in the Gulf caused that trip to be canceled."

So Senator McCain had to change his plans twice because of weather disturbances in the Southeastern United States. That is probably frustrating. It is certainly coincidental. It is not, however, ironic.

Panty Raid!

2008-08-10T07:33:00.000-07:00

So let me make sure I have this straight. John Edwards, neither serving in office nor currently running for anything, admits to having an affair with a campaign film producer. This is not only the biggest story on the weekend that Russia and Georgia go to war, it is also generally understood to have extinguished whatever future political plans Edwards may have had.

John McCain, sitting senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, not only admits to having an affair during his first marriage but actually left his wife and children and married the rich young heiress with whom he was dallying. This is understood to be old news which has no bearing whatsoever on McCain's presidential ambitions.

As I've noted below, I have no interest in what politicians do once they flip the deadbolt on their hotel room doors. Good people do bad things; bad people do good things. I have no idea where Edwards or McCain fits along that continuum. Indeed, the best presidents of the 20th Century have generally been proven philanderers (FDR, LBJ, JFK, Clinton) while the worst (Nixon, Ford, Carter, W.) have generally been considered faithful to their wives, if not (in some cases) to their solemn oath of office.* I'm not saying we should elect tomcats; I'm simply saying that we shouldn't care one way or the other.

But if we're going to make sheet-sniffing a regular feature of our political process, then the same rules ought to apply regardless of how much journalists like or dislike the politician in question.

*Yes, I left out Reagan. I have no idea what his personal history was back in his Hollywood days and I don't think he was an especially good president, a view that was shared by roughly half of all Americans at the time of his presidency.

Note to Sports Journalists

2008-08-06T04:36:00.001-07:00

The U.S. is composed of fifty states. Forty-nine of them couldn't care less what Brett Favre is doing this very moment, what he will be doing at this time tomorrow, or what he plans to do next month. If we want to follow the adventures of some narcissistic has-been, we'll flip over to C-Span and watch John McCain on the campaign trail.

Georgie Mac, Michael, and John

2008-08-03T06:46:00.000-07:00

Has anybody here seen my old friend Georgie Mac?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He was smeared by Nixon's liars
But he never would fight back
I just turned around and he's gone

Has anybody here seen my old friend Michael?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
They called him unpatriotic
But he never would fight back
I just turned around and he's gone

Has anybody here seen my old friend John?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
The Swiftboat veterans slimed him
But he never would fight back
I just turned around and he's gone

Didn't you like the things that they promised?
Didn't they try to find some good for you and me?
But it was not to be
You gotta knock down every bully

Has anybody here seen my old friend Barack?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' the road to defeat
With Georgie Mac, Michael, and John

A Question of Character

2008-07-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

If you've surfed the web at all over the past two weeks, you are probably aware of the hot new rumor about a well-known Democratic politician, his mistress, and their secret love child. The National Enquirer has been riding this horse for several months now, and bottom feeders like Matt Drudge and Mickey Kaus (of Slate.com) have now taken their turns wading into the sewage. Right-wing blogs are indignant about the fact that the traditional media have yet to find the story worthy of their attention. If this had been a Republican, they caterwaul, it would be a Page 1 story on every newspaper in the country and Katie Couric would be doing a victory dance around her teleprompter.

Except, of course, that a similar story (sans baby) actually did involve a GOP presidential nominee a generation or so earlier. There was no internet at the time, of course, but the Enquirer and its competitors took their turns rummaging through the underwear drawer, making accusations and naming names. Finally, in desperation, one high-level Democratic operative blurted out the rumor in a roomfull of reporters and was immediately relieved of her duties. The supposedly liberal media then let the whole thing die.

And that is as it should be. The personal and sexual lives of candidates are generally not newsworthy. Indeed, until 1987 everyone agreed on that. It was then that Gary Hart, Democratic frontrunner for president, stupidly told the working press not only that he was not philandering, but that he had no objection if they followed him around 24/7 to satisfy their curiosity. They did, and the result was that Gary Hart ceased being the Democratic frontrunner shortly thereafter.

From that moment on, we have been forced to weight the "character issue" when judging our presidential candidates. This has been enormously destructive in multiple ways. First, it deprives us of the services of men and women who, but for irrelevant personal weaknesses, might be outstanding presidents. Gary Hart was and is a bright and creative thinker. He almost certainly would have been a better candidate than Michael Dukakis and a better president than George H.W. Bush (with the added advantage that the defeat of the father would likely have ensured that the arrogant, reckless, and incompetent son would never have entered the White House again without a visitor's pass).

But it's not just Hart. Outstanding people, unwilling to endure the full body cavity search of today's presidential politics, simply pass up the opportunity to run. This, in turn, leaves us with only the hyper-ambitious, the sixth-grade class president types who are willing to crawl through broken glass to satisfy their craving for power and affirmation. Surely, out of 300 million people, we ought to be able to do better than John McCain and--sorry--Barack Obama.

The other problem with the character issue is that it causes voters to elevate truly immaterial portions of a candidate's biography and turn them into decisive criteria. Wesley Clark, for example, spoke an undeniable truth when he pointed out that John McCain's POW experience had no bearing on his qualifications for the presidency. There is, in fact, no time during the next four years in which the Commander-in-Chief will be required to languish in prison and be subjected to brutal torture.

Oh, but wait! Doesn't this show what kind of man John McCain is? Well, I suppose it shows what kind of man he was forty years ago, but it's still irrelevant to the task at hand. The job he is currently applying for requires no particular physical courage. Indeed, it is possible to be heroic in one context and hopelessly venal in another. Just as former Top Gun pilot Duke Cunningham.

The same John McCain who refused early release from the Hanoi Hilton also aided and abetted (and won favors from) Charles Keating, one of the nastiest swindlers of the Savings and Loan Era. Doesn't that also speak to the issue of character? Indeed, doesn't it speak quite a bit louder, since it happened more recently and involved the conduct of his public, elected office?

So getting back to the question of extra-marital sexual activity, the rules seem pretty clear. The only time it should be considered newsworthy is when it intersects--or potentially intersects--with a politician's day job or involves violation of the law. Larry Craig fits both categories, having been arrested for conduct that he regularly condemned on the Senate floor. Likewise, if you choose to ambush a sitting president at deposition with questions about his sex life and then impeach him when he lies, you better keep your zipper locked and in the upright position. There was, in that sense, nothing wrong with exposing the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde back in 1998.

Also, the JFK rule: if you're shtupping the girlfriend of an organized crime boss, that, too, should be made public.

But otherwise, public people ought to be allowed private lives. And we should stop pretending we have any insight as to the "character" of our public officials. First of all, we don't. Second of all, despite our desire to pigeon-hole and summarize, "character" is not some trait that is greater than the some of its parts. Character is the sum of its parts, nothing more, nothing less. We all have people that we know and love who are wonderful in hundreds of ways who nevertheless occasionally make terrible, hurtful choices in their private lives. If we can understand that about our friends, we should be able to understand it about our politicians as well.

The Latest Fox News Democrat

2008-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Susan Estrich, who once managed Michael Dukakis's campaign from a 17-point post-convention lead to a one-sided loss to George H.W. Bush, is now employed by the Fox News Network. Her job, of course, is to play Washington Generals to Brit Hume's and Sean Hannity's Globetrotters. With her grating voice and generally wimpy defense of all things Democratic, she makes Hannity's designated piñata, Alan Colmes, sound like Keith Olbermann.

Anyway, she has an opinion piece up at RealClearPolitics.com entitled, "Arrogance Won't Win the Election." You already know what it's about and you already know which candidate it's directed at. All Fox News house Democrats know how to use Republican talking points when writing supposedly pro-Democratic articles.

But, hey, Suzy, as long as you're dispensing advice to the Obama campaign about how to win elections, I have a great suggestion: Why don't you tell him to strap on an oversized helmet, jump in a tank, and ride around in circles while the media and public laugh incredulously?

I'm Back, Sort of...

2008-07-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

So here I am again, after a hiatus of a good month or so, during which I lost all ten of my regular readers. For a while, the day job simply demanded too much of my time; after that I just kind of hit the wall. But there was something else, too.

With the death of George Carlin a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of one of his less celebrated comments. I think it came from one of his books. He said (and I'm taking this from memory, so it may not be exactly right), "Whenever I hear someone propose a political solution to a problem, I know I am not dealing with a serious person."

Obviously, I don't entirely agree with Carlin. I teach political science, so it wouldn't make much sense for me to argue that politics is meaningless. Some problems demand political solutions; I suspect that even George understood this.

But I think Carlin was making a deeper point, one with which I do agree: people who expect politicians to rescue us from ourselves are almost certain to be disappointed. I say this not as some sort of libertarian rant, but as a simple statement of truth. It's not that we don't need government, because we do. Indeed, we need more government than we have now. The current economic and social meltdown in health care, environmental degradation, and rapacious capitalism cries out for greater regulation in any number of areas. If the past quarter century has taught us anything, it is the simple fact that unregulated or barely regulated markets will never lead us to peace and prosperity, much less justice and human decency.

Rather, my point is that politics will always be a blunt instrument and politicians will always be unreliable heroes. Take Barack Obama, for example. His recent desperate, amateurish lurch toward the center has been a keen disappointment to those lefty bloggers who honestly thought that he was something other than a hyper-ambitious politician willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy his burning need for power and personal validation. This, of course, is only a dress rehearsal for the disappointments to come should Obama win the presidency in four months. (In this sense, of course, John McCain is not one bit better. He now embraces nearly everything he once rejected, groveling before the same vicious theocrats and scorched-earth reactionaries who were once willing to destroy him and slander his family. It is difficult for those who don't burn with the single-minded ambition of a top-tier presidential candidate to understand that nothing--issues, principles, or even basic personal integrity--matters more than the quest.)

In my lifetime, I have seen politics and politicians do far more harm than good. And that's not just because the Oval Office has been filled mostly with Republicans for the past two generations. The Democrats may have done less harm, but they also accomplished very little of lasting merit. Seriously, what do we have to show for twelve years of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton? Camp David, I guess, and maybe a decent economic run during the 1990s.

This is not to say that politics doesn't matter. The past eight years have certainly shown us that politicians, willing to lie, ignore the law, and place lockstep party support over all other principles, can overwhelm and render moot James Madison's brilliant constitutional design. Today, yet another White House alumnus brazenly defied a congressional subpoena, knowing that nothing bad would happen to him as a result. Yesterday, a craven Congress once again gave a power-mad administration still more power to intrude on the lives of innocent Americans and overturn decades of civil liberties. Politics retains the ability to visit enormous harm on people at home and abroad. Perhaps the best we can hope for in any election is to limit the damage that our ballots can wreak.

Sure, there have been some rare shining moments of progress. But even these exceptions prove the general futility of hoping for political solutions. It took the assassination of a president to move Congress, decades too late, to extend basic rights to its African American citizens. It took a complete economic meltdown to give Franklin Roosevelt the tools to trasform American society. And even then, much of his success depended on the onset of a cataclysmic world war.

The most pressing concern of the moment is health care. Our system doesn't work, is ridiculously expensive, makes American industry less competitive, and--worst of all--causes, both directly and indirectly, the untimely deaths of thousands of Americans. Yet, even Hillary Clinton's timid, inadequate work toward a solution in 1993 was shot down by a powerful industry and its political enablers who easily convinced an ignorant nation that they already had the best health care system in the world, even as families were being ruined by the sort of catastrophic illnesses that would never force Canadians or Britons into the poorhouse.

Anyway, all of this makes it a little depressing to blog about the 2008 presidential election. If we choose Door Number 1, we get four more years of dangerous and destructive foreign entanglements, four more years of tax cuts for the wealthy and trickle-down misery for everyone else, and, with the likely forthcoming changes at the Supreme Court, twenty years of backsliding toward unchecked police power and unshackled corporate dominance. If we choose Door Number 2, we get an untested rookie politician, obsessed with re-election from Day 1, who, when not triangulating on a Clintonesque scale, will find himself hamstrung by the take-no-prisoners tactics of a fanatical minority and the cowardly careerism of a majority that has already internalized an unwillingness to stand up to bullies. Oh, and there is no Door Number 3.

I'll choose Door Number 2, of course, but without a lot of enthusiasm.

In the meantime, forgive me if my blogging is sporadic and if I talk less about the election than I have previously.

Say Goodnight, Dick

2008-05-26T20:21:00.001-07:00

The passing of Dick Martin seems as good a time as any to recall a moment from "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in" forty years ago. Dan Rowan, reading the News of the Future, refers to "President Reagan" serving in 1988. It was, of course, a punch line; the very idea that Ronald Reagan would ever be handed the world's most powerful job by any sane country was the stuff of comedy back in 1968.

Today we're living in Ronnie's world, so I guess the joke's on us.

In the Year 2013...If Man is Still Alive

2008-05-16T04:18:00.000-07:00

I'm still buried by work, but when John McCain dons his psychic's turban, I have no choice other than to put down the grade books and pay attention. It seems that Senator McCain, desperate for any attention these days, decided to look ahead to the year 2013, telling us what we can expect by the end of his first term if he is elected president this November. Most candidates, of course, take an eight-year perspective, so some talking heads wondered aloud if McCain was trying to tell us that he would not seek to break Ronald Reagan's old age record by running for re-election in 2012. But anyone who expects a man this consumed by ambition to be a one-term Johnny is apparently still besotted with the notion that there is something "different" about the presumptive GOP nominee other than the fact that he was born only a year after Babe Ruth retired.

Anyway, McCain has apparently provided the following vision of the world after only four cleansing years of straight talking:

* The Iraq War will be won
* Osama bin Laden will be captured or dead (perhaps of old age?)
* No significant terrorist attacks will occur on U.S. soil
* Health care will be "available to more Americans than at any other time in history" (I guess if he meant "universal", he wouldn't have needed to use nine words)
* "Both parties" will have decided to fix Social Security without a decline in benefits
* Congressional earmarks will be eliminated
* You'll be able to talk to your dog and understand what he's saying to you
* The Tooth Fairy will be forced to find another line of work because teeth will never fall out

How we will get to this Golden Age remains unrevealed at this point. Presumably McCain has some "ideas" and "proposals" that will soon be unveiled, or maybe he'll just summon his straight-talking superpowers and make the whole thing happen overnight while we're sleeping. Maybe he'll do it all with a big loan from Lincoln Savings.

But that's not what I want to talk about. Rather, I am more interested in the media's reaction to what was, to even the most untrained eye, a fairly obvious case of election-year excess. I mean, how exactly will the Great Man persuade Congress simply to cede its institutional perogatives and bend to the new president's will? Has John McCain ever read Federalist 51?

None of this stopped some of the fools on CNN from gushing over McCain's courage in making promises by which he will be judged should he win the 2008 election. One of them marveled at the senator's willingness to stick his neck out in a way that most politicians would not. It was left to Jack Cafferty, ever auditioning for Andy Rooney's curmudgeon job on "60 Minutes", to point out to his starstruck colleagues that "the devil's in the details", a cliche that roughly translates to "McCain didn't tell us anything about how he would actually govern, you blow-dried airheads!"

Just to be clear, Senator McCain has done what politicians have done since the invention of elections. He has made promises that he knows he can't keep in order to win higher office. Like all the others, he figures he can finesse everything else once he's elected. By the time 2012 comes along and most of his pledges remain unfulfilled, he can blame the Democratic Congress or the terrorists or the United Nations or the freemasons.

Seems to me that some callow young Texas governor eight years ago was promising a humble foreign policy and compassionate coservatism. And look how well that turned out...

The Day Job...

2008-05-13T21:20:00.001-07:00

is a little overwhelming at the moment, so blogging will be sparse for a couple more weeks.

Not much to say about the election right now, anyway, except this:

1. After losing the special congressional election in Mississippi tonight, Republicans must be terrified at the prospect of losing the House for a generation in November.

2. John McCain's "I am not Bush" tour still has to face the problem that on the two issues people really care about--the economy and Iraq--he's pretty indistinguishable from the incumbent.

3. Barack Obama will not win West Virginia in the general election.

It's Over

2008-05-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

The window was there for a brief moment. The problems that have plagued Barack Obama over the past month or so provided Hillary Clinton with the chance to do something she had yet to do--mount a comeback in a state that had already been conceded to her opponent. Had she done so, had she somehow squeezed out a victory in North Carolina or even made the race close, it would have been a crippling blow to the Obama campaign.

But it didn't happen. Instead, Barack Obama swept to an easy victory in the Tar Heel State, leaving Indiana, where Clinton needed a strong victory, as the evening's nail biter. Whatever momentum Hillary gathered with her 10-point Pennsylvania triumph is now gone. Only the cold reality of mathematics remains, and it is not her friend.

It is quite possible that the Super Delegate dam will now burst, and Obama will be the presumptive nominee even before the next state votes. But it doesn't matter. The race is over. For better or worse, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Whether or not he is the strongest candidate (and it says here that he isn't) no longer matters. The sound you hear this evening is Hillary Clinton's window closing.

At this point, there is no need for her to continue seeking the nomination. As my seven or so readers know, this blog has generally argued for Clinton's candidacy on the basis of electability. But the question is now moot. Senator Clinton should withdraw from the race and allow her colleague to begin his general election campaign.

There is no longer any benefit in hanging around.

A Must Win State for Clinton and Obama

2008-05-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

I'm on the road at the moment, so blogging will be sparse for the next day or two.

I just wanted to take note of an interesting fact. So far, we have had must-win states for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Tomorrow, we will see the first state vote that is a must win for both of them: North Carolina. If Hillary doesn't win the Tar Heel State, the delegate numbers will finally, irreversibly overcome her candidacy. By now it is clear that the Super Delegates will not overturn the will of the voters, however inadequately expressed through caucuses and the like. A loss in North Carolina will largely erase the gains Senator Clinton made a fortnight ago in Pennsylvania.

On the other hand, Barack Obama also needs to win the North Carolina primary, Unlike most states in recent days, this one has been regarded as a lay-up for Obama for several weeks. But Clinton has closed the gap of late and if she somehow won this southern state, with its large African American population, it would strike fear in the hearts of the Supers. Obama has been bleeding support over the past few weeks. Losses tomorrow in Indiana and North Carolina would turn that bleeding into a hemorrhage.

There is an emerging consensus that Barack Obama has been critically weakened by the recent negative press he has received, particular the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Should he suffer a loss in his southern breadbaskets, the whispers and murmurs will turn to shouts. For the first time since Super Tuesday, a Hillary Clinton nomination would be not only plausible, but even likely.

Grab the popcorn: tomorrow will see either the effective end of one candidacy, or the possible beginning of the end of the other.

Guam!

2008-05-04T03:48:00.001-07:00

Here's another one you can add to that list of things you didn't think you'd see in your lifetime. You know the list, right? You never thought you'd witness a president actually impeached by Congress, or an election so close that the Electoral College overturned the will of the voters, or a Vice President become the most powerful man in the world. This is not a list of good things, you understand. It's simply an accounting of occurrences that everyone assumed would only happen (or happen again) after the Cubs won the World Series, the fifty-first state was added to the union, and we all drove around in our personal hovercrafts.

Well, here's the latest one: never in your wildest dreams would you have envisioned a scenario in which anyone on our side of the International Date Line cared how the people of Guam voted in a presidential primary. If you're like most Americans, you probably had no idea that Guamians (Guamanians? Guamsters?) actually participated in the presidential selection process. Actually, if you're like most Americans you probably don't know anything about Guam other than the fact that it's a Pacific island.

But that's how close the current Democratic race for president is this morning. In a jurisdiction far closer to Manila than Miami, a couple thousand people caucused while the rest of us slept. Four—count 'em—four delegates were at stake. And CNN actually interrupted the Saturday re-run of the Lou Dobbs Hour of Hate to tell us that Barack Obama had been projected the winner in a place so far away that (according to a friend who was once stationed there), the locals watch Tuesday Morning Football. Is this unbelievably cool or what?

But it gets better. Evidently, Obama beat Clinton in Guam by exactly seven votes. In one sense, of course, it doesn't matter. The candidates will each pick up two of the four delegates. But wait! It turns out that Obama's seven-vote margin may gain him an additional Super Delegate, since Pilar Lujan, who was concurrently elected the island's Democratic Party Chair, has said that she will support whichever candidate receives the majority of the caucus vote. Can you say "recount"?

I know there's a lot at stake here, but it's still fun to take a step back every now and then and reflect on how amazing this primary season has been. If Indiana and North Carolina don't settle things on Tuesday, the final result may come down to yet another island that rarely receives political attention on the mainland. Puerto Rico votes on June 7.

Stay tuned.

Educating Jazmine

2008-05-03T05:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's on-line Wall Street Journal features an opinion piece by the newspaper's "deputy Taste editor", one Naomi Schaeffer Riley. I don't read the Journal on a regular basis, so I don't really know what a deputy Taste editor does other than assist the Taste editor. I presume from the capitalization that Ms. Riley works for that section of the WSJ that other papers refer to as "Style" or "Living". That is, her life is devoted to whatever it is that the spouses of mortgage bankers do on weekends before their mates are carted off to country club prisons for swindling the public. Or something like that.

Anyhow, Ms. Riley has decided that a devotion to Taste shouldn't prevent one from throwing one's in-laws under the Uptown Express. So she tells us the story of her niece Jazmine, a young lady who, in Ms. Riley's gentle opinion, "goes to one of the worst schools in Buffalo, N.Y." Now, I have no metric to judge such an assertion (for all I know, Buffalo schools are fabulous), but I'll proceed from the assumption that poor Jazmine attends one of those prisons with blackboards that Tom Berenger was forced to come in and clean up several times in those awful 1990s movies. "There are," Ms. Riley helpfully informs us, "security guards at the door", something that evidently shocks the conscience of the deputy Taste editor.

As an act of what sounds a great deal like noblesse oblige, Ms. Riley invites Jazmine to her side of the tracks to help the youngster complete a successful college application (this notwithstanding the fact that "Jazmine has learned very little in the last four years"). The deputy editor is forced to shoulder this burden because Jazmine's "parents and teachers seemed disinclined or unable to help." The niece's name may be a pseudonym, of course, but Ms. Riley's surely isn't, so by now Jazmine's mom and dad, their neighbors, and their friends probably know exactly which set of parents have been outed in the national press for dereliction of duty. One suspects that Thanksgiving at the Rileys' will be a little awkward this year, even assuming that people "with incomes of less than $40,000" actually know how to eat turkey that doesn't come in a plastic wrapper.

This would obviously not be the Wall Street Journal without a little editorializing about the supposed failure of public education, and Ms. Riley makes her de rigueur contribution:

"Public schools used to be the great equalizer in America -- the institutions that allowed the children of immigrants and the descendants of slaves to become fluent in the English language and prepare them for careers. In too many urban areas, they don't perform such basic educational functions. But they don't offer structured environments, either, for the few students who are trying to lift themselves up and get a better educational experience at college."

To her credit, however, the deputy editor offers not a single aside about the need for private school vouchers, that persistent right-wing hobby horse. Indeed, once she's done with the hackneyed public school bashing, Ms. Riley finishes with a fairly reasonable case against the unnecessary bureaucracy involved in the college admissions process. Jazmine evidently had to contend with some schools that were prepared to write her off simply because one small piece of her application package was incomplete and others that required additional letters and essays just to qualify for a vitally needed scholarship. If all of this is true, it is certainly something that American universities should correct. No teenager should be required to decode the Rosetta Stone just to further her education.

And what about the public schools? Well, Ms. Riley favors us with stories about teachers who couldn't be bothered to write meaningful letters of recommendation or even correct the grammar and punctuation on those they did manage, reluctantly, to generate. One teacher supposedly hand-wrote an illiterate paragraph ("Jazmine is enlightened by the journey of academia the twist, turns and heights elevated to farthest stretch imagined") and then told the girl to type it up herself.

The problem with all discussions of failing public schools is that writers tend to speak about the school entirely out of the context of its environment. Thus, Ms. Riley can oversimplify the issue by opining that "kids need a real high-school education, complete with literate, motivated teachers". Well, of course they do, so let's fire this sorry lot and airlift in Mr. Chips, Jaime Escalante, and that Robin Williams character from "Dead Poets Society". Or better yet, let's start a voucher system and auction these kids off to the lowest bidder.

Even Ms. Riley seems vaguely aware of the complications inherent in talking about failing schools. The security guard who so shockingly guards the school house door is not employed to protect the kids from grammatically clueless English teachers. He (or she) is there because the environment outside the schoolyard is one of hopelessness, violence, and desperation. As a society, we allow our inner cities to rot and then wonder why the only teachers willing to walk past the security guard every morning are those who are otherwise unemployable.

The other unintentional revelation involves Ms. Riley's swipe at Jazmine's parents, who "seem disinclined or unable to help". What superhuman motivation is required on the part of a teacher in the face of a classroom full of kids whose parents don't care? Presumably, since Ms. Riley refers to parents in the plural and speaks of her niece as "a smart, respectful young lady who has steered clear of trouble", Jazmine represents the best-case scenario at Buffalo's high school from Hell. And yet, even her mom and dad apparently won't gather themselves together sufficiently to contribute to their daughter's upward mobility. And this is primarily the teachers' fault?

Sure, there are some lazy, stupid, and burned out teachers operating in our nation's classrooms. But everyone who has been within ten miles of a public school anywhere in the country knows that they are a small minority of the total. Levels of competence vary, of course, but the overwhelming majority of school teachers works hard and cares about their students. Indeed, many of those who have given up have done so only after decades of walking past security guards and being stood up after scheduling meetings with parents who stopped trying years earlier.

If you can’t throw money at a problem, as conservatives invariably insist, then why is it that everyone wants to become rich? There are no doubt pathologies in our inner cities (and elsewhere!) that will not lend themselves to monetary solutions. But money can attract more talented men and women into public education. It can reduce the size of classrooms and allow for more individualized instruction. It can pay for the technology and other supplies that will allow poor kids to enjoy the same classroom benefits as youngsters whose parents read the Wall Street Journal's Taste section. And it can support early morning and late afternoon programs for latchkey children who must otherwise negotiate dangerous neighborhoods on their own.

In short, an infusion of financial support might just give hope to Jazmine's classmates who are neither so lucky as to have a successful aunt willing to help, nor so unlucky as to have one eager to spill the entire story on the pages of a national newspaper.

The Lowest of the Low

2008-05-02T05:33:00.000-07:00

It is now official. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in American history, or at least the portion of history that post-dates the creation of computer punch cards. The Gallup Organization has been conducting public opinion surveys since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they periodically ask their sample to weigh in on the performance of the current occupant of the White House. When asked recently to rate President Bush's seven years on Pennsylvania Avenue, fully 71% of respondents reported dissatisfaction with the incumbent. The director of the poll, commissioned for CNN, provides the following perspective:

"No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup Poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president's disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark."

The previous nadir of presidential support stood at 67 percent disapproval and that record lasted for over a half century. George W. Bush has wandered into territory of failure previously unexplored by even the hapless Jimmy Carter or the reflexively corrupt Richard Nixon. Unlike Carter, Bush is the author of most of his own troubles. Unlike Nixon, he can claim no compensatory progress either in foreign or domestic affairs.

We've discussed this before, but Bush clearly continues to take heart in the fate of the man whose record for unpopularity he has now surpassed. Harry Truman, who has finally found the Roger Maris of futility to erase his own Ruthian standard, was not just the most unpopular president prior to last week, he was also the least popular. That he remains: a deluded 28% of the American public is still willing to rate W's performance in office as acceptable. On this measure at least, Bush has not yet dropped either to Truman's low mark of 22% or Nixon's of 24%. But it's only spring.

Truman, of course, is now generally regarded as having been an above average president. He was honest and forthright, which now, sadly, stands as something to praise in our leaders rather than something to expect. He oversaw the U.S. victory in World War II, the highly successful Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, and the reconstruction and democratization of Japan. By executive order, he required the integration of the American military. History has been kind to Truman because subsequent results have borne out the wisdom of many of his decisions: Europe, Japan, and South Korea, for example, are now free and thriving nations.

For his part, Bush looks to Truman and sees the possibility of his own rehabilitation, perhaps even while he is still alive to see it. It's a far-fetched scenario. Certainly, his legacy would be helped by the advent of a prosperous, de-fanged, democratic Middle East, but there is, at the moment, no reason to anticipate such an outcome. But then again, few back in 1945 would have predicted that the 21st Century would open with multiple Asian democracies contributing both to world prosperity and world peace. So anything is possible, though it speaks volumes about Bush's historical prospects that all he has left in his pocket is this single Iraqi lottery ticket.

More likely, George W. Bush will be viewed by history as a composite of the worst characteristics of every unsuccessful president who preceded him. He possessed Truman's bullheadedness without his vision; Johnson's deluded arrogance without his social conscience; Nixon's contempt for constitutional principles without his strategic brilliance; Carter's fumbling incompetence without his transcendent morality and goodness; and his father's patrician obliviousness without his intellectual depth and diplomatic skills. Bush even borrows the worst characteristics from two far more successful chief executives: he possesses Ronald Reagan's lazy over reliance on poorly supervised and power-hungry aides and Bill Clinton's overeager willingness to sacrifice civil liberties in the service of his political ambition.

For the first time since the sorry days of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, we have a president who is unable, at least plausibly, to lay claim to even a single domestic or international success. Bush's economic policies have resulted in (or, to be more generous, perhaps failed to stave off) rampant joblessness; the simultaneous collapse of the dollar and the U.S. housing market; spiraling oil prices; historically high budget and trade deficits; pervasive corporate corruption; and rising poverty and homelessness. As we speak, the country teeters on the edge of an economic meltdown that would make Jimmy Carter's 1970s look like a golden age.

The international side is obviously even bleaker. Two wars fought with such breathtaking ineptitude that America's very world leadership is imperiled. Under George W. Bush, international distaste for the United States has grown, terrorist recruitment has been made easier, and other global powers are gaining on and passing us while we spend ourselves in futile combat. The most powerful military in the history of the world has been extended to the breaking point, with four thousand young American lives lost so far. And the Iraqi people have experienced unceasing death and misery, rather than the democracy and prosperity that they were promised.

Say what you will about Jimmy Carter, but very few Americans or innocent foreign nationals lost their lives on his watch. Furthermore, despite his failings, Carter negotiated the most significant Middle Eastern peace treaty since World War II. The 1978 accord between Egypt and Israel represents an accomplishment that we take for granted these days, but will, I suspect, be recognized and applauded by future historians long after the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980 is long forgotten.

By contrast, the best anyone can say about Bush these days is that he overthrew Saddam Hussein (sure, but at what cost?) and that he threw a few paltry million dollars at the catastrophic AIDS crisis facing Africa. He promised more, of course, and could have—and should have—answered this fundamental test of world citizenship more vigorously. But even his strongest efforts have been inadequate.

I haven't even mentioned torture, but that, too, looms over the Bush legacy as a stain from which he will never escape.

The fact that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in history should not even merit a headline from the national news organizations. The real surprise is that it took this long for the reality to sink in. Indeed, the headline should be the fact that, in the face of overwhelming evidence of incompetence, malfeasance, and corruption, more than one in every four people you meet on the street still insists that Bush is performing his job capably.

Mr. Bush's Five Year Mission, Unaccomplished

2008-05-01T06:08:00.001-07:00

Today marks the five-year anniversary of George W. Bush's second most disgusting trip to San Diego, California. First place will forever belong to the morning of August 30, 2005, when a smiling Bush pretended to play a guitar emblazoned with the presidential seal while country singer Mark Wills and the traveling press corps looked on. At the same time the president was mugging for the cameras, coastal Mississippi was staggering from a blow that had leveled entire towns and the breached levees of New Orleans were distributing their deadly flood waters into some of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States.

Second place goes to one of the most widely publicized events of Bush's entire regrettable administration. On May 1, 2003, the cocky commander-in-chief, donning a ridiculous (for him) flyboy outfit, hitchhiked aboard a Navy fighter jet and landed on an aircraft carrier off the San Diego coast. He could have taken a five minute helicopter ride or even arrived via a Coast Guard speedboat. But this was Bush at his cockiest, the frat boy fulfilled and ready to lord it over every girl who had ever dumped him for a richer, smarter, or nicer kid. Sailors were used a props for this made-for-television spectacular and some genius in the White House P.R. office decided that the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, named for a far nobler president, should be defaced by a banner reading "Mission Accomplished".

Five years doesn't seem like a long time once you get past a certain age. But sometimes it's important to remind ourselves of just how long it actually is. If you are fifty years old, ten percent of your life has passed since Bush's act of maritime hubris. Entire classes of high school and college students have passed from their first day as freshmen through their graduation ceremonies. Anyone who bought a car on May 1, 2003 (and I hope, for your sake, it wasn't a low mileage SUV) just finished paying it off. Many of the men and women who will vote for president this November were in junior high school the day Bush dishonored the uniform he refused to wear when he was their age.

The problem with the passage of time is that what was once aberrant eventually comes to seem normal. Five years ago, nobody would have believed that the country would still be at war less than nine months before George W. Bush's presidency passes into the pages of what will certainly be scathing history books. Yet now the twin conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are such an accepted part of life that they even have their own regular slot on CNN, a program called "The Week at War".

