So let’s get two things out of the way.
I think Obama’s going to win.
I think Obama should win, that we’ll be better off if he does – so listen up hawks.
And once he does win, I think it’s going to rain hard rocks on the heads of a lot of us. I think we’ll see institutional death spirals in the major parties and in the media. And, shockingly, I kind of look forward to it all.
Let’s get through these one at a time.
I. OBAMA’S GOING TO WIN
Look, McCain and Palin haven’t shown that they’ve got the punch to hang with Obama and the media. There’s punch there to be had – if Patterico and Ace and Confederate Yankee were running the messaging part of the McCain campaign, I think he’d be doing better, bluntly. I started out really impressed by Steve Schmidt. Today – not so much. Look, it’s not fair that the media are looking through Palin’s used Kotex with a microscope and a gene sequencer and ignoring major stories about Obama. It’s not fair that they are editing out whole sections of speeches that McCain is giving and then slamming him for his silence.
But you know what? Politics at this level isn’t fair, and we pay our leaders to solve problems like this. There are ways to do it. Buy airtime. Run better ads. Give better speeches while you’re at it. Route around the media to the extent you can, and flood the zone with talking heads, letter writers and Youtube videos to the extent you can’t.
Managing the media beast is the first job for a president, because the first job for a president isn’t governing, it’s not managing the mechanism of the government, it’s messaging. It’s running psyops on us to keep our beliefs and hopes aligned with his (and vice versa, I should add).
So, bummer, John and Sarah, thanks for playing, see you next time (one of you at least).
II. OBAMA OUGHT TO WIN
Yeah, I know all the arguments for why he shouldn’t. Iraq, Iraq and Iraq. Reprising Kennedy’s flop in Vienna in Tehran. Launched his political career as a member of the kinda-socialist New Party.
Big Deal.
Look, I continue to be someone who sees one primary issue as central to the history of our time – are we going to kill (or allow to be killed) a shedload of Arabs because we allowed a crazed ideology to be funded by kleptocrats and delude their people into believing that they could defeat the two Satans if they really tried? I’d like to avoid this, thank you very much. And avoiding this isn’t a matter of accommodating footwashing stations in university bathrooms (although that’s something I’d be having a long hard talk with some regents about…). Sadly, the other side is more – well more millennial than that. And if they truly gain power – power over the masses of the Arab world, who today mostly just want to stop being screwed by their governments – then we’ll have a problem. Not as bad of one as they will, but a problem nonetheless.
I see two steps to avoiding that problem. The first is, simply, being stronger by being united. In the comments here and in discussions I’ve had elsewhere, the fracture line over the war appears to be the de jure boundary between parties. That’s wacked, but true. We need to stir the pot. And since I’m convinced that nothing we do can or will tip the balance if the GOP stays in power, they need to take one for the team and lose. I believe deeply that the innate impulses of even Barney Frank are in the right place. I believe that our leadership class does truly love the country an that they – like JFK – will try to do the right thing once they stumble once or twice.
As someone with skin in the game, I expect them to stumble, but really, really, hope they do not stumble too badly.
And, as I’ve said before, we’re strong enough to err on the side of calmness. Let’s go talk to people; let’s step back – having shown that we do have teeth and may use them – and let’s try chatting with people before we have to decide to shoot them.
On the domestic side, I hate to say it, but I really do support Obama. Look, he’s a crony capitalist liberal – a true denizen of the Skyboxes. But some tough decisions are going to have to be made in the next few years as we readjust our fiscal expectations a bit, and I think both that a Democrat will be able to get more from the public sector unions than a Republican will, but that in balancing the scales of sacrifice, Obama will tip them more in the direction I believe they ought to go.
III. IT GOING TO BE UGLY WHEN HE DOES
The GOP will start the slugfest as the Reagan coalition deconstructs itself. The GOP has been this weird accumulation of insider traders, courtiers selling favors, small government true believers, strong America advocates, and those seeking to recapture a traditional America which – while a great and necessary myth – really never existed. They are going to be seriously pissed off at each other after November.
The Democrats won’t be far behind, I believe. Obama may have deep roots in the Left, but nothing in his career has shown him to be anything but a sharp political operative with his eye on the main prize. Short of a Sierra Maestra story, which I refuse to believe because it’s just too damn implausible, what we have is a power-hungry (like all politicians) young man who came to the game with a core set of values (which are still buried in there) and who decided that what he liked was the game. And was damn good at it.
And if I’m wrong, I have a lot of faith in American institutions to rein him in. Unless George Soros buys them all, and installs Oliver Willis and Matt Yglesias as editors of the Daily Him.
But he has lashed together a coalition that includes folks who just aren’t going to be happy at all when he turns out to be a pragmatist. And while the GOP battle will be over what it will take to be relevant and win again – meaning that there is hope for introspection and rational thought – the Democratic side is going to be like a cage of rabid weasels.
And the media, my friends, the media. I don’t think I can tell you how badly the media has p**sed away it’s only valuable capital stock – its credibility. 30% of the people in America think Palin was a pretty good choice and that she was RF’ed by the major media. A lot of people who don’t love Palin think she got RF’ed by the media and that Obama (like Edwards) got a nod and a wink. A lot of people who love Obama don’t like the media either – so they are going to find themselves with damn little support out here in the world. The media absolutely shaped this election, let’s be clear. But the aftershocks will mean that they will have far less to say about elections in the future – assuming that they have jobs at all.
IV. WHY THIS IS GOOD NEWS
The collapse of an established – anything – whether a political order, a worldview, a movement, an industry is a time of great anxiety. And of some suffering as the winners in the old order find themselves no longer on top.
But it’s a good thing, and something that has over our history made us a great country. Because we can have these kinds of collapses and inversions and yet we’re still on our 1st Republic. So fasten your seat belts, strap on your helmets, it’s going to be a wild ride. But out of it, I genuinely believe will come two things that will be incredibly valuable to my sons.
A new political alignment as the alignment of 30 years ago splinters. And a new media universe and the major media companies go back to funding expensive entertainment and leave the newsgathering to a smaller, more agile group of people who manage – through dispute, personal witness, and the ubiquity of record – to bring us together around a new level of news.
There’s a lot to cover here, but the short version of my reaction is that all those good things you seem to believe will happen following an Obama victory – the Republicans getting their crap together, Obama governing as a pragmatist, the aftershocks in the media – I would expect the exact opposite to occur.
McCain & Palin seem to be the only Republicans capable of straightening out the party; the task is far easier following a wildly improbable victory than an expected defeat.
An Obama victory will be – rightly – regarded as a vindication of the nutroots; nothing in Obama’s history indicates he desires to reach across the aisle, and, more importantly, he has no incentive to.
Last, wouldn’t the victory of the media’s chosen candidate encourage even more such behavior rather than diminish it? Do you really think that an Obama victory, or defeat, will be more likely to inspire critical self-reflection by the media?
AL, I really hope you’ll be right, but I fear you won’t be—baring a massive October surprise, it looks like Obama will manage a narrow to moderate win. Although he may be a pragmatist, I think there’s enough socialist momentum to continue this crazy government assumption of the banking and insurance controls in the US, to unbalance the SCOTUS, and to generally enlarge government while diminishing individual liberties. McCain’s record in those areas is pretty dismal, too, with the exception of SCOTUS picks, but he’s so random that at least we know he can’t get his act together enough to make a coordinated effort in all those areas.
I hope I can finish my two AR-15 builds before January… in the meantime, I’m buying “We’re Screwed ’08” shirts for Michelle and me tomorrow. 🙂
AL,
I like your argument. Crashes are often nessiary to clean out the crap in a large system, but I have a major concern about it all.
At this point I really don’t really want John McCain to be president. I think he would just lurch from thing to thing, not really getting anything done. He ambition to do big things, but something about him says that he would make a mess of it all.
It’s likely that Obama would cause the crash you describe (Bad leadership, very unrealistic view of humanity). Everyone in power is being increadibly ireasonible right now and a shock to the whole system would liklly lead to better things in the future. But then again, it might kill our system all together.
However there are other possibilities:
1. Obama could create a big enough cult of personality to mess up life for a long time. FDR is my example of this. FDR was totally irresponsible, kept the depression going for 5/6 more years that it would have normally, believed the crap that Stalin was putting out and tried to sneak us into a war that no one in America wanted. And everybody loved him. People who screw up are sometimes re-elected with overwhelming majorities.
2. Obama could permanently rig power for himself and the Democrats. He has strong ties to the biggest election fixing machine around. Remember, he cut his teeth in 2ed most corrupt political scene in America and once he gains power he will likely institutionalize that corruption. The media will look the other way and election after election will be fixed. Giving a very corrupt person great deal of power can lead to horrible anti-democratic results. He has already replace most of the DNC people with the crew from Chicago. We have seen him threaten strong armed tactics before the election as it is: removing tax free status (protest about Iran with Palin), fairness doctrine, revoking FCC licenses for TV stations that don’t tow the line.
3. Obama proves to be very weak and guts the military. He pushing everything into domestic spending and lets the world go to pot. China and Russia goes on the warpath and Iran bullies the middle east. America falls into a terminal decline. When push comes to shove, people do what the powerful tell them to do. If we give up that power China and Russia will most certainly step into that gap we leave. And we return to 1940’s land, but with nukes.
He is going to be the next president and I really hope you are correct. But I have my doubts. Good post.
Sorry, AL: “RF’d”? My brain’s mind control laser crystal must be on the fritz… Ah! “Royally F***ed?” I m snart.
.
Great stuff! Either Obama does some good, or he may be out in 4 years. He may turn out to be the ‘New Dhimmi Carter’, thus educating more of today’s young people of the folly of The Left.