Half a decade earlier, even after the horrors of 9/11, most Americans would have been repelled by the very idea of torturing prisoners of war. Torture was something that other, less civilized countries did, and our renunciation of it was a source of national pride. When we first learned about the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, the news was met with disgust and shame. But here we are now with the President of the United States admitting to the world that he personally approved the imposition of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on suspected bad guys and the story can't even break through the sideshow media obsessions with incestuous Austrian fathers and pitiful wives of West Texas polygamists.

Five years ago, the death of even a single American during wartime was cause for a headline. Each time the precious life of soldier or Marine was lost in combat the nation collectively mourned. Today, between one and two brave Americans die every day in the unforgiving deserts or the demolished cities and nobody screams out loud when the president calls it progress. In the month that just ended, 51 names were added to the list of those whose limitless futures were snuffed out in a hopeless war that arrogant, prideful politicians refuse to end. Almost nobody noticed.

In 2003, we were promised that our economy was slowly recovering from the devastation caused by the 9/11 attacks and that the cost of the mission that had supposedly been accomplished would remain in the millions. Today, the president's failure costs us over $300 million per day and the overall tally has exceeded half a trillion dollars. Even if all that money had been allotted to pork barrel spending, those "earmarks" that John McCain keeps yapping about, the country would have been far better off. Instead, our economy crumbles and the best solution the president can summon from his sycophantic advisers is a one-time rebate of a few hundred dollars in taxes.

And of course, sixty months ago, our military and civilian defense infrastructure was the envy of the world. Now recruitment is down to the point where we are enlisting felons, soldiers' families are dissolving under the strain of repeated deployments, and the stop-loss program reminds anyone who might consider a career in the reserves or National Guard that the only way they can be assured of getting out is never to get in. We are one international crisis from catastrophe and every honest general and politician knows it.

As for the Guard, much of our first line of homeland defense has been sent overseas to keep Bush's Mesopotamian house of cards from collapsing entirely. Thus, when the water rose on the streets of New Orleans in 2005, Louisiana's hapless governor knew she could not rely on the full contingent of troops that she needed. Perhaps the logistics of the disaster would have made their presence futile, but we'll never get another chance to find out. Or at least we fervently hope we won't.

If it were up to me, the FCC would require every television station every year on May 1 to replay Bush's "Mission Accomplished" ceremony in its entirety. Very rarely has a better cautionary tale been committed to video tape. It is almost as though we raided the catacombs and found the actual film of Nero plucking his violin amidst the flames of a dying Roman Empire. We may be far from finished as a nation, but we must never forget how little time it takes for incompetent, vainglorious politicians to push us toward the brink of disaster.

Happy Mission Accomplished Day, Mr. President.

News Judgment

2008-04-30T06:11:00.001-07:00

Over at the website of CNN.com, it's not difficult to determine the single most important news story of the day. The lead headline reads, "Incest Family Holds 'Astonishing' Reunion." Above, a blood red banner alerts us that "[p]olice are investigating possible links between man suspected of imprisoning his daughter and unsolved murder of a young woman." These are, as you probably know by now, references to the same story.

It's a horrible story, obviously, something about a guy holding his daughter captive while fathering several children by her. For this, his relatives have, in the insensitive shorthand of the mass media, earned the title of the "Incest Family". But really, there are some truly twisted people in the world who do unspeakably awful things to one another. This is news when it happens on your block, or perhaps even in your home town.

In this case, however, the "Incest Family" hails from Austria. What happens in Central Europe rarely qualifies as news in the United States unless casualties number in the dozens or some celebrity gets buried in an Alpine avalanche. To my knowledge, CNN has never before featured local crime news from Vancouver, let alone Vienna (or, in this case, some place called Amstetten).

The interest in this sordid tale, then, must be seen as almost entirely prurient. In the battle for ratings, the Cable News Network has decided to travel the globe to update us on a local matter involving kidnapping and incestuous rape. In Austria.

It is tempting to make an immediate appeal to nostalgia, to the days before 24 hour cable broadcasting, when the Big Three networks had only thirty minutes to bring us the news and simply did not have the time to regale us with tales of Austrian incest or guys named Peterson who kill (or may have killed) their wives. But as early as the late 1980s, ABC began regularly squandering part of their precious half hour with some fluff about naming the "Person of the Week". And CNN, around that same time, remained fairly true to its middle name, bringing the public a relatively steady diet of hard news.

It's easy to blame the Fox News Channel for the degradation of cable journalism. By mixing confrontational right wing politics with interchangeable hot blonde newsreaders and spiffy graphics, Fox quickly made CNN look as anachronistic as a black and white Movietone Newsreel. But the sad truth today is that Fox seems far more likely than CNN to concentrate on hard news and leave the blood and gore stories to their elders. The reactionary bias on Fox is unmistakable, of course, but on an average day, you're more likely to see political coverage on FNC than wall to wall coverage of the latest missing white woman.

But if the fault does not rest with Fox, neither does it entirely lie with CNN. People vote with their channel changers. Networks follow their ratings closely and they do so on more or less a daily basis. The reason that the murder of Lacy Peterson was turned into a national soap opera was presumably because the folks in Atlanta noticed that the story produced higher viewership than some dreary discussion of health care or the economy. Same thing with Natalee Holloway. If the old CNN Headline News had generated decent numbers, Nancy Grace would still be toiling on the lower rungs of cable TV hell and Glenn Beck would be nothing more than another forgettable right-wing jerk with a radio show.

The tragedy here is that there are real stories to cover. Few Americans truly understand the forces that have driven housing prices down and gasoline prices sky high. Surely, someone could find a way to make these fairly complicated stories interesting. They are, after all, matters that concern Americans a great deal more than the fate of the Austrian "Incest Family".

One of the "traditional" networks, ABC, recently scooped the full-time news outlets by reporting on direct White House involvement in the decision to torture terrorism suspects. President Bush actually confessed on camera (though he likely didn't view it as a confession) that he was fully engaged in the decision to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" on captive prisoners of war. This represents an extraordinary moment in American history, made no less so by the fact that some attractive young schoolteacher may have been caught seducing one of her students.

Or how about the Supreme Court decision that just came down reaffirming a law in Indiana requiring photo identification in order to exercise democracy's most fundamental right, the right to vote. The justices were unmoved by the knowledge that this law would almost certainly disadvantage poor and minority voters. Nor did they show any concern over the fact that this is a solution without a problem; evidence of rampant voter fraud is rare to nonexistent. Everyone recognizes that laws such as Indiana's are bald faced attempts by Republicans to discourage traditionally Democratic constituencies from casting their ballots. While it's true that the cable networks gave this issue a little attention yesterday, they characteristically did so in the usual, useless point-counterpoint fashion where opposing spokespersons exchange talking points and the public emerges no wiser for watching. A real news organization would investigate the issue of fraud itself as well as the political history of attempts to limit turnout.

But who has the time for that? Apparently, the American people would prefer to watch the 5,000th story about that polygamist cult in West Texas while their economy tanks, gas prices rise to $4 a gallon, more people lose their jobs, and another family is evicted from their home. And "the most trusted name in news" is more than happy to deliver.

Maybe Barack Obama is wrong. Maybe the rot in politics today doesn't begin on the banks of the Potomac. Maybe it originates in the average American living room, where the new flat screen TV hangs on the wall bringing the latest news from Austria's "Incest Family".

At least ancient Rome managed to provide bread along with its circuses.

Art and Exhibitionism

2008-04-29T05:55:00.000-07:00

I'm an academic and a blogger, but I typically don't think of myself as an academic blogger. Now and then I'll have a word or two to say about the right wing's attack on academic freedom because I think that's an issue people should care about even if college is neither in their past nor in their future. The United States boasts the greatest system of higher education in the world, and the desire of ultraconservative culture warriors to dismantle it should be a serious concern to everyone.

Most on-campus controversies, however, are either arcane or meaningless to those who are not closely connected with the academy. But once in a while, some issue makes its way from the ivory tower to the popular press and hits the radar screen of Middle America. Such an event is taking place right now at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the school that improbably produced both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

A senior art major named Aliza Shvarts decided that her going away present to her fellow Elis would be to ensnare her alma mater in one of the ickiest dilemmas imaginable. For her graduation project, Shvarts decided on a performance piece commenting on "the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body" (that's ok, I have no idea what it means, either). The particulars? Let's go with the description offered by InsideHigherEd.com:

"A Yale University undergraduate said she repeatedly inseminated herself and induced multiple miscarriages to produce a senior art project."

Suffice it to say that the project itself included display of the results of her efforts.

Now let me begin here by saying that not only do I not know what art is, I don't even know for sure what I like. I went with drama—rather than music or art—to satisfy my fine arts general ed requirement in college. That means that the last time I actually studied the subject, I was very young and we were making plaster casts of our right hands for Mother's Day.

Shvarts efforts, which will apparently never find their way into a Yale studio, have simultaneously generated three separate threads of controversy. The first, of course, involves the morality of abortion and the definition of life. The second concerns the nature of art and the dividing line between creativity and exhibitionism. The third involves the responsibility of a university and its personnel to monitor the choices its students make, particularly if those choices might put a student at some level of danger.

I actually find the third controversy to be the most interesting, so we'll start there. First of all, Yale insists that the school was told by Shvarts that her performance piece was a hoax. She replied in an article in the Yale Daily News that her efforts were authentic, and that she did, indeed, artificially inseminate herself with samples from volunteer donors and then deliberately attempt to induce miscarriage.

The distinction here is critical. Every reputable university has a board of faculty members and/or administrators that weighs in on research projects that involve human beings. The complication, of course, is that this was, strictly speaking, not a research project and Shvarts was jeopardizing nobody's health other than her own. Nevertheless, academic advisers presumably have an obligation to keep students from harming themselves, and there is the non-trivial issue of the sperm donors and whether or not they were fully informed as to what would occur in this course of this project. If the Yale Art Department and its adviser(s) understood Shvarts' work to be a provocative hoax, then they have presumably committed no wrongdoing; if not, their judgment is certainly open to question. (Oddly, while insisting on the hoax story, Yale has nevertheless disciplined Shvarts' adviser. That seems inconsistent with logic, though consistent with the CYA attitude of many college administrators.)

As to the question of what is art, I will leave that to the experts. Several years ago, a young man placed a crucifix in a jar of urine and displayed the piece at one of America's finest museums. He was defended against the predictable public outcry on the grounds of free artistic expression, even though the entire concept struck me as something a couple of drunken high school sophomores might come up with before dissolving into an evening of Beavis and Butt-head giggling. If "Piss Christ", as it was called, is art, then I don't see how Shvarts' more complex and creative piece is not (my point here is not to defend Shvarts, but simply to compare her work to other controversial exhibits that have been supported by the artistic community).

It is, interestingly enough, the abortion controversy that provides perhaps the greatest justification for Aliza Shvarts' efforts. If one purpose of art is to get people to think (and that is what many critics argue), then she has succeeded brilliantly. I don't mean that she got the world thinking about "the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body", whatever the hell that means. But she did provide an interesting challenge to both sides in the debate over abortion.

Pro-choice groups have been quick to condemn Shvarts for trivializing abortion and miscarriage. They are, of course, worried that public revulsion at her project will play into the hands of those who wish to criminalize the voluntary termination of pregnancy. But they also find themselves in a sensitive situation here, since Shvarts' supposed terminations all occurred during the first trimester of the gestation period, a time in which abortion rights advocates claim that the product of conception is emphatically not a child. Perhaps they can take issue with the safety concerns of inducing repeated miscarriages, but their efforts to distance themselves from Shvarts betray an ambivalence about abortion that does their cause no favors.

But the pro-life groups also face problems. Those who oppose abortion rights like to conflate abortion at all stages of development. Their protest signs regularly display fetuses, usually from the second trimester or later, that appear human in their basic anatomy. But if Shvarts actually did induce spontaneous miscarriage (and inducing miscarriage is clearly equivalent to abortion), she did so at such an early stage of pregnancy that few outside the pro-life camp would seriously believe that she had actually killed a baby.

The first trimester, of course, is the Achilles heel of the anti-abortion movement: it is both the time period in which most Americans are comfortable with the abortion procedure and the one in which most elective abortions take place. Nobody who forced themselves to view Shvarts' project (if it were allowed to be displayed) would observe anything resembling a baby in the gory byproduct of her efforts. The success of the pro-life movement, however, depends on us "seeing" the baby every time an abortion is performed. Even more problematic for the pro-lifers is the fact that Shvarts claims never to have visited an abortion clinic, but rather to have used natural herbal methods for inducing miscarriage.

Again, I have no idea if Aliza Shvarts is an artist. Nor do I have any interest in sickening myself by viewing her project, should that ever become possible. But she has, for better or worse, raised several uncomfortable issues that go beyond the ickiness factor. In the end, I would not, as an adviser, allow a student to do potential harm to herself in the name of art or research, but it is hard to deny that Shvarts has provoked a national conversation on several levels.

America's Sweetheart

2008-04-28T06:03:00.001-07:00

So I'm channel surfing last night and I can't find anything worth watching. The network fare was typically worthless. The cable news channels were still obsessing over Barack Obama's pastor, wondering why he chose this week to make a round of highly publicized speaking engagements and broadcast interviews (maybe because he doesn't much care for his current national image as an anti-American, conspiracy peddling lunatic?). Depending on the channel, ESPN was offering up NFL draft coverage, more NFL draft coverage, or classic women's bowling.

So I found myself flipping over the C-Span, something I almost never do. Don't get me wrong: I think C-Span is a wonderful resource and provides the best unfiltered coverage of politicians and other political types doing what they do best: speaking, debating, and conferencing. But most of their programming is, for lack of a better term, excruciatingly boring. And the call-in shows represent the worst of both worlds of that particular genre—nutty, uninformed callers being given respectful treatment by hosts who are apparently instructed to let them ramble on, no matter how idiotic they appear.

But anyway, there I was parked on C-Span watching Michelle Obama addressing some audience in Nowhere, Indiana. I like Michelle Obama, probably more than I like her husband. She seems as smart as he is, but a great deal more authentic. With Barack, there's always the sense that the audience is being lectured to, even talked down to a bit, by a very bright college professor who knows that most of the class probably won't earn passing grades for the semester. Michelle, on the other hand, seems less practiced, her eloquence less ringing but more personal. She also conveys a toughness that her spouse seems reluctant to harness even in the heat of battle; you just know that she would have come to that Pennsylvania debate the other day and put Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos in their place and probably dusted off Hillary a time or two, as well.

But as I watched Michelle Obama entertain this crowd of mostly white Hoosiers, something else struck me, too. In many ways, she is the equivalent of the 1992 Hillary Clinton. Like Hillary, she is a successful professional in her own right, someone whose self-image and personal standing are not dependent on her husband's accomplishments. She feels no need to project that first lady stare, the one that conveys both adulation and hero worship, but also self-abnegation. She is, in short, no wifey.

If we are in a celebratory mood, I suppose we can remark on how much things have improved in just 16 years. Hillary's independence was considered problematic by many observers back in '92 and people openly questioned whether this outspoken career woman really met America's expectations of a First Lady. Her flippant comment that she didn't plan to stay home and bake cookies was treated as blasphemy by many pundits, the violation of a 200-year old tradition that had been honored by every women in the White House, with the possible exception of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Up until the emergence of Hillary Clinton, the role of First Lady had been updated only cosmetically, the way General Mills had gradually modernized the image of Betty Crocker on their food packages. Maybe Betty had graduated from stay-at-home June Cleaver to contemporary soccer mom, but she was still the lady who baked the brownies. Likewise, Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter helped modernize their office after 22 years of Mamie, Jackie, Lady Bird, and Pat. But they still conformed to America's outdated expectations of the job.

But here we are in 2008 with another strong, successful woman fiercely defending her husband while refusing to merge her identity with his. This time, however, it doesn't seem to matter. Indeed, the only time Michelle Obama has been controversial was when she chose her words poorly and said that public reaction to Barack's candidacy had made her proud to be an American for the first time. But even then, the attack was not based on the notion that the woman didn't know her place. And in fact, the incident really didn't gain much traction. We all knew what Michelle really meant.

This is progress, I guess. We seem unlikely to get a woman president this year, but at least we are no longer arguing about the proper behavior of the president's wife. What was the stuff of heated debate 16 years ago barely registers today. Of course, Michelle Obama is a successful woman with her own career and her own mind. It's the 21st Century, after all.

Fifty Bullets and One Body

2008-04-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure I don’t have the psychological makeup to be a police officer. I'm not attracted to risk and excitement, I have a relatively low tolerance for mortal danger, and I would be highly disinclined to kill another person in an ambiguous situation. It's obviously a good thing that other people are willing to take on this responsibility; I'm just glad it's not me.

I try to bear all of that in mind when evaluating cases like the one that is currently dividing New York City. You probably know the story by now: three unarmed men, all African American, left a bachelor party at a Queens strip club around 4:00 in the morning. Some sort of argument followed with other patrons who turned out to be undercover detectives. Stories differ as to what happened next, but two facts remain undisputed. Three officers fired fifty rounds from their service weapons and a 23-year old man named Sean Bell died on the morning of the day he was to be married.

On Friday, the three officers were cleared of all counts resulting from Bell's death. The judge in the case (the defendants waived jury trial) determined that reasonable doubt existed as to whether the policemen might have been justified in believing that their lives were in danger. Witness testimony was contradictory. The cops say that they were worried that Bell was using his vehicle as a weapon. Someone suggested that a shattered window in the victim's car—the result of the officers' fusillade—was mistaken for return fire. A defense expert persuaded the judge that fifty rounds could be fired so quickly that intent and premeditation were impossible to assess.

On the one hand, the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" that protects us all must also protect officers of the law. This is a criminal case, after all, and the rules don't change just because the alleged perpetrators wear badges. On the other hand, if you or I had killed someone under these circumstances, the only remaining question is whether our resulting prison sentence would be twenty years for second degree murder or five for voluntary manslaughter. No judge or jury on the planet would entertain the notion that our actions were justified.

But you and I are not police officers. We are expected to walk—or even run—away from deadly confrontations and to let the bad guys get away rather than risk our own lives. We are not obligated to consider the danger our adversaries pose to others, nor are we charged with enforcing any law.

Still, the Bell case presents a number of disturbing issues that somehow always seem to dominate matters such as these. First, the waiver of jury trial is problematic because many judges are drawn from the ranks of criminal prosecutors, whose predispositions may well favor law enforcement. Although that was apparently not true in the present case, it is still possible that even those judges without prosecutorial backgrounds will identify with the professionals rather than the public (more on that in a moment). Juries are valuable precisely because their members are not otherwise participants in the criminal justice system and are drawn from all sectors of society.

Second, anyone who has watched even a couple of episodes of "Law and Order" should be familiar with the extent to which police and prosecutors not only work hand in hand, but also come to depend upon one another. When district attorneys bring charges against law enforcement officers, a potential conflict of interest automatically exists. Any deficiencies in the subsequent prosecution raise questions—fairly or not—as to whether the D.A.'s office is really fighting to win, or merely going through the motions. These sorts of cases cry out for an independent prosecutor.

According to the trial judge, one of the key factors in acquitting the three police officers was the inconsistency between witness' statements at the time and their later testimony. Here's the judge's statement:

"The court has found that the [prosecution's] ability to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt was affected by a combination of the following factors: the prosecution witnesses' prior inconsistent statements, inconsistencies in testimony among prosecution witnesses, the renunciation of prior statements, criminal convictions, the interest of some witnesses in the outcome of the case, the demeanor on the witness stand of other witnesses and the motive witnesses may have had to lie and the effect it had on the truthfulness of a witness's testimony. These factors played a significant part in the people's ability to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt and had the effect of eviscerating the credibility of those prosecution witnesses. And, at times, the testimony just didn't make sense."

Let's parse these words for a moment. To being with, details are commonly misremembered, particularly in the heat of a violent and traumatic altercation. Further, the "interest of some witnesses in the outcome of the case" and the "motive witnesses may have had to lie" would logically apply much more strongly to the police officers—who faced prison sentences—than to those who sided with Bell. As to the demeanor of witnesses, what does that mean? Does anyone expect a polished performance from young men and women who have never before taken the witness stand, especially compared to cops who do so routinely? Reduced to its essentials, the judge's statement basically boils down to this: "I didn't believe any of these thugs."

I'm not arguing that this case was necessarily wrongly decided. Nor am I suggesting that police officers should be presumptively disbelieved; quite the opposite: they are entitled to the presumption of innocence as much as anyone else. But the fifty spent bullets and one dead body provide testimony unimpeached by issues of consistency, criminal conviction, or demeanor. Something wrong happened here and justice was obviously not served.

At the very least, even if criminal culpability cannot be proven, these officers should clearly be excused from further participation in law enforcement at any level. Having never worn a badge, I am willing (albeit reluctantly) to concede that split second judgment calls can go terribly wrong and innocent people can die without criminal responsibility on anyone's part. But I would feel better about reaching that conclusion if there was no conflict of interest in the prosecution and a jury was impaneled to weight all of the evidence without bias.

I would also be a bit more comfortable if these mistakes on the part of law enforcement--and the number of bullets fired--didn't always seem to correlate so highly with the race and social class of the victim.

John McCain's Southern Strategy

2008-04-26T06:12:00.001-07:00

Thirty-eight years before John McCain's Monday photo op in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, another Republican presidential hopeful made his own symbolic nod to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Ronald Reagan kicked off his third bid for the presidency in 1980 by offering a speech on states' rights before a nearly all-white crowd in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Reagan himself was no student of history, but his advisors obviously knew that Neshoba County, of which Philadelphia is the county seat, was the scene of a ghastly murder of three young civil rights workers in 1964. It was a cynical bid on the part of the Gipper, an attempt to appeal to the votes of white bigots who may have supported Reagan's rival, Georgia-born President Jimmy Carter, four years earlier out of regional pride.

So we can at least say this: it may have taken them nearly forty years, but the GOP is finally on the right side of the most significant moral divide of the 20th Century. McCain, to his credit, did not employ the language of white resistance as he stood before the scene of a bloody police riot in 1965. Indeed, the presumptive Republican nominee had nothing but praise for the courageous men and women who endured the billy clubs and attack dogs with persistence and dignity. This is progress, and we should bear it in mind the next time someone demands that we attach Ronald Reagan's name to yet another school, post office, or airport.

Still, there was an oddity about McCain's brief visit to Alabama that received notice even from his usually fawning media embeds. In a city which is 70% African American, McCain's Selma audience was nearly all white. The senator's graceful response to this rather embarrassing revelation was, in effect, that he wanted to show that his presidency will respond to the needs of all Americans, regardless of whether or not they support the GOP. Nobody, however, thought to ask McCain precisely how he would respond to the desperate poverty faced by rural black southerners, including those in Selma.

The next stop on McCain's "I Care" tour was New Orleans, the city that America pledged never to forget, and then promptly did. While in the Big Easy, the nominee-in-waiting took a couple of polite, if indirect, shots at President Bush, wisely separating himself from the incumbent administration's shameful record of obliviousness followed by neglect in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. If nothing else, McCain implicitly assured the country that the next time a major American city is overwhelmed by an epic natural disaster, he would not be 1,000 miles away sharing a birthday cake with an old rival on an airport tarmac somewhere, as President Bush did (the old rival, as you probably guessed, was none other than John McCain, though it's clearly not his fault that he shared the stage with his incompetent Commander-in-Chief on that terrible August day).

While in the Crescent City, Senator Straight Talk was asked what he would do about rebuilding the Ninth Ward, a devastated African American community that remains in ruins nearly three years after the city was flooded. He was unable to summon an answer, indicating that he would consult with experts or something. He also, to my knowledge, said nothing about the fate of the tens of thousands of Katrina evacuees, mostly African American, who have never been given the chance to return home.

I tend toward the cynical, but I suspect that even Pollyanna herself would have raised a few questions about John McCain's new southern strategy. What message did the senator hope to send by visiting towns that will never support him in states that almost certainly will? Was a Republican presidential candidate finally, at long last, reaching out to African Americans in a serious way? And if so, why was that not reflected in the crowds that came to hear him speak?

Well, obviously McCain has to know that he will lose the black vote by a margin of roughly 9-1, especially if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. No campaign, especially one as cash-starved as McCain's, goes looking for votes in politically hostile or indifferent territory. McCain, then, was, at least in one sense, doing precisely what Ronald Reagan did in 1980: he was evoking symbols of the civil rights era in order to appeal to white voters.

To his credit, McCain was not making a pitch to the same kind of voters that Reagan wanted to persuade during his visit to that other Philadelphia. Rather, the Arizona senator was reaching out to an audience that was all the rage a decade or so ago, but is now largely forgotten: the soccer moms. White women will be a key swing constituency in an Obama-McCain general election contest and McCain knows he has some ground to make up.

Soccer moms, who inhabit the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Denver and Milwaukee, are political moderates who abandoned the GOP back in the early 1990s as Republican rhetoric on civil rights, women's rights, and religious freedom grew increasingly harsh and intolerant. Some returned to the fold in 2000 under George W. Bush's banner of "compassionate conservatism", while others were frightened into voting Republican in 2002 and 2004 out of fear that their children would grow up in a country in which every airplane ride could result in sudden death.

If we assume that the minority and youth votes go to Obama and the white male electorate sides with McCain, then it is quite possible that married white women will decide the 2008 presidential election. Further, the GOP hopes that many of them will be alienated from the Democratic Party because of Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful bid for the nomination (assuming, of course, that it is unsuccessful). Perhaps a straight-talking, maverick, compassionate conservative can convince some of these women that an untested, weak-willed Obama is too risky to entrust with their children's safety.

To do this, however, McCain must distance himself from the angry, edgy, testosterone-fueled Bush Administration and its reign of incompetence and insensitivity. His visits to Selma and New Orleans represented the first step in that process. Their key audience was not the children of the brave men and women who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, nor was it the desperately poor Katrina evacuees in Houston and Atlanta, praying for a chance to go home. Rather, McCain's target audience was the mother of two in Shaker Heights, Ohio, juggling a job, a marriage, and a family, discouraged by the mean spirited tone of contemporary U.S. politics, but also worried that her children will be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Osama bin Laden next decides to strike.

If John McCain can win their votes, he will take the oath of office next January.

Clinton, Obama, and Daily Kos

2008-04-25T05:31:00.000-07:00

If you're trying to gauge a candidate's viability in April of an election year, you probably don't want to start with the polls. Public opinion is notoriously fluid in the spring and, with no immediate need to decide, voters regularly flirt with candidates about whom they still know relatively little. At this point in the campaign season, the best estimates of a potential nominee's strengths and weaknesses are probably derived from a dispassionate analysis of the issues, both personal and political, that are likely to dominate each party's talking points in the fall.

Nevertheless, the polls are out there and it is sometimes irresistible to take a peek and try to draw some tentative conclusions about where things might stand in November. The website www.electoral-vote.com provides a useful map of the 50-state match-ups between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on the one hand, and John McCain on the other. Let's start with the headline before we get into the spin:

IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY, HILLARY CLINTON WOULD ALREADY HAVE SECURED ENOUGH ELECTORAL VOTES TO BECOME PRESIDENT; BARACK OBAMA WOULD NOT.

This alone obviously does not prove that Clinton is the most electable Democrat. It is, after all, still six months before Election Day and plenty can change between now and then. In addition, many of the states in which Clinton leads are very close, some within the statistical margin of error (this is also true for Obama). And there are some goofy results in there, indicative of a period in which voters have yet to give serious thought to the general election: California, for example, is improbably listed as a "weak Democratic" state.

Still, it is what it is. The Democrats win 289 electoral votes and the presidency with Hillary at the helm. They win 269 with Obama, one short of the magic number. Indeed, for Obama to win under this scenario, he would have to capture the one state on his map that is tied, North Carolina, which hasn't supported a Democratic candidate for president since Obama was a Hawaiian high school sophomore (i.e., 1976). On balance, then, this information would, if anything, support those who argue that Clinton is the superior choice to face John McCain in November.

But wait—you haven’t heard from the 24/7 pro-Obama spin machine that is Daily Kos, the premier left-wing blog. The site's proprietor, Markos Moulitsas, helpfully provides us with the following summary information:

Strong Dem: Obama, 67; Clinton 74
Weak Dem: Obama 144; Clinton 98
Barely Dem: Obama 58; Clinton 117
Tied: Obama 15; Clinton 10
Barely GOP: Obama 76; Clinton 13
Weak GOP: Obama 44; Clinton 89
Strong GOP: Obama 134: Clinton 137

Fair enough, I suppose, though he does leave out the grand total, which is, as we've noted, 289-269 in Clinton's favor. But then, in the best traditions of the cable TV pundits, Moulitsas proceeds to spin like a gyroscope. Here are his arguments for why a deficit of 20 electoral votes actually represents an Obama victory:

1. Obama does better if you look only at strong and weak Democratic states.

2. McCain does worse against Obama if you look only at strong and weak GOP states.

3. More Democratic electoral votes are "at risk" with Clinton because more of her support comes from the "barely Democratic" column. (Does Moulitsas not recognize that this is simply a re-statement of point #1, or does he think his readers' analytical skills are that dull?)

4. "Obama puts more pressure on McCain states." (A re-statement of point #2.)

5. "Obama holds the Kerry states better." It's not clear why this is an advantage since Kerry, you know, lost. But I guess Moulitsas had only two arguments but wanted to stretch them into five.

A couple of things the Daily Kos webmaster did not point out in his somewhat redundant analysis. First, both of the states that decided the past two presidential elections—Ohio and Florida—fall into the Clinton, but not the Obama, column. Indeed, with Obama heading the ticket, Florida becomes a "strong GOP" state. Moreover, to say that Obama "holds the Kerry states" sidesteps the fact that, other than a couple of very iffy pickups in Colorado and Nevada, that's really all he's got. Obama, of course, was supposed to be the candidate who expanded the Democratic coalition beyond the parameters of 2000 and 2004. But outside of Denver and Las Vegas, the evidence suggests that his electoral territory would be little different from that of Al Gore and John Kerry. So much for the new Democratic majority.

The problem with Moulitsas and many of his allies in the left blogosphere is that they have built a small empire that may be just as important to them as their original mission, which was to replace Republicans with Democrats. An Obama nomination validates Kos' mantra of "people powered politics"; a Clinton win renders his movement impotent and, perhaps, irrelevant. Moulitsas is a player now, with a gig at "Newsweek" and a regular seat at the pundits' table. There is more at risk for him these days than the mere fate of the Democratic Party. (Indeed, even now, he can't bring himself to concede that the amateurish anti-Joe Lieberman campaign of 2006 was an unqualified disaster for the cause.)

It goes without saying that none of us yet knows how the 2008 election will play out. It is quite likely that John McCain will never be stronger than he is right now, as he traipses around the hinterlands pretending to care about people (black Alabamians, displaced Katrina survivors, etc.) whose lives his economic policies would only further devastate. But it's also very possible that Barack Obama—like John Kerry before him—is currently enjoying his high-water mark in terms of popularity. Experience tells us that relatively unknown quantities—Carter in 1976, Dukakis in 1988, Kerry in 2004—generally see their appeal decline as the campaign wears on.

Say what you want about Hillary Clinton, but she is one of the best known quantities in American politics today. She has her deficiencies and a lot of people despise her beyond all cognitive understanding, but very few people have yet to decide how they feel about her. Of the three remaining candidates in the race, she is the one most likely to remain where she is in the polls, both nationally and at the state-by-state level. There's not much chance that she will win more than 310 electoral votes, but it's equally unlikely that the bottom will drop out on her come October.

But don't ever expect to read that in DailyKos.

Three Cheers for Four Dollar Gas!

2008-04-24T06:13:00.001-07:00

One summer back in the early 1970s I spent a couple of months with my family in Europe. When I returned back to the states, the very first thing that struck me was how large American cars were. I mean, it was striking. After several weeks seeing nothing but tiny European roadsters, the contrast was overwhelming. Imagine someone raised on 1950s television sets suddenly appearing on the showroom floor at Circuit City in 2008. That's what it was like.

By the end of the 70s, of course, everything had changed. The first oil crunch hit and then the second, gas prices shot above (gulp) one dollar a gallon and people waited in hour-long lines just to fill their tank. Cars were no longer judged by their metallic flourishes and expansive tailfins but rather by their mileage. Datsuns and Fiats and, eventually, Yugos began to dominate the American highway.

By the 1990s, when the first SUVs began to stare down on us as we navigated the interstate, it became clear that the lessons of the Carter years had been lost. Automakers convinced otherwise sensible people that they needed to cart their children to soccer practice in armored personnel carriers. Those of us old enough to hate disco worried aloud that this new love affair with multi-ton vehicles could someday come back to haunt us. Nobody listened. Instead, suburbanites flocked to buy non-military versions of the Humvee, the four-wheeled behemoth that was a minor star in that brief and glorious reality show known as the Gulf War of 1991.