.
absurd thought –
God of the Universe says
ELECT Socialism
let the young people see
survive the false promises
.
absurd thought –
God of the Universe hates
history either way
America WILL survive
no matter who wins the votes
.
http://lulu.com/uspace
http://haltterrorism.com
.
Time for a Cleanup on Aisle 5?
Shorter AL: there’s a pony in here somewhere
Jim: Drive by much? Stick around and contribute substance, great. We value that. Pop your head in and do what you just did before establishing some credibility / credit here, and be invited to take a hike. Your choice.
PS: Your post of 9/24 was not bad. “Shorter {x}” as your second post? Come onnnn.
[Edited]
Apologies, here’s something I hope will be construed as on-topic, though a bit ranty. [And there’s a lot of overlap with Blake Sobiloff’s comment upthread. Oh well.]
It is not impossible that BHO is both a con man *and* feckless, depending upon context. Of course, that might be said of McCain as well. Thus my general dyspepsia regarding the next 4 years. I’ve already said to Beard, in another thread here at WoC, that I anticipate being less free (in law; in fact, who can say?) in 4 years no matter who gets the stick. It’s just a question of which part of the balloon gets squeezed. The financial problem is one more invitation for folks who want to get a nice firm grip on that stick. Only — ever hear of Pilot Induced Oscillation?
[There are two metaphors I’m trying for here. The balloon is the envelope of authentic rights purportedly defended by the government — actually those rights that are not infringed at any moment in time. The stick is the monopoly on force the government gets, and by figurative extension, the control stick of an aircraft.]
With O, we will, without a question, get a Supreme Court packed with folks who will be inclined to reverse Heller (for instance) by a thousand cuts, and who believe that “harmonizing” US laws with other countries is better than stodgy stare decisis; along with a House and Senate who will cheerfully nod at utterances that things like health care are rights. That way leads, I’m sorry to say, to “a more perfect union” of the slavery kind. All consenting, of course. Cattle get all the pharmaceuticals they need, right?
Brrr.
Remind me how Obama’s / the Dems’ snake oil is any better than the kind apparently swallowed by way too many people who never learned in school — or on the streets — that a deal (mortgage / what have you) that sounds too good to be true probably is? “Soothing, habit-forming, deee-licious!”
Hmm. Surprising my own self here. Since CA is all sewn up for O, I guess I’ll be pulling the lever for Bob Barr. Hell, he might crack 2% here! Hoooah!
[Edited]
There’s a lot I could say, and would like to say in reply to this but (a) I’m not an American citizen and (b) I don’t really have the time.
I just want to say.. Jimmy Carter’s mistakes still haunt us. A legitimized theocratic Iran is among the worst of his legacies. The housing bubble can arguably be traced back to policies from that era, although I’ve no idea how much of a hand he had in them.
I *really* don’t want the next president of the USA to be a similar combination of weak, idealistic and unable to see the consequences of his actions. Please don’t make that mistake again. McCain is far from the best candidate but I don’t think he’s any of those things (although I think there’s a glimmer of idealism left in him somewhere). As for Obama, I’ll leave an assessment of him up to those who know more about him than I do.
[i]Look, I continue to be someone who sees one primary issue as central to the history of our time – are we going to kill (or allow to be killed) a shedload of Arabs because we allowed a crazed ideology to be funded by kleptocrats and delude their people into believing that they could defeat the two Satans if they really tried? I’d like to avoid this, thank you very much.
I believe that our leadership class does truly love the country an that they – like JFK – will try to do the right thing once they stumble once or twice.[/i]
The Democratic leadership has been happy enough before to condemn the people of South East Asia to the communist slaughterhouses.
How long has the left been agitating that the USA is to blame for the mess in the Middle East? Since the Yom Kippur and Iraq-Iran conflicts at least?
Obama has spend years helping to make the war against Arab extemism the most poisonous item in American politics. And certainly has never shown any political courage or deviation from leftist tropes.
But suddenly, if elected president that same Obama is going to spend his political capital on continueing the war in Iraq or Afghanistan? The insane left will suddenly throw overboard their lifelong convictions? Can’t see it happening.
Much more likely is that Obama will abandon the Middle East, with Europe’s participation evaporating at his first sign of weakness.
However, it isn’t called peace until both sides decide to stop fighting, and it may take a nuclear mushroom to remind the West of that.
Apart from all the possible good results, for both Democrats, Republicans and Americans in general, AL, might there not be effects abroad, effects for those who have been fooled to think that throwing in their lot with the US of A is not an automatic death sentence?
“As we all know, the Iraq war was unwinnable from the start. The supposed ‘anbar awakening’ was at most a temporary fluke that was blown up all out of proportion by lying Generals in collusion with the Republican administration, but probably lies from beginning to end.
Since it was unwinnable, cutting aid to our corrupt puppet was not “selling out our allies” as the Stab-in-the-back-legend-Republicans like to pretend it was, it was stopping throwing good money after bad. Continuing would merely have delayed the inevitable outcome, wasting money and lives in the process, and made real the ‘massacres’ the Republicans fantasize about.
Oh yes, the massacres. Only reported by fleeing officials from the puppet regime, who would have preferred to continue to live off our aid and repress the majority. Only believed by supporters of the Bush administration, who desperately cling to them in an attempt to posthumously justify their disastrous war.
Is it really in the American interest to provoke a war with Iran by subjecting them to a blizzard of accusations about imaginary massacres? At the point where we might bury our old differences with Iran by stopping to oppose their appointment to the sixth permanent seat in the Security Council?
If it isn’t in our interest to go to war against a nuclear armed adversary, what nations interest are the Republicans working for? Perhaps they should make sure their registrations as agents of a foreign power are up to date?”
…but nothing in his career has shown him to be anything but a sharp political operative with his eye on the main prize…
Didn’t Obama run unopposed in his first Ill. election campaign? He didn’t exactly open a can of whoop ass on Hillary Clinton, either.
Yeah, that Jeremiah Wright stuff. Very sharp political acumen there. And a great show of judgment. So in 20 years, Captain Brilliant never picked up the church newsletter? So a guy whose mentor was the black David Duke is gonna bring the country together? Yeah, probably in a second civil war we’ll all becoming together?
And those campaign contributions from Franklin Raines. Well-timed. Hey, maybe Obama can get all the new Peace Corps volunteers to clean up the mess on Wall Street. And if anyone gets hurt, why they’ll have the same health care as Congress!
William Ayers anyone? Yes sir, a new day is certainly dawning over the Potomac.
The main prize in Iraq is winning. Obama never even had his eye on that. The whole anti-surge affair– why would anyone in the military take him seriously? You think Iran isn’t licking their lips over the thought of an Obama presidency?
Sorry, but Obama’s real political gifts begin and end with the media’s dream of “being a part of something historic.”
_”because we allowed”_
What is this, the “Only Americans have moral agency” theory of foreign policy? We act, everyone else is only acted upon?
What I believe:
1. Obama will win: The media are in the tank for him, spending the last of their rapidly devaluing credibility on getting him elected, and McCain is a lousy campaigner, who’d never have gotten the nomination if he hadn’t had the fortune to win in winner take all primaries, and lose in PR primaries. And he just can’t resist pissing off his base, no matter how much he needs them.
2. NONE of these clowns _deserve_ to win. I weep for our country when I think the choice came down to this.
3. Damn straight it’s going to get ugly. Democrats have been less and less willing to accept that they can lose elections legitimately, and Obama’s got associations with ACORN, the name that always comes up when you see a report of fraudulent registrations. I expect the “Fairness” doctrine to make a comeback. I expect massive pressure to purge the media of any conservative voices. I expect efforts, probably successful to some extent, to institutionally entrench the Democratic party against the Republican, the way the two majors entrenched themselves against third parties over the last couple of decades.
This may be the last really free election we have.
And, _Armed_ Liberal, I expect relentless attacks on our 2nd amendment rights from a former board member of Joyce, and Heller being reversed with a vengeance should any of the majority kick the bucket, assuming they don’t just revive FDR’s court packing scheme.
4. We’re not going to be better off. The system needs a reboot, not a sledge hammer to the main drive.
Wow, reading through all this is just… hugely amusing.
As a relatively mainstream liberal Democrat, let me just point out that I’m far less confident about Obama’s victory than many here seem to be- I do think he’s gonna win, but after the last 8 years I’m not celebrating anything until McCain’s concession speech.
That said, seeing all this brewing in the month before the election – seeing the right-wing conventional wisdom suddenly coalesce around the idea that _of course_ Barack Obama’s a hard core ultra-left wing sleeper agent programmed over a decade ago by Bill Ayers to DESTROY AMERICA – gives me some insight into what the talk radio world must have been like after Bill Clinton was elected.
And there are many, many things I could argue at length about in AL’s piece above (you can say Obama’s a “crony capitalist liberal” with a straight face after 8 years of George Bush? Please…) but I think mostly I’ll take some comfort in knowing that AL’s long-running “The Democrats must reform themselves to be more like me to win” thesis is well and truly dead, and that AL himself is reduced to hanging out with disaffected right wingers, watching his political avatars, like Joe Lieberman, crumble into irrelevance.
That, and the (minor, but real) possibility that we could be looking at FDR 2.0 here. Whoot!
I am a big fan of creative destruction. The present situation we find ourselves in is just reality’s way of telling us what we have been doing, all of us, isn’t working.
The world is upside down. Banks are being nationalized by Republicans.
Whatever the outcome of an Obama Presidency, it is not the end of the world. and, whatever the policies that are put into place over the next four years, they will survive or perish based on whether or not they work in the world that the Creative Destruction process we are we will go through produces over the next decade.