Usually, I enjoy saying "I told you so". This time, not so much. As gas prices rise toward four dollars per gallon, SUV drivers face the prospect of dropping a cool C-note every time they refuel the monster. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't occurring simultaneously with rising unemployment and widespread housing foreclosures. All of this is topped off, of course, with a ruinously expensive war that we cannot win. It turns out that we didn't elect the son of George H.W. Bush in 2000; we elected the illegitimate love child of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

I don't understand the oil markets well enough to know exactly what's going on. From what I gather, three factors stand out in the current crisis. First, we've made a mess of one of the biggest oil producing countries in the world (Iraq) and an enemy of another (Venezuela). Second, commodities speculation, based as much on fear and greed as anything else, is driving the price of petroleum to new heights. And perhaps most important, countries such as China and India have created enormous new demand for oil, putting the producing countries and energy corporations in the driver's seat.

As we ride this out, I suppose we can at least try to search for the silver lining that some people insist lurks behind every recessionary cloud. So how about this:

1. Just as the 1970s oil crises drove the giant Oldsmobiles and Buicks from our lives, perhaps the current decade will usher in the demise of the SUV. That would be so good on so many levels. It would, first and foremost, be an environmentalist's dream. It certainly wouldn't solve global warming, but it would move the ball forward. And those of us who drive more sensible sedans would no longer have to share the road with cell-phone yapping yuppies trying to pilot their giant killing machines while simultaneously disciplining six spoiled brats in the back seats.

2. Except in fits and starts, Americans rarely get serious about real public transportation until the alternative is civil insurrection. Four or five dollar gas could, if we are lucky, get us to that point. Not only is mass transit environmentally preferable, it is also an enormous boon to the lives of poor people, a group that has, sadly, been increasing significantly during the Bush years.

3. This could force all the bitter and nasty debate over illegal immigration into remission. As transportation costs rise, the price of food will naturally follow. As that happens, it will become politically impossible to crack down on migrant farm workers without pushing already high prices through the roof. Bigotry is one thing, but self interest trumps all. You heard it here first: if oil reaches $200 a barrel, Lou Dobbs will be unemployable and reduced to carrying signs and ranting about "illegal aliens" in front of soup kitchens and bus stations.

4. Maybe, just maybe, we'll finally get serious about alternative fuel sources. Everyone knew that this would happen after the crises of the 1970s, but of course it didn't, at least not to any appreciable degree. But maybe it would happen this time.

5. NASCAR! How about an executive order canceling the next five seasons of auto racing? How awesome would that be? I'm just kidding. I think.

Anyway, this is my week for optimism (enjoy it while it lasts), so let's get out there and spread the word. Four dollar gas is our friend. As long as we don't, you know, eat, travel, or heat our homes during the winter.

Why Pennsylvania Doesn't Matter (and Why it Should)

2008-04-23T05:35:00.000-07:00

In the minds of most Americans, Hillary Clinton got the double-digit victory she needed in Pennsylvania last night to remain viable in her race against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. To the liberal zealots over at Daily Kos, on the other hand, special rules of arithmetic always apply: round up or down, depending on which result most benefits Obama. The latest reports from the Keystone State show Clinton leading Obama 54.69% to 45.31%, which, to most of us, rounds up to 55-45. Listen, however, to Kos himself, site proprietor Markos Moulitsas Zúniga:

"That's a difference of 9.38 percent which, if you're going to round, would round down to 9 percent, not 10 percent."

Well, all right then.

Another front page Kos diarist is busy this morning insisting that nobody should pay attention to the nationwide popular vote totals, a strange statement to post on a website that still insists George W. Bush stole the 2000 election from Al Gore. But apparently, if the votes from Florida and Michigan are included, Clinton has now received more support from individual Americans in 2008 than her frontrunning opponent. At this point, of course, such an argument would be a bit of a stretch for Team Hillary since Obama's name was not even on the ballot in Michigan. But the fact that Kossacks feel the need to strike back preemptively against the argument that every vote should count tells us a great deal about where Obamamania has taken the left blogosphere.

And this is, quite clearly, the dilemma that the Democratic Party now faces. For the past four years, left-wing activists and their blogs have claimed that they are committed to the Democrats recapturing the White House in 2008. But something has changed over the past four months. It seems that they are now committed exclusively to Barack Obama winning the presidency and are impervious to all the warning signs that have emerged over the past several weeks, particularly their champion's persistent inability to connect with white working class and Latino voters in the states that will likely decide who wins the election in November.

Having said that, it is likely that the Kossacks will, in the end, get their way. By promising to throw a tantrum if the nomination is "stolen" by Super Delegates acting entirely within the scope of their authority and mandate, the Democratic left has put their party in an impossible situation. The one thing the Democrats cannot afford is to go into the fall campaign with large portions of their base openly questioning the legitimacy of the party's nominee. That is especially true this year, with the issue of race never far from the surface.

At some level, Hillary Clinton must understand this. She must realize that unless she wins every remaining primary and caucus, which she won't, she will come to Denver at least 100 delegates behind Obama. Further, her political instincts should tell her that the Super Delegates, elected officials and party officers, will lack the political will to overturn what is now called—and laughably, given the disproportionate impact of low-turnout caucuses—the will of the people.

At this point, I assume that Clinton is simply hanging around hoping for an electoral miracle. Or, more likely, she remains in the race just in case there is yet one final skeleton to be found in the closet of her still relatively unknown opponent. Obama has already been rocked by his connection to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his carelessly elitist comments about working class bitterness, and even (ridiculously) his nodding relationship with a radical bomb-thrower from the 1960s. We've learned a lot about Senator Obama over the past month or so, little of it helpful to his campaign. Team Hillary can perhaps dream that one more shoe remains to be dropped.

The Obama argument, repeated often and with conviction in the internet echo chambers, is that once the Democratic nominee is chosen, Hillary Clinton's supporters, especially women, union members, and Latinos, will line up behind his candidacy. This may well be true of Latinos, who could be critical in several southwestern states, though a Clinton nomination would likely do more to motivate high turnout. But Obama's prospects among working class men and women are great deal more iffy.

Four years ago, in the darkness of George Bush's victory over John Kerry, liberal bloggers pledged themselves to do everything possible to see that the next presidential election would bring the Democrats to power. And then they fell in love. Ever since, they have been unable and unwilling even to consider the possibility that Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, might be the strongest Democratic candidate to face off against John McCain.

Thus, they will not stop to consider, even for a moment, the implications of Senator Clinton's ten-point victory last night in Pennsylvania. Indeed, they'll insist that it's only a 9.38 point victory and then demand that we round that figure down. They'll tell us that delegates matter more than voters. They'll persistently defend the notion that victories in Alabama, Idaho, and—since it's coming soon—North Carolina matter every bit as much as primary results in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California. They'll willfully ignore the distorting effects of the caucuses.

And then, if the Democratic ticket loses in November, they'll blame the rest of us.

Raging Bull?

2008-04-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

I guess the media decided the other day that it was John McCain's turn to take the heat. Every four years, the working press establish their negative narratives and then dare the candidates to prove them wrong. This year, for example, Hillary Clinton is a soulless liar who will say or do anything to win. Barack Obama is an elitist wimp with a barely disguised taste for radicalism and friends who hold their country in contempt. And now we have McCain, the raging bull of politics, the man with a temper so out of control that even some of his Republican colleagues express concern about his ability to represent America as diplomat in chief.

This is nothing new, of course. These narratives go as far back as I remember, so they're not just the creation of the 24/7 cable TV industry or the internet echo chambers. Over forty years ago, Barry Goldwater was the reactionary nutjob who never met a bomb he didn't want to drop. Hubert Humphrey was the loyal vice presidential lapdog, too weak to stand up to LBJ, let alone the Vietcong. George McGovern was both wimpy and extremist, not decisive enough to negotiate tough Cold War realities, yet simultaneously single-minded in his pursuit of the San Francisco-ization of America. Tricky Dick Nixon obviously served as his own self parody.

More recently, Bill Clinton carried the burden of the nickname Slick Willie, while the first President Bush was such a pampered rich boy that he didn't even recognize a grocery store scanner. Bush's son played the role of anti-intellectual frat boy and sometime religious fanatic. Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, had a weird penchant for making up tall tales about such bizarre personal accomplishments as inventing the internet. John Kerry was one beret short of being a French citizen.

My theory, both unoriginal and previously expressed, is that candidates get into trouble when they say or do something that inadvertently plays into these negative stereotypes. That's why the eleventh hour discovery, back in 2000, that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in Maine in 1976 likely hurt him. It's not that anyone really cared how their presidential nominees celebrated the Bicentennial; instead, the incident simply reminded the electorate of the pre-existing frat boy narrative. Likewise, Hillary Clinton has been enormously damaged by peddling an apparently false story about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia. See, her opponents said, we told you she can't be trusted.

In any event, now that the narratives have been developed for the 2008 election, it should be clear that Senator McCain is both at the greatest advantage and the most significant risk. Assuming that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee (and he might well be by the end of this evening), everything he says will be parsed carefully for any evidence of arrogance, elitism, or subtle anti-Americanism. Phrases that would seem innocent coming from others will be transformed by the media into smoking gun proof of either weakness or world-weariness, and everyone will be hunting for further signs of his supposed disrespect for Joe Six-Pack. Obama will be fighting this battle all the way until November.

Should Hillary Clinton shock the world by upsetting Obama at the Democratic convention this summer, she will receive the Al Gore treatment. That is, fact checkers will pore over her every utterance to make sure that what she said happened in Minneapolis didn't actually take place in St. Paul. The slightest deviation from the historical record will be taken as indicative of her inability to speak honestly about her past, a particularly damaging result considering that her opponent will be Mr. Straight Talk.

As for McCain, all he needs to do is keep his tantrums private. So long as he doesn't blow up at anyone, press or public, he can actually reverse concerns about his capacity for anger. The Democrats will almost certainly work to goad him into some sort of explosion, with campaign trail surrogates seeking ways to annoy him whenever and wherever possible. Either Clinton or Obama—but especially Clinton—will spend much the fall debates working to get the GOP nominee's goat and trigger some sort of angry reaction in front of an audience of millions. As long as he refuses to take the bait, McCain will be fine.

But the risk is obvious. Whereas no individual act on the part of Clinton or Obama would be irreversibly devastating, a single incident of McCain rage, expressed publicly, might effectively doom his candidacy. It probably won't happen, but you know that every Democratic flunky with a cell phone camera will be out there trying to provoke a Macaca moment.

Of course, politics doesn’t have to be this way. Our professional media could make the effort to treat these complicated men and women as something more than stick figures with only two or three defining personality traits. I could also win the lottery, move to Tahiti, and stop worrying myself about all the nonsense.

Obama Nation

2008-04-21T05:37:00.000-07:00

Flipping through the cable channels yesterday, I landed on MSNBC, where Tim Russert was talking to David Gregory and Chuck Todd about the Democratic presidential campaign. Usually, the sight of Russert alone is sufficient to propel me in the direction of the nearest channel changer, willing to hit any button to make it go away. But I was lazier than usual this particular Sunday afternoon, so I hung around for a few moments.

Someone—I think it was Todd—made a point that has not received nearly enough attention from the popular press. He mentioned the single-minded ferocity of Barack Obama's supporters, christening them "Obama Nation", as though they were devotees of some professional sports franchise. Todd remarked on the deluge of e-mails received by ABC News after last Wednesday's Democratic debate, most of them coming from Obama backers who were outraged that their man should be asked uncomfortable questions about his personal associations. Todd concluded by suggesting that these political zealots would have a difficult time uniting around a Hillary Clinton candidacy, should Clinton somehow wrest the nomination from Obama.

Anyone who frequents the major political sites on the internet must have found Todd's comments utterly unsurprising. The most significant liberal blog, DailyKos, has been a veritable clearinghouse for pro-Obama propaganda ever since John Edwards dropped out of the race in February. That, in itself, might be unremarkable, of course. Obama polls well among young people and highly educated Americans, two groups overrepresented on the web. If Clinton owns the union halls, Obama is the master of cyberspace.

Still, the devotion of Obama Nation goes far beyond a mild preference for one liberal Democrat over another. Instead, the Illinois senator's supporters not only deify their own preferred candidate, they also demonize a woman who, less than a decade ago, was considered liberalism's greatest friend in her husband's disappointing administration. Go to Google and punch up "Hillary Clinton is a liar" and you will be rewarded with 95,000 hits, a large proportion of them from liberal websites, including Daily Kos. It's as though a whole new generation of liberals needs to re-learn the lessons of the 1960s and 1970s: the point of presidential elections is to win in November, not April.

Chuck Todd, whose relative youth may be a disadvantage as he searches his memory for analogies, compared 2008 Obama supporters with backers of George W. Bush in 2004. That, I thought, revealed a startling ignorance of the conservative movement. Outside of Bush's immediate family (and we really don't know for sure how Jenna voted), very few right-wingers are invested in W himself. Rather, they are focused on the success of the movement. They're not very fond of John McCain, but you notice that they are predictably flocking to his campaign now that he has become the only alternative to four years of Democratic governance. George W. Bush was never the point to the conservative movement; winning was.

Had Todd reached back a few years, he could have found at least two superior analogies, one Republican and one Democratic. The last presidential nominee to enjoy this level of personal loyalty from his troops was Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater's supporters not only displayed the requisite level of fanaticism, they also despised their hero's opponents for the GOP nomination, especially New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. But the analogy breaks down at this point. Unlike in the current Clinton-Obama contest, the ideological distinctions between Goldwater and Rockefeller were substantial. Imagine Barack Obama fighting for the nomination against Joe Lieberman.

Perhaps the better comparison comes from the Democratic side. And no, it's not George McGovern. McGovern's supporters certainly idolized the South Dakota senator, but their focus was mostly on ending the Vietnam War. Had McGovern lost the Democratic bid in 1972, they would still have been united in their dislike for Richard Nixon.

Rather, the best analogy may be to the supporters of Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Like Obama, McCarthy appealed to a coalition of the young and the educated limousine liberals. He built his following in opposition to a destructive, hopeless war and to the incumbent president who refused to bring the troops home. So great was their devotion to his candidacy, that thousands of youthful campaign workers even cut their hair and beards (a pretty significant sacrifice in the late '60s), going "clean for Gene".

Once it was clear that the anti-war vote had legs, Robert Kennedy swooped into the nomination fight as the establishment alternative to McCarthy. This outraged many of McCarthy's supporters, despite the fact that Kennedy's views were essentially indistinguishable from those of their champion. They redoubled their efforts, spoke angrily about RFK, and handed the Kennedy family its first-ever electoral defeat in the Oregon primary, just before the race headed to California.

Tragedy would intervene in Los Angeles shortly thereafter, so we will never know for sure whether McCarthy's army would have sided with Bobby Kennedy had he won the Democratic nomination. We do know that they not only rejected the eventual Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, with a vengeance, but that many of them converged on the Dems' Chicago convention, resulting several nights of violence (mostly in the form of police beatings) that discredited the party and helped give the unsavory Dick Nixon the keys to the White House.

It's not 1968 anymore, so nobody expects a repeat performance of the melee in Grant Park this year in Denver. Indeed, unlike McCarthy, Obama probably will win the Democratic nomination, where he will ultimately receive the grudging support of Team Clinton. The party will unite around Obama in a way that it might not have united around Hillary.

And therein we see the problem. What happens if Obama loses the 2008 election to John McCain? Will the netroots be chastened and realize that the party needs all of its legs (including the hated moderate DLC) to run a successful race? Or will the Daily Kos diarists and their internet allies simply return self-righteously to their echo chamber prepared to make all the same mistakes four years later?

The future of the Democratic Party—indeed the country—may hang on their response.

In Praise of Bad Debates

2008-04-20T06:27:00.001-07:00

I guess I'm a little late to the table on this, but I didn't actually see the ABC Democratic presidential debate the other night. I saw plenty of snippets and highlights, so I have a pretty good idea what transpired, but I had other plans which were, I think it's fair to say, infinitely more attractive than watching Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lock horns for the 237th time.

Anyway, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos have been pilloried ever since for the gotcha quality of the questions they asked the two Democratic contenders. One after another, the veteran newsreader and his diminutive sidekick inquired about each of the mini-controversies that have recently plagued the campaign. Obama seemed to get the worst of it, which greatly offended his blogosphere cheerleaders, but he's the frontrunner now, and that's the way these things go. Though Clinton did respond to pointed questions about her honesty, Obama had to fend off queries about his supposed elitism, his relationship with his former pastor, his refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin, and his acquaintance with a neighbor who did some bad things as a 1960s era radical.

As I said, I only watched the post-debate coverage and a YouTube video or two, but Obama seemed very much thrown off his game by these attacks. His responses were often defensive and much of the self-confidence and eloquence that has characterized his performance on the stump seemed, at least temporarily, to elude him. He had his moments, of course, but if he performs like this against John McCain in the fall, he will do himself little good.

But mostly, what the audience witnessed on Wednesday was not so much the failure of journalism as the ultimate futility of endless debates during the primary season. The truth is, has been, and will remain that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama differ only on the margins of most issues, if that. A debate between two people who agree on almost everything is simply not going to be terribly edifying. Only policy wonks and diehard candidate supporters really want to hear yet another retelling of the subtle distinctions between Clinton's health care proposal and Obama's, especially when neither will likely get Congress to pass an unamended plan. As for the Iraq War, regardless of what took place five years ago, they're both against it now and their blueprints for withdrawal are essentially identical.

So what exactly were Gibson and Stephanopoulos supposed to ask about? For better or worse (which is to say, for worse) network news departments are now required to be profit generating engines first and journalistic resources second. Presumably, ABC wants an audience and Wonkfest 2008 would not have retained more than a handful of viewers after about the first five minutes. It's not 1960 anymore—we've had plenty of substantive debates and anyone who desperately needs to know the candidates' take on trade with Greenland need only punch up a couple of websites to find out.

Look, at this point the only relevant question facing Democratic voters is which of these ideological twins can defeat John McCain and bring an end to the ruinous Bush reign. I realize electability is a difficult concept to nail down, but really, it's all we have left. Ask anyone but the geekiest of the geeks why they prefer Clinton to Obama, or vice versa. You will, almost 99.9% of the time, get an answer that has nothing to do with the policy differences between the two. The closest you might come is if someone mentions Clinton's vote in favor of the Iraq War resolution, but that's not a policy difference, either.

If there is any advantage to a long primary election season, dragged out over four or five months, it's the fact that the candidates get poked and probed for weaknesses. We find out what where they are vulnerable to attack in the fall and how they hold up in the face of withering assault. John Kerry's early triumph four years ago deprived us of that opportunity, and by the time we learned about the man's abundant deficiencies as a candidate, it was too late. I presume that no Democrat wants to see that happen again.

In that respect, Gibson and Stephanopoulos were asking exactly the right questions Wednesday night. If you read any of the blogs that attacked the ABC duo this week, you will know that they have spent an inordinate amount of time fretting about the very issues (or non-issues, if you prefer) that were covered during the debate. Wouldn't it have been nice two decades ago if we had learned during the primary season just how ineffectively Michael Dukakis would respond the attacks on his patriotism? Of course the attacks were petty, unfair, and un-American. But that didn't stop them from coming and it didn't reduce their effectiveness.

If it were up to me, I'd schedule one more debate. This time I'd hold it on the Fox News Channel and invite former journalist Brit Hume and the second stringers he laughably calls the "Fox News All-Stars" to ask the questions. And the only ground rule would be that the Foxsters would have to hold nothing back. Ask about Jeremiah Wight and Bill Ayers and Mark Rich. Hell, ask about Vince Foster. Give Clinton and Obama a dress rehearsal for the kind of battering they can expect when the Republicans go into full attack mode later this year.

See, the good thing, as I mentioned yesterday, is that John McCain has yet to face the music. And when he does, it may be the GOP that suffers from buyer's remorse. Let him enjoy his moment in the sun and don't worry about the pettiness of debate moderators. Just be glad that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will be nearly impossible to sucker punch.

Optimism Saturday

2008-04-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be optimistic this morning. I don't feel this way very often, but we've got clear skies, no deadlines for another 48 hours, and only three days left before we're finally done with the Pennsylvania primary. Not only that, but one year from today, George W. Bush will be in permanent Texas exile, dictating his straight-to-the-bargain-rack memoirs to a ghost writer who knows how to conjugate verbs.

But really, the thing that has me temporarily looking to the future with relatively less dread than usual is something a friend told me the other day. She reminded me that sixteen years ago, right around this time of the year, H. Ross Perot was the frontrunner in the race for President of the United States. Her point, of course, was that if old, batty Ross and his cornpone jeremiads could reach top of the charts back in 1992, then we should all know enough to ignore springtime presidential horserace polls.

I mention this because John McCain, presumptive nominee of Mr. Bush's discredited political party, is currently holding his own against either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, at least according to the latest surveys. At first glance, this is terrible news for the Democrats. President Bush is currently about as popular as food poisoning, voters have long since rejected his bumbling foreign policy, and most Americans are convinced that a three-card monte dealer could produce a superior economic outcome.

If this is, as we were all promised back in January, a Change Election, then why are some polls being led by the one Washington lifer left in the game? Is the country really that desperate and childlike in its demand for heroes after eight years of incompetent malevolence? I know a lot of Americans adopted Ronald Reagan as their surrogate daddy, but at least he didn't let the wheels fall off until he had safely handed off the baton to his inarticulate successor. Do people actually think that leadership consists of nothing more than physical courage, unreflective self-confidence, and headstrong blustering?

Or is this, like most everything else, the fault of the media? Political reporters are—most of them, anyway—privileged children of the suburbs who have never been asked to sacrifice anything greater than an Ivy League tuition check. Measured against their lives of entitlement, perhaps McCain and his valiant back story provide what they think is the first taste of reality they have ever experienced in person. Maybe they have been so intimidated by decades of dishonest right-wing rants about the "liberal media" that they cower at the thought of having to expose yet another Republican charlatan.

Anyway, I believe I said I was going to be optimistic this morning. So here goes. For weeks, I have been looking at the polls and wondering how any GOP candidate could still be competitive after the party produced the most incompetent, venal, brutal, repressive administration in American history.

But there's another way to look at it: Given that McCain has received a free pass from the media for nearly three months while Clinton and Obama have been hitting each other with increasingly damaging assaults, why has the presumptive Republican nominee been unable to put any distance between himself and his potential opponents? According to Real Clear Politics, the current average of all national horserace polls has McCain tied with Obama and just one point ahead of Clinton. Only in Florida—and only against Obama—does McCain show a substantial lead in any of the key battleground states needed to win the presidency in November.

It's hard to imagine how things could get any better for John McCain than they are right now. He has no GOP opponent, he enjoys fawning press coverage, and his two Democratic challengers are currently locked in a steel-cage death match. The disaster that is the Iraq War is in a temporary lull that is inexplicably being described as victory. Fears about the economy abound, but the other shoe hasn’t quite dropped just yet. Nevertheless, despite these favorable conditions, if the election were held this afternoon, McCain's best-case scenario would be the sort of narrow, tainted victory secured by George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

As for the Democrats, there is a silver lining to all the nastiness of the past several weeks. We're learning a lot of damaging things right now about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. She can't get her story straight about going to Bosnia in 1996; he thinks Middle Americans are "bitter". Her husband has a big mouth; so does his pastor. Democrats naturally worry about the potential destructive power of these revelations, but imagine how much worse it would be had they been uncovered in October rather than April. If nothing else, this extended primary season has used up all of the GOP's talking points as Clinton and Obama lob their nastiest spitballs against one another. By the time the Republicans drag these stories out again in the fall, they are going to sound like ancient history.

There are three serious candidates remaining in the race for the presidency. Two have been severely battered over the course of the first four months of 2008. The other has taken few, if any, significant hits. Despite that fact, half the country still wants to purchase the damaged merchandise. Eventually, the Democratic Party and its nominee are going to turn the spotlight on John McCain and his image will suffer the same tarnish that Clinton's and Obama's have already endured. His poll numbers, in that respect, can only go down, and if they do, he loses.

And we are assuming here the maintenance of the status quo. In fact, things could get a lot worse for the Republicans. At best, the economy could stabilize at its currently unsatisfactory level; at worst, the slippage could continue or ever accelerate. As for Iraq, there is already evidence of a slight uptick in violence against both Iraqis and U.S. troops. Iraq on the back burner doesn't do McCain much good. Iraq on the front burner absolutely destroys his candidacy. Every decent American hopes for the first outcome, but the second—more violence and death—seems increasingly possible.

I am under no illusions that the current presidential race will be easy for the Democrats. McCain is formidable and well-liked by the media. The Electoral College favors the Republicans. The 1988 election proved that voters can be persuaded to act against their own self-interest in the name of patriotism or religion or fear. The GOP will do everything in its power to turn Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton into Michael Dukakis. Maybe McCain will even visit a flag factory, as George H.W. Bush did twenty years ago in his ignoble quest for the White House.

But this isn't 1988, a period in which an apparently robust economy and a crumbling Soviet empire made Americans feel like world beaters. This is more like 1980 going on 1932. In the end, McCain will—as Carter and Hoover before him—have to account for his party's dismal mismanagement of the country's affairs.

I'm sure I'll switch back to pessimism soon enough. That pessimism has, after all, been well rewarded over the past few decades. But at least for now, when I lose hope I can always think of Ross Perot and my unhappiness will at least temporarily fade away.

Like a giant sucking sound.*

(*For you young'uns, that's how Perot described the sound of American jobs being lost to Mexico if Congress adopted the North American Free Trade Agreement. Hillary and Barack think he was right.)

You Don't Need a Weatherman...

2008-04-18T05:34:00.000-07:00

On a Tuesday morning a few years ago, the New York Times published an article on Bill Ayers, a one-time radical who had just produced a memoir about his time in the Weather Underground. You probably don't remember the article. But you definitely remember the date it appeared.

It was September 11, 2001.

This was, to say the least, just about the worst possible moment for someone to say, as Ayers did, that he had no regrets about setting a bomb that blew up in the Pentagon. Ayers, of course, could hardly have known what would transpire the morning the article hit the newsstands. Nor, it must be pointed out, has Ayers ever been accused of detonating an explosion that killed or seriously wounded anyone. Still, his timing obviously could have been better.

In the six years and seven months that have passed since copies of the Ayers article were reduced to dust in the rubble of the World Trade Center, the former Weatherman has hardly attained the status of a household name. But that probably changed on Wednesday night when the fake journalist George Stephanopoulos, at the urging of reactionary cable screamer Sean Hannity, asked Barack Obama to defend his supposed relationship with Ayers. Obama responded that they were not close, that Ayers lived in the same Chicago neighborhood, and that they briefly served together on the board of an anti-poverty organization.

And this, my friends, is what we have come to. A man born in 1964 is being asked to defend—what?—the fact that he periodically interacts with a guy who did bad things in the 1960s and claims not to regret them. (And would it really matter if he apologized? Jane Fonda, who never bombed anything, has expressed regret for her youthful visit to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and she has been forgiven by exactly nobody.) So now guilt by association has been defined down to the level of casual acquaintances. What precisely was Obama supposed to do, stab Ayers in the chest with an American flag lapel pin?

Last night, some meathead cable TV pundit tried to argue that Obama should have refused to serve on the same board as Ayers. Yes, there's a sensible solution: decline to help out an organization dedicated to assisting the poor because you don't like one of the other board members. Hell, if he really wanted to make a statement, maybe he could have moved away from Illinois entirely, just to make sure he wouldn't have to breathe the same air that Ayers might have exhaled. Do it for your country, man!

I get why the Republicans are doing this. Given the disastrous state of foreign and domestic policy and the deficiencies of their economically-illiterate nominee-in-waiting, they can only win by destroying the reputation of the Democratic candidate. And I know why Hillary Clinton wants to give this non-issue additional life. She's desperate to keep her campaign hooked up to life support for at least a few more weeks.

I guess I even understand why the media types are so excited. They're dumb, lazy, and uncreative, and a race between two ideologically indistinguishable candidates doesn't give them much to talk about. At this point, they're looking for something—anything—that can help them extend the conversation and stop viewers from flipping over to Animal Planet.

What I don't get is why the 1960s and early 1970s continue to be such a flashpoint in American society. When I was a kid, people who had lived through the Great Depression were still in their middle aged years. The 1920s and 1930s had their own share of culture wars, from prohibition to the flappers to FDR's bold attempts to insinuate the federal government into the economy in an unprecedented manner. The early 20th Century arguments between liberals and conservatives were often heated and bitter. But three or four decades later, everyone had moved on, choosing not to live their lives in the past.

Today, not only do sixty year old Baby Boomers wallow in memories of the Movement, but young conservatives seem absolutely transfixed by events that happened when they were in diapers, in utero, or in waiting. My theory (though unoriginal) is that right-wingers, both young and old, feel a great deal of sexual and social repression and deeply resent the apparent freedom and carefree lifestyle of the hippie and student radical. That sort of projected self-loathing combined with visceral dislike of the Movement's occasional anti-Americanism has twisted our conservative friends into psychological pretzels, raging against gray-haired men and women who haven't had a radical thought since they received their first mailer from AARP.

And while we're on the topic, why is it only the former radicals who are considered to have blood on their hands? The Vietnam War sent tens of thousands of young Americans and perhaps millions of Vietnamese to premature deaths and inadvertently ushered in the genocidal reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Why, then, should Bill Ayers be regarded as a pariah while Henry Kissinger continues to be treated with unearned respect by the same media hacks who wonder why Obama doesn't recite the flag salute after every meal?

I have my doubts about Barack Obama both as a potential Democratic nominee and future president, but his election, should it occur, could perform one enormously valuable service to his country. It is long past time to relegate the Vietnam era to the history books. The sooner we can all stop choosing up sides over events that took place during the impossibly distant past, the better off we will all be.

The First Catholic President

2008-04-17T05:54:00.000-07:00

Here's something you can try if you enjoy being offended. Go to Google and punch up "first Catholic president". You will be rewarded with a listing of websites, half of which refer to George W. Bush.

Now I know some people used to call Bill Clinton America's first black president, and that was kind of stupid, but at least nobody had to pass over an actual African American chief executive in order to make that claim. And should Barack Obama win the battle for the White House in 2008, nobody will ever again refer to Clinton in that manner.

But we did actually have a Catholic president. His name was John F. Kennedy. He was well known, quite popular, and his Catholicism became something of an issue during the 1960 election. His face appears on the half dollar coin even today, so it's not like anyone could really forget about him.

Maybe not, but last Sunday, with Pope Benedict XVI coming to America (yeah, I had to look up his name, too) some guy named Daniel Burke wrote the following in the once reputable Washington Post:

"[I]f Bill Clinton can be called America's first black president, some say, then George W. Bush could well be the nation's first Catholic president. This isn't as strange a notion as it sounds. Yes, there was John F. Kennedy. But where Kennedy sought to divorce his religion from his office, Bush has welcomed Roman Catholic doctrine and teachings into the White House and based many important domestic policy decisions on them."

Then, just to dig the hole a little deeper, Burke drags former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum out of the political graveyard to remark that Bush is "certainly much more Catholic than Kennedy". When a man has publicly compared homosexuality to "man on dog" sex, the idiot bar is already set pretty high. Santorum, however, may have shattered his own world record. A practicing Catholic himself, the recently defeated senator evidently feels that opposition to abortion and stem cell research trumps confirmation, communion, and confession in the eyes of Rome. It's hard to imagine a man being any dumber without needing to wear a metal bracelet reminding him how to breathe.

As for Mr. Burke, we will generously assume that he was not a history major. At no time did JFK seek to "divorce his religion from his office". Kennedy was a proud and vocal Catholic and his faith clearly informed his views on social justice (just as his ambition informed his general unwillingness to act on those views while in office). In his famous speech to the Houston Baptists, the future president never promised to put his Catholicism in a blind trust. He simply reassured his more bigoted countrymen that he would refuse to take orders from Rome and would resign the presidency before he would impose his personal faith on the public agenda.

Only late in the article does Burke concede that maybe there's more to the Catholic Church than its views on a couple of hot button issues. Indeed, a few Catholics, apparently unwilling to throw JFK under the historical bus, even suggest that Bush's policies "have created a wealth gap that clearly upends the Catholic principle of solidarity with the poor". Ya think? Oh, and our 21st Century Carl Bernstein neglects to mention the death penalty, but W's Texas record as a serial executioner would earn a real Catholic serious minutes in the penalty box, or at least the confessional booth. When John Paul II talked about the "culture of life", he was not merely referring to fetuses.

Bush has, the article noted, appointed Catholics to both Supreme Court positions that have come open on his watch, continuing the pattern of recent Republican presidents. (Of course, his first choice for one of those slots was his own attorney, Harriet Miers, an evangelical Protestant.) Indeed, a majority of the High Court now consists of Roman Catholics, as Bush's justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, join Clarence Thomas (selected by his dad), Anthony Kennedy (chosen by Ronald Reagan), and Antonin Scalia (ditto) on the bench.

Speaking of which, the majority-Catholic court celebrated Benedict's arrival in the United States Sunday by upholding the practice of execution by lethal injection, an activity which was challenged on the basis that it might be cruel and unusual. Some have argued that the process paralyzes the victim but still allows him or her to feel excruciating pain. The Eighth Amendment would seem to frown on that sort of thing.