208 weeks is not going to usher in a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Awful stuff has happenend on the Republican watch and you pay for that at the polls. That is the way the system works. The Republic survives.
I like AL’s take. I am interested in seeing what happens. How the parties will realign themselves. What new and brilliant ideas are spawned by adversity. It may not be fun, but it will be interesting.
And, we will make the best of it.
If Obama is elected, I sincerely hope that he will be a great president. I believe that he will be like Jimmy Carter on foreign policy (weak and vacillating), FDR on economic policy (disastrous but popular), and Saul Alinsky on domestic policy (divisive and socialist), and that he will end up being a lot like LBJ in overall effect (partisan and divisive at home, weak abroad, and requiring 20 years of cleanup to get to some reasonable point again in either area). That does not cheer me.
If McCain is elected, I sincerely hope that he will be a great president. I believe that he will be like Ronald Reagan on foreign policy (good and incisive, strong), Richard Nixon on economic policy (disastrous but popular), and George H.W. Bush on social policy (essentially uninterested).
In other words, I think that Obama would be a catastrophe, and John McCain would be ineffective or disastrous except on foreign policy. I hope, hope, hope I’m wrong, and I become ever more convinced that we should separate out the State from the Government, because the two require significantly different kinds of leadership and policy vision.
Wow, AL, you really stirred up the hornets nest this morning. I just got my coffee, so I’ll have to ponder on it. I’m also not ready to count McCain out yet. He’s got a whole set of new Ayers ads to run, and linking democrats to terrorists has always been a successful strategy.
Still, there’s reason to believe this strategy will fail. I think the last two debates have helped define “Who is Obama?” in the public mind, at least enough so that the public will be partially resistant to the charges. I also think that the McCain/Palin demeanor is going to turn away undecided independents. But I could be wrong on both counts.
Obama has always struck as a pragmatist AND a politician, continuing some of the best and worst of both categories. Some of that is necessary to run an election, some of that is necessary to run a government. Certainly, some of these things are not helpful, but elections changing politicians is part of the problem with american politics (see McCain, John). What Obama keeps (and tosses away) from his campaign strategy will define his presidency. It could be a very interesting 4 years.
BTW: I think Palin is completely unable to reestablish the republican party. Thus far, she has only shown the complexity of a bumper sticker, when she would need to be a stick shift. She’s smart, but has been completely unable to define herself outside of ‘mainstreet mom’, or show any interest in doing so.
AL,
I think both parties need to be reformed and that a whole sale clean sweep of DC of both the elected and the bureaucratic officials. Sadly, I disagree with you that Obama being elected would be a catalyst for this and I think recent history bears me out.
There are two recent historic cases which argue against this:
1. If having ineffective far left leadership in DC would force the reform you envision, than Pelosi and Reid should have already triggered it. Congress has dropped into *single digit* approval ratings, lower even than a very unpopular president, under their leadership. One of the most important bills in the last several years floundered not on reasoned discussion about the pros and cons, or even the wisdom of following the path. Instead it floundered on pure gotcha politics at a time the country needed to draw together! I see that becoming worse under Obama.
2. In Massachusetts we elected Deval Patrick as Governor. He is another charismatic, leftist, newcomer to politics. Almost literally the first thing he did in office was to trigger a series of scandals related to spending money on his own aggrandizement. These were acts of pure pride and power, the same faults many fear that Obama is susceptible to. Despite some truly widespread disgust in him after this, there is no evidence that any sort of reform is being looked at in the MA Democratic Party. The parallels in this case are significant and argue against your case.
Now, I don’t consider McCain any prize as president. Palin could be a good VP, the jury is still out. On the other hand, I think if McCain unleashes her in DC, we *will* see a major clean up of the bureaucracy, which would effect part of the problem. I see both Obama and Biden leveraging the existing bureaucracy for their own benefit, and creating risk for further corruption based on favoritism.
Sorry, AL, but I think you’re big hope is a mirage in the desert of corruption we’re all in.
StargazerA5
_if I’m wrong, I have a lot of faith in American institutions to rein him in._
It looks as if the Democrats will achieve the 60-majority in the Senate they need to override any filibusters. When you combine Obama’s record of following Pelosi and Reid’s lead consistently, also with solid enough control of both Congress and POTUS to override the brakes that are built into the system, it looks like we’re headed for the kind of serious abuses that happen when there isn’t divided government.
My hope is that the “Blue Dog Democrats”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Democrats will unite with the GOP remnants to block any truly egregious abuses, but that’s clutching at straws. Hope is not a plan.
I’m not saying the GOP doesn’t deserve the time out in the desert which they’re about to embark on, just that expecting Obama to suddenly become a pragmatist is, frankly, wishful thinking. There’s no reason for him to do so: the man is a believer, and with Congress under firm Democratic control, there’s no reason to expect anyone to rein him in.
I also fear Obama’s going to be getting seriously schooled in foreign policy by seasoned pros like the ISI, the Turks, and the Russians (not to mention the Iranians). They know what they want, know how to play one party against another, and they’re ruthless. They’ll test Obama early to see what he’s about.
I will be taking some version of “Esmay’s pledge”:http://deanesmay.com/posts/1090843655.shtml before the election, and I’m definitely not _hoping_ for this to happen, it just seems the most likely scenario.
I’m hearing some rumors around that the polling going on has been skewing the respondents. Nothing solid.
Personally — I think Obama’s going to win. A simple look at the electoral map reveals it. IF the data is good, and there aren’t any October surprises coming down the pipe (Ayers isn’t it).
I’m a libertarian hawk — if the Democrats wanted to resurrect the New Left, minus the Communism, I’d be okay with that. If the Republicans want to rescue the Reagan Coalition, I’m okay with that, too. Some of both party seems to be running in that direction. Meanwhile, my own party drank the cool-aid and insisted on ideological purity… so they’re toast. Electorally speaking, read your Drucker, or die.
But what we’ve got running is a bunch of Progressives/Populists. If some creative destruction occurs around that one, I’m fine. I’m inclined to believe that Obama would do MUCH less damage, with at least part of a party in opposition, than McCain in office and both parties steamrolling his populism through Congress.
Folks, please don’t take my predictions for assumptions that Obama will be a great president – I’d say the odds on his being a decent one are about 1 in 4 – lowered because the times will be so turbulent.
And no, turbulence is never fun, and lots of people are going to be hurt.
But I genuinely – and maybe foolishly, I’ll admit – believe that’s what’s on the other side of these rapids is better than where we are, and look forward to pushing through them.
A.L.
bq. Didn’t Obama run unopposed in his first Ill. election campaign? He didn’t exactly open a can of whoop ass on Hillary Clinton, either.
You left out his effortless ascension to the Senate after Jack Ryan’s campaign imploded (a judge unsealed his divorce court records (link) at, um, a _very_ convenient time in the election cycle) and he ultimately ran against Alan Keyes, of all people.
The man has literally built his resume out of his opponent’s misfortunes, a single speech at the 2004 DNC convention, and a lot of charisma. Even if he had the best ideas ever for the country–which he definitely is nowhere near–he certainly does not _deserve_ to win the election any more than, say, Sarah Palin does.
bq. As a relatively mainstream liberal Democrat
Oxymoron alert!
bq. That, and the (minor, but real) possibility that we could be looking at FDR 2.0 here. Whoot!
Uh, absent the need for one due to a third World War, that is *not* something to cheer for. (And if anyone thinks BHO is ready to run WWIII…)
bq. The world is upside down. Banks are being nationalized by Republicans.
QFT. And the Democratic leadership is running around “whining”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHVyPBMMM9MA&refer=home “No one knows what to do”, when this kind of government power grab is usually their default mode of thinking. Of course they ultimately passed it after browbeating the GOP; wither the “opposition” in Congress?
Interesting times, indeed. And I mean “interesting” in the “Chinese curse”:http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/245000.html sense.
[ Link fixed. Additional Slate.com article on Jack Ryan’s Senate run “here.”:http://www.slate.com/id/2102872/ — M.F. ]
Oops, MoveableType seems to hate Wikipedia’s formatting for in-article links. If anyone could replace the Jack Ryan that with the link to “the main article”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(Senate_candidate) (or to “this Slate article”:http://www.slate.com/id/2102872/ if that still doesn’t work), it should fix the strangeness.[ Changes made to #23 — M.F. ]
Unbeliever-
bq. _As a relatively mainstream liberal Democrat_
bq. Oxymoron alert!
Nope. Internalize this now – if Obama wins by the kind of margins he’s currently getting in the polls, the idea that liberalism is somehow outside of mainstream political thought is dead as a doornail.
bq. _That, and the (minor, but real) possibility that we could be looking at FDR 2.0 here. Whoot_!
bq. Uh, absent the need for one due to a third World War, that is not something to cheer for. (And if anyone thinks BHO is ready to run WWIII…)
Yes, Unbeliever, clearly I’m hoping for World War 3, instead of being excited about the kind of Democrat who can rise above historical crises and shape national politics for decades to come. Also, like Barack Obama, I associate exclusively with terrorists, pray to the twin gods of Stalin and Mao daily, and use the American flag for a handkerchief.
Any other ridiculous stereotypes you’d like to trot out, or are we done with this nonsense?
Let’s go through these one at a time:
I. OBAMA’S GOING TO WIN
No argument here. I think what Armed Liberal said is right.
I would only add that the right response for conservatives is to follow and imitate Sarah Palin. Organize, work for victory, swing from the hips every day that’s left, and always enjoy the fight.
For those who need some pepping up, here’s a rousing haka: (link)
Does that say “game on” or what? That’s the spirit!