Nevertheless, this apparently troubled the Court no more than it bothers the "first Catholic president". Chief Justice Roberts, once celebrated as a brilliant legal mind, bizarrely argued that "a condemned prisoner cannot successfully challenge a state's method of execution merely by showing a slightly or marginally safer alternative." The issue, of course, is not safety; this is an execution, Einstein. The issue is finding a way to perform the procedure without torturing the condemned prisoner (assuming the Court considers torture a constitutional violation, something we may—shudder—learn in the near future). By a 7-2 margin, the Court decided it didn't matter.

Perhaps someone will think to ask Pope Benedict how he feels about the fact that all five of the Court's Catholics voted with the majority. Or, even better, maybe they can see what the Pontiff thinks about the concurring opinion written by Scalia and Thomas, both members of the flock, that a "method of execution violates the Eighth Amendment only if it is deliberately designed to inflict pain." Evidently, pain inflicted carelessly or ignorantly doesn't hurt as much; I must have missed that message in John Paul's teachings.

Four years ago, the country was treated to a moronic debate over whether John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, should be allowed to take Holy Communion. Oddly, those same voices of tolerance are not only silent on the eligibility of the Catholic justices, they are even suggesting saving a wafer for our warmongering president. If we are lucky, Benedict will remind them what a real Catholic sounds like.

In the meantime, just to clear things up, George W. Bush is not the first Catholic president. You do not become a Catholic—much less a Catholic president—simply on the basis of your desire to impose your beliefs on other people. John F. Kennedy, the first real Catholic in the White House, understood that. Bush's actions do not make him the first Catholic president; if anything, they make him the first Taliban president.

The Straight Talkin' Flim Flam Man

2008-04-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

Is it too late to propose a New Year's resolution? It took me three and a half months, but I finally have one. By the end of the current decade, I am going to play quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals.

You may scoff, but I've got it all figured out. First, I am going to read every book ever written by, about, and for NFL quarterbacks. I'll take the best advice from each and put it together to mold myself into the perfect signal caller. Then I'll hit the workout room for at least four hours a day, maximizing my strength and conditioning. I will also pick up the latest version of the John Madden video game, which will help me to hone my reflexes and test my strategy.

Finally, I'll wait for the football fairy to sprinkle some pixie dust on me and I'll be good to go.

At this point, you're probably wondering if I've been sampling some of the local mushrooms, but I can promise you I've been drug free since…well, since long after the statute of limitations expired. Besides, I don't need to convince you, because I already know that John McCain will believe me. In fact, right now, he's probably telling all of his friends back in Phoenix to invest in Cardinals' season tickets, if only for the resale value. McCain, after all, knows his economics just as I know my football, and he understands that my plan to participate in Super Bowl XLIV is every bit as plausible as his proposal to restore America to full fiscal health.

And sadly, he's right.

Let's start with yesterday's headline, McCain's plan for the temporary elimination of the federal gas tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Please join me in counting all the ways this proposal is frivolous. First, kicking eighteen cents or so off the price of a gallon of regular hardly gets us back to normalcy. Yesterday, I paid $3.35; had I paid $3.17 instead, I would have saved exactly $1.80. Now granted, I don't drive a movable fortress, but even you Hummer owners would only pick up about five bucks per fill up. And let's face it: if you own a Hummer, five dollars is chicken feed, and if you own a Hummer, screw you anyway.

Second, the gas tax is one of the few means the feds have to help repair our country's crumbling infrastructure. Take that away and the Minnesota bridge collapse we saw a few months ago could become a regular occurrence. It's like deciding that the best way to lose weight is to have your liver removed.

Third, why do this during the summer? The most serious problem with high gas prices is not that families won't be able to visit Auntie Em in Kansas during July. Rather, it's the day to day difficulties faced by commuters and those who operate motor vehicles for a living. Their problems aren't going to end in September.

Finally, as someone else mentioned (I forget where I saw it, or I'd give them credit), no tax cut should ever be regarded as temporary. At some point, one of two things would happen. Either everyone's gasoline tax would have to rise by a noticeable and presumably anger-inducing eighteen cents, or a timid Congress would simply make the cut permanent for fear that opponents would accuse them of voting to raise taxes again. And somewhere in the heartland, another bridge would fall.

OK, other than that foolish innovation, what else does Senator Straight Talk have in his bag of tricks? Well, most of it is warmed-over Bushism, the sort of economic genius that brought us to this moment of crisis in the first place. McCain wants to make Bush's tax cuts for the rich permanent. And yes, these are the very same tax cuts he voted against when they were originally proposed, proving to all doubters that the senator does, indeed, have a learning curve. It simply has a downward slope.

Perhaps his best idea—not really his, of course, but that's all right—is McCain's recommendation that the Medicare prescription drug benefit be needs tested. Single people earning over $82,000 a year and married couples taking home more than $164,000 would have to pay market price for their pharmaceuticals. I guess it's only fair that they should invest part of their sizable tax cut windfall to purchase a few more years of life, but my guess is that McCain will feel enormous pressure from the Republican base to dump this proposal. Maybe even before the election.

Then we get to the truly risible stuff. Remember my goal to use pixie dust to ease my way into the NFL? It turns out John McCain has similar plans for his presidency. He says that he'll freeze all discretionary spending for at least a year, veto any spending bill with earmarks, and institute a "top to bottom" review of the entire national budget. Except, of course, that military spending—including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—will be untouchable.

McCain estimates that these measures will save the federal government $100 billion per year. That's almost certainly false, but let's take Mr. Straight Talk at his word for the sake of argument. Even if he's right, the Iraq War current costs $341 million dollars each day, meaning that McCain's gains would be offset by his fixation on military "victory" by early October of each year, leaving us about $25 billion in the hole by December 31.

And that's only if he's right. There is a very simple and time-tested rule for judging the budgetary implications of any would-be president's economic policies. If he or she resorts to statements about cutting the fat in order to make the whole thing add up, then you know you are dealing with a hoax. There's obviously fat in the budget, of course, but not nearly as much as advertised, and when it comes time to bring out the axe, nobody can ever agree on what items are and are not necessary.

Same thing with pork barrel spending and earmarks. The whole notion of pork barrel spending is a right-wing misnomer. Nobody in Washington literally takes hundred dollar bills and burns them in a giant bonfire. All spending creates jobs, stimulates the economy, and furthers some laudable goal. That doesn't mean we shouldn't prioritize, but anyone who claims that local spending is inherently wasteful is a liar. And when a sitting member of Congress does so, he or she is a lying hypocrite.

McCain is running for president right now, so his Senate website has probably been scrubbed of all information regarding the money he has brought home to his Arizona constituents over the years. So let's look instead at the site of his GOP colleague from the Grand Canyon State, Senator John Kyl. Kyl says:

"I will also continue to seek funds outside the highway funding formula for priority highway, airport, and transit projects in the state. Some of the projects I’ve helped win funding for in recent years include:

"In Fiscal Year 2008:
· $1.25 million for taxiway improvements at Sky Harbor Airport;
· $1.75 million for taxiway construction at Williams Gateway Airport;
· $2 million for construction of the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge;
· $1 million for bus programs in Tucson;
· $500,000 for bus programs in Mesa;
· $1.375 million for I-10 Widening in Maricopa County; and
· $750,000 for the Houghton Road Corridor Bridge Replacement."

How about we ask John McCain exactly how many of these seven measures he voted against. I'd do it, but I have to get back to my pre-season workout. I'm cutting the fat as we speak. I can't wait for my phone call from President McCain when I finally win the Super Bowl.

Juicy Libel?

2008-04-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

I learned something today. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but the word is out. I learned that a number of women on college campuses across America are sluts, whores, and a few other nouns that I choose not to repeat. Further, I discovered their names, what university they attended, and what sorority they pledged.

The story of JuicyCampus.com is no longer new, but it takes a while for contemporary cultural phenomena to reach my desk these days. I am aware of MySpace and Facebook, of course, but I have only visited one of them a couple of times. I don't remember which one; I have an account there because my students once set up a page for me and I wanted to check it out. Ever since then, I occasionally get requests from people I may or may not know asking me to be their friend. I leave these queries unanswered, which may be a major breach of etiquette and will probably earn me a label as aloof or thoughtless, but I really don't care. It is, I've learned over the years, best not to party with one's students, even if only in the virtual world.

One of the pleasures of growing older is that you recover your ability to be shocked. During childhood, everything is shocking, from the first time your hear someone curse in public to the first time you see a picture of a naked person (and yes, I do realize that these events may take place sooner in life now than they once did). As adolescence kicks in, the senses are overloaded and a certain jadedness sets in. By the time you reach thirty, you've seen and done everything, you've mastered the shady and sleazy precincts of popular culture, and you laugh at your elders who constantly decry the declining standards that allow the likes of Beavis and Butt-head to enter their living room (as the man once said, I date myself, but at least I always send flowers the next day).

At some point in the blur of the fourth decade, you wake up one morning to find that popular culture has passed you by and you discover that Billy Ray Cyrus is not only still alive, but he now has a famous daughter with a rhyming stage name. Contemporary music hits start to sound indistinguishable. You begin to wonder when all the jokes on "Saturday Night Live" became so damned childish.

And then somewhere, maybe around the age of forty, you suddenly regain your ability to be shocked. Maybe it was "South Park", or perhaps "Family Guy". Or possibly the obscene lyrics emitting from the future hearing aid wearer stopped at the light next to you. Regardless, eventually you hit that first moment when, usually involuntarily, you hear yourself ask, "Can they really say that?" Recalling that your parents once asked the same question about Archie Bunker and the Sex Pistols, your day is now ruined.

Eventually, you get over your repulsion at what you've become and make peace with your alienation from popular culture. We had Jello Biafra, they have Fifty Cent; I can deal with that. Still, once in a while something comes along that offends you so much that you consider writing your Congressman, except that you don't remember his (or is it her?) name.

The discovery of JuicyCampus.com was such a moment for me, though, to be honest, I might well have objected to this site even if I were still seventeen. After only a few minutes on the site, I learned that a certain young woman in a certain sorority at some campus in the United States was "the nastiest most pathetic whore on the face of the earth". Her first and last names were mentioned explicitly, along with the assertion that "[s]he's a stinky ugly [ethnic group]."

Armed with the name, the sorority, and the campus affiliation, I went to Google and discovered that this young woman does, in fact, exist. (I am only giving you this much because Juicy Campus does not allow its content to be indexed by search engines.) She no doubt has, in addition to feelings, friends, parents, siblings, and other people who love her. And here I am, in another part of the country, able to read some anonymous coward's vile and bigoted words about her intimate sexuality.

The First Amendment protects a lot of things, but we generally assume that it does not protect slander and libel. In a technical sense, I suppose, we are probably not expected to believe that the coed in question actually performs sexual acts for pay, though that is obviously the dictionary definition of "whore". Nevertheless, at the very least, we are led to think that she is carnally promiscuous, which is itself, if untrue, a potentially libelous statement. She's not the only one, of course; the word "slut" shows up with alarming frequency in the various descriptions of women posted on the site.

I could have given you even better examples, except that they would be more specifically identifying, and I have no interest in furthering anyone's humiliation. But there are explicit descriptions of sexual acts some of these women supposedly perform as well as diseases that they carry and pass on. If true, then the twisted individuals who post these allegations would be, for better or worse, legally protected. If not, they could quite possibly be sued successfully in a court of law.

Except that the jackasses who post these vile remarks do so anonymously. And the owner(s) of the website are evidently shielded by a law that holds internet proprietors blameless for libelous remarks made by visitors leaving comments. As a blogger with a comment section, I can certainly see the wisdom of this law. As we speak, someone could be leaving a note on my site saying that President Bush bites the heads off live birds and spits them out on Iraq War veterans. If I found such a falsehood, I would remove it quickly, but sometimes I go two or three days without checking my comments (since I usually don’t get too many). It's reassuring to know I'm not responsible for the vicious acts of others.

But Juicy Campus is different. The whole purpose of the site is to invite people to spread rumors and nasty gossip about their fellow students, and to do so anonymously. It is unclear to me why anyone who actively solicits these salacious tidbits shouldn't be held legally accountable if the words in question turn out to be false and defamatory. And if a law needs to be passed to make that happen, then let's get on with it.

I'm ready to take action. All I need is to figure out my congressman's (congresswoman's) name.

It Could Happen to Yoo

2008-04-14T01:58:00.000-07:00

Very little time today, so I must make it short.

According to InsideHigherEd.com, a civil liberties group is lobbying the University of California to expel John Yoo, a tenured law professor who, while working in the Bush administration, wrote memos justifying the use of torture against suspected terrorists. The American Freedom Campaign argues that "Yoo should not only be disqualified from ever serving in government again, but he should also be prohibited from spreading his distorted view of the law and the role of lawyers to young law students. He must be fired."

This is, quite simply, a terrible idea. I say this not to defend Yoo, who, in a just world, would at least be investigated by a war crimes tribunal, if not shipped off to The Hague for trial before the World Court. But his actions did not take place in his capacity as a Berkeley law professor, nor is there any evidence of related misconduct occurring on the job.

Firing John Yoo would set a terrible precedent. If university administrators, absent conviction in a criminal court, are able to decide that someone's off-the-job conduct merits revocation of tenure, then the entire professoriate is at risk. The academic right-wing, already hostile to the tenure process, would almost certainly swoop in and pressure administrators and governing boards to release liberal and radical educators who say something considered out of bounds based on whatever standards they decide to apply.

In short, if it can happen to Yoo, it can happen to you.

Parsing Obama's Words

2008-04-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

Let's leave aside for this morning the political fallout from Barack Obama's comments on the bitterness of working class Pennsylvanians. Instead, let's approach it from a different angle. To what extent is Senator Obama speaking the truth?

You could scroll town to read his words, but I'll go ahead and re-post them here. Referring to the residents of small towns where "jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama says:

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Taken as a whole, it's not exactly a shocking statement. The historical record is littered with stories of cultures that resorted to violence and xenophobia in reaction to economic deprivation and hopelessness. The (perhaps too pat) story that every American schoolchild learns about the rise of Adolf Hitler begins with the sacking of Germany after World War I, the failure of the Weimar government to produce prosperity, and the need for a wheelbarrow to carry all the Deutsche Marks necessary to purchase a loaf of bread. Seizing on the anger and bitterness of his countrymen, Hitler was, according to this narrative, able to produce a scapegoat and enlist the German nation to perform unspeakable crimes against humanity.

Senator Obama, of course, is not suggesting that Pennsylvania in 2008 bears any direct resemblance to the latter stages of the Weimar Republic. The first mistake he makes, however, is his selection of the subjective personal pronoun. By saying that "they" become embittered, gun-toting bigots, Obama seems to be suggesting that the majority, or even all, of the people concerned fall into this category. Much of the trouble in which he now finds himself might have been reduced had the senator simply replaced both instances of the word "they" with a less inclusive term like "some".

Obama's second mistake, and perhaps his biggest, was to include religiosity in his list of qualities that describe the embittered. While people may "cling" to religious faith during difficult economic times, that's hardly something to decry. Indeed, the degree of religious devotion in the United States is high enough that it makes no sense to suggest that it is some unique quality of the dispossessed.

I presume that Senator Obama meant to say that some frustrated working class Americans find themselves attracted to particularly intolerant religious orders. Certainly, there is an abundance from which to choose, if one is so inclined. Depending on one's anger, bigotry, and work ethic, the menu can range from Pat Robertson's occasional conspiratorial musings to that awful church in Kansas that sends devotees across the country to picket the funerals of those who have died of AIDS. Still, it is unclear if even these sorry individuals are motivated by bitterness at external economic conditions or, rather, by deeper, far more personal struggles.

That same point holds for two of Obama's other claims: that economic deprivation encourages fierce support for gun rights and equally fierce opposition to immigration, both legal and illegal. Again, there's probably a grain of truth here. The militia movements, the Minutemen, and perhaps even people like Timothy McVeigh may have been driven to their extremism by a sense that the rules of the modern world were stacked against them. A whole generation of American men witnessed the dismantling of the assembly line and other factory jobs that allowed those without college degrees to enjoy upward mobility. This created the sort of smoldering frustration that Billy Joel captured two decades ago in his song "Allentown" (a song, fittingly enough, about recession in Pennsylvania):

"Every child had a pretty good shot/
To get at least as far as their old man got/
But something happened on the way to that place/
They threw an American flag in our face"

But xenophobia and bigotry (not to mention gun worship) do not exist exclusively among the downwardly mobile in the old steel towns. There are plenty of gun nuts and racists to be found among the ranks of the middle and upper classes. The current anti-immigrant movement spawned in the boomtowns of the Southwest during the relatively prosperous 1990s. I realize, of course, that the Clinton-era recovery did not always reach down to the lower rungs of the economic ladder, but certainly cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and San Diego provided ample opportunities for people across the class spectrum.

Indeed, there is, perhaps ironically, a strong measure of optimism hidden in Barack Obama's damning ruminations about working class Americans. There is the implied suggestion that if we can find a way to bring upward mobility and hope back to the people of Allentown and elsewhere, we can solve the problems of violence and hatred that plague our society. We might even persuade them to crash Lou Dobbs' ratings and send him back to CNBC, the business channel that nobody watches.

Unfortunately, this is only partly true. There is little doubt that a return to prosperity coupled with a restoration of upward mobility for working class Americans would do wonders for the country's crime rate. On the other hand, anyone who has spent time in the Southwest understands that the anger directed at Latino immigrants knows few class boundaries. Rather, it speaks to the primitive centers of the brain that instinctively reject the outsider and the "alien".

In the end, then, Obama's statement was, especially for a man so famously careful in his crafting of phrases, stunningly careless. It unnecessarily indicted entire swaths of the population. It was unacceptably vague in its treatment of religious faith. And it seemed to assume that xenophobia was entirely economic in its origin. It was the sort of loose talk one would expect from a 1970s limousine liberal, and not a 21st Century presidential candidate promising to unite a nation.

Playing to Your Weakness: Barack Obama's Turn

2008-04-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

I have a theory. Well, it's not my theory exactly; others have said more or less the same thing. Also, I may have mentioned it previously on this blog. Anyway, here it is: politicians develop certain images, exaggerated summaries of their strong and weak points. They tend to get themselves into trouble when they say or do something that plays into—and emphasizes—the fears and concerns that voters already have about them. Thus, what might be a mild distraction for one candidate could become a devastating blow for another.

Throughout history, presidential debates have provided a wealth of such moments. In the very first televised debate between Democratic and Republican nominees, John F. Kennedy triumphed over Richard Nixon more on style than substance. Even today, people remember that radio listeners thought Nixon had won, while TV viewers gave the victory to Kennedy. This, it turns out, is an exaggeration, but it is clear that Kennedy won the battle of images. Smartly dressed in a dark suit, legs comfortably crossed, JFK benefited from the contrast with the pasty-faced, sweaty, nervous-looking Nixon, whose light suit blended into the backdrop and whose own legs seemed fidgety.

Why would any of that matter? Well, back then people were given to thinking that television was a window to the soul and Nixon's soul had already been the subject of some controversy, going all the way back to his 1952 Checkers speech, the first—but hardly the last—time Tricky Dick had to explain that he was not a crook. And there he was on yet another national broadcast looking like nothing so much as a criminal defendant undergoing police interrogation. Even his eyes were shifty. It's not as though these same characteristics would have helped another candidate, but in 1960 they were especially damaging because they played into everyone's fears that Nixon might just be, as Harry Truman once said, "a shifty-eyed goddamn liar".

Sixteen years later, Gerald Ford was the recipient of the next memorable debating "moment". Responding to a question about the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, Ford stated that he did not believe that Poland, Romania, and the rest were under Soviet control. He almost certainly meant that he would never concede the legitimacy of Russia's domination of its neighbors, but that's not what he said. The next day's newspapers were filled with devastating speculation about the inability of the President of the United States to comprehend even the most basic realities of Cold War geopolitics.

Again, no candidate would be helped by such a gaffe, but it hit Ford especially hard. The rap on Jerry Ford was that he was a nice man of great integrity who, as Lyndon Johnson once remarked, couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. The comedian Chevy Chase portrayed Ford on "Saturday Night Live" as a clueless bumbler, and speculation abounded that the new Commander-in-Chief was not the sharpest blade in the Ginzu collection. As a result, an honest misstatement during a single debate was perceived by millions as further evidence of President Ford's lack of intellectual qualification for his high office.

And it's not just presidential debates. Think back to Howard Dean's infamous scream in Iowa back in 2004. How could anything so trivial end up dominating the electorate's view of a bright and dedicated public servant? Even today, if you ask the average American to tell you one thing about Governor Dean, you will likely hear something resembling "Yeeeowww!!!!" The problem, of course, was that The Scream corresponded perfectly with the negative side of Dean's image, the notion that he was amateurish, radical, and slightly out of control.

OK, I think you get the point. Here we are in 2008, with fifty—if not 250—years of evidence that candidates need to avoid playing into their most negative stereotypes, and yet they still do it. Hillary Clinton's tall tale about taking sniper fire in Bosnia obviously hurt her a great deal. Her poll numbers have not been the same since her story was discredited. Once again, no presidential contender wants to get caught in a lie, but the damage to Senator Clinton may have been particularly strong because many voters and pundits already thought of her as someone who would do or say anything to acquire political power. When she was caught doing precisely that, the impact was likely greater than it would have been on any of her opponents.

This week, it is Barack Obama's turn. Talking to supporters in San Francisco, of all places, Obama discussed the plight of small town Americans in the grip of economic recession:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

So far, so good. Nice empathy. A shot at both the Clintons and the Bushes. But then he added:

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Yikes! That's gonna cost him some votes in Altoona. But worse yet, it's going to fit nicely within the developing Republican (and Clinton) narrative that Senator Obama is an urban intellectual elitist who thinks he's better than the working men and women who didn't edit the Harvard Law Review. They cling to guns or religion or bigotry. They wear mullets and spit tobacky juice and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. They'd probably tell you that Merlot was a French impressionist, except that they all think that "French impressionist" is just another name for a mime.

Barack Obama will very likely be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. His famous eloquence could easily turn to dust if millions of American start to view it as the pretty words of a man who enjoys showing off to his wealthy coastal friends. At this point, Obama is perhaps one additional slip away from becoming John Kerry. The Republicans have prospered for years by convincing Middle American voters that the Democratic candidate du jour looks down on their simple expressions of religious devotion, their insistence on the right to bear arms, and their heartfelt patriotism. And now Obama has all but told them that it is their weakness that compels them to "cling" to Jesus and Remington.

I suspect that we will not hear the last of this until sometime in mid-November.

Moral Equivalence

2008-04-11T05:08:00.001-07:00

Their country was under attack. On one quiet morning in the late summer, men flew airplanes into their cities and thousands died. These men came from a faraway land and the dead had done nothing to invite their wrath. Most of those who perished were apolitical, simply average people carrying out the daily rituals of their lives, unaware that this morning would be their last.

The country's leaders were desperate. They had no idea where the next attack was coming from or how bad it would be. They viewed the men in the airplanes as vicious enemies, unworthy of humane consideration. They wanted to save their people from further fear and agony.

In one of their prisons sat a young man who had worked with the attackers, helping them to plan and execute their assault. Maybe he knew something. Maybe he could provide some detail that would help them ward off the next attack. Maybe if they could break him, they could save hundreds or even thousands of their fellow citizens. Maybe they were simply consumed with rage at what had happened to their country. Whatever the motivation, they decided that they knew what they had to do.

And so they tortured John McCain.

Don’t you dare assume that I am suggesting a moral equivalence between the hijackers of 9/11 and the bomber pilots of the Vietnam War. I am doing nothing of the sort. The former were unqualified brutes whose sole motivation was to bring misery to the innocent. The latter were honorable men who believed that their actions were helping provide freedom to the Vietnamese and ultimately protecting their own homeland from the threat of a rapacious empire and its cruel totalitarian philosophy. John McCain is, whatever his faults, a decent and courageous human being; Mohammed Atta was scum.

Instead, my point is that the use of torture can always be rationalized. The same arguments that pass the lips of our current political leadership have been rehearsed throughout history by those who dehumanize and then brutalize. If you contort logic and principle carefully enough, any end can be made to justify any means. But nobody back in the 1960s argued that the Communists' use of torture was wrong because we were the good guys. They insisted that it was wrong because, at some deeper level that transcends strategy and philosophy, it was simply barbaric and unworthy of civilized people.

The Vietnam War was a hopelessly flawed mission, commissioned by arrogant intellectuals, justified by duplicitious politicians, commanded by delusional generals, and fought by brave, good, and self-sacrificing young Americans who deserved better from their superiors. But even Lyndon Johnson and William Westmoreland had a core of humanity that could not be breached. Even as the losses mounted and the humiliation grew, they refused to resort to torture.

No, if there is a moral equivalence between the thugs who abused John McCain and the actions that have taken place during the Iraq War, it is the responsibility of those leaders who, out of shock or fear or anger, decided that the United States of America would join the list of regimes that torture their enemies. And never forget that they knew it was wrong. When Lynndie England and her colleagues at Abu Ghraib were exposed visiting inhuman brutality on their captives, nobody in the Bush administration came to their defense. Nobody spoke then about the need for enhanced interrogation techniques to save American lives. Instead, they kept silent, denounced the atrocities, and insisted that "we don't torture". We now know that they were lying, but it was the fact that they understood the need to lie that remains the most incriminating piece of evidence against them.

And now, finally, comes word of just how organized the effort was and just how high up it reached. They actually sat in a room, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld and (God help us) Colin Powell, and they personally directed who would be tortured and to what degree. Perhaps they did not all consent to the actions that took place, but they all sat there without leaving the room, phoning their secretaries, and dictating a letter of resignation. Leave it to John Ashcroft—poor, overmatched, overwhelmed John Ashcroft—to provide the single, inadequate cautionary voice, speculating out loud that the activities taking place inside that room would be judged harshly by history. But he didn’t quit either.

The question is not whether the need for information was acute. Of course it was. They truly did have no idea when, where, or how devastating the next attack would be. Most of them probably did fear for the safety of the American people and they were surely motivated by a desire to prevent the next terrorist atrocity. None of them, I'm sure, took any pleasure in what they were doing (though I suppose I shouldn't necessarily speak for Cheney).

But that's the point, really. Torture can always be justified, if that's what we set out to do. Indeed, that is why we make it illegal and why we make that illegality unequivocal. History tells us that the temptation to torture can be enormous and that people consumed by a focus on ends often find themselves becoming increasingly permissive about the means. That's the reason we say no ahead of time.

Office Doors and Free Speech

2008-04-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

There are two types of college professors: those who post cartoons and slogans on their office doors, and those who do not. I fall into the latter category, though I generally have no problem with my colleagues who decorate their academic portals with pithy observations from "Dilbert" or "Ziggy" or even some hack editorial cartoonist. I simply prefer not to have my students know too much about me, other than what I choose to present in class. More important, I don’t want to have crowds milling around my office chattering and otherwise interrupting my deep intellectual reveries ("Why did I draft Pedro Martínez when Daisuke was still on the board?").

For the most part, office decorations fall safely into First Amendment territory. I say this guardedly, however, since I believe that a college campus is not the equivalent of the public square and that office doors are state property (we're assuming non-private institutions here, since the argument is constitutional). I think it is possible, for example, to argue that the walls inside the office are more protected than a doorway visible from the hall, or even that one's office merits more scrutiny than the bumper of one's personal vehicle. But generally I don't think we should be looking for reasons to restrict anyone's free expression.

I bring this up because InsideHigherEd.com features a story this morning about one Richard Crandall, a social sciences professor at Lake Superior State University in Michigan. It seems that Professor Crandall is a political conservative who posts provocative comic strips and other materials on his office door. Here's how IHE describes it:

"Items included a photo of Ronald Reagan, pictures mocking Hillary Clinton, a sign posting a 'Notice of the Weekly Meeting of the White, Male, Heterosexual Faculty and Staff Association (WMHFSA),' and various cartoons about abortion, Islamic terrorism and other topics. One depicts two hooded women looking over a photo album. One says, 'And that’s my youngest son, Hakim. He’ll be martyring in the fall.' The other replies, 'They blow up so fast.'"

The university has evidently demanded the removal of at least some of this material, claiming that it may cause a hostile environment for, presumably, gay and Muslim students. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has now entered the fray with the predictable argument that Lake Superior's actions constitute viewpoint discrimination, pointing out that liberal professors who wallpaper their doors have not been similarly sanctioned. According to the article in IHE, left-wing faculty members have displayed an "'Exxpose Exxon' slogan and an 'Honor Veterans: No More War' bumper sticker, while another door bears a sign asking if the Bush administration works for 'Big Oil and Gas'."

My first thought is that if FIRE scoured the campus and those were the most offensive liberal paraphernalia they could find, either they weren't trying very hard or Lake Superior State University is a pretty mild-mannered place. It would be hard for even the most hyper-sensitive conservative to feel personally intimidated or otherwise abused by those rather mainstream sentiments. I guess maybe if someone's mom worked for Exxon he might be a little out of sorts, but really, if that's the best FIRE can do, maybe they ought to mount a less hackneyed argument.

Regardless, the real question here is not whether liberals are getting away with murder while conservatives are being ticketed for jaywalking. Rather, the issue is the degree to which the First Amendment protects speech that creates a hostile environment and expresses sentiments that undermine a university's mission. The other point, of course, is whether Professor Crandall's entryway offerings actually crossed that line, but let's leave that to the side for a moment.

The judicial system has already made clear that speech and expression which would otherwise be protected may, in fact, be prohibited in the workplace. I once saw a highly offensive bumper sticker on a car that read, "No More Mr. Nice Guy. Down on Your Knees, Bitch". I believe that the unqualified jackass who chose to adorn his vehicle in such a manner is protected by the First Amendment. I also believe that if he were a college professor (little chance of that, I suspect) and attached the sticker to his office door, the administration would have every right to order him to remove it and sanction him if he did not. This would be true not only because it would likely fall afoul of sexual harassment law, but because it would undermine the university's mission to provide a learning environment free of personal ridicule based on sex, race, ethnicity, etc.

Obviously, this doesn't mean we set the standard around our most easily offended students and employees. But we are not, as the right-wing keeps reminding us, in the self-expression business; we are in the education business. And those things that make students feel unwelcome on the basis of who they are may, in fact, interfere with a college's ability to perform its primary function. I think, for instance, we would all agree that no professor should be allowed to feature a Confederate or Nazi flag anywhere in the officeplace. I would feel the same way about any colleague who adorned his or her door with a slogan such as "White People are Pigs".

So we've already dismantled much of the usual argument made by groups such as FIRE. The remaining question, then, is whether Professor Crandall went too far in his hallway postings. The short answer is, I'm not sure. Clearly, Ronald Reagan's portrait is acceptable, as is a cartoon ridiculing Hillary Clinton, so long as the attack is primarily based on her politics and doesn't, say, use the B-word. The anti-abortion pieces are also likely protected, as are any other conservative equivalents of "Exxpose Exxon" and "No More War". I'd probably even give Professor Crandall a pass on the "White, Male, Heterosexual Faculty and Staff Association" so long as it did not specifically attack gay and lesbian students.

The anti-Muslim cartoon, however, troubles me. On the one hand, it is clearly a statement against terrorism. On the other hand, I might want to know how Muslim students react to it. Do they regard it as primarily political or primarily racial? Do they feel singled out for ridicule and do they consider the cartoon to be part of a broader hostile environment in Professor Crandall's classroom or on the Lake Superior campus?

The typical right-wing response to all this is to tell the offended students to grow a tougher skin. But that sort of argument gets us nowhere. We all agree—at least I think we do—that some forms of expression (the swastika, for one) have no place in the halls of academia. Therefore, it is no longer a question of unfettered free expression, but rather where and when to draw the line.

Blast From the Past

2008-04-09T06:01:00.001-07:00

My day job has the best of me at the moment, so I've reached into the archives (i.e., stuff I wrote before I had a blog) to see what I can post. The following is from 2002. In its defense, the ACLU finally found its voice a year or two after this was written, but its unwillingness to launch a full-throated protest during the sensitive period immediately post-9/11 was costly to them and to the nation. They--and we--have been playing catch-up ever since.

The more depressing thing about re-reading what I wrote six years ago is how many of the outrages I mention are now essentially facts of life in Bush's America. And even I didn't anticipate back then that my country would add its name to the roster of those who torture. I wonder how many more years it will be before we right ourselves.

Anyway, here are my thoughts from the summer of '02:

I love the American Civil Liberties Union. I have been a member of the ACLU, on and off, for a quarter century. No organization in the United States has been more vigilant in patrolling the frontier between freedom and tyranny. And while I wish that they would at least reluctantly acknowledge that the Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights (innocent gun owners deserve protection, too), only the deliberately dishonest would accuse the ACLU of being a mere tool of the left. When the despicable, ignorant, malicious, and constitutionally-protected Nazis needed a permit to march through a heavily Jewish Chicago suburb in the late 1970s, the ACLU was there, fingers clamped tightly over noses, to insist that they receive it.

Yet here we are, ten months after September 11, and I don’t know if maybe I’ve spent too much time watching trailers for that new Scooby-Doo movie, but all I can say is: ACLU, where are you?