II. OBAMA OUGHT TO WIN
On substance, I disagree with Armed Liberal. I think the only foreign policy that’s going to do any good is in a nutshell less Islam, and all major parties oppose that, so foreign policy is a wash. Morally, I think there’s one overwhelming issue, and when it comes to life and death, Sarah Palin is as good as possible, while Barack Obama is as bad as possible. On cultural issues which are important to the character and national identity of our American friends, such as full-blooded support for the first and second amendments, I think that the Republican Party is always far superior, and Heller, decided by one vote, shows how important the difference is. But in this election the Republican offer is less palatable than usual, at least at the top of the ticket. John McCain, of McCain-Feingold and McCain-Kennedy, is unconvincing as a defender of the first amendment to the Constitution and of the national identity. On economics, I think the Republicans have sounder principles and the better record, but in the present crisis neither party gives evidence of knowing what it is doing. On administration, I think Barack Obama is about as crooked as can be, while both Palin (a sterling reformer with executive experience) and McCain (an authentic pork-buster who knows where the bodies are buried) are ideal. Except that they would have almost no power to impose reforms in the face of a crooked Democrat legislature. So that’s better than a wash for conservatives, but not by all that much.
Ultimately I come down for Sarah Palin and against Barack Obama on life. Naturally those who support choice will see it the other way.
There’s also the question of how the election was won.
It’s no good to ask for any restraint from liberals here. Too many of them believe that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election, and that his presidency was illegitimate. Now it’s payback time. On the other hand, conservatives think that George W. Bush was legitimately elected, and Al Gore tried to to get himself legally selected, and failed, and that ought to have been that.
After this election, there will be a long list of precedents that conservatives will think Barack Obama has set – not, from their point of view, in legitimate retaliation – as to what you can do in the 21st Century to get elected. Conversations among conservatives already trend to the view that on judicial appointments, since Democrats have obstructed qualified Republican nominations by harsh tactics, Republicans ought to be just as nasty and harsh when it’s a Democrat president, otherwise you just lose and reward bad behavior. I don’t think conversations about the way this election was won are going to be much different. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, Barack Obama’s win will legitimate every tactic and attitude that brought it about, including diversion of government money to pay for electoral fraud (ACORN), silencing critics (with the Obama campaign launching what were in effect denial of service attacks against radio shows that gave a voice to people Barack wanted silent) and the mainstream media and academic campaign of hysterical, vomiting, head-exploding rage and hatred against Sarah Palin. (And by using those adjectives I only quoted Mrs. Palin’s critics and Barack Obama fans describing their own and their friends reactions.)
Eh. It is what it is. Liberals were bound to win a presidential election in the 21st Century, and since they’ve been acting like this continually since they started to delegitimize the election of George W. Bush, whenever they won they were going to consolidate the legitimacy of this style of politics. So this has been baked in the cake since Bush vs. Gore.
The potential up-sides Armed Liberal points to in a Barack Obama presidency are well thought of, and I hope they come off. Maybe the Democratic Party will take more responsibility for resisting jihad terrorism, and if so that will be a great thing.
III. IT GOING TO BE UGLY WHEN HE DOES
Ah, yuh. But compared to Armed Liberal’s expectations, I think things are going to be easier for Democrats and harder for Republicans than he expects.
bq. _”But he has lashed together a coalition that includes folks who just aren’t going to be happy at all when he turns out to be a pragmatist.”_
That’s OK: there’s plenty of room yet under Barack Obama’s bus, and that represents the best hope that he may be a reasonably efficient president. The people who need to be out of his circle for him to do a good job are crazy enough to force him to get rid of them.
Armed Liberal, you’ve often said that the mainstream media holds a hidden disadvantage for the Democratic Party. When those who should be reviewing your performance and giving you useful feedback on how you’re doing are in fact praising your holy name and getting thrills up their legs at the very nearness of you, you can lose your way. I and Joe Katzman on the other hand have simply insisted: a mighty wurlitzer is an advantage. And as we can see from this election, so it is.
I kept meaning to add – but forgetting till now to post it – that pure and constant hate-tinged negativity also deprives you of feedback. It’s depressing, it’s infuriating, it’s corrosive, undoing the sense that we all have some important interests in common. But mainly, it’s uninformative.
I’ve also addressed some other problems the Republicans have before.
I think the party has shown that it’s not serious about delivering to pro-lifers and religious conservatives what they want. George W. Bush seemed to take his Supreme Court appointments as no more than chances to give a couple of his old cronies, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers, good jobs, and he didn’t care at all how ugly the needless dispute over Harriet Miers got: all that dissuaded him in the end from continuing to press her candidacy was the sad news that she simply couldn’t be coached to a level of constitutional adequacy that would get her through a Senate hearing. As time and stare decisis render Roe unbudgable, and with it the total defeat of the pro-life cause irredeemable, people are going to wonder what they’re fighting for.
After that, I think we’re going to see some reduced turnout elections. A very large part of America, under a third but still significant, is going to tune out like late Romans, when it became apparent that the state they loved had no more use for them, and its course was going to be directed by emperors, without them and their republican values, to the end of Rome. They will have nothing left worth fighting for, because by a judicial coup the Constitution will have been redefined to rule their deepest sense of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” illegitimate. The contest is going to be for the support of people who do want things that politicians can and will deliver, like patronage.
The Republican Party has no idea how to win in a landscape like that. Once you rule out of court the old believers in republican virtue and the pro-lifers and the Christian conservatives, there’s not enough people left who will vote Republican without being well paid to do so.
Patronage works best with huge, discrete pools of permanent clients, and in support of deep bigotries that keep those pools partisan and locked in at minimum cost. The Democratic Party has won this game in advance, and Barack Obama’s monolithic Black support illustrates that.
IV. WHY THIS IS GOOD NEWS
bq. _”The collapse of an established – anything – whether a political order, a worldview, a movement, an industry is a time of great anxiety.”_
Yup.
bq. _”And of some suffering as the winners in the old order find themselves no longer on top.”_
And of much more suffering for those who were never on top, but who had hope that however long the road, however high the cost, right might eventually prevail, but who see the door close forever.
That is a bitter cup, and Barack Obama the baby-killer is going to make pro-lifers drink from it, right to the dregs.
And a brave new world will be born.
_Civilization is sterilization._
_Progress is lovely._
_One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments._
When it comes to the unborn handicapped – or even eventually with the born, and those in comas and considered not worth trying to help, etc. etc. etc. : _Ending is better than mending._
_Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have today._
That last one, I approve of. Sarah Palin’s obviously having fun. The party won’t last forever. Get in there!
After the election is lost, there will be plenty of time to draw conclusions about the right way to behave in Barack Obama’s world.
Chris, in the wildest, most optimistic visions of the Obama folks I know, the election looks like a 55 – 45 race, with a closer electoral vote b/c the big margin Obama wins will be concentrated in the core blue states.
That leaves 45% of the public who don’t accept Obama-esque liberalism as a core value.
Obama’s reaction to that will determine the success or failure of his Administration.
Because 2 years from now, we’ll be having a Congressional election, and to the extent that Obama is pissing on their shoes, it’s likely that we’ll see changes in Congress that make it harder – not easier – for him to operate.
A.L.
#23 from The Unbeliever at 3:58 pm on Oct 09, 2008
Oxymoron
I have been defending this very specific and beautiful word from degradation through mis-use for the past 40 years.
People more and more use it as a synonym for the phrase Contradiction in Terms.
In fact, it refers to a poetic device that merges *seemingly* contradictory terms or ideas, most famously used by Shakespeare when Juliet speaks to Romeo in the garden scene, she says:
Sweet, so would I,
Yet *I should kill thee with much cherishing.*
Good night, good night! *Parting is such sweet sorrow*,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
Both have enormous emotional charge. Anyone who has ever experienced love cannot deny the verity in these seeming contradictions in terms. Especially the last, which distills the emotional power of the device to its purest form.
The word Oxymoron shouldn’t be debased by confusing it with its poorer cousin.
bq. Nope. Internalize this now – if Obama wins by the kind of margins he’s currently getting in the polls the idea that liberalism is somehow outside of mainstream political thought is dead as a doornail.
Roughly a “5%”:http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/general_election_mccain_vs_obama-225.html average lead does not an impressive landslide make. Combine both Obama’s and Hillary’s blatant image morphing to appear moderate, and the fact that “twice as many Americans self-identify as conservative over liberal”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_03/010893.php (and yes, I know the counter-argument about _operational_ liberalism), and I think you’re being a little, ah, “irrationaly exuberant”.
bq. Yes, Unbeliever, clearly I’m hoping for World War 3, instead of being excited about the kind of Democrat who can rise above historical crises and shape national politics for decades to come.
Personality cult much?
FDR was great at _political image_ but not so good at domestic policy. He lengthened the Great Depression, instituted wage and price controls, and got large swaths of the New Deal struck down as unconstitutional (after his whole “court packing”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Reorganization_Bill_of_1937 fiasco; can you imagine what would happen if Bush (or Obama) tried that today?) He started programs which have put America on a deficit footing to this day, and came pretty damn close to turning the US into a planned economy.
So no, I am most definitely *not* hoping for a second FDR. If you want to be excited about better communicators as head of state, fine; that’s been my main problem with Bush since 2002. But you’re foolish to invoke a good communicator with crappy domestic policies, in an election season where the leading candidate is a charismatic speechmaker with a socialist economic policy.
(Obviously you would have got less disagreement if you hoped for another Reagan as the next Great Communicator. But that would clash rather harshly with your party’s myth and narrative, now wouldn’t it?)
And as my Grand Bipartisan Gesture for the year, I’ll agree to TOC’s entire post #28 and concede my grammatical laziness. I blame the Internet’s tendency to encourage us to communicate via memes instead of exact terms, when it facilitates quicker communication of general ideas. (Just like the liberal vs conservative labelling that started this.)
#27 from Armed Liberal at 5:01 pm on Oct 09, 2008
Chris, in the wildest, most optimistic visions of the Obama folks I know, the election looks like a 55 – 45 race, with a closer electoral vote b/c the big margin Obama wins will be concentrated in the core blue states.
That leaves 45% of the public who don’t accept Obama-esque liberalism as a core value.
Obama’s reaction to that will determine the success or failure of his Administration.
Because 2 years from now, we’ll be having a Congressional election, and to the extent that Obama is pissing on their shoes, it’s likely that we’ll see changes in Congress that make it harder – not easier – for him to operate.
A.L.
___________________
The most important impact in this election will be in the Senate. I have never underestimated Obama. When many here saw him as an empty suit, I said that this was a very formidable opponent and an outstanding politician. Possibly even better than Reagan and Clinton, who as politicians were both excellent.
I fully expect Obama to turn the country 180 degrees during his first 100 days in office. The Senate will be where he has secured his power to do so.
I also said that I thought he was ruthless, which I do not feel is necessarily a bad trait.
As David Blue mentioned above
_That’s OK: there’s plenty of room yet under Barack Obama’s bus, and that represents the best hope that he may be a reasonably efficient president. The people who need to be out of his circle for him to do a good job are crazy enough to force him to get rid of them._
I cannot remember a president entering office with more of a mandate a from top to bottom. From state legislatures to the Federal level with a choke hold on both Houses of Congress. Maybe Johnson, but I don’t feel like looking it up.
Anyone trying to predict President Obama’s actions is going to be surprised. We will just have to wait and see. for all the complaints that Obama has no political resume, he is about to step into a position of power that no President has enjoyed since Roosevelt.
It is really remarkable.
That leaves 45% of the public who don’t accept Obama-esque liberalism as a core value.
And it assumes the 55% are voting for Obama as a liberal. I don’t accept this assumption. Obama is not running as a liberal, he’s running (quite successfully) as not a Republican. They’re not the same thing.
I hope Obama governs as he’s campaigned, and not the way his personal history would lead me to believe. The lack of any counter-balance greatly concerns me, however.
I really do want to know who his Secretary of the Treasury will be. That’s the person I’m most interested in.
#30 from The Unbeliever at 5:11 pm on Oct 09, 2008
And as my Grand Bipartisan Gesture for the year, I’ll agree to TOC’s entire post #28 and concede my grammatical laziness. I blame the Internet’s tendency to encourage us to communicate via memes instead of exact terms, when it facilitates quicker communication of general ideas. (Just like the liberal vs conservative labelling that started this.)
____________________
Yes, but will you join my crusade. One thing I will tell you when you defend Oxymoron in the way I just did, the chicks love it. 🙂
I’d like some of what A.L. is smoking. This, though a minor point, seems particularly preposterous:
bq. _a Democrat will be able to get more from the public sector unions than a Republican will_
To the extent Obama has a jobs program it revolves around regulation and expansion of the public sector. A lot of the fiscal burdens will be hidden or in the long-term form of pension benefits for future administrations.
But I don’t reject outright the notion that only Nixon could go to China and perhaps only Obama can bomb Iran, but its doubtful. Obama and too many of the Democrats have only one organizing principle: NOT BUSH. This makes sense as an electoral strategy, but for governance it looks pretty weak. Bad things are going to happen in the world is my prediction. And Obama will be blamed for them justly or unjustly.
_A new political alignment as the alignment of 30 years ago splinters._
Again, what is A.L. smoking? First of all, the cult of personalities that are the candidates for both parties do not have the type of ideological depth for re-alignment. Secondly, if there were any re-alignment, it would not be one to A.L.’s liking. Obama represents the rise of the technocratic elites in the Democratic Party and the fall of the working class Democrats. Almost certainly Republican candidates will be looking to exploit that gap four years from now.
So who is in this new alignment you dream of?
#31 from TOC:
bq. _I cannot remember a president entering office with more of a mandate a from top to bottom. From state legislatures to the Federal level with a choke hold on both Houses of Congress.”_
And the Fourth Estate, let’s not forget them.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
#31 from TOC:
bq. _”for all the complaints that Obama has no political resume, he is about to step into a position of power that no President has enjoyed since Roosevelt.”_
bq. _”It is really remarkable.”_
It really is. The world is changing fundamentally before our eyes.
PD Shaw, all you need for a deep, permanent change in what plays in America is some Supreme Court picks. It doesn’t work if they betray you, but Supreme Court “growth in office” goes only in one direction. It doesn’t work if you pick conservatives who want to upset the apple cart as little as possible with each decision, but it works fine if you pick radicals who think that their duty is to impose their own wills. And it doesn’t work if you can’t get your picks, or if the pool you pick from is restricted due to people not wanting to be Borked or held up indefinitely, but it works fine if the Fourth Estate and the Senate are cheering for you.
Barack Obama has what it takes to remake America and the world. The only thing that could make him even mightier is for more vacancies to open up on the court.
#8 Nortius:
Sorry for the snark. I do lurk here when I can but mostly don’t comment, since others have usually said what I’m thinking.
Substantively, I think AL is probably right on #1, probably wrong on #2, probably right on #3. The snark was due to the late night jaw-drop at #4. I actually hope #4 is right, but there is so much uncertainty about what might happen when things collapse, it struck me as wildly optimistic to say “this is good news” vs. “this might be good news”. Especially since aspects of #3 could erase whatever post-racial credit we’d want to give ourselves for electing Obama.
I’d love to see a couple of centrist, pragmatist parties emerge from the ashes of the Dems and the GOP, especially if one of them would have room in the tent for the handful of metrolibertarian hawks like me. But for the replacements for our collapsed establishment institutions to be better, the better angels have to be found for the rebuilding. What do we actually see in this year’s political landscape? I see:
– both parties are running on soak-the-rich populism
– the political innovations from the Dems include the Kossacks, ACORN voter-registration, and Doodad Pro
– the GOP analysis of the McCain weakness is that he hasn’t veered far enough to the right
– as AL points out, the MSM has thrown out its credibilty
– even the Libertarian wing of the political discourse is the Paulbots and Bob Barr (?!!!)
If I wasn’t deep down an optimist about American exceptionalism, I’d be downright depressed. For mostly nonrational reasons, I think we’ll survive the next 4-8-whatever years. But I would have done #4 as “Why this might not be an unmitigated disaster” instead of “Why this is good news”.
I would probably add: “for us here in the USA”. I’m less optimistic about the idea of Obama helping our standing in the world, especially in the sense of what it means to be an ally or a trading partner. After the debate, I realized that the pattern for the two candidates is that McCain says intemperate things about our enemies (Bomb Iran etc.), but Obama likes to threaten our friends. The Iraqis, the Afghans, the Canadians, the Mexicans, and the Colombians… they all need to step up more or…what?
Is that better? Can I come back?
When a caller to the debate eagerly asked what kind of sacrifices they would demand from “the American people”, it was obvious that aging liberals expect to finally inherit the world they’ve always dreamed of: a dismal socialist bureaucracy, headed by the Beautiful Leader who not only tells people what to think and feel, but tells them who and what they are.
No longer a world but a story – a story with a political moral. A nasty, puritanical, Woodrow Wilson kind of moral.
This is not going to be as easy as they think.
bq. Is that better? Can I come back?
Jim, given your weakness for puns about “fluorescence resonance energy transfer,”:http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=6566 the answer can only be, “sure thing!”
#38 from Glen Wishard:
bq. _”This is not going to be as easy as they think.”_
To give them everything they want? No.
But for the Supreme Court to toss something extraneous and incompatible with the constitution into it, and leave the rest of society struggling for decades or centuries with what they’ve done, is horribly easy.
Every time the Supreme Court sits is a constitutional convention, if the justices are so disposed, and only their opinions are really consulted.
Quoth Chris:
bq. if Obama wins by the kind of margins he’s currently getting in the polls
You mean 11%? Or do you mean 2%?
That kind of spread is striking to me. Not to you, apparently.
Personally, I only go with Gallup polls, because I think they are done the right way. I believe them when they tell me what I want to believe, and I believe them when they tell me what I don’t want to believe.
_Gallup: Steady: Obama 52, McCain 41_ falls into the latter category.
I’d reprise George Orwell’s famous statement about not assuming current trends will continue (without the accusation he tacked onto it — that doing so is ‘power worship’). At a time when we’ve just seen our financial models collapse, in spite of having been built by the best experts money could buy, we ought not to be too certain that our political forecasting is better. It suffers from the same flaws: for one thing, that the people doing it have a great deal personally invested in the outcome.
There remain any number of forces that could change the trends of the election. I’ll point to a simple one that is highly likely to come up: this very line of thought that you’re engaging in here has consequences.
The very thought “Obama has this thing just about won” has consequences: people start thinking along these very lines.
#31:
_…for all the complaints that Obama has no political resume, he is about to step into a position of power that no President has enjoyed since Roosevelt._
The “buyer’s remorse” concept has a real effect on elections, and we’ve seen it at work in this election. Hillary Clinton’s long, strong finish came about precisely because Barack Obama seemed to have won early, and voters had to ask themselves if he was what they really wanted. The voters fought tooth and nail in many places to stop him, until the superdelegates had to step in and say, “No, we’ll ensure he is the nominee.”
We’re about to see that phase of the general election. People will start to say, “Hey, he’s about to win the Presidency. Do we really want that?” People will be thinking, “What would he do with all that power?”
How deep will the effect be? I don’t know, and neither really does anyone else. It depends on what other events and conversations harmonize with the thought.