Foreigners are languishing in prison without being charged with a crime. The government is planning to listen in on confidential attorney-client conversations. Wiretaps are as easy for cops to obtain as jelly donuts. Government agents have access to your computer records whenever it strikes their fancy. And now, American citizens are being detained indefinitely because the Attorney General believes that they might—might!—be planning to do something nasty.

Hel-looooooo?

I presume that the ACLU opposes each of these assaults on civil liberties. On their website (www.aclu.org), they opine that President Bush’s proposed Department of Homeland Security is “long on secrecy, short on needed accountability”. That less-than-forceful condemnation can be found just below a link to a story entitled, “Appeals Court Rejects School Teacher's Attempt to Keep Transgender Employees from Bathrooms”.
Now I don’t want to denigrate the need of the transgendered for lavatory liberation, but what in the name of Clarence Darrow is going on here? It’s as if your doctor, as you staggered into the emergency room bleeding from the ears, immediately started tending to the hangnail on your big toe.

There will be time to struggle for restroom equality. There will be time for battling rural southern judges who want to plaster the Ten Commandments on every public facility from the crick to the holler. There will be time for safeguarding the rights of high school students to wear vulgar t-shirts celebrating the latest talentless shock band.

But that time is not now.

This, my friends, is the civil liberties Super Bowl. The Bush Administration isn’t flicking specks of paint off the fenders of the Constitution any more; they are under the hood pulling out the wires and dislodging the hoses. Habeas corpus. Attorney-client privilege. Speedy and public trial. The right to face your accuser. The protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The presumption of innocence. These are the foundations of what it means to be a free people, and those foundations are currently being toppled to the overwhelming delight of a terrified nation. This is no time for position papers and a couple of timid lawsuits. This is time for a loud, indignant, and sustained campaign to preserve our birthright.

Maybe an organized, vocal, and relentless ACLU presence wouldn’t matter. Maybe people are so angry and vengeful that they are willing to barter our national heritage for a pound of Osama bin Laden’s flesh. Or maybe after nearly a year of red alerts and ceaseless government warnings about anthrax and smallpox and water-, air-, and food-borne contaminants, Americans are willing to torch every sheet of yellowed parchment in the National Archives just to make it all go away. But right now we don’t know, because only one side of the argument is being heard, unless you count the occasional hapless law professor who wanders into Bill O’Reilly’s intellectual slaughterhouse to face some smug Heritage Foundation type who invariably tut-tuts about the naiveté of overage flower children.

Only the ACLU has the record, the credibility, and the gravitas to lead this fight, to present the American people with the other side of the debate. Only the ACLU can rally the troops, forge the battle plan, and provide courage to the millions of Americans who fiercely oppose the Administration’s actions, but currently feel isolated and vulnerable. Only the ACLU can bring the intellectual firepower to the table that can match wits with cable television’s dreary procession of former prosecutors, terrorism “experts”, retired soldiers, and war-loving think tank geeks.

The stakes could not be higher. ACLU, where are you?

Absolut Stupidity

2008-04-08T06:09:00.000-07:00

If you're over 30, you can probably remember a time when CNN was a legitimate news organization. Even in its heyday, of course, it could be soft: Larry King has held down a position there since the 1980s. But first and foremost, Ted Turner's Atlanta franchise took news gathering and reporting seriously. When the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, the network had reporters on the ground in Baghdad providing first-hand accounts, with pictures, of the initial U.S. bombing of the city. In just fifteen years, CNN became the go-to station whenever a national crisis occurred.

During this period, Turner Broadcasting created a companion station, CNN Headline News, meant to provide a television version of the news radio outlets that had become so popular in many of the nation's largest cities. Every half hour, the station would update the top stories, and follow that with sports, entertainment, and human interest features. It was not a channel you'd care to watch for more than an hour or so, but it did keep the promise of the old radio broadcasters: "You give us 22 minutes, and we'll give you the world."

Eventually, the Fox News Channel signed on the air, with its format of conservative propaganda dressed up as news reporting. If CNN modeled itself after news radio, FOX patterned itself after right-wing talk radio, emphasizing controversy, heated (and usually one-sided) debate, and trivial local stories intended to outrage the sensibilities of the average rube. In addition, since journalism was secondary, FOX did not need to worry about the credentials of its on-air talent. Thus, they hired a roster of attractive blonde newsreaders along with some pretty boys for the ladies. To the country's everlasting disgrace, this format was hugely successful and FOX soon became the cable TV news ratings king.

Around the time this was happening, I happened to meet a well-known CNN reporter who spoke darkly of the changes that were already taking place in Atlanta. Overreacting to the loss of a chunk of their audience, he said, the network was revamping itself to become more like FOX. Hard news gave way to even more opinion shows. Human interest stories presided. The new faces coming to the screen looked more and more as though they were recruited from modeling—rather than journalism—school.

The Headline News Network has obviously taken the biggest hit. No longer primarily an outlet for straight news coverage, HNN is now anchored by Nancy Grace's "Guilty Until Proven Innocent" broadcast and Glenn Beck's moronic thuggishness. And on those occasions when some attractive young female teacher beds an eighth grade boy, the station will often go with the sort of wall-to-wall coverage that used to characterize a major political assassination.

The flagship network, CNN, still covers the major news stories, but far more superficially than before. Their analysis of the current presidential campaign, for example, has been especially useless, emphasizing point-counterpoint talking heads and pundits who obsess over the latest trivial gaffe or two-percent fluctuation in the public opinion polls. To be fair, CNN has never been entirely innocent in this regard—they first brought political food fighting to television with the late, unlamented "Crossfire", a full decade before FOX took to the air, where friendly, ineffectual, septuagenarian Tom Braden would play Colmes to Pat Buchanan's Hannity.

In keeping with its initial commitment to comprehensive news coverage, CNN hired a young Seattle news reporter with a Harvard economics degree to anchor its business reporting. With Lou Dobbs at its helm, "Moneyline" became one of the network's most successful programs. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Dobbs was a straight-laced cheerleader for the financial markets, speaking the same language as his Wall Street audience.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, however, Lou Dobbs metamorphosed into an anti-corporate populist, raging against outsourcing and downsizing. No longer a reporter, he has become something akin to the Peter Finch character in the movie "Network", mad as hell and no longer willing to take it. Since the CNN brass had, by that time, become as thoroughly cynical as the fictional executives from Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 masterpiece, the new Dobbs was soon allowed to restructure his show, and it became "Lou Dobbs Tonight". So rebranded, the subject matter was no longer simply economic news, but rather whatever happened to be sticking in the host's craw on any given evening.

This new format, of course, has become hugely successful, and Dobbs is now considered a galvanizing voice in American politics with his rants against corporate greed, the emergence of "Communist China", and, most notably, Mexican immigration. Almost single-handedly, Dobbs has returned the hoary and bigoted term "illegal alien" into popular discourse. While he claims to be unprejudiced against Mexico or its people, many of his reports not only address citizenship issues, but also concentrate on crime and corruption south of the border. The unmistakable message: there's something wrong with this government and these people, and we need to keep their inherent corruption from destroying our country. Dobbs also regularly features stories on crimes committed by undocumented workers, the more violent and grisly, the better.

But more than anything else, Lou Dobbs is an expert in awakening the inner bigot that evidently lives in millions of Americans. Playing off nativism and tribalism, he pits group against group and stokes outrage over the most trivial occurrences. If Mexican flags outnumber Old Glory at a Cinco de Mayo parade, count of Dobbs to point it out. On St. Patrick's Day, however, he somehow never manages to send one of his sycophant reporters to Fifth Avenue to count the prevalence of banners from the Irish Free State.

The latest stupidity, and the news that motivated this entry, is Dobbs' attempt to raise the national blood pressure over an ad placed by Sweden's Absolut vodka in a Mexican periodical. The ad shows a map of North America, with most of the Southwestern United States under Mexican control. The caption is, "In an Absolut World".

This would be easily recognized by any impartial observer as little more than some nationalist chest-thumping, the kind Americans do with regularity. To Dobbs, however, this provides still more proof of the Mexican desire to administer the reconquista, the takeover of land that was stolen by the United States during the Nineteenth Century. All that's needed now is a call to rename tacos, "freedom sandwiches".

Somewhere under a rock, Rupert Murdoch must be very proud.

Generation Gap

2008-04-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

Defining and pigeonholing generations can be fun as long as you don't take it too seriously. Pop psychologists regularly publish books and articles explaining how the diverse experiences of millions of Americans can be neatly summarized by the era in which they grew up. Thus, you have the Greatest (or G.I.) Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation Jones, Generation X, and the Millennials.

Ever since John F. Kennedy, at 43 years old, captured the White House in 1960, the presidency has been dominated first by the G.I.s (JFK through Bush the First) and more recently by the Boomers (Clinton and Bush the Second). If anything, this reality should give pause to anyone who seeks to explain presidential behavior and success in terms of generational values. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter exhibited none of the boldness of Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush's callow recklessness had little in common with Bill Clinton's timid triangulation.

Still, the human brain is programmed to look for patterns, and it's difficult to convince people to stop thinking in terms of generational identity even after you point out that Bob Dylan and Wayne Newton were born less than a year apart. So let's go ahead and play along. How will their generational affiliation influence the behavior of the current crop of presidential candidates?

If you're into this sort of discussion, the first thing you notice is that two previously unrepresented generations are likely to face off for the grand prize in November. John McCain represents the Silent Generation's last chance to make it into the history books. The Silents, born between 1930 and 1944 (or thereabouts) have not only failed to produce a chief executive, they have coughed up just two major party nominees, the less-than-memorable Fritz Mondale and Michael Dukakis during the 1980s. If McCain is denied, the youngest of their tribe will be 68 in 2012 and the oldest 82.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is the first credible candidate to be offered by Generation Jones (I hate the name, but it seems to have caught on), the post-Boomers born between 1956 and 1965. Superficially, at least, Obama possesses all the core characteristics of a Joneser, having avoided military service, snorted cocaine, and written a painfully introspective book about getting in touch with his feelings. Somewhere hidden deep within an old box of keepsakes is probably a little yellow smiley-face button.

We are rarely treated to a presidential contest between "father" and "son" generations, so the 2008 election (assuming Boomer Hillary doesn't crash the party) should at least be entertaining. The last time this happened was 1992, with Poppy Bush barely disguising his contempt for that draft-dodging, pot-smoking, moral degenerate, Bill Clinton. We now understand that Bush was probably just working out his feelings about his eldest son, but at the time it felt like Ali-Frazier III, the rubber match between heavyweight generations. The G.I.s won the battle of 1968, the Boomers knocked out Dick Nixon in 1974, and it was time for these two aging pugs to have one last go at it. (What we didn’t realize at the time was that the real battle in 1992 was between the left- and right-wing factions of the Boomer generation itself, a contest that continues to this day.)

What, then, should we expect from this latest intergenerational contest? Well, here are two descriptions, one of each generation:

"[They] appear to offer a more conservative and less secular approach to politics…"

"[T]hey became empathizers, mediators, and conciliators…[and] they preferred more intellectual approaches to problems, and tried to avoid nasty confrontations."

How about it? Which one better describes Barack Obama and which captures the essence of John McCain? I'm setting you up, of course; the first passage refers to Gen Jones and the second to the Silents born during the '30s. Neither candidate, it seems, is an exemplar of his generation the same way that Bush Senior and Clinton were of theirs. Indeed, strong evidence suggests that Obama's cohort, having come of age during Ronald Reagan's presidency and inexplicably fallen under the B-movie actor's spell, is the most Republican of any age group. Without their ballots, John Kerry would currently be running for re-election. The Silent Generation, on the other hand, is far more likely to support Democratic candidates at all levels.

What does all this mean? Hell if I know. But it does suggest that any pop psych "theory" that wants to lump John McCain together with Michael Dukakis probably shouldn't be given too much credence.

Taking the Week Off

2008-04-06T06:21:00.000-07:00

Now that it's Sunday, I can tell you that I decided to take last week off. I didn't miss work, or stop bathing, or anything stupid like that. Instead, I (mostly) swore off the 2008 presidential campaign. I blogged about it, of course, but I generally avoided watching the cable news networks or checking out the more political websites. Old habits die hard, so I didn't exactly go cold turkey, but I came closer than I have in at least a couple of years.

In short, I spent the past week living the life of a typical American.

This wasn't something I planned. I don't want to sound like one of those annoying, self-important yuppies who annually observe "Turn Off Your TV Week" and then brag about it to anyone who will listen. I just got fed up. I detest manufactured political news and that's about all there is out there right now. Desperate for something to talk about, the various anchors and their predictable lineup of talking heads are left to speculate on the earth-shattering importance of some trivial gaffe made by one or another candidate's deputy vice-director for photo ops. Even Keith Olbermann has become increasingly unwatchable as he slowly embraces the troubling anti-Hillary bias of his MSNBC stablemates.

So I just quit. And I'm glad I did. From the outside, the presidential campaign seems so much less urgent. Who cares about Clinton and Obama when March Madness is in full swing and the baseball season awaits? Why follow John McCain's cross-country biography tour (Good call, John! Remind everyone how old you are.) when your cable system has over 200 channels of counter-programming, at least five of which are running one of the Godfather movies? My iPod contains well over 5,000 of my favorite songs, even the worst of which (probably "Chevy Van") brings me more pleasure than any one of Chris Matthews' unhinged diatribes.

And it's not like you can completely tune out the candidates regardless of how hard you try. You flip on the local news during a severe weather watch and there they are. Their names come up constantly in the late night comedy monologues. Even blogs that are decidedly apolitical occasionally make passing reference to some controversy that occurred on the campaign trail. I am vaguely aware, for example, that some hospital in Ohio is denying one of Senator Clinton's stories about how they refused to treat an ailing woman who subsequently died. I'm sure the fanatics over at Daily Kos are having a field day with this. (Just checked. They are.)

I'll probably spend the next few days slowly working back into my regular routine of TV watching and web surfing. I don't want to fall too far behind. But it was nice to be reminded that politics is only a small corner of the world, and that millions of Americans insist on treating it that way. Many of them will start paying attention once the nominees are chosen and the race begins in earnest. But they will not dwell on each meaningless detail of the campaign just because Brit Hume or Lou Dobbs or Tucker Carlson tells them to. (I know Tucker no longer has his own show. Evidently, the public appetite for smugness is finite.)

In the meantime, GO [INSERT NAME OF FAVORITE BASEBALL TEAM HERE]!

Exposing the Myth of the "PC University"

2008-04-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

The beauty of the right-wing lie is that once it works its way into the national bloodstream there is virtually nothing that can be done to banish it. Even today, in the face of a mountain of contradictory evidence, millions of our fellow citizens believe not only that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden collaborated on the 9/11 attacks, but that at least some of the al Qaeda hijackers held Iraqi passports. Gullible Americans express fears that Barack Obama secretly pledges loyalty to radical Islam and intends to destroy the United States from within. About one in every fifty cars you pass on the interstate carries someone who is convinced that Bill Clinton is a rapist or that his wife is a murderer. Ours is a nation of conspiracy theorists and the far right has exploited that fact with enormous success.

In my business, higher education, the most persistent lie involves the prevalence of ideological—that is, liberal—brainwashing on college campuses. From the basic, but largely irrelevant, truth that a majority of college professors support Democratic candidates for public office, conservative rabble rousers have spun tall tales of rampant political indoctrination by academic radicals who use their classrooms as pulpits and ridicule or even fail students who stand up for God, motherhood, and country. Entire blogs and organizations are dedicated to this proposition or, more importantly, to feeding this idea to the ignorant and ill-informed.

The dozen or so of you who frequent this blog are aware that this is an issue I address periodically. The reason I do so is because the myth of liberal indoctrination has burrowed its way into thousands of narrow minds and has become something of a nuisance on its way to being a threat. Fifteen years ago, few parents or students ever asked me about my political leanings or those of my colleagues. Now it happens all the time. Junior McCarthyites monitor lectures in the social sciences and humanities, reporting any hint of political bias—usually imagined—to websites designed to shame and embarrass. Ignorant and pandering legislators introduce, and occasionally pass, bills designed to foster "ideological diversity" in academia, a form of affirmative action for conservatives.

As I have pointed out on several occasions, most of us who make our careers in this business find the whole discussion bizarre and perplexing. I have not once, in twenty years in higher education, heard anyone discuss a job applicant's political views. Generally, they aren't known or knowable, but even when they are, nobody cares. The truly important divisions in most departments involve theory and methodology, neither of which has an inherently ideological basis. In my own field, I have seen liberal and conservative professors unite against what they see as the unwarranted dominance of quantitative research in the discipline.

I have also, at various times in my career, held administrative posts that compelled me to hear student grievances. Most of these, of course, involved the allegedly unfair application of professors' grading standards. Some, however, concerned allegations of bias in the classroom, with a small number of students claiming that their grades suffered because they didn't tell the professor what he or she wanted to hear.

I am sure this sort of thing does happen. Nevertheless, in my experience, over 90% (actually, just about 100%) of these accusations fall apart when hard evidence is requested. Yes, a few professors get off a snide anti-Bush joke every now and again, and delicate sensibilities can be easily offended. But I have yet to see proof of a single instance where an instructor pushed a political viewpoint so hard that basic course material went unaddressed. Nor have any of my students ever substantiated an allegation of grading skewed by ideology.

Again, I realize that there are a few bad actors out there. Some professors sleep with their students. Some commit acts of sexual harassment. Others no doubt reduce students' grades because they support the Iraq War. The right-wing noise machine revels in locating these rare cases and arguing that the plural of anecdote is data.

Still, the vast majority of academics that I know have too much respect for their students (and too much modesty about their own feeble powers of persuasion) to try to indoctrinate anyone. They dutifully present all sides of every argument. They glow with pride when a frustrated student finally asks, "So which is it? Are you a Democrat or a Republican?"

The good news is that we are finally developing hard empirical evidence that refutes the conservative case against academia. In the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education comes word of a study demonstrating that the people who know us best—our current and recent students—are the least likely to believe the right-wing myth about political indoctrination. Says the Chronicle:

"That's the chief finding of a question from a survey conducted through The Chronicle/Gallup Panel that asked Americans: "How often do you believe that college professors use their classrooms as a platform for their personal politics?

"Only 29 percent of those age 25 to 34, and who are more likely to have spent time on a college campus in recent years, responded that professors "often" use their classrooms to espouse their political views. But that response grew to 41 percent of those between the ages of 45 and 54, and to nearly 60 percent of those over age 65."

Conservative academic critics, of course, willfully ignore the study's most important conclusion and immediately jump to that figure of 29%. "It's only by contrast," says right-wing blogger Erin O'Connor, "that 29 percent can be seen as 'only' 29 percent. There are more than 14 million college students in this country at any given time. 29 percent of that figure is a whopping number…"

Why yes, yes it is. Except that anyone who understands the situation knows that a hefty share, probably the vast majority, of that 29% is made up of ideologically charged students (left and right, but mostly right) who consider even a balanced presentation to be hopelessly one-sided. If a professor dares to mention that the Japanese had some legitimate grievances leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she is biased. If an instructor even broaches the subject of institutional racism, then he is an anti-American radical.

Indeed, the most telling number in the entire survey is this one: "About 70 percent of Republicans but only 17 percent of Democrats said professors often use their classrooms as political platforms…" Right-wing students are told to expect faculty bias, and so they naturally find it, even where it doesn't necessarily exist.

Unable to refute the raw power of the numbers, professional academic critics simply move the goalposts. "The problem of the PC university," says Anne Neal, who can't even string six words together without trafficking in hoary clichés, "is not so much unrelenting political rants, although they exist, so much as it is that certain topics are not taught, certain disciplinary perspectives are not covered, and certain questions can't be asked." Adds O'Connor, the real issue is not "the political demagogue stumping for lefty causes in class", but rather the "soft bias that is rampant on campus."

In anyone else's world, of course, these statements would be accurately seen as concessions that the conservative critique of the academy is, in fact, terribly overstated. Evidently, hard-core indoctrination efforts are few and far between (take that, David Horowitz!). Neal and O'Connor, however, would have us believe that the relative absence of classroom demagoguery itself simply masks a more insidious and pernicious form of mind control.

Regardless, the fact that millions of American are being hoodwinked into believing the myth of the "PC university" remains troubling. People who have never set foot on a university campus (or who haven't done so since Eisenhower was president) are full participants in our democracy. We must, therefore, somehow find a way to get the truth out to them, the truth that the overwhelming majority of our students already know.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today

2008-04-04T05:46:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in my elementary school classroom when the campus intercom brought word that John F. Kennedy had been cut down in Dallas. I was just waking up and coming to breakfast five years later when the Today Show informed me that Bobby had also been murdered. I was in a cab on the way to the airport when the driver mentioned that the space shuttle Challenger had just exploded. And on 9/11, I was headed to work and happened to flip on the radio, only to hear Peter Jennings' voice on what should have been a music station.

But I have no lasting memory of where I was or what I was doing when I first learned about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I understood that Dr. King's death was a major news story and I knew him to be a good man fighting on the right side of history. From my thoroughly Yankee vantage point, however, the civil rights movement was something that was happening "down there" in the South, a hopelessly backward region made up of inexplicably vicious white people and heroic, long-suffering descendants of former slaves. There was no question whose side I was on, but, as a child, I always regarded it as someone else's fight.

The fortieth anniversary of Dr. King's death is being observed with any number of stories speculating as to what might have happened had James Earl Ray misfired on that terrible spring day. What would Dr. King have done in the forty years between 1968 and 2008? How would he be regarded by succeeding generations, both black and white? What role would he have played in American life as the Movement matured, and issues of fundamental equality gave way to thornier matters involving school busing and affirmative action?

It is impossible to answer these questions, of course, with any confidence. Dr. King remains forever 39 years old in our minds, but in reality, he would have changed with the times as the rest of us did. Indeed, his lieutenants traveled in a variety of directions during subsequent years. Andrew Young and John Lewis went into politics, the former an increasingly moderate Democrat and the latter an unapologetic liberal. Jesse Jackson founded operation PUSH in Chicago, twice ran for president, and ultimately emerged as the most visible—and controversial—of the Movement's alumni. Dr. King's immediate successor, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, carried forward his mentor's cause, though with far less success, before ultimately throwing his support behind the 1980 presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan, a man who made his first significant campaign appearance, either pointedly or obliviously, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered less than twenty years earlier.

The country was changing in 1968. Dr. King recognized those changes before most other Americans did, and he was already acting in response to them at the time of his death. He understood not only that the dismantling of the Jim Crow regime represented merely the opening round in the fight for equality, but he also knew that the next steps would engender increasing white resistance, and not just in the south. Against the advice of many of his advisers, for example, Dr. King became a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War, a conflict that he accurately saw as being fought primarily by the children or poor and working class Americans.

The white backlash was already in full swing in April, 1968, though most observers had yet to notice. George Wallace of Alabama had just started to take his toxic politics north of the Mason-Dixon Line, revealing broad support beyond the boundaries of the Old Confederacy. Before the decade was out, Daniel Patrick Moynihan would pen his infamous "benign neglect" memo to Richard Nixon, urging the new president to put issues of racial justice on the back burner. Dr. King himself was the target of increasingly angry newspaper editorials, as white journalists decried his unwillingness to keep in his place and stay out of controversial issues of foreign and economic policy.

It is quite possible, therefore, that white America, convinced that various laws and court rulings had finally settled the issue of equality, would have started to tune out Dr. King as the 1960s came to an end. I suspect that my family represented much of the northern, Caucasian population, sympathetic to the civil rights cause, but seeing it far too dispassionately as something happening elsewhere. How long might it have been before the first white pundit, weary of the Movement and frightened of the implications of its nationalization, carelessly accused Dr. King of playing the "race card"?

I do not wish be misunderstood. Dr. King could never have become irrelevant. He was too bright, too charismatic, too powerful to be ignored. Certainly, Young and Lewis and, especially, Jackson have remained in the public eye for the past four decades. But like his protégés, Dr. King's image would have become more complex as his movement became more complex. And the vicious, often racist background noise about infidelity and plagiarism would have attached itself to a living man rather than an honored martyr, and Dr. King would have found himself forced to wade through the shallow celebrity culture that emerged in the 1970s and has dominated the media ever since.

I wish Dr. King were still with us, but not because I imagine that he would have ushered in some magical era of racial healing. Instead, the Reverend's death deprived the country of a man of enduring stature and transcendent credibility just at the moment that the civil rights movement was about to face the backlash, Nixon's "Southern Strategy", and the divisive politics of the 1970s and 1980s. I'd like to think that, when Ronald Reagan began to spin his crypto-racist tales of Welfare Queens, Martin Luther King would have been there to match the Gipper jab for jab, bringing his own charisma to the fight. And when the Republicans assailed affirmative action by appropriating Dr. King's ringing words about being judged by the content of our character, the great man himself would have put them in their place.

But he's gone, and all the speculation in the world will never tell us how much we truly lost on that early April day in Memphis forty years ago. Still, many of Dr. King's greatest gifts remain with us today. Perhaps the greatest of all is the recognition, four decades later, that the civil rights movement was and is a truly American struggle, and not simply something involving someone else somewhere else.

End the Tyranny of Caucuses!

2008-04-03T05:04:00.001-07:00

Let's look ahead to November's general election and assume, as is now likely, that Barack Obama wins the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. But let's also make one further assumption: Obama loses to John McCain and the Democrats blow their best chance to recapture the White House in twelve years. Be honest: it could happen. The polls are pretty much dead even right now, and the Republicans have an undeniable Electoral College advantage.

I'm not predicting an Obama defeat, you understand. Obviously, unfavorable economic news on top of foreign policy failure typically bodes poorly for the incumbent party and its nominee. And John McCain is perceived by many as an old guy who knows less about economics than the average eBay bidder. Plus, Obama is eloquent, inspiring, he's the choice of a new generation (or was that Pepsi?), etc., etc., etc.

Still, the scenario by which Obama loses remains fairly easy to envision, even without a new and devastating terrorist attack. While the inflammatory words of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, may not have affected his support among Democrats, they continue to burn in the ears of independents and marginal Republicans. In addition, the bar will be set so high for Obama at this fall's presidential debates that McCain will merely have to speak in a language vaguely resembling English to acquit himself successfully. And we still have no idea what Rovian viciousness the GOP has up its sleeve in anticipation of an Obama candidacy.

And what state is Obama going to bring into the Democratic fold that John Kerry didn't capture in his losing effort four years ago? Hillary Clinton decisively won the two big swing states, Florida and Ohio, and Floridians in particular may well blame Obama for depriving them of their right to participate in the nomination process. Winning Missouri or Colorado would be insufficient; it's not even clear that winning both of them would get Obama over the hump. When the ballots are counted in seven months, most of Obama's best primary and caucus states, those in the Great Plains, Rockies, and Deep South, will support the Republican Party just as they have in nearly every election since Lyndon Johnson beat down Barry Goldwater nearly half a century ago.

So sure, Obama could definitely win, but he could also lose. For the sake of argument, let's assume the latter. The Wednesday after the election, as the Democrats spend another cold November evening in the grip of despair, one question will pass nearly every lip: Would we have done better with Hillary? That, of course, would be impossible to know with any accuracy, but the possibility would nevertheless haunt the party faithful.

The answer would obviously depend on exactly how Obama lost. If he was held to just the Kerry states, with perhaps a pickup of Iowa and New Mexico, speculation will center once more on Ohio and Florida, and Obama's fairly one-sided primary losses in both places. If he fell just one small state short, as Al Gore did in 2000, pundits might wonder if a likely Hillary win in Arkansas would have made the difference. The point is that should Barack Obama lose in November, nothing that happened this spring will matter. Instead, the party will be dominated by what-if games.

Should this occur, perhaps one good thing could come out of it. The Democrats might finally, at long last, put an end to the tyranny of the caucus. We have known for years that caucuses are easily dominated by ideological fanatics. Most average voters have better things to do than to show up at some schoolhouse or firehouse and give up part of their evening to interact with strangers. To do so takes a special measure of either political interest or single-minded devotion to a candidate. There were, to my knowledge, few if any Democratic caucuses back in 1972, but if there had been several, George McGovern, with his ferocious support among anti-war activists, would have enjoyed overwhelming success in them. Caucus victories simply do not provide representative results.

I've made this point before, but it bears repeating. In the official Washington State caucus, held on February 9, Obama beat Clinton 68% to 31%, an absolute blowout. Ten days later, however, the state party held a non-binding "beauty contest" primary, in which voters' ballots would be merely symbolic. Despite the fact that most everyone knew that this was not the vote that counted, and despite the fact that the period between the caucus and the primary was filled almost non-stop with good news for Obama, the Illinois senator's edge over his New York colleague shrunk from 37% to just 5%. Oh yeah, and 638,000 more Washingtonians participated in the "meaningless" primary than bothered to show up for the binding caucus. There's an obvious lesson here, if the Democrats are willing to learn it.

Without the caucuses, the Democratic presidential campaign would be a virtual dead heat right now. Nobody would be haranguing Hillary about dropping out of the race because everyone would see that her support is, for all practical purposes, equal to Obama's. It is the caucuses, populated largely by ideologues, that have propelled Obama to the presumably insurmountable delegate lead he currently holds.

And perhaps the ideologues are right this time. Maybe Obama is the party's strongest candidate. But in a better system, we would still have a fair fight, and the nomination would still hang in the balance. We would not face the prospect of a frontrunner who is only now being vetted, one who has shown a general inability to win over electorates in most of the states the Democrats need to win in November.

If the Democratic Party somehow manages to lose this presidential election to an out of touch warmonger with a tenth grade economics education, it will not be a result of the fairly mild attacks that have marked the current race for the nomination. Nor will it be because of McCain's wisdom in backing the Iraq Surge, which has cut U.S. troop deaths to "only" one per day with no political settlement in sight. It will have nothing to do with Bill Clinton or James Carville or any of the other mouthy relics of the 1990s.

Instead, the fault will lie with the unfortunate prevalence of unrepresentative party caucuses. So get rid of the Super Delegates if you wish; they were never a particularly useful innovation to begin with. But if you are, like our friends at Daily Kos, going to go on about "people powered politics" or some other such alliterative nonsense, at least have the honesty to acknowledge that caucuses are every bit as elitist as smoke filled rooms. They are simply less concentrated on winning and more concerned with ideological purity.

Twilight of the Super Delegates

2008-04-02T05:25:00.001-07:00

Whatever happens between now and November, the 2008 election will almost certainly end the era of the Super Delegate. Back in the 1970s, the average voter did not consider it her birthright to choose each party's presidential nominee. In 1972, the Democrats allowed their selection process to be dominated by primary elections for the first time. Their reward was a 49-state defeat, with George McGovern losing to Richard Nixon in a landslide of historic proportions. When the party, appropriately chastened, decided to return at least some of the power to bosses and insiders, almost nobody complained.

The Democrats added the Super Delegates, political officeholders and party officials, as a check against the sort of ideological, populist uprising that gave McGovern the nomination. At the time, the press, pundits, and even most of the attentive public considered this a reasonable decision. Parties are in the business of winning elections, and if that means rolling back popular sovereignty a little, then so be it. Nobody back in 1973 would have expected the Democratic Party to drive into a ditch for the sake of honoring the results of a bunch of primary elections.

Times, of course, have changed. Over the years, not only has the system of choosing nominees through primaries and caucuses become institutionalized, it has also remained, for the most part, uncontroversial. One candidate would wrap up the nomination well before the convention and the Super Delegates would be irrelevant, serving only to rubber stamp the overwhelming choice of the Democratic electorate.

Things are obviously different this year. In all likelihood, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton will arrive at the party's Denver convention with enough elected delegates to secure victory. Suddenly, the Super Delegates have been rediscovered, and many voters—especially Obama supporters—are unhappy to learn that they can vote however they wish, even if that means giving the nomination to the second place candidate, in this case Senator Clinton.

This has been, to say the least, a public relations disaster for the Democrats. Obama and his fanatical internet supporters insist that any result in which the Super Delegates side with Hillary will mean that the nomination has been stolen. That this is a willfully ignorant interpretation of party procedures is beside the point. Despite the fact that these rules have been in place for over 35 years, the Obama camp acts as though the goalposts are being moved in the middle of the game. The pundits, many of whom have despised the Clintons since the 1990s, are all too happy to play along.

Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, who either frightens easily or secretly longs for an Obama victory (probably both), now argues that every Super Delegate should be prepared to publicize his or her choice by July 1. Barring the unexpected, this would put enormous pressure on the Supers to ratify the "people's choice", presumably Obama, even though he will have failed to secure the necessary delegates for the nomination. Dean suggests that the prospect of a brokered convention would be fatally damaging to the Democrats' prospects against John McCain and must, therefore, be avoided at all costs.

The Super Delegates, of course, were meant to introduce careful deliberation into the nomination process. Dean wants none of that. God forbid anyone refuse to turn Obama's plurality into a majority.

If Senator Obama wins the presidential election in November, his supporters, both in the grassroots and in the DNC, will have their decisions validated. The Super Delegates, they will say, are not only superfluous, but they almost prevented the right candidate from receiving the nomination and beating the Republicans. The internet devotees of "people powered politics" will, in their moment of triumph, insist on a return to the McGovern era rules in which virtually all delegates are selected through primaries and caucuses. Fair enough: to the victors go the spoils and all that.

Should Obama lose, however, these same people will attempt to blame Hillary Clinton and the Super Delegates for their own lack of wisdom and foresight. They will suggest that Clinton doomed Obama's bid by refusing to give up her campaign even after her efforts began to divide the party and deprive Obama of the head start he needed in the general election race. Without the Super Delegates, they will insist, Senator Clinton would have been forced, by mathematical imperative, to end her bid around the end of February, knowing that she could never win enough popular support to secure the nomination. Had she done so, Senator Obama could have spent the spring uniting the party and marshalling his resources for the fight against the GOP, rather than battling to prevent Hillary's Super Delegate coup.

The problem with both arguments, but especially the latter, is that history, unlike science fiction, allows us no glimpse into the counterfactual. Assuming Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, we will never know what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had succeeded in her strategy of rallying the Super Delegates behind her. Perhaps such an effort would have led to a triumphant Clinton/Obama ticket.

In a sense, the Democrats who created the role of the Super Delegate back in the 1970s should have seen this coming. Regardless of the supposed independence of these party officials, their actual purpose, to thwart the will of the people, always carried the risk of backlash. Imagine, for example, how George McGovern's supporters, in the angry heat of the Vietnam era, would have reacted if Lyndon Johnson's old vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had found a way to "steal" the nomination from their anti-war champion. A repeat of 1968 Chicago might have erupted right there on the glittering streets of Miami Beach. There are, in fact, worse things than losing 49 states (especially since Nixon had no coattails in '72 and would almost certainly have beaten Humphrey anyway).

Additionally, we should not necessarily assume that the wisdom of the smoke filled room is flawless. The last time Democratic Party regulars beat back an insurgent candidacy came in 1984, when Walter Mondale took the nomination from a young, charismatic Colorado senator named Gary Hart. That was also the second time that the Republicans achieved a 49-state Electoral College victory.

Still, there is an irony in the current dispute over the role of Super Delegates. Although the Democrats have lost five of the eight presidential elections held since 1972, this is the first time the Supers have ever been controversial. And yet, the Obama campaign, a grassroots groundswell largely fueled by ideologically-charged amateurs, represents precisely the kind of McGovern-like candidacy the Super Delegates were intended to scrutinize most carefully. But it appears that a frightened party will not allow them to do their job.

This is not to say that Barack Obama is facing a 49-state loss. He is not George McGovern, John McCain is not an incumbent, and 2008 is not 1972. There is every reason to believe that Senator Obama will be competitive all the way through to November. But it is barely April, we are just now learning the candidate's entire personal story, and the possibility remains that additional revelations—both good and bad—await. Insurgent candidacies, even those backed by millions of dollars and a new technology, are inherently risky.

Regardless, the Obama campaign, even if it accomplishes nothing else, will almost certainly succeed in ending the unexpectedly toothless reign of the Super Delegate.

Bill's Chill Pill

2008-04-01T06:03:00.001-07:00

Bill Clinton, invoking the slang of his 1990s heyday, told Democrats last week to "chill". Everything, he said, would be all right regardless of how the party's current primary campaign ultimately unfolded. Clinton obviously speaks from a biased perspective—he wants to silence those who insist his wife's perseverance is helping the GOP—but he also understands the dynamics of politics better than most of his peers.

He knows, first and foremost, that this has not been an especially bitter campaign. Nobody has crossed a line from which they cannot retreat. Either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could endorse the other without having any truly nasty sound bites thrown back in their faces. As I believe I've mentioned before, George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan's supply side tax proposals "voodoo economics" back in 1980, yet still ran victoriously as the Gipper's vice presidential running mate. No putdown that memorable has been spoken by either Democratic contender in 2008.

People who care deeply about politics sometimes forget that they live in a bubble of information that is largely unfamiliar to most of their fellow citizens. As high as primary turnout has been this year, the vast majority of Americans are not paying close attention to the current campaign. They do not watch Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. They know that Clinton and Obama are duking it out for the Democratic nomination, but they aren't familiar with too many of the details. These people will make up the majority of the electorate in the general election, and they will be untainted by all the charges and countercharges being leveled at moment.

By now, it is fairly clear how things are going to turn out for the Democrats this summer. Most likely, Barack Obama will hold onto his lead in the popular vote and the delegate count, winning, say, Oregon and North Carolina, and will coast to a fairly easy victory in Denver. Indeed, should that happen, making it fairly clear that even do-overs in Florida and Michigan would not save her, Hillary Clinton will, despite what she says now, probably concede the race prior to the Denver convention.

Many women voters will likely be upset with the treatment Senator Clinton has received from the media and from her fellow Democrats. But there is absolutely nothing about John McCain's testosterone-filled campaign of perpetual international combat that will appeal to the average feminist. McCain may want to woo frustrated independent women with a female vice presidential nominee, but the GOP bench is pretty thin in that department. So given the choice between the most progressive presidential nominee in years and a man who will appoint anti-abortion Supreme Court justices, Hillary Clinton's voters will turn out for Obama.

The other possibility, of course, is that Obama's candidacy will implode, he will lose almost all the rest of the primaries between now and June, and the two Democratic frontrunners will be virtually deadlocked heading into Denver. Should that occur, a movement of Super Delegates in Clinton's favor will not seem nearly as suicidal as it does now. Indeed, if Hillary runs the table for the next ninety days, even many of Obama's supporters will start to get cold feet.

Assuming Obama has not been further tarnished—whatever lead he currently enjoys, he cannot afford another Jeremiah Wright episode—Clinton would, at this point, almost certainly select him as her running mate. This would presumably mute, at least to some degree, the potential outrage from liberal activists and African Americans at Obama's come-from-ahead loss. And a Clinton-Obama ticket would be tough for John McCain to attack or beat (not that he wouldn't try).

Finally, if another scandal causes Obama to go into public opinion freefall, then nobody (except perhaps the Daily Kos dead-enders) could possibly begrudge Senator Clinton the nomination. Indeed, under such circumstances the party would no doubt be grateful for the chance to avoid disaster. Having invested this much in her race for the White House, and having seen the damaging revelations that have faced Senator Obama so far, this possibility may be exactly what keeps Hillary Clinton from throwing in the towel.

The problem with predicting how people will feel in August is that we have no idea what the political landscape will be at that time. Today is April Fool's Day. Just three months ago, when we popped the corks to welcome in the New Year, we had absolutely no idea that we'd be looking at an unresolved, roller-coaster Democratic contest by the end of March. So let's stop worrying about who will or won't be angry when the Democrats select their nominee more than four months from now.

Let's chill with Bill.

Anybody But Gore

2008-03-31T05:12:00.000-07:00

We need a fifty-first state and we need it now. It doesn’t matter how we do it. Add Puerto Rico or Guam, take on Saskatchewan, or buy Guadeloupe from the French. Carve West Virginia in half and create the state of East West Virginia. Annex the Moon and give it three electoral votes. I don't care as long as someone promises to hold a primary election next week. Because really, if we have to wait three more weeks for Pennsylvania to go to the polls, we're all going to go crazy.

The best evidence of this impending lunacy is the suggestion, which has received a staggering amount of airtime this week, that the Democrats should simply abandon both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and ask Al Gore to accept their presidential nomination. Al Gore! The man has already won a Nobel, an Oscar, a Grammy, and probably the Publishers' Clearinghouse grand prize. And now we want to give him the keys to the White House? Let's just award him the Stanley Cup while we're at it.

Seriously, though, this is truly a bad idea, the sort that only comes to you after your fifth beer or when you have a cable talk show and you've run out of things to discuss. Shall we start with the obvious point? What sort of reaction would the Democratic Party generate were they to dismiss both of their history making candidates in favor of an aging white guy who already failed in his two previous bids for the presidency? What would the slogan be? How about, "Al Gore: Because History Can Wait".

Also, isn't this supposed to be a "change" election? I know Hillary's husband was once president, but at least she is relatively new to public office and her gender does set her apart from all previous viable candidates. But how can we have a change election, an election about washing the foul taste of the past eight years out of our mouths, if our only choices are the two guys that George W. Bush beat back in 2000.

And it's not as though the media ever stopped holding Al Gore in contempt. If anything, his success away from politics has only made the bullying pundits angrier. Even today, we are still periodically treated to the hackneyed (and untrue) story about Gore claiming to have invented the internet. Do you really want to go through all that again during the most important election of our lifetime? Just let candidate Gore say that he ordered the filet mignon when it was really the T-bone, and the media dam will burst with all the old chestnuts about Al the serial exaggerator, the man with the weird penchant for making things up. After all, the guy even thinks he invented the freaking internet!

There's another thing, too, something that people forget now that Al Gore is a multimedia superstar. As a political candidate, he absolutely sucks. He ran as the incumbent party's nominee during a time of peace and prosperity and he lost. He faced off against a callow, ignorant, part-time politician who could barely form a coherent sentence and he finished second. He even managed to win the election but somehow screwed that up.

Did we mention that Al Gore once had the chance to select from hundreds of brilliant, charismatic, loyal Democrats to serve as his running mate and instead opted for Joe Lieberman. Not only did Lieberman bring his tiresome national nag act to the campaign trail, but he managed to do something that had previously been considered impossible: he actually lost a debate to Dick Cheney. And when the party needed him to fight for them in the noise and corruption of the disputed Florida results, Lieberman high-tailed it out of town, desperate to protect his own presidential viability for 2004 even if that meant allowing George Bush to seize a victory he did not earn.

Of course, the same could be said of Gore. As soon as the networks—not coincidentally led by Fox—prematurely declared Bush the winner, the Democratic nominee hopped into his limo all ready to concede. It took a phone call from his Florida operatives to persuade him to wait until the actual votes were tallied. And even after various recounts showed him gaining on his rival in the Sunshine State, Gore's phlegmatic approach to the whole process seemed both weak and petulant. Despite the fact that he probably did win Florida, and thus the election, he became Sore Loserman.

But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it was that either his ego prevented him from running on the highly popular Clinton record, or his political instincts were so bad that he actually believed all that crap about "Clinton Fatigue". Indeed, the choice of Lieberman represented an explicit attempt to distance himself from his boss, Lieberman having delivered a famous (and characteristically sanctimonious) speech criticizing Bill Clinton for his dalliance with Monica during that critical time when the Republicans were attempting their coup-by-sex-scandal.

Gore's refusal to embrace the Clinton presidency left him open to GOP charges that he was a tax and spend liberal in the Mondale/Dukakis mold. It also deprived him of the most salient argument in his own favor. The election of 2000 was most decidedly not a change election until Al Gore stupidly made it into one. And once that happened, Bush's line about compassionate conservatism trumped his opponent's rambling musings about Social Security lockboxes. In the big scheme of things, Gore is far more responsible than Ralph Nader for the ruinous Bush presidency.

So far, at least, the Draft Gore movement does not appear to be picking up any steam. Maybe it exists only in the fevered minds of cable TV anchors desperate to put some excitement back into a Democratic campaign held in suspended animation by the currently empty political calendar. But any Democrat who would seriously entertain this possibility might just as well avoid the middle man and send her contributions directly to the McCain for President campaign.

When Cynics Fall in Love

2008-03-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

Political reporters are among the most cynical people on the planet. They have to be. Their careers consist largely of parsing the self-serving words of preternaturally ambitious politicians who lie without embarrassment. They watch ideologies blur and positions change as even the most respectable public servants calculate which positions will help them secure re-election. Too often, Washington journalists find themselves covering powerful men and women whose venality, ignorance, and bigotry can never be fully revealed to their constituents, who, in most cases, would simply accuse the messenger of partisan bias anyhow.

Astute observers of the political scene often accuse the D.C. press corps of treating government and serious public policy choices as a game, emphasizing winners and losers rather than the impact legislation has on the real lives of real people. The problem, of course, is that the politicians themselves never stop playing, and most of their actions involve trying to gain some sort of advantage over their opponents, both intramural and extramural. How, for example, is it possible to cover the Obama-Clinton Democratic presidential contest, a battle between ideological soulmates, as anything other than a horserace?

And it's not as though the American people do much to spur political journalists to greater and more enlightening insights. Long discussions of public policy cause most voters to reach for their channel changers. Fox News, which specializes in dumbed-down coverage, quickie sound bites, and non-substantive stimulation, blew CNN out of the ratings water after less than a decade on the air. CNN, which was never exactly the New York Times to begin with, has responded with its own edgy shows that reduce the news to ranting argument and titillation. No real journalist wants to share the airwaves (or the cable tubes) with carnival barkers like Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck, but they prefer it to unemployment.

Still, I am convinced that most political reporters, even more than most politicians, got into the business because they once cared deeply about public policy. They started at small newspapers in insignificant cities where they encountered local government types who cared as much as they did. They interviewed school board members whose own children were in the system, city councilwomen who took calls from constituents at all hours of the day and night, and took pride in their ability to fix potholes and beautify failing neighborhoods. Sure, these rookie journalists also met the local conmen and the drunken incompetents, but they nevertheless saw firsthand how government could effect change for the benefit of its citizens.

If these reporters were good enough, they eventually made their way to the larger urban dailies (or to their big city TV equivalents) where they began to cover politicians of statewide and even national stature. No doubt they expected these people to be smarter, more energetic versions of the local officials they had once covered in Podunk, Iowa. What they often found instead were cynical men and women for whom politics was not a calling, but a path to personal glory. Detached from the everyday lives of the people they served, these governors or senators or presidential candidates inhabited a world where power and ambition corrupt equally, and nothing matters other than who wins and who loses.

To survive, to cover these self-important people and their petty games on a daily basis, it was necessary for the reporters themselves to adopt a veil of cynicism. Imagine a job in which the norm is that everyone you encounter is trying to spin you and nobody tells you what they really think. What must it be like to leave a congressman's office only to watch three lobbyists enter by the side door, and knowing that, in all likelihood, the lobbyists will get what they want? It's not as though we send corrupt people to Washington; rather, we send strivers and high achievers who will do whatever it takes to hold their position or to climb up the ladder. While many of us understand this on a theoretical level, for the political journalist it is a persistent fact of life.

Still, buried beneath layers of practiced cynicism and ennui masquerading as objectivity, the idealist remains. Reporters may swear off political romance, but love sometimes takes them by surprise regardless. Surrounded by professional liars, they crave authenticity. Overwhelmed by men and women who can't decide where to have dinner without convening a focus group, they are drawn to the very few who are willing to risk it all for a higher cause.

They despise the Clintons because Bill, a talented young governor who swept into Washington in a wave of hope, let them down in so many ways. They flirted with Barack Obama—even jaded reporters can be inspired—but are increasingly put off by his industrial strength ambition and the ideological emptiness at the core of so much of his eloquence. Political reporters almost certainly develop an aversion to those who have been running for president since they were in second grade, and Bill, Hillary, and Barack all fall clearly into that category.

John McCain, on the other hand, had a life before politics (and not just 15 minutes before, Obama fans). He put himself on the line as a young man in the most serious manner possible and endured horrors that few of us could imagine. Perhaps even more important, he speaks frankly and directly with the press corps, even when explaining his regular pattern of flip-flopping on the issues.

The reporters, in turn, have fallen in love. Here, at last, is a man who has paid his dues in blood. Even the cynical are subject to the pull of hero-worship and McCain plays to that by allowing them to share in his persona, to feel more invigorated and macho as they bask in the glow of his bravery. And he doesn't insult their intelligence with risible talking points and perpetual spin. He embraces his political duplicity and lets the media in on his dirty little secrets.

From all appearances, John McCain would be a terrible president. He is ignorant on domestic matters, bellicose in foreign policy, and evidently prone to volcanic anger. At best, he would be Ronald Reagan, a realist conservative who could occasionally buck the will of his ideologically fanatical advisers. At worst, he would be George W. Bush, too intellectually lazy to do any more than rubber stamp the harebrained schemes of whichever aide could best play to his vanity and need for manly affirmation. Reagan was a bad president; Bush is an unqualified disaster.

But don't expect a fair fight in the coming election. When reporters don't respect you (Dukakis, Gore, Kerry), you start at a significant disadvantage. But when they've fallen in love with your opponent, you are fighting an uphill battle that makes Everest look like a pitcher's mound.

It's Silly Season!

2008-03-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

Campaigns ought to end the way trials do: as soon as the prosecution and defense rest, we hand the whole thing over to the jury, regardless of whether two, twenty, or two hundred days have passed. At some point, candidates should simply admit that they've run out of arguments and then immediately let the voters decide. Instead, we must wait for some arbitrary date on the calendar before we pass out the ballots, and politicians, like local anchors on a slow news day, must find some way to fill the allotted time.

As a result, every highly publicized campaign eventually reaches Silly Season, that moment after all plausible arguments have been made and all serious charges have been leveled. Unfortunately, presidential primaries bring out the worst in politicians because the actual policy differences between them are usually so slight. Our electoral system almost guarantees truly distinctive characters—Dennis Kucinich, say, or Ron Paul—an early appointment with oblivion, leaving us with choices between people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whose real differences are difficult to identify.

Seriously: name any issue in the current Democratic contest and describe in ten words or less how Clinton's views differ from those of Obama. You probably can't do it, at least not in ten words. You would need entire paragraphs to sort out what Al Haig used to call nuance-al distinctions between these two mainstream liberals. They're both pro choice and anti-war. They favor a similarly timid approach to reforming health care, they each want to cut taxes for the middle class, and neither one is willing to take sides in the immigration debate, except to suggest that we must simultaneously close our borders, step up enforcement, and help those who are here illegally to obtain citizenship, so long as they pay a gratuitous fine and write "I will not sneak into your country" 500 times on a blackboard (haven't these people heard of Power Point?).

Given few policy differences to work with, the campaigns quickly moved into a discussion of two factors that bear at least some relationship to voters' choices: experience and electability. Hillary Clinton claimed that eight years as her husband's consigliore qualify her to inherit the family franchise. Barack Obama responded that only he can inspire and mobilize enough new voters to secure a solid victory over the Republicans in November. Clinton defended her high negatives and suggested that her opponent was unseasoned. Obama repeatedly hammered his colleague for her vote authorizing President Bush's war with Iraq. Obama pledged to change things; Clinton promised to change things back.

All of these are reasonable bases for decision making, though they do force voters to speculate over issues about which they have little expertise. Other than actually being president, what truly prepares a person to sit in the Oval Office? Hell if I know. Without knowing what will happen between now and September, how can we really tell which contender has the better chance of beating John McCain in the general election? The last time Democrats worried about electability, they saddled themselves with John Kerry. The last time the country decided that executive experience was a singular qualification for the presidency, they sort-of elected George W. Bush.

Regardless, the debates between Clinton and Obama on the issues of qualifications and viability were played out weeks ago. By now, we all know that Barack Obama went into the United States Senate directly from junior high school and that Hillary Clinton has spoken with every significant foreign leader since Archduke Ferdinand. We are painfully aware that Senator Clinton's negative ratings stand at 102% (deep down, she even hates herself), and that Senator Obama will not only bring a generation of nipple-pierced slackers to polls, his charisma and eloquence will even raise the dead from their graves to support the Democratic ticket in 2008 (the man does hail from Chicago, after all). Clinton is more experienced and Obama is more electable; we get it.

This would, therefore, be an excellent time to take this case to the jury. But that's not the way our system works. Instead, we still must hear from Pennsylvania, Oregon, and about ten other states that couldn't rouse their legislators to move their primaries to Super Tuesday along with everyone else. To make matters worse, the Democratic race is—despite what Obama's supporters desperately want you to believe—a virtual tie. Obama's delegate lead gives him a strong edge, of course, but a Clinton sweep of most or all of the remaining races would make it hard to deny her the nomination without hanging a big sign on the front gate of the White House reading, "No Girlz Allowed". Obamamaniacs may bemoan the power of the Super Delegates, but their candidate, as well as Clinton, will nevertheless need some of their Super Votes in order to leave Denver as the Democratic standard bearer.

So we continue to continue, forcing us into an extended version of Silly Season. Issues recede, and minutia presides. Clinton works to remind voters that while she's sure her opponent loves his country at least as much as—oh, say—Jane Fonda, his former pastor said some rather incendiary things that now make Obama radioactive. The Obama campaign pounces on a trivial Clinton exaggeration about taking sniper fire in Bosnia and blows it up into the biggest political lie since Dick Nixon was reunited with Checkers. Serious pundits talk grimly of how all of these monumental gaffes threaten the Democrats' chances of beating a man who can't even distinguish between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, a far more serious lapse than Hillary's Tales from the Combat Zone.

It will not get better any time soon. Thanks indirectly to Margaret Soltan (a link that led to a link), I found this "record of exaggerations and misstatements" by Barack Obama on HillaryClinton.com. Apparently, according to his rival, Senator Obama once claimed to have "put Illinois on a path to universal [health] coverage" when in fact he had only sponsored a bill to create a task force! Quite damaging, though I suppose, to borrow from Hillary's husband, it depends on what your definition of "path" is. Technically, when you merge onto the San Bernardino Freeway in Los Angeles, you have put your car on a path to New Orleans, that path being Interstate 10. So Obama wasn't necessarily lying, even if it's likely that his scheme to insure all Illinoisans will break down, as I once did, somewhere outside Lordsburg, New Mexico. (Oh, calm down. Unlike President Bush, I only torture analogies.)

Another charge hurled by the Clinton campaign involves Obama's use of the title "law professor" when he is, in fact, only a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Says the website: "In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter. In academia, there's a significant difference: professors have tenure while lecturers do not."

Well, actually in academia, there are three levels of professors, only two of which usually enjoy tenure, but why get bogged down in details that don't, uh, matter. Besides, in academia, grownups with Ph.D.s routinely complain because their colleagues were given slightly bigger offices, so perhaps we're not the best group to use when making a point. In any event, the U of C now says that Obama is within his rights to call himself a professor, since all instructors are addressed as Professor even when they're not professors. Or something like that.

Finally, and this is my personal favorite, the Clinton campaign catches Senator Obama lying about his own conception. Evidently, Obama once told an audience that his parents were able to unite only as a result of Dr. King's march from Selma to Montgomery, which, it turns out, occurred several years after the senator's birth. If a man cannot speak truthfully about his own fetus-hood, how can we possibly trust him with THE BUTTON. (Hillary's disadvantage here is that we have video directly contradicting her story of sniper fire in Bosnia; we do not, Praise the Lord, have film of Barack Obama's conception.)

So I guess I really have no bigger point to make today. Just that it's Silly Season. We'll be over it soon, and all the cable TV gasbags can stop wringing their hands. It happens every four years. It's really no big deal.

Guns Don't Kill People, But Bad Ideas Might

2008-03-28T05:51:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I supported very strong—even confiscatory—gun control laws. If you grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s, you understood the power of firearms to equalize the battle between good and evil, often in favor of the latter. JFK. Bobby. Dr. King. Even George Wallace, a generally unappealing character back in 1972, but nevertheless an undeserving target of attempted murder. Gerald Ford, that most benign and inconsequential of presidents, found himself nearly victimized by two gun-toting women in two California cities in less than a month in 1975.

And then there was the crime. Thugs with guns never really threatened most Americans, but they dominated our fears, much as they do today. The botched robbery, the violence of street gangs, and the cold-blooded slaying just started to become staples of the local news during that era. Gun control laws were, as a result, generally quite popular, with large majorities favoring the banning of at least some types of weapons (typically handguns).

Over time, my views changed, though not because the danger ebbed. Sure, the crime rate fell during the 1980s and 1990s, but it would have been difficult to tell that from watching television, which continued to feed us a steady diet of homicide each evening. Besides, I never really felt all that vulnerable in a personal sense.

Instead, my change of heart resulted from a desire to reconcile my generally civil libertarian views with a reflexive distrust of gun owners and their political allies. The liberal argument in favor of gun control is not unlike the conservative plea for strengthening the government's hand in the battle against terrorism. Regardless of the Bush Administration's true motives, the case for domestic surveillance and warrantless wiretaps is based on the premise that protection of life sometimes justifies reductions in liberty. Proponents of restricting access to firearms take more or less the same position.

Eventually, I came to realize that I couldn't have it both ways. Strict, confiscatory gun control would almost certainly make us safer. But so would the imposition of a police state, permitting the authorities to monitor our every move and allowing the police to search people and property at the slightest whim. Freedom is a risky business, always has been, and if I have the right to turn away law enforcement when they come to my doorstep, then why shouldn't Jim Bob the gun nut enjoy that same privilege. We are after all, both innocent, law abiding citizens, even if Jim Bob has a soft spot in his heart for David Koresh and the Michigan Militia.

I'm intentionally being a little obnoxious here. Millions of firearm owners have no interest in building an arsenal, do not consider Janet Reno the Antichrist, and fully comprehend that Hillary Clinton didn't kill Vince Foster. Still, take my word for the fact that many vocal opponents of gun control make for terrible ideological allies. They can, on the one hand, defend their rights in the most libertarian tones, yet turn around and propound a naïve, anything goes philosophy in the war against terrorism. They claim that citizen ownership of weapons is a necessary bulwark against government tyranny just before lending their support to some of Washington's most tyrannical misdeeds. Many adorn their bumper with decals lauding "NRA Freedom" and then climb into the car wearing a "Club Gitmo" t-shirt.

And all too many, including some in positions of power, actually do their best to conform fully to the title of "gun nut". At some point, the rational argument in favor of weapons for the innocent becomes detached from all common sense, and guns, rather than being a tool, start to become an unqualified good in and of themselves, the solution to every problem. Not too long ago, I wrote of some startlingly unwise efforts to arm college professors as a way to deal with what remain very rare instances of violence on university campuses. The controversial right-wing social scientist John Lott once wrote a book called, "More Guns, Less Crime", a notion that must seem laughable to the gun-free, low-violence countries of Europe, as well as our own neighbors to the immediate north (a gun crime would lead a Canadian newscast not because it titillates, but because it shocks).

Another bad idea, courtesy of the NRA types, passed Congress with little fanfare in the wake of the hijackings and murders of September 11, 2001. The Air Line Pilots Association, generally a sensible group, asked legislators to give the occupants of America's cockpits the right to carry firearms aboard commercial aircraft. The House and Senate, always willing to entertain bad public policy in the service of their own re-election, quickly enacted this poorly considered legislation and the bill was signed by our Rhinestone Cowboy president.

It is, on the surface, a dumb idea. It assumes that terrorists have only one script and no ability to improvise. Once cockpit doors were made bulletproof and impregnable, the 9/11 scenario of commandeering an airplane and crashing it into a building was rendered inoperative. So exactly when would an armed pilot be of any value? Indeed the last thing you'd want in a repeat performance of that terrible day would be for the pilot to leave his or her sanctuary and provide the terrorist with any kind of opening.

Would pistol packing pilots have helped on 9/11? Of course not. Back then, our theory of airline hijackings was similar to our theory of bank robberies: give the bad guys what they want and end the standoff peacefully. Faced with terrorists holding box cutters to the throats of flight attendants, the pre-2001 pilot would have surrendered his or her weapon to save colleagues' lives. After that, we would all have assumed back then, the plane would be diverted to Cuba or Libya, extensive negotiations would take place (or an Entebbe-like raid would occur on the ground), and the situation would end with minimal or no loss of innocent human life.

So the bill to arm pilots was, at best, a classic case of locking the door of a now-empty barn and, at worst, a poorly thought our sop to macho pilots and NRA fanatics. Adding amateur marksmen (or women) to an equation that already includes nervous travelers and small pressurized compartments should have been recognized immediately as foolish. Even the law permitting armed air marshals to board aircraft is probably unwise in the big scheme of things, but at least in that case we're talking about highly trained professionals.

Well, the inevitable finally happened the other day. A US Airways pilot, supposedly stowing his handgun for landing, accidentally fired off a shot that tore through the plane's fuselage. The pilot's story seems a bit questionable, but that is for investigators to determine. All we know for now is that a commercial aircraft filled with innocent passengers came within an eyelash of disaster. What would have happened if the bullet had shattered the cockpit windshield? Or the co-pilot's skull?

This story was dutifully reported in the media, but has received far less attention than it deserves. It is clearly time to tell pilots that their desire to be armed is more dangerous than it is reassuring. Even the most basic rights are subject to time, place, and manner restrictions. Your right to free speech does not permit you to joke about bombs in the airport security line. And we can limit the First Amendment, we can also limit the Second.

No matter what my allies the gun nuts say.

The Culture Warriors are Wrong: Part MCMXLIII

2008-03-27T05:56:00.000-07:00

The only people who still believe the right-wing critique of academia are those who haven't set foot on a college campus for years or those who are so blinded by their own doctrinaire conservatism that any challenge to the existing order seems hopelessly radical. Most of the pundits and bloggers who push this line, of course, don't really believe it themselves. They merely resent the right's inability to penetrate the academy and silence left-of-center voices the way they have so effectively done in politics and journalism.

Because those who see American universities as leftist indoctrination centers are either ignorant, fanatical, or dishonest, there's really no reason to believe that they can be persuaded by facts or data. Study and after study provides evidence that academic indoctrination is neither common nor successful, but that hasn't daunted David Horowitz or the folks at ACTA. Neither will the latest research by a bipartisan pair of political scientists, soon to be published in one of their discipline's general interest journals.

Using a comprehensive survey of U.S. college students, the authors find only a slight liberal drift in ideology between the freshman and senior years. Further, they suggest that this drift can be explained by factors other than the political leanings of the students' professors. Indeed, even after four (or more) years of supposedly leftist indoctrination, the number of seniors describing their views as "far left" still falls below their age cohort in the general population.

No doubt we will hear the usual responses from the usual suspects. Some will take issue with the study's methodology. The most common, however, will sidestep the findings altogether and argue that the supposed lack of intellectual diversity on campus damages students even if most tenured radicals fail to persuade their captive audience.

On the website Inside Higher Ed, an article quotes a professor named Daniel Klein, a George Mason University economist who evidently obsesses about these matters. “Even if it were true that students totally took a Bart Simpson attitude toward their college professors and were completely uninfluenced by them," Kline tells the website, "I still think it would be a tragedy that during those four years, they were not getting the good stuff.” Tragedy is where you find it, I suppose, though when I encounter the word, I normally think of Hurricane Katrina rather than a 22-year old graduate going out into the world having never read Milton Friedman.

As for the "good stuff", well, leave it to a critic of the so-called liberal academy to undermine his own point. Precisely what makes Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Adam Smith (these are the examples Klein cites) "the good stuff' rather than, say, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, or even Paul Krugman? The answer, of course, is nothing, or at least nothing more than Klein's own judgment. Presumably, he would tell us that this judgment is based on his understanding of economics and objective reality rather than his desire to indoctrinate the students he encounters each semester. Imagine, though, how he and similar academic critics would respond to a leftist professor making an equivalent statement.

(For what it's worth, by the way, if you Google "economics", "syllabus", and "Keynes", you get 17,300 hits. If you Google "economics", "syllabus", and "Friedman", you get 102,000. Replace "Friedman" with "Marx" and the number declines to 68,100. It is certainly possible that all of these economists are simply availing themselves of the opportunity to trash Milton Friedman before an impressionable young audience, but that seems unlikely. Rather, though this little quick and dirty survey may not prove much, it does suggest that perhaps Professor Klein can take heart that at least one tragedy has been averted during the Bush Administration.)

If Daniel Klein can reference "The Simpsons", I can cite "South Park". The right-wing critique of the academy reminds me of the Underpants Gnomes, an industrious little group of cartoon characters who steal boxers and briefs out of the characters' homes. When finally traced to their hideout, the Gnomes explain that their theft is part of a three-step business plan. Step One concerns stealing underwear, while Step Three involves making a profit. When asked about Step Two, the Gnomes explain that they are still working on that one. The show does not make clear whether the Underpants Gnomes studied Hayek.

Interestingly, the logic of the anti-academic right displays a similar fundamental flaw. For them, Step One is proving that college professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are far more likely to be liberals and Democrats than the population at large, which they are. Step Three is to assert that this fact exposes American college students to the risk and reality of political indoctrination. But they never quite come to grips with Step Two, which would require evidence that these supposedly tenured leftists actually seek to indoctrinate in the first place. One of the few attempts to do this, ACTA's risible "How Many Ward Churchills?" study of college syllabi, failed so comprehensively that the organization's president, Anne Neal, was forced to argue that her methodological critics were "applying irrelevant 'scientific’ standards to textual analysis", a statement so profoundly ignorant that it released Ms. Neal from any further consideration as a serious student of the academy.

But the full truth is even more damaging. This latest study by the two political scientists demonstrates that Horowitz, ACTA, and the rest are, in fact, even less credible than the Underpants Gnomes. Not only have they failed to address Step Two, but now it appears that they fall short on Step Three as well. It's hard to sustain shrill jeremiads against academic brainwashing when the empirical evidence demonstrates persuasively that such indoctrination doesn't even take place.