#43 from Grim at 7:30 pm on Oct 09, 2008
_The “buyer’s remorse” concept has a real effect on elections, and we’ve seen it at work in this election._
You are right here. Unfortunately, the candidate who has inspired most Buyer’s remorse has been John McCain and the absolutely dismal campaign he has run. This guy is turning out to be the worst candidate I have ever seen. His campaign team is even more incompetent than McGovern’s and Dukakis’.
He and his campaign infuriate me. His effect as a millstone around the party’s neck is going to cost us the ability to even filibuster in the Senate.
“Buyers Remorse” Steve Schmitt and John McCain are the very definition of Buyers Remorse.
If you think the electoral map looks bad now, we haven’t yet seen the right’s flight to Barr and Paul kick in yet. How does a loss in Georgia sound. Thanks to this campaign it is becoming a possibility.
Tell me about Buyer’s Remorse, I am suffering from a severe case of it at this point.
” Look, it’s not fair that the media are looking through Palin’s used Kotex with a microscope and a gene sequencer and ignoring major stories about Obama.”
AL: This goes well beyond sexism and bad taste.
#44 from TOC:
bq. _”He and his campaign infuriate me. His effect as a millstone around the party’s neck is going to cost us the ability to even filibuster in the Senate.”_
Not if Sarah Palin can prevent it, and maybe she can.
She’s certainly trying her heart out, and in so doing setting the right example for all conservatives to follow now.
Jerry, if you’re infuriated by that, you should stay away from what the media and major commentators are saying about Palin. I think it’s an accurate reflection of their state of mind.
A.L.
JerryT, I don’t agree. No bad words were used, and this is approximately what the mainstream media is doing. Its grubby intrusiveness is the offense, not Armed Liberal calling them on it.
The devastating thing for Republicans is how much credibility the press _hasn’t_ squandered in doing this, how many people simply think the mainstream media is being fair.
For conservatives, read this Pew research and weep: (link).
Some high points: 60% think the press is being fair on John McCain (and 15% think the media is being too easy on him), 60% think the press is being fair to Barack Obama (and 7% think the press is being too tough on him), 66% think the press is being fair to Joe Biden, and even though 38% think the press is being too tough on Sarah Palin, an equal number (38%) thinks the press is being fair to her, and 21% thinks the press is taking it too easy on her. In no case is “fair coverage” less than the most common public verdict on how the press is treating a candidate.
People really do believe what they read in the papers.
#46 from David Blue at 8:05 pm on Oct 09, 2008
_Not if Sarah Palin can prevent it, and maybe she can._
This is what the party has come to? Reliance on Sarah Palin? Don’t get me started on how choosing her is the very symbol of the Party being intellectually bankrupt.
Poor Sarah Palin, the Rovian tool.
#49 from TOC:
bq. _”This is what the party has come to? Reliance on Sarah Palin?”_
Yes. Someone has to make an effort, get out there are rally the troops, no matter how bad the circumstances are. She’s doing it joyfully. And that makes her better than all the people who aren’t doing anything. So it’s right to look up to her.
#49 from TOC:
bq. _”Don’t get me started on how choosing her is the very symbol of the Party being intellectually bankrupt.”_
bq. _”Poor Sarah Palin, the Rovian tool.”_
Well, you were more polite than David Brooks calling her a fatal cancer, so that’s something.
Specifically (link): Sarah Palin “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.” As opposed to David Brooks’ response to Obama: “And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.”
People are and have been reading rivers of toxic, cruel slime directed at Sarah Palin and her family, and daily religio-erotic press adorations of Obama, _and they simply go: ‘sure, that’s fair’._
To behave like that and continue to be believed, to be treated as fair and the arbiter of what’s mainstream and reasonable: that’s _power_.
Senator Roark: “Power don’t come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big, and gettin’ the whole damn world to play along with you.”
– _Sin City_ (2005)
Glen,
Speaking of Woodrow Wilson, that may be what Obama turns out to be, rather than Jimmy Carter.
Ultimately, Jimmy Carter was an executive, a do-er, whereas Wilson was a professor. Obama may have had more legislative experience, but he remains a professor/thinker.
Another parallel is that Wilson is the culmination of the progressive era, and Obama is also the product of the new progressive movement.
David Blue (#26)
The Latino population remains a potential game changer in the demographics of American politics. For now the Latino vote goes largely Democratic. But for how long? Already in the Southwest, we see a conflict inside the Democratic party machine between the black and Latino caucuses.
Unions have also had an uneasy relationship w/ the Latinos. They can’t decide whether to unionize the illegals or not.
In addition, as Latinos move up the economic ladder, they are becoming more conservative in outlook. Many of their ancestors took charge of their destiny by moving across the border. That is an inherently Republican value.
So the future is still unwritten. There is only one way to find out.
For most of the media, “fairness” in this campaign seems to mean that if the story’s out there–somewhere–then it’s been covered. The time spent on reporting positives and negatives, the framing of the issues: trust us, we’ve got it about right. And per #48, most Americans seem to agree.
For instance, reams have been reported about Palin and her doings. And there have been stories about Obama’s associations with Ayers, as well, even in last Saturday’s “NY Times.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html
Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.
Oh. Sorry. I forgot the “blockquote” command for that last paragraph. Those aren’t my words, but the sentiments of “John M. Murtagh,”:http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html who was a nine-year-old at the time that Ayers’ and Dohrn’s Weatherman cell attempted to murder him. His father had the poor taste to be the judge of a trial of Black Panthers. “Eggs, omelets,”:http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/6/pulitzer-mccollam.asp family, firebombs, Ayers might plausibly quip.
In case I’d missed this color, I queried the Times’ search engine with “Murtagh Ayers.” The null-set results were “not surprising.”:http://query.nytimes.com/search/politics?query=murtagh+ayers&x=17&y=5
#50 from David Blue at 8:32 pm on Oct 09, 2008
I have nothing against Sarah Palin. I think she was used by Schimtt and McCain, who bear the full responsibility for this debacle and for the cynical, totally political motivation for choosing her.
Worse, they did not vet her, went under the assumption that she could attract women and have more or less kept her in purdah for the bulk of the campaign.
I don’t like that kind of behavior, nor do I think anyone else in their right mind does.
Again I have nothing against Sara Palin, I do have a lot against the McCain campaign for choosing her.
David Blue, my view of the Supreme Court is that if Obama wins, two liberal justices (Stevens and Ginsburg) will probably retire. It’s an interesting question whether Obama would replace them with liberals or moderate liberals. One of the names thrown around is Obama’s friend, “Cass Sunstein,”:http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/7/19/105134/542 a judicial minimalist who would be highly preferable to me.
If McCain wins, I am less certain that Ginsburg would retire and the possibility is that Scalia might retire. And I question McCain’s ability to nominate conservatives that would be ratified by the Senate. He’s likely to pick a moderate.
So my tally is that liberals have the most at stake in the courts this election since their seats are most likely to open, but there are probably little gains that conservatives can gain in this election cycle either, and there is some perverse risk that they could lose their spokesperson.
AMac,
You seem to be happy playing the role of todays pawn in this tiresome and losing effort to connect two people who only have had peripheral involvement with one another and who do not share views on many issues, most importantly on domestic terrorism and acts of violence.
As Obama has made clear many many times, but you choose to ignore.
It is frustrating to think that your political opposition is capable of little more than this. I can’t decide if we’re lucky or unlucky to be living in a time of such radical change and turmoil where such piffle is naturally relegated to the far fringes of the discourse. But here we are. And here you are talking about Ayers. Sad, really.
You’d think the very fact that it is trivial to make similar associations of McCain/Palin/Bush etc. which, in some cases, are stronger and more sinister than Obama/Ayers, should be enough to deter this kind of thing, or at least provoke the fear that it can backfire. Apparently not.
Sorry to say but your quiver is nearly empty and this last arrow is broken.
bq. Chris, in the wildest, most optimistic visions of the Obama folks I know, the election looks like a 55 – 45 race, with a closer electoral vote b/c the big margin Obama wins will be concentrated in the core blue states.
Oddly enough, AL, the current electoral map counts I’m seeing have Obama’s likely electoral victory closer to 65%. And, considering that Bush Sr.’s win over Dukakis was only 8 percentage points, but was plenty enough excuse for liberals to be told for years afterwards how out of touch they were, I think it’s only fair that conservatives hear the same for a similar victory by the Democrats.
bq. That leaves 45% of the public who don’t accept Obama-esque liberalism as a core value.
bq. Obama’s reaction to that will determine the success or failure of his Administration.
bq. Because 2 years from now, we’ll be having a Congressional election, and to the extent that Obama is pissing on their shoes, it’s likely that we’ll see changes in Congress that make it harder – not easier – for him to operate.
Alternatively, as even people on this thread have pointed out, this is the end of the Reagan coalition, which means that the 45% the Republicans scrounge this election may turn into a much smaller percentage next time around, as guys like, say, Ross Douthat and David Brooks decide that the paranoid ravings of the Republican base are more of a turnoff than sane, thoughtful liberalism.
I would love to hear some sane, thoughtful liberalism. It just seems very hard to find, particularly in the national Democratic Party.
I’m still looking at popular vote projections at FiveThirtyEight showing Obama winning with 51.8% of the vote. That could certainly turn into a more significant electoral vote (347.6 according to 538), but I think that’s way too close to (a) predict realignment or the end of the Reagan coalition or (b) pronounce liberalism ascendant.
Armed Liberal said:
bq. The media absolutely shaped this election, let’s be clear.
Just waking up to this notion I see? They’ve shaped the last two as well. Look where that got us. At least in this case their alleged favorite is also likely to do more good than harm, unlike his predecessor.
bq. Folks, please don’t take my predictions for assumptions that Obama will be a great president – I’d say the odds on his being a decent one are about 1 in 4 – lowered because the times will be so turbulent.