It must be frustrating to conservatives that they have been unable to get the same sort of toehold in the academy that they enjoy in politics and the mass media. Unfortunately, the academic culture demands that adherents to any theory defend their assertions with evidence, something most right-wing culture warriors have little experience at. Even leftist professors must submit their work to peer review, and they cannot expect to pass the bar simply on the basis of their politics.

But in one sense, none of this really matters. The cultural right will forge ahead with their plans regardless of how high the mountain of evidence against them grows. They are not interested in reality; they are interested in ideological hegemony. After all, as Stephen Colbert once pointed out, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Daily Kos, Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore

2008-03-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

Hypocrisy and rationalization grate regardless of the source. But somehow they always seem worse coming from those who claim purity of motive. Barack Obama and his internet cheerleaders promise a new politics, leaving behind the name calling and trivial attacks of the past. What they deliver, however, is generally more of the same.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton spoke several times of arriving in Bosnia back in 1996 under the threat of sniper fire, and having to race for shelter upon landing. Video of the event seems to contradict this claim, showing the First Lady and her daughter spending time on the tarmac greeting the locals, apparently unconcerned about the dangers lurking in the hills above. Naturally, this ludicrously unimportant matter has come to dominate this week's political news.

First, it remains unclear exactly what Senator Clinton was trying to accomplish with this story in the first place. Even if true, it would hardly make her a paragon of physical courage. Perhaps she simply figured that if enduring torture in Vietnam makes John McCain a foreign policy expert (which, of course, it does not) then dodging sniper fire in Eastern Europe gives Hillary a perspective on the world that Senator Obama cannot match. If that was, indeed, her gambit, it was pretty useless: whatever foreign policy experience Clinton accumulated in her world travels would have come from face to face meetings with international leaders rather than any brief taste of danger she may have experienced along the way. So really, this story is a nothing-burger to begin with.

In any event, Clinton disavowed the tale yesterday, acknowledging that she misspoke. Here's what she says now:

"I was told we had to land a certain way, we had to have our bulletproof stuff on because of the threat of sniper fire. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her -- so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left. Now that's my memory of it."

Who knows? Maybe the candidate misremembered events that occurred over a decade ago. It happens. Maybe the words "sniper fire" stayed with her even after other memories receded. Or perhaps—and let's face it, most likely—she thought she had an impressive story to wow her audiences and make her look dashing and daring, Hillary the Superhero. In short, she probably told a little campaign fib, the sort that was commonplace and unimportant until the age of YouTube and its associated legions of obsessive, unemployed internet fact-checkers armed with bags of Cheetos and dreams of stardom.

Over at the Obama for President branch campus at Daily Kos, the hive was buzzing with all the intensity of Encyclopedia Brown ready to call out the perpetrator of some sandlot crime. From the reaction of the Kossacks to this fairly inconsequential exaggeration, you would have thought that Senator Clinton had been caught bellowing, "God damn America!" This is, if the liberal blogosphere is to be believed, bigger than Teapot Dome, Watergate, and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping combined.

Here is the overwrought musing of one recommended Daily Kos diarist, doing the right wing's work for them:

"OK. The CBS story tonight is HUGE. It really rips Hillary apart on the Bosnia issues and just keeps nailing her. It's brutal. They really take her on. At this point, it's a beautiful dream come true."

This is, one assumes, a slightly different beautiful dream than the one espoused by Senator Obama on those days when he still talks about bringing America together. Karl Rove couldn't have said it better himself. To be fair, though, Rove would never have been so callow as to say it out loud. That is best left to the amateurs. (The breathless, sophomoric headline to this post, incidentally, is "She is SO screwed".)

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the proprietor of the site, even chimes in with his own triumphant snark:

"If Hillary Clinton lied about snipers in Bosnia because of sleep deprivation (doubtful, given it's a lie she's said at least four times), then what will she do when she gets that call at 3 a.m.? Remember, she's clothed and wearing makeup at that hour, so chances are, she's not getting much sleep."

Sure, we don’t all have the talent to write for David Letterman, but that's really not the important point here. Rather, it is instructive to keep in mind a simple fact: this is precisely what the political media did to Al Gore back in 2000. They seized on a few minor exaggerations and built them up into something HUGE.

Remember when Gore said that his mother used to rock him to sleep with the "Look for the Union Label" song, an advertising jingle that wasn't written until he was well into adulthood? Or during his first debate with George W. Bush, when Gore falsely told of visiting Texas during some wildfires, accompanied by the FEMA director (he was actually attending a fundraiser in Houston)? Or how about the time Gore inaccurately claimed that his mother-in-law paid more for an arthritis drug than the price charged when the same medicine was used to treat the candidate's dog? Ah, good times.

That's three exaggerations for Gore versus one for Hillary. Nevertheless, to this day, the liberal blogosphere, Daily Kos included, rages at the mass media for elevating these minor missteps into major campaign stories, thus easing Bush's ruinous entry into the White House. And they're right: the 2000 campaign was distorted and trivialized in any number of ways by a press corps that either detested Al Gore or was too lazy to develop a new script (or both).

But it turns out that the bloggers and their allies didn't really object to the unfairness of the coverage. They objected to the fact that it was unfair to their candidate. When this same sort of meaningless gotcha journalism is trained on the enemy du jour, the Daily Kos crowd can hardly contain their delight. Meet the new politics; same as the old politics.

Barack Obama's liberal internet supporters bristle at the suggestion that they constitute something of a cult of personality. And it is, in the main, an unfair charge. But it would be an easier charge to refute if they didn't adopt cult-like tactics in trying to destroy their opponent, particularly one who agrees with them on almost all the issues.

The Left Blogosphere Creates a Monster

2008-03-25T05:58:00.000-07:00

The John McCain World Tour is apparently over, having rocked the house in several Middle Eastern and European cities. It didn't get as much publicity as the senator might have hoped, what with the United States engaged in a vital debate over whether or not Barack Obama's former pastor should be allowed to speak at the next American Legion convention. But I'm sure someone in Baghdad right now is wearing the official tour t-shirt, albeit under about twenty pounds of armor and Kevlar.

Having dispatched the lesser life forms that once challenged him for the GOP presidential nomination, McCain evidently decided it was time to remind voters that he has foreign policy credentials, though nobody has identified for certain exactly what they are. His current calling card is the fact that he supported the troop "surge" that preceded—but did not necessarily cause—a reduction in violence and American casualties in Iraq. It probably didn't help that, within a week of McCain taking his victory lap around Mesopotamia, the U.S. death toll hit 4,000 and violence looked again to be on a slight uptick. On the other hand, it probably didn't hurt much, either, since there may not be ten Americans left who have yet to make up their minds about the wisdom of George W. Bush's current war of choice.

The most enduring memory of McCain's tour was the sight of Joe Lieberman whispering in the candidate's ear, reminding this expert on all things international that Sunni al Qaeda and Shi'a Iran don't much care for one another. Indeed, if the actions of the Bush administration ever did succeed in joining Osama in common cause with the Ayatollahs, that disaster alone that would supersede every other disaster caused by the president over his seven disastrous years in office. At least then, we'd finally understand what he meant back in 2000 when he called himself a "uniter".

But the link between Osama and Iran, as it turns out, exists only in John McCain's head, where it is apparently as unmovable as his preference for big band music and 78-rpm phonograph records. And before you call me ageist, please understand that this is not my opinion. Rather, it is the conclusion of former journalist Brit Hume, who offered, in damning defense of McCain's blunder, that the senator may simply have suffered a "senior moment". Which is exactly how a 72-year old candidate wants to be remembered by the electorate. Had Hillary Clinton or, especially, Barack Obama employed that phrase to describe McCain, Hume's Fox News employers would have broadcast a five-part series on "Why the Democrats Hate Older Americans".

Anyway, I do have a point here. As embarrassing as it may have been to see Lieberman correct his hero in front of an international audience, it would have been far worse if McCain's words had simply remained out there, waiting for the Democrats to pick the proper time to pounce. Let's face it: if John McCain doesn't have foreign policy credibility, he doesn't have much. His credentials on campaign finance reform basically evaporated the day he decided to game the system to accept, and then conveniently reject, public funding. Unless the voters decide that this is the guy they want at the helm the next time a crisis occurs, Senator McCain has little claim on anyone's support.

So Lieberman's role in the Republican campaign should not be underestimated. Already, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee has twice saved McCain's bacon (the other time came when McCain decided to label Purim as the Jewish Halloween; Lieberman took the blame for incompletely informing his friend about the nature of the holiday). It would not surprise anyone to see the former Democrat give a nominating speech at the GOP convention, a turn of events that would be far more devastating than the liberal blogosphere imagines. This would not be crazy-uncle-in-the-attic Zell Miller, all bulgy-eyed and sputtering, carrying on about them lib'ruls and revenuers. This would be the man who Al Gore selected less than a decade ago to serve one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

Joe Lieberman was never my idea of the perfect Democrat. He got to office by running to the right of incumbent Republican Lowell Weicker, a man who, like him or not, possessed even more integrity than Lieberman pretends to have on his most sanctimonious day. Once in office, Lieberman's generally liberal voting record could not obscure the fact that he was, culturally, well to the right of his party, forever prattling on about the evils of various popular culture forms, such as rap music. When Bill Clinton was facing down the Republicans' attempt at a sex scandal coup, it was Lieberman who took the highly publicized opportunity to gain national attention by stabbing his one-time ally in the back with a characteristically prudish speech from the Senate floor.

Nevertheless, Lieberman was a Democrat and, other than his support for the Iraq War, a fairly liberal one, at least in terms of his voting record. His partisanship tethered him to some extent and prevented him from, for example, endorsing George W. Bush for re-election. Parties are big tents, and big tents have clowns. Professionals learn how to live with that fact.

Next door in Rhode Island, the GOP had their own outlier, in the form of left-wing Senator Lincoln Chafee. In 2006, the national Republicans did everything they could to help Chafee win re-election, even going so far as to help defeat a conservative primary opponent. They succeeded, though Chafee lost in the general election anyhow.

The left blogosphere, on the other hand, in a startling case of political naïveté, decided that they should back Lieberman's liberal challenger, Ned Lamont. They were overjoyed when Lamont edged the incumbent in the Democratic primary, only to find out to their dismay that Lieberman, under Connecticut law, could still mount an independent candidacy. The GOP, teaching the internet kids a lesson, backed the former Democrat. Lamont turned out to be an inferior candidate, and Lieberman was re-elected, this time with a huge chip on his shoulder.

The folks over at Daily Kos spend quite a bit of time patting themselves on the back over their questionable contributions to the Democrats' resurgence in 2006. Rarely, however, do they take a step back and engage in serious soul-searching about their unfortunate role in the transformation of Joe Lieberman from hawkish Democrat to McCain cheerleader. Not only did the Lieberman affair tarnish what would otherwise have been a clear Democratic takeover of the Senate in 2006, it also unleashed a monster, a well-respected national figure able to call his former party out at the worst possible time.

There is an arrogance to the left blogosphere, a youthful sense that enthusiasm trumps reflection and that a community of thousands cannot be defeated. But two years ago in Connecticut it was defeated, and the Democratic Party continues to pay the price for the careless hubris of young men and women who seem to think that they created populism (George McGovern's supporters thought the same thing back in 1972). Even now, the bloggers continue to funnel precious money into primary challenges against flawed Democratic incumbents who nevertheless provide the party with its slender congressional majorities.

And now they have decided that only Barack Obama can lead the Democrats out of the wilderness and take the White House back from the GOP. They may, perhaps, be right. But their track record offers little in the way of reassurance. Indeed, their greatest blunder—the elevation of Joe Lieberman to top McCain lieutenant—may yet help to seal their candidate's fate in November.

Ben Stein's Baloney

2008-03-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

Ben Stein, who gained improbable fame as the quintessential burnout, monotone teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off parlayed that notoriety into several commercial gigs and a short-lived cable game show with a misleading premise. Nobody on "Win Ben Stein's Money" actually won Ben Stein's money; the cash was fronted by the producers of the show and Stein, in addition to his salary, got whatever was left after the contestants were paid off. This little bit of misdirection, however, pales in comparison to Stein's earlier and subsequent work.

Before his celebrity breakthrough, Ben Stein was best known as a persistent apologist for Richard Nixon, the disgraced 37th President of the United States. Stein had been a speechwriter for Nixon, a politician known more for his revelatory extemporaneous asides ("I am not a crook!") than for his soaring rhetoric. To this day, Stein insists that Nixon's misdeeds were trivial, and that those who brought him down are responsible for the genocide visited on Cambodia by Pol Pot (Nixon, ever the humanist, would evidently have prevented the massacre for which his unwise invasion of Cambodia first lit the fuse). Fortunately, anyone inclined to believe Ben Stein on any of these points need only review the tapes and transcripts of Nixon's own words, reminding all of us just what an amoral, vicious, contemptible man Stein once worked for.

Well, it turns out that rehabilitating Tricky Dick is only one of Mr. Stein's bad ideas. While we were not looking, it seems that he has also taken up the banner of Intelligent Design (ID), the latest pseudo-scientific offering from the creationist community. Stein has lent his notorious voice to the production of Expelled, a documentary bemoaning the inability of opponents of the theory of evolution to be given total access to college biology classrooms.

For the purposes of this blog, I have no opinion as to how life on Earth began. Plenty of believers in evolution argue that a higher power summoned the Big Bang and started the whole thing going according to His or Her design. That's fine with me. Science was always intended to explain the natural world and to leave the realm of the supernatural to others.

Intelligent Design, however, is not a theory; it is an assertion. Theories, at least in the scientific sense, are both testable and falsifiable. Biologists have spent decades testing propositions about the development and adaptation of various species. Some have held up, and others have been discredited. But the evidence in favor of the reality of evolution simply overwhelms. Not the assertion; the evidence.

Some would-be scholars, most if not all driven by fundamentalist religious beliefs, have entered the scientific field with an eye toward discrediting evolutionary theories. That is, in itself, unscientific. Real scientists go where the evidence leads them. They do not drag the evidence along, kicking and screaming, in another direction. One may certainly conduct tests demonstrating the flaws in one or another study. Scientists refer to this as replication, and it is an important part of the process.

But a flawed study here and there, or even a hundred of them, says nothing about the broader issue of how life emerges and changes over time. The fatal weakness in ID, from a scientific point of view, is that it contends that every hole poked in research on evolution somehow provides positive evidence in favor of the notion that God created the universe, the flora, and the fauna. This is, very simply, bad science. Even if these neo-creationists were able to debunk every one of the thousands of pro-evolution findings in the literature—something they can never and will never do—the burden would still be on them to develop hypotheses by which Intelligent Design could be tested.

The question, then, is whether or not proponents of Intelligent Design—who have never developed a single empirical test of their "theory", indeed who believe it to be, a priori, unfalsifiable—should be permitted to peddle their wares in any Department of Biology worthy of the name. And the answer, obviously, is no. The minimum standard for serving as an academic scientist ought to be an adherence to the scientific method. Unless we are going to admit students of astrology into astronomy departments, this point should be fairly clear (and to be fair, astrology, unlike ID, actually does posit some testable—and presumably falsifiable—hypotheses, though astrologers rarely submit their work to such analysis).

Let's say I'm a poet, perhaps a very good one, but I insist that my proper role is to serve as a Professor of Music. When the time comes to present a recital, I read my poetry aloud without accompaniment. This, I insist, is every bit as musical as the output of the pianist, trumpeter, or mezzo-soprano. When I was ultimately fired—and it wouldn't take long—nobody would pay much attention to my complaints that I was unfairly expelled because of my renegade beliefs about music. Everyone would understand that my appropriate academic position would be in an English or creative writing department.

The same holds for proponents of Intelligent Design. They are not scientists; they do not begin with the premise that their ideas can be falsified. They would not, for example, agree that any appearance of an elementary design flaw in, say, the construction of a human being might provide evidence against ID. Ask an Intelligent Design advocate whether or not she would have developed the human throat so that both food and oxygen have to pass through the same opening, creating the possibility of choking. I doubt you could find a single one who would agree that this reality presents even a minor challenge to their worldview, even though it clearly does.

My point is not that choking proves there's no God. It is perfectly appropriate to debate these issues in theology or religious studies classes, and to insist that God has reasons and motivations that transcend human understanding. Scientists don't pretend to have answers to every one of life's biggest questions. Indeed, a fairly large percentage of them are themselves religious believers.

But the idea that Intelligent Design deserves equal billing with evolution as an alternative scientific theory is preposterous. It's just as absurd as suggesting that Richard Nixon was a misunderstood martyr. Or that game show winners' prizes were taken directly out of Ben Stein's checking account.

Howard Dean, Barack Obama, and Plan B

2008-03-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a scary thought for the Democrats: we already know everything good there is to know about Barack Obama. We know his inspiring life story. We have all experienced the power of his oratory and his ability to move a crowd. Nobody could be unaware by now of the fact that Obama opposed the Iraq War from its very outset.

From here forward, everything else we will learn about the Illinois senator will chip away at this carefully cultivated image as a man above politics. The first, and stunningly devastating, revelation occurred with the airing of the incendiary words of Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The candidate responded with a characteristically brilliant speech, but the Wright affair nevertheless cost Obama the support of thousands of independents, votes he will never get back. The Democrats may not realize it yet, but this is already Michael Dukakis in a tank, and could turn into Gary Hart in Bimini.

As we speak, the only remaining economic question seems to be whether the forthcoming recession will be mild or wrenching. The current Republican president suffers from the longest sustained levels of unpopularity on record. A pointless war continues to snuff out lives, with feckless politicians gloating of success because it is snuffing out fewer than it did a year ago. The worst vice president in American history, his vicious arrogance in full flower, replies to a reporter's question about massive public dissatisfaction with his administration's foreign policy by saying, "So?"

Out of a field of second-stringers, the Republican Party managed to nominate the single candidate most closely associated with the failures of the past seven years. John McCain remains one of the Iraq War's biggest cheerleaders, boasting of his wisdom in calling for a troop surge at a time when most Americans want out of Mesopotamia entirely. Lacking grounding in domestic affairs, McCain's platform, such as it is, amounts to warmed over Bushism, from tax cuts for the rich to privatizing Social Security.

Nevertheless, despite McCain's manifest disadvantages, he currently not only leads Obama in the presidential polls, but also holds a commanding advantage in Ohio and Florida, as well as a slight edge in Pennsylvania. Let's be clear: any Democrat who loses these three states will lose the election in November. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is essentially tied with McCain in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and is within striking distance in Florida.

Sure, these polls have come out after a week in which Jeremiah Wright has been the big national story. At some point, the subject will change. Springtime surveys rarely make for effective predictors of general election results.

But it's not as though this has been a banner week for the presumptive Republican nominee. The John McCain World Tour, expected to emphasize the candidate's foreign policy resumé, has instead been marked by a couple of rather serious gaffes. In addition to misstating the relationship between Sunni al Qaeda and Shi'a Iran, McCain also managed to suggest bizarrely that Purim is the Jewish version of Halloween.

And yet he still leads.

The Democrats, including those who support Barack Obama, must understand the trouble that they are in. They fell in love on the first date and accepted a marriage proposal on the second. And now they are trying to schedule the wedding as soon as possible. Go read Daily Kos and you will see dozens of diaries and front page articles talking about how Obama already has the nomination wrapped up and how Hillary Clinton should just go away and find herself some other country to govern.

This is politically suicidal. If the Democrats are really going to put Senator Obama on top of the ticket in perhaps the most important election of our lifetime, the least they could do is to extend the vetting process as far as the calendar will allow. I mean, what if Hillary had quit the race a month ago? Is it possible that the revelations about Reverend Wright would have been the GOP's October surprise? Is there anything else we don't know?

Howard Dean, who has done so much good for the party over the past three years, needs to take charge of this process. Specifically, he needs a Plan B in case Obama does not recover from the current freefall. It is clear that, under the current circumstances, the Super Delegates cannot overturn the primary and caucus results without opening the party to charges of unfairness, charges that will invariably have racial overtones (especially when the media blowhards get through with the story).

The only way out of this dilemma, then, is for Dean to demand (and pay for) a re-vote in both Florida and Michigan, to be held in June. By then, we should know just how damaged Obama is and whether or not Clinton can mount a comeback in the remaining primary states. If Obama can win either do-over primary, then he's probably the Dems' strongest nominee. But if Hillary goes on a big run between now and the first week of June, and then wins decisively in Florida and Michigan, the party will have the breathing room do what it has to do without any appearance of the nomination having been stolen.

Obviously, Barack Obama can win the presidency in November, even after the disastrous events of the past couple of weeks. This will almost certainly be a good Democratic year and John McCain continues to diminish himself whenever he veers from his script. But gone are the days when the Obama campaign could plausibly promise a 1932-style realignment, with previously deep-red states entering the Democratic column. Instead, the senator will need to eke out the same narrow victory that barely eluded Al Gore and John Kerry.

In the meantime, Governor Dean, rather than childishly adhering to his arbitrary rules that stupefyingly favor solidly Republican South Carolina over swing-state Florida, must find a way to bring all 50 states to the table. Barack Obama may, indeed, be the Democrats' best hope for beating John McCain. But it's Dean's job to make him prove it beyond all reasonable doubt. The stakes are bigger than any one man's (or woman's) ego.

March Madness, Presidential Style

2008-03-22T06:50:00.001-07:00

I was listening to the radio a couple of days ago when someone mentioned March Madness, the 2008 NCAA college basketball tournament. Since the games had not yet started and nearly all the experts had evidently weighed in, the topic at hand was who the major presidential candidates thought would take home the championship trophy. Hillary Clinton answered that she would have to defer to her husband, a huge college hoops fan. I don't recall John McCain's response, but I'm sure he said, "The United States will win, of course, though the tournament may have to go on for fifty rounds and last at least until September." (OK, I made that one up.)

The most interesting prediction, however, came from Barack Obama, who picked the University of North Carolina. My first reaction was surprise that Obama, of all people, would be such a chalk player (for you non-gamblers, that's someone who only bets on favorites). Carolina, after all, remains the Vegas choice to cut down the nets on April 7, and is one of four number one seeds going into this past weekend. Surely, I thought, the Candidate of Change would have yet one more surprise in store for us. But he did not.

There may be no candidate in history as qualified to handicap college basketball. Not only is Senator Obama a major roundball devotee, but his brother-in-law coaches the Brown University varsity. Though Brown did not win the Ivy League, and will thus watch the games on television along with the rest of us, there's nothing like having a well informed insider to consult when filling out one's brackets.

But then my cynical side took hold and I started thinking further about Obama's selection. Sports allegiances and sports predictions have often been manipulated for electoral gain in recent history. Rudy Giuliani, die-hard Yankees fan, went to New England last year and intimated that he hoped that the Boston Red Sox, the Yanks' most bitter rival, would defeat the Colorado Rockies and win the World Series. Hillary Clinton, lifelong devotee of the Chicago Cubs, found herself donning a Yankees cap when she decided, eight years ago, that she'd like to be a senator from New York State. Could Obama be engaging in this same sort of pandering?

Well, yes, of course he could. Everyone may be focusing right now on the upcoming Pennsylvania primary, but that may not be the most important race still coming down Interstate 95. Rather, Barack Obama's real firewall state is now (drum roll, please) North Carolina. Senator Clinton currently enjoys a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania, and a victory there would strengthen her claim that she is the real champion of the states that Democrats actually need to win to defeat John McCain in November. Indeed, a big enough victory in the Keystone State could inch her closer to an outright lead in the overall popular vote, a result that would put Obama in the embarrassing position of playing George W. Bush to her Al Gore (real voters be damned: only delegates count!).

Should Clinton win Pennsylvania decisively—and if she doesn't, it's all over—the next battle would come two weeks later with primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina. Indiana may border Obama's home base of Illinois, but the link is only geographical. Other than a few Hoosiers in the far northwest corner of the state, Indianans do not get their news from Chicago and even their Democrats are generally more conservative than those from the Land of Lincoln. Indiana may be a good state for Hillary Clinton, but even if she loses there, the media will still probably blame—incorrectly, in my view—an Illinois spillover.

North Carolina, on the other hand, seems tailor made for Barack Obama. The senator has yet to lose an open primary in a southern state, indeed winning most by a formidable margin. Clinton's southern victories have been limited to the closed primary in Tennessee, Bill's home state of Arkansas, and the phantom vote in Florida. By all rights, then, Obama should sweep to victory in the Tar Heel State.

His lead, however, is only about five points at the moment. Obama's campaign continues to battle back from the controversy over the words of his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Initial reactions to the senator's speech on race and religion seemed highly positive, but the issue has not receded. Republicans, and even some Democrats, continue to ask why Obama remained in a church where supposedly anti-American rhetoric was being delivered on a fairly regular basis. Nationally, Obama has dropped noticeably in the head-to-head polls against Senator McCain, having seen his support dip among the all important independent voters.

Should the Illinois senator lose badly in Pennsylvania next month, May 6 could become a make or break day for him. The Super Delegates do not want to upend the will of the voters, such as it is (the caucuses should still, in my view, be largely discounted). But they also do not want the 2008 presidential election to be a contest between God Bless America and "God Damn America". That this is enormously unfair to Barack Obama, an unabashed patriot, is beside the point. The point is to defeat John McCain and put the ruinous Bush years permanently behind us.

In any given NCAA tournament, about sixteen teams have a real shot at the national championship. The other three number one seeds represent states (California, Kansas, and Tennessee) whose primaries and caucuses have already passed. Of the remaining twelve teams, Obama could have predicted victory for the University of Pittsburgh (a number four seed), which might have pleased the folks in Western Pennsylvania. But instead he went with his firewall, North Carolina, and its flagship university. That meant picking against Duke, of course, another entry from the same state, but most Dukies come from elsewhere, particular Hillary's northeastern home base.

And sure, maybe Barack Obama simply believes that UNC is the best team in the tournament. A lot of other people do as well, including the NCAA selection committee. Still, whether Obama's choice was a matter of electioneering or expertise (or both), it does point out just how critical the upcoming North Carolina primary may be to a campaign that is, even while enjoying frontrunner status, taking on more water by the minute. To employ the parlance of the tournament, the Tar Heel Primary may effectively prove to be a single-elimination contest.

John McCain's Questionable Qualifications

2008-03-21T05:44:00.000-07:00

Lately, the cable TV pundits have taken to filling the minutes between Viagra commercials with breathless discussion of the relative qualifications of the two Democratic candidates for president. This is not entirely their fault, of course. Hillary Clinton has largely staked her bid for the White House on the proposition that she, rather than rival Barack Obama, is fully prepared the lead the country into the next decade. Obama, in response, has questioned whether eight years as First Lady really contributed anything meaningful to his opponent's curriculum vitae (and yes, there is a subtle tinge of sexism to that position, but we'll leave it for another day).

In all the Democratic crossfire, one question has received surprisingly little attention from the talking heads: if we’re going to talk about qualifications, exactly how prepared is John McCain for the nation's top job. He has, of course, warmed a seat in the United States Senate for more than two decades, but his lengthy incumbency is hardly his most appealing calling card. Rather, McCain's Vietnam experience is constantly trotted out as de facto evidence of his fitness to enter the Oval Office. A few reporters have even gone so far as to suggest that commanding a squadron of fighter pilots somehow represents executive experience, something that Obama and Clinton do not have.

For quite a while, it looked as though McCain would be able to slide past the great qualifications war without so much as a cursory inspection of his credentials. This week, however, he brought himself back into the conversation in the worst possible way. Speaking in the Middle East, he announced that Shi'a Iran had made common cause with Sunni al Qaeda in Iraq. The gaffe was so great that one of the roadies on McCain's world tour, Dempublican Senator Joe Lieberman, had to whisper into the great man's ear that he should have mentioned "extremists" rather than bin Laden's Shi'a-hating outfit.

To be sure, everyone except Hillary Clinton is allowed one free blunder on the campaign trail, but it did not take long to uncover the fact that McCain had been publicly mixing oil and water for quite some time now. His slip-up in Jordan was far from the first time that the senator had made a mistake akin to talking about the British alliance with the IRA during the troubles in Northern Ireland. There is a rule in the proofreading business: if you misspell a word once or twice, it's a typo. If do you so more than that, it becomes clear that you are simply ignorant of the proper spelling.

And that, for McCain, is the best-case scenario. Perhaps he has spent his long years as one of the Senate's leading foreign policy voices utterly unaware of one of the most consequential splits in the Islamic world. Maybe he has come to accept that a Muslim is a Muslim, a terribly misguided—and arguably bigoted—view of the world. Certainly, this sort of information deficit is not unprecedented: on a good day, Ronald Reagan understood as much about the outside world as a second year drama major. But Reagan never claimed that foreign policy expertise was his major selling point.

Again, that's the best-case scenario. The less appealing story is that John McCain knows his Shi'a from his Sunni, but has chosen to lie to the American people anyway. Now why would he do that? Well, al Qaeda remains Public Enemy #1, the terrorist authors of the horrible September 11 attacks, the embodiment of all that is evil. If the Republicans ever hope to build a consensus in favor of action against Iran, especially after the ruinous consequences of the current war with Iraq, it would be helpful to convince the rubes that these two mortal enemies, Osama bin Laden and the Iranian ayatollahs, are joined at the hip and poised to reduce Albuquerque to rubble. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney spent the past seven years blurring the lines between fundamentalist al Qaeda and secular Saddam Hussein. Perhaps McCain has learned his lesson from their effective deceit.

So take your pick: either John McCain, the supposed master of foreign policy, has trouble keeping America's enemies straight, or he has willfully set out to bamboozle a frightened American public into buying into yet another unnecessary war. Either way, this seems far bigger than anything Jeremiah Wright or Geraldine Ferraro has ever said on their very worst days. For the moment, even McCain's cable TV cheering section has been forced to notice. The question is whether they will now let this story fade away.

Actually, that's not really the question. Of course, they'll let this one blow over. Not only do they like McCain, they are also constantly on the prowl for new material. It will be up to the Democrats to hammer this point home again and again.

Welcome to Year Six

2008-03-20T07:35:00.001-07:00

World War II did not last five years. Nor did World War I, the Korean War, the Civil War, or the American Revolution. Many full presidencies never reach the half-decade mark. Even the original mandate of the Starship Enterprise called for the mission to be accomplished within a five year period, and they were traversing entire galaxies.

But the Iraq War, a ruinous, gratuitous conflict authored by a dishonest, incompetent administration, has now entered its sixth year. To celebrate, John McCain, who still doesn't understand the difference between Shi'a and Sunni Islam, dragged himself over to Baghdad to babble about victory before heading over to Israel to fit in a photo-op over at the Wailing Wall. To hear McCain talk, one could imagine that he still expects the conflict in Iraq to end with somebody (Osama bin Laden? The ghost of Saddam? Some anonymous warlord?) eventually surrendering to the United States like Lee handing his sword to Grant at Appomattox.

Meanwhile, back at home, George W. Bush, whose capacity for rationalization must daunt O.J. Simpson, keeps talking about winning as though he has any idea what that would mean. The United States, he insists, is making progress. The mass media, compliant as ever, fail to point out that there has been but one conflict in American history in which military and political leaders could claim only "progress" after five years of fighting. And that, of course, was the Vietnam War, another deadly monument to the failed ambitions of arrogant men.

The Bush Administration has moved the goal posts so often during the current war that it is sometimes difficult to remember the original promises made to the American people. But a quick accounting would include the following. The United States, we were told, would 1) topple Saddam Hussein; 2) seize and neutralize his weapons of mass destruction; 3) secure the Iraqi oil fields and help Iraqis to rebuild their economy; and 4) bring Sunni and Shi'a together to establish the first functioning Muslim democracy in the Middle East. Moreover, we would accomplish these objectives with 5) minimal loss of American life; 6) minimal death and destruction visited on the Iraqi people; and 7) only a small commitment from the U.S. Treasury.

Of these seven promises, only one—the removal of Saddam—has been accomplished, and that occurred within the first months of the conflict. The WMDs, of course, did not exist and the continuing inability to restore Iraqi oil production has helped to drive gas prices to record levels. Most tragically, however, the final three promises have all been irrevocably broken. This unnecessary war has cost nearly 4,000 American troops their lives (and tens of thousands of others their health and well-being) and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Most of the rest suffer under a crumbled economy, collapsed infrastructure, and daily threat of violence. And the cost of the war to American taxpayers has already reached into the multiple trillions, crippling the country's ability to meet its own needs just in time for what appears to be the onset of a major economic downturn.

Under these circumstances, debates over whether The Surge is succeeding are diversionary at best. To the extent this year-old policy is working, all it has done is to stop the bleeding. We are still losing, on average, one soldier a day, and Iraqi citizens continue to forfeit their lives to random bombings and other acts of terror. Misery and deprivation remain daily facts of life for a people who have already suffered far too much. It would have seemed impossible, back in 2003, to imagine that this once proud country could be worse off under U.S. command than under Saddam Hussein. But George W. Bush's presidency has been all about realizing the unthinkable.