Not sure where you got these numbers…perhaps from your back pocket or somewhere in close proximity?
Times are going to be very tough. A McCain presidency will destroy America. An Obama presidency at very least has the change of turning things around.
My biggest fear, and a very realistic one I’d say given past and current (McCain/Palin’s Hate Rally’s…er, campaign events) behavior, is that Republicans would rather he failed (and the country as well) than succeed, in order to avoid the possibility of a Democrat getting credit for doing good, or better still, great.
With wolves like this nipping constantly at his heels, he will have more of a challenge than just the current events present. He will have opposition from within, who will gleefully regard screwing America as mere collateral damage on their mission to destroy Obama’s presidency.
Warren Harding won the Presidency (a) campaigning on a “Return to Normalcy” from the hectic Wilson years, (b) with a thin resume supported by good looks and a good speaking voice and (c) with celebrity endorsements from Hollywood.
They call this “Warren Harding Error.”:http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2015
Vista, having been at some recent Democratic events here in SoCal, to single out the emotion at the McCain rally and call it a “hate rally” is just silly. The amount of venom on both sides is far too high, and your own posts here are often sharp enough to suggest that you’re happy to partake when it’s your own team’s.
A.L.
“With wolves like this nipping constantly at his heels, he will have more of a challenge than just the current events present. He will have opposition from within, who will gleefully regard screwing America as mere collateral damage on their mission to destroy Obama’s presidency.”
You sound exactly, and I do mean exactly, like a Republican complaining about criticism of Bush from Democrats.
Hey, remember those Republican activists shouting down Obama at the DNC? Oh, no it was the other way around… Remember when the McCain campaign sent an email out urging supporters to flood the phone lines of radio stations to demand critics not be given air time, oh wait, not it was the other way around.
Vista #56 —
bq. this tiresome and losing effort to connect two people who only have had peripheral involvement with one another and who do not share views on many issues, most importantly on domestic terrorism and acts of violence.
Those are the talking points of David Axelrod and the ~75%? of the media that wants to do their job well while helping Obama get elected.
John Murtagh was quite eloquent on the impact of “involvement” (#53 above). I agree with you and, presumably, Murtagh that Obama doesn’t share Ayers’ views on domestic terrorism. Ayers himself is self-congratulatory on his bomb-throwing past and without a shred of remorse for his evil deeds. He celebrates his lack of empathy for his victims, actual and intended. This makes “Hate the sin, love the sinner” a bit of a tightrope walk in this case. No?
Obama is an unusual candidate because of the thinness of his resume. He stands out in comparison to (for example) McCain, H. Clinton, Romney, Biden, Richardson, Bush 43, Bush 41, Gore, W. Clinton, and Dole. Among recent national candidates, perhaps Palin and Huckabee approach Obama most closely in this respect. Instead of accomplishments, each of these three based their candidacies around a Story–one that is inspirational to their fervent supporters and alienating to their opponents.
Personal history (exotic and otherwise) aside, what are Obama’s credentials?
* Graduated from an Ivy League college
* Alinskyite community organizer
* Went to Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude
* President of Harvard Law Review
* Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge
* Illinois State Senator
* A run for Congress
* U.S. Senator
What are his major accomplishments?
* Credit for whatever good he did as an organizer
* Wrote two autobiographical best-sellers
* Credit for whatever good the CAC did
* His legislative wins in Springfield
* His legislative wins in Washington, DC
This is from memory, jogged by “this timeline.”:http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2008/cands08/obamatime.html I couldn’t do this off-the-cuff with, say, Bill Clinton.
The point is that these lists aren’t particularly long. And yet a couple of weeks before the election, significant gaps remain in the mainstream media’s coverage.
Obama has indeed made clear many many times that Ayers was just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”:http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTgwZTVmN2QyNzk2MmUxMzA5OTg0ODZlM2Y2OGI0NDM= That narrative runs into difficulty because of Ayers’ central role in at least two of Obama’s main accomplishments: “the Annenberg Challenge”:http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/10/07/ayersobama-update-my-final-exchange-with-the-new-york-times/ and his State Senate campaign. There’s circumstantial evidence that the connection of the two men is deeper and “extends back to the late 1980s.”:http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2008/10/airing-out-ayer.html People who read blogs know of these twists, but–since the mainstream chooses to ignore such leads–most voters don’t.
bq. your political opposition is capable of little more than this.
I comment on what interests me. If I’m a pawn of McCain’s, be reassured that I’m a low-paid one.
bq. You’d think the very fact that it is trivial to make similar associations of McCain/Palin/Bush etc. which, in some cases, are stronger and more sinister than Obama/Ayers, should be enough to deter this kind of thing
The ironic aspects of this tu quoque defense regularly elude Obama’s champions. In any case, the circumstances surrounding Troopergate and the Keating Five scandal should get thorough airings. At least when it comes to that side of the aisle, journalists and editors can identify what their job is.
bq. I can’t decide if we’re lucky or unlucky to be living in a time of such radical change and turmoil… your quiver is nearly empty and this last arrow is broken.
As far as that ancient Chinese curse, we’ll begin to find out the specifics, soon enough. If quivers and arrows are meant to refer to the outcome of this election, then you and I agree once more. As David Blue and others have said upthread, it goes to Obama–and the unlikely event of a last-minute McCain upset would be nothing to celebrate in any case.
Jeff Medcalf-
bq. I would love to hear some sane, thoughtful liberalism. It just seems very hard to find, particularly in the national Democratic Party.
I suppose it does depend on your reference point, at that. If you think Armed Liberal here is the voice of sane, thoughtful liberalism, then yes, the Democratic Party is just about fresh out. On the other hand, if you think W. and the Iraq War have been as big a disaster as most of the rest of the country does – and as Douthat and Brooks apparently do – then the current Democrats may be just what you’re looking for.
PD Shaw-
bq. I’m still looking at popular vote projections at FiveThirtyEight showing Obama winning with 51.8% of the vote. That could certainly turn into a more significant electoral vote (347.6 according to 538), but I think that’s way too close to (a) predict realignment or the end of the Reagan coalition or (b) pronounce liberalism ascendant.
As for (a), I suggest you take it up with AL, who said it far more clearly than I:
bq. The GOP will start the slugfest as the Reagan coalition deconstructs itself. The GOP has been this weird accumulation of insider traders, courtiers selling favors, small government true believers, strong America advocates, and those seeking to recapture a traditional America which – while a great and necessary myth – really never existed. They are going to be seriously pissed off at each other after November.
And as for (b), the combination of Obama taking the presidency and the very real chance that Democrats won’t merely control both parts of Congress, but will also have a filibuster-proof majority, sure sounds like liberalism ascendant to me.
Chris –
Well, for two years it will be, yes.
A.L.
Marc, I am going to engage with your point II, as you’ve assured me before that it’s the core of your motivation to support Obama, and I take you at your word.
It’s also wretchedly sloppy thinking on two levels.
First, Obama. Whatever positive attributes he may possess, determination and steadfastness in the face of adversity that can harm his political future are not on the list. Just how many have gone under his bus during the campaign? His pastor, his financier, his grandmother, soon the ‘educator’ that got him started in politics, if past is prologue.
Unfortunately, there’s room under that bus for a nation or two, including the hard-fought successes won by our troops. Why you would believe that a man of this character will stand for four years against the antipathy and rage of his base if he holds the line in Iraq and elsewhere, setting himself up for a come-back from Hillary, I do not know. You may call it hope, I call it wishful thinking. And that’s not a strategy.
Obama and the Democrat congress have said repeatedly what they intend to do if they have the power to control the course of the war. I take them at their word; I suggest you do as well.
Though I’m not sure it matters any more, at least in the way that you state – ‘avoiding killing a shed load of Arabs’.
The ‘win by being nice’ plan has had its run. It may even succeed in part, but that matter is now largely out of our hands, and into those of the Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims. Obama can and probably will reduce the chances of success, by pulling out early while whatever institutions may evolve in Iraq are still shaky. But the Arabs and Muslims have now seen both Al Qaeda and America at their fullest – and they now have their own choice to make.
Whatever the full motivations, what we did in Iraq and to large extent in Afghanistan was the act of a wealthy nation confident in its staying power. While the cost in American lives has been less than any historical precedent, the monetary and political costs have been enormous. We gave away enormous force multipliers and years of time in order to get down in the dirt and try to create a decent alternative to slaughter.
It won’t happen again. No sane strategist or commander-in-chief is now going to put forward a plan requiring years of endurance and expense, and commitment from both sides of the political aisle. The political will is expended, we are done. We may also question whether we will have the wealth to afford niceties in the future, the way things are running this month.
If there’s another go around, either through another terrorist assault, or the need to confront Iran or an Islamist Pakistan, it’s going to be full kinetic. Political, economic and military trends all point to a return to the ‘kill people and break things’ way of persuasion if it comes to that. I don’t believe McCain has an interest in going the way of GWB, and I don’t think Obama would risk ending up a second Jimmy Carter.
It doesn’t necessarily mean killing shed loads of Arabs (or Persians or Pashtos), not directly. There really has been a ‘revolution in military affairs’ in the last few years, though not in the original meaning of the phrase. JDAM and its buddies give us a ‘reverse neutron bomb’ – we can wreck the infrastructure and leave the population mostly intact. In the dark, cold (or hot), and no longer a threat.
The initiative has passed. It’s up to the “other side” (in its broadest sense) whether we go another round. If it happens, the nature of that round is not in very much doubt.
I believe your national security case for Obama fails on two grounds – his character, and the exigencies of the strategic situation.