But even this ignores the main point. The objective of the Iraq War, when it was launched five years ago, was ultimately political. That is why the U.S. did not withdraw forces as soon as the statue of Saddam came crashing down to Earth. The explicit American goal, made clear by the president and his chattering lackeys, was the establishment of democratic, constitutional rule in Baghdad. The mission was, after all, rather cynically labeled "Operation Iraqi Freedom". With Hussein removed and the nerve gas and nukes clearly nonexistent, the only possible justification for continuing a military presence in Iraq was to oversee the transition to self-sustaining, democratically elected, ethnically tolerant government.

By now, it is clear that this will never take place. Further, even one year after The Surge, not a bit of progress has been made on bringing liberal democracy to the Iraqi people. The Surge, therefore, is a failure, and the war has been lost. Whenever Bush, McCain, and the camera-hogging Joe Lieberman talk about the successes achieved by General Petraeus since last spring, simply remember this: if anyone had told you five years ago where we would be in March, 2008, in terms of costs and casualties and unmet objectives, you would have dismissed that person as insane. Even most of the opponents of the Iraq War probably didn't believe that it would go this badly.

At some point in the future, the conflict in Iraq will end. The best case scenario is that it will end in a stalemate, with a fake government following a fake constitution, while mullahs and warlords divide the country into factions and collect the spoils. If this is accepted as victory, it will further illustrate the descent of the United States as a world power. At least when the U.S. fought to a draw in Korea, the primary goal—preventing Communist troops from overtaking the south—was achieved. In the case of Iraq, all we can hope for is to leave the country only a little worse off than when we invaded. And that's the best case scenario, the one that doesn't include civil war, mass starvation, a Kurdish conflict with Turkey, or an Iranian puppet government in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, regardless of how or when this war ends, we will never recover the 4,000 irreplaceable young men and women who gave their lives so that dishonest politicians could play Stratego with real human beings. We will never bring the permanently injured back to full health, nor will we soon restore our economy to any semblance of balance. The hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis will never return to their families, and the miseries visited on a whole nation will not be forgotten. The rage stirred in the hearts of young Muslim men and women will not be stilled even by the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

We have, in short, already lost this war. The only remaining question is how much more we will lose before (and after) we finally get out.

Howard Dean's 48-State Strategy

2008-03-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

Four years and three months ago, Howard Dean was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, proprietor of the infant weblog "Daily Kos" was one of Dean's biggest online cheerleaders. Though their efforts failed back in 2004—Dean simply wasn't up to the task of sustaining a top-tier candidacy—both survived the debacle quite nicely. Today, Moulitsas ("Kos") holds down a position as one of the most influential voices in the left blogosphere, and his blessing (as well as his fundraising prowess) is routinely sought by Democrats running for various offices from coast to coast. Howard Dean, once the quintessential insurgent, now chairs the Democratic National Committee.

Each came into the 2008 with a big idea. Kos argued, as he did during the Dean campaign, that rank and file Democrats must break the monopoly on power held by the party's sclerotic Beltway insiders, timid centrists, and money-grubbing consultants. In the subtitle of his coauthored book, Crashing the Gate, Moulitsas alliteratively argues for "the rise of people-powered politics".

Dean, suddenly finding himself the ultimate insider, defied the conventional wisdom of the pundit class by embarking on what he called a 50-state strategy. It was critical, he insisted, to rebuild the Democratic Party's infrastructure in states that had been all but abandoned to the GOP over the past quarter century. To the dismay of those who thought he was flushing vital millions down the commode, Dean sent cash and party troops to places like Mississippi and Wyoming, states whose hostility to the national Democratic Party had previously been unquestioned.

These efforts achieved some measure of fruition in 2006, as the Democrats regained majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in a dozen years. Moulitsas and his "netroots" supporters backed insurgent Senate primary candidacies in Montana and Virginia, and saw their men achieve November victory over the Republicans. Dean's willingness to build up his party in hostile territory was rewarded not only with the two Senate wins, but also a handful of House seats in such unlikely venues as Kansas and Indiana.

It remains unclear, of course, just how much credit Dean and the Kossacks deserve for the party's midterm turnaround. It is quite possible that the establishment Democratic candidate could also have won the Montana seat (the state's other senator, after all, is already a Democrat), and Virginia's Jim Webb owed his triumph largely to incumbent Senator George Allen's campaign trail meltdown, in which he referred to a dark-skinned young opponent as "Macaca". Further, the Democrats' re-capture of the House had much less to do with breakthroughs in the pro-GOP heartland than it did with a realignment in the already competitive and relatively liberal states of the northeast and midwest.

Fortunately, both theories have been provided with a new test case in 2008, this time at the presidential level. Barack Obama, an anti-war liberal, is not only taking on one of the icons of the Democratic Party establishment, Hillary Clinton, he is doing so on the basis of grass-roots organizing and small-scale fundraising, much of it coming from the internet. Further, part of his claim on the party's attention is his supposed ability to mobilize young people and African Americans, perhaps making the Democrats competitive in states that they have not seriously contested, at least on the presidential level, since 1976. Obama thus embodies the fifty-state strategy.

Moulitsas has become an unabashed Obama supporter, and his blog now serves as a virtual branch office of the Illinois senator's campaign. Dean, as DNC chair, professes neutrality in the race, but given his own insurgent history, his liberal politics, and his uneasy relationship with the Clintons, it is hard to imagine that he has not spent the past few months privately rooting for an Obama victory. The man certainly has some scores to settle, as well as a perch from which to settle them, should he so choose.

All of this leads, of course, to Florida and Michigan. Flexing his muscles as party boss, Dean insisted that any state that defied his ban on holding primaries before February 5 (other than the chosen four—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina) would not have its delegates seated at the Democratic convention in August. Florida and Michigan pushed ahead with their primary elections anyway and Dean held his ground. Even when the two states crawled back to the DNC asking for either forgiveness or a do-over, Dean refused to front the money for a revote.

This is, one might have thought, the sort of thing that would drive the folks at Daily Kos into outright rebellion. One set of party officials battles another, and the result is the effective disenfranchisement of Democratic voters in two of the most important swing states on the electoral map. Surely, people-power (whatever the heck that is) would demand that the blameless denizens of Miami and Muskegon should have their voices heard, whatever the cost. A party that can send real money to Nebraska and Utah can surely spare a couple of bucks so that the voters of actual competitive states can be represented.

Ah, but this is politics, and the DNC chair is now the darling of the netroots (or at least their leaders) and Obama is their candidate. The Kossacks have spent the past two months insisting that "rules is rules" and that Florida and Michigan have earned their punishment, regardless of the fact that ordinary Floridians and Michiganders had little say in the decision. Kos and the gang insist that their newfound devotion to the iron rule of the DNC has nothing to do with the fact that shutting out these two states will virtually assure that Barack Obama receives the Democratic nomination. What a difference four years makes.

As for Dean, it would be difficult to throw darts at a map and hit two states more critical to Democratic prospects of victory in November. Voters tend not to look kindly at a party that has deprived them of their voice in the electoral process. Should these states fall narrowly to John McCain in November, Howard Dean's legacy will be the squandering of the party's most important opportunity to capture the White House since at least 1932. If nothing else, perhaps that will make the world forget his infamous Iowa scream.

Clearly, Michigan and Florida constitute very different cases. Obama's name did not appear on the Michigan ballot, making it difficult to consider the Wolverine State's results valid. In Florida, on the other hand, both local campaigns were active (though neither candidate visited the state) and over 1.5 million voters went to the polls. Senator Clinton's victory there was at least as legitimate as Obama's various triumphs in low-turnout caucus states.

So this is what it comes down to: Will the DNC and its blogging cheerleaders sit idly by while the citizens of two critical swing states are denied the right to participate in the selection of the Democratic presidential nominee? Or are both Dean and the netroots so invested in an Obama victory that they are willing to achieve it through strong-arm tactics better suited to Karl Rove. The credibility of the advocates of "people-powered politics" is very much on the line.

So is that of Howard Dean and his 50—now 48—state strategy.

Faith, Race, and Barack Obama

2008-03-18T08:05:00.001-07:00

OK, so let's for the sake of argument assume the worst case scenario. Somewhere a witness or, worse yet, a film clip exists verifying Barack Obama's presence in church at the moment his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, said something controversial and angry. Maybe even something along the lines of "God damn America".

Obviously, this would be devastating to Obama's campaign for president. It might even constitute a death blow. Indeed, the fact that this story has dominated the cable shows for nearly a week has already damaged the senator badly (Obama must wish that Eliot Spitzer had decided to tough it out for a while, rather than resigning immediately). The fallout from his former minister's remarks has been so great that Obama has been forced to schedule a speech today to address the one issue he had hoped to avoid: race in America.

But leaving aside the political consequences, consider what this incident says about Barack Obama the man. The answer, of course, is nothing, or at least nothing bad. Rather, it means that the senator is like a few million other Americans who regularly attend Sunday services and maintain their affiliations despite finding some of their preacher's words to be shocking, disappointing, or irritating.

Imagine that you are the Obamas and that Jeremiah Wright is that man who married you, who baptized your children, and who made the gospel relevant to your lives. Week after week, he inspires you with the teachings of Jesus Christ, emphasizing peace, brotherhood, and forgiveness. Once in a while, however, a brief streak of anger shows, and Wright's disappointment with how the United States has conducted itself spills over into his sermons.

Do you really get up and walk out? Even if you are deeply offended by Reverend Wright's suggestion that God condemns America for its treatment of African Americans (which is, after all, what "damn" means in this context), do you actually break your ties with a community of faith that has sustained you through some of the most difficult times of your life? Or do you shake your head, grit your teeth, and wait for your pastor to return to his day job, understanding that these sorts of diversions, however unsavory, are generally rare?

The notion that one's church can be changed as quickly and effortlessly as a pair of socks is contrary to everything we know about faith and worship. Indeed, the fact that Obama stayed with his church, even knowing how Reverend Wright's words might someday help derail his political ambitions, suggests that the senator's religious devotion is real and not just some convenient political accessory meant to appeal to the faithful. For a man whose authenticity often comes into question, Obama's stubborn unwillingness to abandon his house of worship provides testimony that he is more than just the sum of his ambitions.

There is a larger truth here, too, though it is probably one that Senator Obama, the candidate who supposedly transcends race, cannot tell us. Reverend Wright is in his seventies, meaning that he spent his formative years in the 1940s and 1950s, a time in which African Americans were subject to regular indignities and constant insulting reminders of their second class citizenship. Violence against black men and women was an all-too-common feature of life in many parts of the country, and juries routinely allowed white perpetrators to get away with their crimes. Even a man of God remains a human being, and few could endure such an experience without at least some residual bitterness. And if some of that bitterness occasionally bubbled to the surface during a Sunday sermon, his parishioners, including Obama, no doubt knew how to place it in the proper context and ignore it.

Other Americans, including political candidates, do this all the time without public awareness or condemnation. Many Catholics defy their Pope, practicing birth control and supporting the U.S. war with Iraq. Some protestants attend churches in which homosexuality is condemned as an unforgivable sin, then return home to provide aid and comfort to their gay and lesbian friends. Jeremiah Wright is hardly the only preacher in America ever to have uttered offensive words in a sermon without seeing his flock bolt en masse for the door.

Several weeks ago, John McCain's 95-year old mother made some statements that revealed a clear prejudice against Mormons. The story made the news, of course, but nobody expected McCain to renounce his mother and cut her out of his life. For years, people of faith have insisted that their churches and ministers are part of their spiritual family. If they really mean that—and I think most of them do—then expecting Barack Obama to walk out on Reverend Wright would be little different that asking John McCain to cut ties with his own mother.

The comments made by Jeremiah Wright may well doom Senator Obama's presidential candidacy. But if they do, then the people who caused this to happen—his political opponents, the usual media gasbags, and, indeed, all Americans who turned against him on this basis—should no longer speak about the depth and centrality of faith in their own lives. Not after telling Barack Obama that he is somehow obligated to leave his own church home of twenty years over some gratuitous and offensive expressions of bitterness by an imperfect man of God.

A St. Patrick's Day Message of Hope

2008-03-17T06:29:00.000-07:00

On St. Patrick's Day, 2008, I happily recall a trip I took to the Emerald Isle a couple of years ago. The village of Belleek, in Northern Ireland, is known for its pottery, and our tour bus stopped there to give the passengers a chance to pick up a few souvenirs. Having no interest in pottery, I walked across a bridge in search of a pub.

Nothing remarkable about this other than the fact that the bridge crossed the River Erne and took me from County Fermanagh to County Donegal in the Irish Republic. Those of you younger than thirty might not grasp the significance of this, but as I sat down in the pub with a cool pint of Guinness, I reflected on how I had just crossed one of the most contentious borders of the 20th Century without encountering a checkpoint or even seeing so much as a local constable.

When I was a kid, the word "terrorist" was generally used to describe two organizations often referred to by their three-letter abbreviations: the PLO and the IRA. The Palestine Liberation Organization, during the 1960s and 1970s, filled the unfortunate role in the Arab-Israeli conflict now held by Hamas and Hezbollah. Its notorious leader, Yasser Arafat, was one of the most hated men in the world. Nevertheless, in 1993, under the hopeful eye of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Arafat and Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin shook hands in public for the first time and agreed on a commitment to mutual recognition. Although both Arafat and Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize, the result was only a partial success and cost Rabin his life (he was assassinated two years later).

Bill Clinton's record in international affairs remains badly underrated, especially here in the United States. If his efforts in the Middle East never reached fulfillment, his record in Northern Ireland was nothing short of exceptional. Clinton and his emissary, former Senator George Mitchell, after months of hard work, brought together Protestant loyalists and Catholic IRA leaders on a power sharing agreement and peace treaty signed on Good Friday in 1998. A decade later, the political situation in Belfast remains volatile, but non-violence generally presides in Ulster.

At the time, of course, many Protestants and their British allies viewed the negotiations with the IRA as a stark example of appeasement. The provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, after all, had been responsible for countless bombings and other acts of deadly terror. And now, many felt, they were being rewarded for their evil deeds by gaining a share of power in Northern Ireland that they had never before enjoyed. These fears multiplied when a Catholic splinter group set off a bomb four months after that wonderful Good Friday in the city of Omagh in County Tyrone. Though the IRA strongly condemned the attack, many Protestants feared that this was only the beginning of the price they would pay for appeasing terrorists.

But it wasn't, at least not so far. Even when political stalemate set in several years after the accords were signed, the IRA did not resort to violence to strengthen their bargaining position. Random assassinations are no longer a daily fear, nor do people treat each parked car as a potential time bomb. And over in Belleek, American tourists can casually stroll across a bridge between two countries that have turned from adversaries to allies.

If there is a lesson here, it is best reflected by John F. Kennedy's inaugural admonition that we must never negotiate out of fear, but we must never fear to negotiate. While the actions of terrorists are often horrible, inhuman, and despicable, little is accomplished by simply dismissing them as being entirely rooted in evil. Evil, after all, is unyielding, unthinking, and utterly divorced from any motivation other than all-encompassing hatred. All negotiation with evil is, by definition, appeasement, since evil will never back down or reverse course.

The things that the Irish Republican Army did during the 1970s and 1980s shocked the conscience of any fully civilized person. But they weren't the product of some satanic darkness of the soul or some fanatical religious fervor that could only be satisfied by killing the unconverted. Rather, these vicious acts of terrorism were a tactic designed to achieve certain objectives. And the objectives were, in the end, points that could be successfully negotiated.

My point--and I hope this is clear--is not that terrorism or terrorists should go unpunished. As JFK said, we cannot negotiate out of fear. But we must also understand that Manichean notions of good and evil, the sort that undergird much of the Bush administration's approach to the world, are ultimately both counterproductive and false.

And right at this very moment, someone is unknowingly proving this simply by crossing the River Erne from Fermanagh to Donegal.

Happy St. Patty's Day.

McCain-Rice in 2008: Because Eight Years is Not Enough

2008-03-16T06:37:00.000-07:00

One of things I've learned from blogging over the past four months is that it is often difficult to come up with topics to write about on a regular basis. The world occasionally changes quickly, but mostly it just chugs along at a fairly glacial pace. Today's stories are small variations on yesterday's. Those who write commentary for a living must sometimes feel as though they are forever in rewrite, trying to give old news a fresh angle.

Only this could explain Hendrik Hertzberg's current column in The New Yorker, in which he raises the intriguing--to him--notion that John McCain might be well served by handing the vice presidential nomination to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Reassuringly, Hertzberg suggests that this choice "would not be an entirely cynical one." It remains unclear why that would be the case, since the main justification presented by the writer involves Rice's race and gender, and the fact that her presence on the ticket would free the GOP to attack either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama without mercy. Nope, nothing cynical about that.

OK, so other than a little political insulation and an appealing backstory--she grew up in civil rights-era Birmingham--exactly what does Dr. Rice bring to the table? (And enough of the "Dr." stuff already; she merely has a Ph.D., a degree held by half the people I know, few of whom are prepared to lead the Free World.) Perhaps her stellar performance in the Bush administration? Here's Hertzberg: "It’s true that her record in office has been one of failure, from downgrading terrorism as a priority before 9/11 to ignoring the Israel-Palestine problem until (almost certainly) too late." Well, there's a promising foundation for a candidacy.

But, the author quickly reminds us, Rice remains personally popular despite her rather comprehensive incompetence as a foreign policy guru. And indeed she does, though in large part because her own lack of success pales in comparison to the more spectacular miscues of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Rice has clearly benefited from seeming less nutty than the people who emply her. That protection, however, would quickly dissipate once she moved from understudy to lead actress.

Exactly how would it help John McCain to spend the week of the Republican national convention re-living this little nugget from the televised 9/11 commission hearings:

"RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.

[Commission member Richard] BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.".

Maybe Hertzberg's memory is short (or his cynicism is deep), but that snippet of testimony remains one of the most staggering confessions of neglect of duty ever committed to video tape. John McCain's one and only claim on the presidency is his experience and judgment in the realm of foreign policy. His experience, consisting mostly of traveling abroad and serving on Senate committees, is sure to be challenged by the Democratic nominee this fall. Should he propose Secretary Rice as his designated successor--that man is 72, after all--his judgment on this issue could simply no longer be taken seriously.

Ask anyone who doesn't write for The New Yorker what John McCain needs to do between now and November, and you will get two main answers. He needs to distinguish himself from the dismally unpopular Bush administration and he has to find a way to establish his bona fides in the area of domestic affairs. If there's a way that he can accomplish this by selecting Bush's foreign secretary as his running mate, it surely escapes me.

I mean, if McCain simply needs a woman or minority group member to help him take on either Obama or Clinton, he can undoubtedly find one with at least a little credibility on the big issues here at home. Heck, Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales are just a phone call away. What do you say, Hendrik?

Wright and Wrong

2008-03-15T06:05:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the closely contested Democratic presidential race has been how long it took for all the dirty laundry to be aired. Barack Obama, of course, set a tone early on that made it impossible for him to throw the first punch. But the vaunted Clinton political machine either enjoys a wildly undeserved reputation for effectiveness or has been thrown off its game by the racial dynamics of the 2008 campaign.

We are only now, after most of the country has already voted, hearing about comments made several years ago by Senator Obama's one-time pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Reverend Wright took to the pulpit to suggest that the United States was partly responsible for its own misfortune, citing America's supposed support for "state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans" and comparing al Qaeda's atrocities to the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. And then, two years later, he said this:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Let's first acknowledge the unfairness of judging Obama by the vilest words spoken by what seems to be an otherwise admirable man. Barack Obama did not make these statements nor does he agree with them. This is, in many ways, just a continuation of the back and forth gotcha campaign that has tarnished this race for the past week or so. First, Samantha Power, then Geraldine Ferraro, and now Jeremiah Wright. It appears that this unhelpful bloodletting will not cease so long as there is a Democratic campaign operative somewhere ready to engage foot and mouth together.

On the other hand, these particular verbal indiscretions are potentially far more damaging than those that came before. Reverend Wright is not just some name on a five-page list of Obama supporters. He is, instead, one of the most significant figures in the senator's life, the man who led him to the Christian faith. Given that his religious devotion has been such an important element of Obama's remarkable and appealing personal narrative, the role of his spiritual adviser is, in many ways, even more consequential than that of his foreign policy adviser.

Even worse, of course, are the remarks themselves. There are few precincts in the fifty states where people will react well to a man of the cloth uttering the words "God damn America". Indeed, had all this been known two or three months ago, I suspect that Hillary Clinton might now be enjoying a McCain-like victory lap with the nomination well in hand.

Obama has denounced Reverend Wright's words, as he must, though he apparently has known about them for at least a few months now. He also--bravely, in my opinion--refuses to condemn the man himself. One of the great truths of real life (as opposed to the one-strike-and-you're-out fishbowl of presidential politics) is that we all know and love people who hold dreadful thoughts of ignorance and prejudice. We understand that the sum of a person is not limited to his or her worst outbursts or darkest reveries.

Still, in a political sense, this has the potential to be a bombshell. It will almost certainly be the Republicans' plan to subtlely paint Obama as an exotic figure, a man who spent much of his childhood in a foreign land and lacks a deep-seated devotion to his country. He's the guy who rejects the American flag lapel pin, who refused to place his hand over his heart during the national anthem, whose wife claims only recently to be proud of her country. That these charges are, in the main, slanderous doesn't mean that they won't be effective. Just ask Michael Dukakis.

Obama can weather this, of course, and he is certainly fortunate that the story broke when it did. But trouble will almost certainly loom if it can be verified that the senator was in attendance at any event at which angry or controversial words were spoken by Reverend Wright. Obama insists that he was not present during the sermons discussed above. Nevertheless, we can be confident that GOP operatives are hard at work trying to uncover evidence that the Democratic frontrunner was in the pew to witness any other incendiary comments the minister may have offered to his flock.

Meanwhile, the Super Delegates will await the verdict of public opinion and will react accordingly. Obama supporters have every reason to face the coming week with some apprehension. So do all people who hope for a Democratic victory in November.

My Own Special Comment

2008-03-14T06:45:00.003-07:00

I like Barack Obama a great deal. I will happily vote for him should he receive the Democratic nomination for president. While his courage in opposing the Iraq War from Day One is somewhat exaggerated—he wasn’t in the Senate and did not actually have to cast a vote—it is nevertheless nice to see somebody in the race who never fell for the Bush Administration’s lies. If elected, he will be the first non-Southern Democrat to enter the White House in nearly 50 years. That is a good thing.

I am, however, increasingly bothered by the tone of many of the Illinois senator’s supporters. I understand that once you choose sides, it’s often difficult to resist the temptation to think of your opponent as a (to choose a word at random) monster. I also realize that political first-timers often recoil at the nastiness inherent in the process. Young people in particular may have difficulty acquiring a sense of perspective.

But Keith Olbermann is not young. He was reading baseball scores off a teleprompter in Los Angeles back when Senator Obama was still in law school. Though his beat hasn’t been politics until recently, Olbermann has spent enough time in newsrooms to know a thing or two about the typical behavior of presidential candidates. More than anything else, that’s what makes his Special Comment last night so perplexing.

If you’re not familiar with Olbermann, he’s the guy who has built quite a successful niche for himself over at MSNBC as the liberal answer to Bill O’Reilly. As the only left-leaning voice in a talk show sea of conventional wisdom pablum and right-wing lunacy, Olbermann has generated astonishingly good ratings for a network that has spent most of its history at the bottom of the cable news pecking order. Keith’s most effective shtick is the Special Comment, a lengthy editorial in which he rants eloquently about whatever he currently finds disturbing. Usually, George W. Bush makes for a favorite and highly deserving target.

Yesterday, Olbermann went off on Hillary Clinton. Now, two things are very clear to anyone who hangs around MSNBC at prime time. The first is that Olbermann is a big Barack Obama fan. The second is that the network has for weeks betrayed a rather over-the-top anti-Hillary bias. Chris Matthews in particular seems to rejoice in every Clinton failure and wax despondent after each of the New York senator’s triumphs. When Hillary won Texas and Ohio the other day, MSNBC’s coverage was damn near funereal.

Olbermann is not as bad as Matthews, of course, but he certainly looks prepared to high-five the nearest cameraman whenever he reports an Obama primary or caucus victory. In this case, however, he was evidently set off by Geraldine Ferraro’s dopey comment about how Obama wouldn’t be a serious candidate were he not African American. While Ferraro, who sat on some pro-Clinton finance committee, was about as central to Hillary’s campaign as the guy (woman?) who drives her bus, Olbermann still decided that the senator needed to answer for a throwaway line by a 1980s throwback celebrity.

In Keith’s mind, Team Clinton evidently did not denounce vigorously enough nor apologize profusely enough for comments made by another woman. Disavowal is apparently no longer sufficient. To get right with Olbermann, Hillary should evidently have faced the camera and in her best Pat Robertson voice shouted, “Evil 1984 vice presidential candidate, I rebuke you! Return to your empty life as a footnote in American history textbooks and sin no more!”

OK, whatever. Clinton’s people certainly went overboard in their public reactions to Obama adviser Samantha Power referring to Hillary as a “monster”. So sure, turnabout can be fair play and all that.

But Olbermann went much further, accusing Clinton of wallowing in “filth” and invoking the name of David Duke, the former leader of the KKK. This was, by anyone’s standards, a fairly incendiary remark, even for a guy who once called the President of the United States a fascist. As the reaction of a 22-year old political virgin venting to his stablemates over at Daily Kos, this would perhaps be forgivable. But for a professional newsman and, not incidentally, the most important left-of-center voice on television, it was staggering in its irresponsibility.

It remains possible that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. As imperfect as she obviously is, she should be, to any reasonable Democrat, far preferable to John McCain and his unstable George Patton act. Hillary will not invade Iran, practice trickle-down economics, or be satisfied to leave health care in its current state. She will, as president, behave more or less exactly as Barack Obama would, something that should be clear to anyone who has studied the similarities in their Senate voting records.

As Obama supporters increasingly work themselves into an unhealthy frenzy over the evils of their she-devil opponent, the risk grows that an unbridgeable rift will tear the Democratic Party apart at a critical moment in U.S. history. It is up to veteran political observers like Olbermann to help prevent that from taking place. He must know that the Clinton-Obama struggle has been one of the gentlest in the long annals of primary season internecine warfare. We depend on people like Olbermann to provide some perspective to the lovestruck virgins.

There is another point, too. It has been made by others, but it bears repeating. Barack Obama is not the only trailblazer in this campaign. It is right and appropriate to worry about how African Americans may regard the treatment received by the first viable black candidate to compete for the presidency. But women are also watching how the media boys’ club reacts to the first serious non-male contender for the White House. And on this count, the cable channels, and especially MSNBC, have not distinguished themselves.

Nobody—not even Keith Olbermann—should feel compelled to remain silent because of the unusual (and—let’s not forget—wonderful) demographics of the current Democratic campaign. But they should avoid opening up unnecessary wounds in a party that will need all of its ducks in a row and quacking in order to defeat McCain in eight months. At the very least, they have to understand that summoning the rancid image of David Duke can accomplish nothing positive for the party.

Good night and good luck—to all of us.

A Thought for a Thursday

2008-03-13T17:05:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit indisposed today, so I am only up for a short post.

With that in mind, a quick thought: after 9/11 it's particularly important not to be promiscuous in our use of the word "terrorist". I was reading the other day about a radical environmental group that burned down several unoccupied homes that had just been erected somewhere. Maybe it was some endangered species habitat; I really don't remember. Anyway, the media referred to the wrongdoers as eco-terrorists.

They are not terrorists. They are vandals. They are arsonists. They are presumably felons. But terrorists are people who try to create, you know, terror. They are not people who make clear their intention not to harm or kill another human being.

We musn't allow the right wing to get away with this formulation.

That is all.

Another Day, Another Outrage

2008-03-12T02:56:00.001-07:00

It used to be that the national media would demand our outrage only two or three times a year. First, someone would say something stupid or offensive. Then, we would have the ritual bloodletting, the Maoist-style confession, and finally, if the situation warranted it, the public beheading. Sometimes, as in the case of Don Imus, the offense was actually severe and detestable. Other times, as when Illinois Senator Dick Durbin compared Guantánamo to the Soviet gulag, a slight exaggeration resulted in a manufactured overreaction. Careers interrupted, ambitions destroyed, reputations shattered—all in a day's work for the empty proprietors of the 24-hour cable news networks and their stable of windup pundits.

During this election year, however, we seem to be enduring these faux outrages on a regular basis. This week, in fact, we have been treated to two such controversies in a span of barely 72 hours. Over the weekend, Barack Obama's key foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, walked the plank after it was revealed that she had referred to Hillary Clinton as a "monster" during an interview with a Scottish newspaper. Yesterday, we learned that Geraldine Ferraro, one-time vice presidential nominee and current Clinton adviser, suggested out loud that Senator Obama would not be where he is today—that is, leading Ferraro's preferred candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination—if he were not African American.

Three days ago, the Clinton camp loudly demanded that their rival disassociate himself from Professor Power's petty insult and from Professor Power herself. Obama meekly obliged. Now, seizing on Ferraro's remarks, Team Obama insists that sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, and that Ms. Ferraro should be renounced, sacrificed, and otherwise pilloried on the talk shows for at least the remainder of the week.

For the moment, let's take the Obama complaint seriously, rather than treating it as the political ploy it so obviously is. Our first question, then, is quite simple: Did Geraldine Ferraro's comments go beyond the pale of acceptable political discourse? Is it, in fact, inherently racist to speculate about the role of skin color in the fortunes of presidential candidates and other government officials?

I believe the answer to that question would be "no". Race structures so many opinions and opportunities in the United States that it would be rather foolish to ignore it altogether. Certainly, more that a few liberals have alleged that George H.W. Bush's nomination of the marginally qualified Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court constituted a particularly cynical instance Republican affirmative action. Similarly, it rarely escapes left-wing notice that the few African Americans attending election-year Republican rallies typically enjoy choice seating assignments that happen to correspond exactly with the media's preferred camera angles. Race matters in American politics, and there is no sense pretending otherwise.

Having said that, an argument such as Ferraro's that sees race as the decisive variable is both misleading and insulting. Barack Obama is an African American. He is also a brilliant man, an inspirational speaker, and a charismatic leader. All of these things matter at least as much—and probably far more—than the color of his skin to most voters.

Does Senator Obama benefit from the media's attraction to his life story and also, perhaps, from their unwillingness to undermine a viable black presidential candidate? Maybe. Are the senator's electoral prospects enhanced by the fact that he commands somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90% of the African American vote? Certainly. But Obama's millions of supporters, black and white, are drawn to both the message and the messenger, and race is but one of many reasons for his meteoric rise.

More pernicious is the suggestion that whatever edge Obama may enjoy on the basis of his race is somehow unfair. That is a road we dare not travel because it brings us face to face with the degree to which any of us has actually earned what we have. Hillary Clinton grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class household and married a rising politician. Do you suppose these things might have helped ease her way to the top? John McCain's father was an admiral in the U.S. Navy and McCain himself graduated from Annapolis. Would he be on the national stage today if poppa had been a petty officer?

Unearned advantage can be found in nearly every life. Most successful politicians benefited from some accident of birth. George W. Bush was the grandson of a senator and the son of a president. The list of men who have reached the presidency with no appreciable head start is a short one, and includes Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.

Except, of course, that Clinton and Nixon also had a rather important advantage in their early lives and careers. They were white. Poor—or rich—black kids from Hope couldn't become the governor of Arkansas in 1978. The children of Mexican immigrants in Yorba Linda, California, had little hope back in the 1940s of parlaying their connections into a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. For most of American history—and even, to a significant extent, today—white skin was not simply an advantage in the quest for higher office. It was, instead, a precondition.

This is, in fact, not only the fatal flaw in Geraldine Ferraro's claim against Barack Obama, it is also the point that undermines almost every argument made against affirmative action. If you look only at the presidential election, the Supreme Court nomination, or the elite college admission, it is easy to conclude that minority status confers some sort of decisive benefit in the lives of successful men and women. This claim, however, ignores everything that happened prior to that moment of triumph.

Before he could benefit from his race (if he actually did), Barack Obama first had to overcome all of the biases and prejudices that still face black Americans, especially those whose names sound exotic to the American ear. Long before the first President Bush considered him for the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas had to make his own way out of rural Georgia, a rather considerable feat. Hell, Ms. Ferraro herself, who would never have been Walter Mondale's choice for veep had she been male, achieved that honor only after first overcoming the sexism of the 1970s and winning a House seat in working class Queens. Ultimately, affirmative action only boosts those who have risen, usually on the basis of their own transcendent talents and unyielding efforts, to the point where their goals are finally within reach. To contend that the benefits of affirmative action are somehow undeserved, therefore, is preposterous.

All of this, of course, begs the political question of the day. What should Hillary Clinton do about Geraldine Ferraro? Here's my answer: nothing. Candidates are not responsible for every stupid, misguided idea that comes from one of their aides or advisors. Obviously, there are limits. Bald-faced expressions of bigotry remain a firing offense in any decent campaign. But what Ferraro said was not racist, at least not in the sense we usually think of the term, the Don Imus sense. It was simply wrong.

A couple of days ago, I suggested that Barack Obama should have stood behind his embattled foreign policy adviser. Today, I make that same suggestion to Senator Clinton. Someone needs to take a little air out of the perpetual outrage machine. Now would be as good a time as any to start.