That unfortunately leaves us with the reality of a choice between a Republican, centrist statist, and a Democrat, leftist statist. Perhaps your penchant for wealth redistribution makes you more sympathetic to the potential socialist; if so, it would be better to put forward your case for that destiny of our country, rather than crutching along on a broken national security argument.
NM-
bq. _if Obama wins by the kind of margins he’s currently getting in the polls_
bq. You mean 11%? Or do you mean 2%?
bq. That kind of spread is striking to me. Not to you, apparently.
Haven’t seen any polls with a 2% reading lately, NM – though I have seen a few 3s, and yes, one happy one in double digits.
That said, the poll average has clearly favored Obama for months now, with the solitary exception of McCain’s post-convention bump, and yes, I feel pretty darn comfortable talking about Obama’s popular vote margin at this point… not to mention his electoral margin, as I pointed out to AL above.
But then, based on what you said above in #9, I’m just enslaved cattle happily chewing on my meds, or something, so what else would you expect me to say?
Moo!
Vista —
A blogger I now read regularly is “Fabius Maximus,”:http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com who is now writing daily about the unfolding financial crisis. To give a sense of the urgency that he and some of his knowledgeable readers share, I reproduce part of a comment by “Michael:”:http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/cutting-edge/#comments this afternoon —
bq. …events are heading to a nexus that is bigger than any political solution.
bq. Tomorrow [10/10/08], $400 billion in Lehman Bros CDS [credit-default swaps] will be settled. They have to be settled under their contractual terms, because Lehman has defaulted on its debts. The current guess (no one really knows, of course) is that recovery from Lehman directly on those debts and commitments will be $.10 on the dollar. If so, that means the “insurers†of the CDS – the ones who have been taking money form all the Lehman creditors who wanted to “hedge†against default, plus those who bought the CDS as pure speculation – will have to pay $.90 on the dollar of loss. The insurers are many and include JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, AIG etc.
bq. This means, in the anticipated scenario, these banks and insurance companies would have to produce $360 billion dollars in cash for immediate payment TOMORROW. It’s no coincidence that the DOW fell almost 700 points today when Treasury announced it interpreted the “spirit†of the TARP (it sure ain’t in the language) to permit it to give – on its own authority – “around “$300 billion†directly to banks and other companies inexchange for preferred stock. This will be a make or break moment, since failure to settle these CDS “successfully†means the remaining $50 trillion in CDS are essentially worthless, and there is no more financial system to worry about saving. Sound drastic? If I were King of the Forest, I’d put a moratorium on CDS settlements in place (yes, that would produce its own – much lesser – panic), until we calmed the rest of the financial system down – a matter of months at least.
Is Michael correct? I don’t know, but I have growing suspicions that such analyses are at least partially right. Thus, President-Elect Obama (or possibly, McCain) is going to have his hands full on November 5th, dealing with a massively complex set of developments that make his promises and platform irrelevant, at least for a few years.
In focusing on the shortcomings of this campaign, I lose sight of the need for effective governance. I am (obviously) very dismayed by the inadequacies of a failing media, and by the candidates put forward by our two-party system. Certainly, I wish that an economically-literate person with proven management skills (Romney) was going to be the next president. But this is not to be.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed and support the President-Elect as he wrestles with these overwhelmingly serious threats to the economy.
Tim – longer reply coming…but I disagree.
What does Obama want? He wants to be elected. Once he’s elected, what will he want? He’ll want to be re-elected.
American helicopters lifting folks off of embassy roofs is not a path to re-election.
I’m more worried by his soft attitudes (no matter what he says, I read what he and his advisers have written) about Israel, which may make them nervous enough to Do Something.
A.L.
AL-
bq. Well, for two years it [liberalism ascendant] will be, yes.
Yep. And I’d worry more about your suggestion that’ll change after 2 years, but you’ve had a pretty lousy prediction record starting since 2004, so…
It’s also interesting – but not terribly surprising – to me how you’re reacting to the idea of Obama winning and the Democrats cleaning up big in Congress. There’s an excellent chance we’ll see real forward momentum on things like health care, the environment, jobs packages, tax cuts for the working and middle class – all traditionally liberal issues, and mostly things that one would think would nicely fit in with your supposed “what is the Democratic party doing to help a 35-year-old factory worker?” concern.
Instead, you’re somewhat pleased that Obama may turn the screws on unions, a bit. But still think he’ll probably suck as president.
You and Joe Lieberman have fun starting in 2009, AL… from a liberal perspective, you deserve exactly what you’re getting.
There’s an excellent chance we’ll see real forward momentum on things like health care, the environment, jobs packages, tax cuts for the working and middle class
I read things like this and I wonder, do people really believe that we can simultaneously cut taxes on (almost) everybody, increase government benefits, reduce fossil fuel consumption and generally increase prosperity? There are no trade-offs to be made?
I mean, it would be great if we could do all, but don’t you think some of these goals are in opposition to each other? Or is it your belief that we really can have it all, and it’s just been Republicans, either through ignorance of malice, that’s kept it from happening?
#74:
I notice that the moderator has asked a variation of that question in all three debates. ‘Given the reality, however, which of these many things you’re promising to do is most important to you, and which will you let go if necessary?’
It is a good question that I hope they continue to ask, because so far, not one of the candidates, presidential or vice presidential, has answered it in a satisfactory and candid fashion.
SG-
bq. I read things like this and I wonder, do people really believe that we can simultaneously cut taxes on (almost) everybody, increase government benefits, reduce fossil fuel consumption and generally increase prosperity? There are no trade-offs to be made?
bq. I mean, it would be great if we could do all, but don’t you think some of these goals are in opposition to each other? Or is it your belief that we really can have it all, and it’s just been Republicans, either through ignorance of malice, that’s kept it from happening?
SG, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say “ignorance or malice”, I would say that there’s at least a possibility that those goals can be achieved simultaneously. Obviously we could write several books going back and forth on the feasibility of that statement, but the back-of-the-envelope thinking is basically:
1. Given the _massive_ tax cuts we’ve seen on the wealthy during the GWB years, yes, there’s at least some room to shift the tax burden upwards and still, at the very least, remain revenue neutral, compared to the Bush years.
2. “Increase government benefits” means, I assume, some form of national health care. And I think there’s more than a little evidence here that moving us towards a more centralized health care system that puts a greater emphasis on preventative care, long-term health maintenance, and getting _everybody_ in the risk pool, and less emphasis on a gigantic medical billing bureaucracy would, again, at least be revenue neutral. The one example we’ve seen recently of a country switching from a private insurance scheme to a nationalized health care scheme – Taiwan, in the 1990’s – tends to bear this out.
3. Reduce fossil fuel consumption – oil is cheap, but there are very real suggestions that there are renewable and efficient energy technologies on the horizon that are even cheaper: photovoltaics that convert IR to electricity, hydrogen-cracking genetically engineered bacteria, and flying wind turbines that can get juice from Hadley cells, off the top of my head. I believe a concerted government investment effort can move these technologies to market that much quicker.
4. And even if moving to this stuff wasn’t cheaper than oil, and even if there are no collateral benefits from heavy R&D investments in this stuff (spin-off technologies, green entrepreneurs, creation of new US-based industries, all of which we’ve seen from earlier government investments in stuff like space travel, the Internet, etc.), the real question is, would the costs of going green outweigh the trillion-odd dollars we’re currently spending on Iraq?
Now, all that said, I have no doubt that 95%+ of WoC readers think I’m being outrageously naive or outright delusional about this stuff. And I’m quite positive, from arguing on these boards for the last 3+ years, that I won’t convince any of you, so let me just put it this way: y’all had your shot at achieving a big dream with GWB and the Republican Congress, of getting rid of all the world’s bad guys (or at least the Axis of Evil) and remaking the Middle East as a network of happy democracies. For better or worse, that failed.
Now there’s an excellent chance we’ll get Obama in the White House and Congress fully under our control. It’s time to try out our big dreams.
Just one thing about your comments regarding the media, and them “RF-ing” Sarah Palin:
She is a very crafty politician that relishes the opportunity to destroy her opposition. She is competitive.
That does not mean she is smart, or well-prepared, or experienced enough to do the job she is campaigning for here. Let’s take them one at a time:
1. Intelligence. She comes across like a country-bumpkin, and tries hard to sell that as what the people want. Now, if she’s really hiding her intellect so as to not come across like a latte-sipping elitist…I’m hard pressed to find any evidence of it. My point is: politicians generally can’t hide who they really are, if they are put under enough scrutiny. The media has scrutinized the heck out of her, and she still looks plain, overly sheltered, and not very bright.
2. Well-prepared. As much as some complain (as the candidate Herself has done) that the MSM makes edits to make her look a certain way…so that she can’t speak directly to the people: I think it’s total bat-squeeze. Here’s why: She can’t take follow-up questions, largely because she can’t answer any questions she can’t memorize the answers to ahead of time.
Perhaps she just freezes up in front of a camera. Maybe she was all starry eyed because she met Katie Couric. But not to have any answer to “What periodicals you read?” or “What other Supreme Court cases do you disagree with?” while running for the Executive Office raises a HUGE red flag throughout the entire country. Not just the elite that run it. She will be one of the land’s supreme law-makers. If she is uninformed of world events apart from her special, private meetings with Henry Kissinger, and can’t identify even one Supreme Court case–EVEN IF SHE WAS TOTALLY BULLSHITTING–then she is not qualified to lead. And memorizing her answers makes her even less qualified.
3. Experienced. Sorry. Less than 2 years as the Governor of a sparsely-populated state, and STILL unable to articulate anything relevant about her experience–apart from making up her involvement international relations, and mis-representing how much energy her state produces for domestic use–shows me that her only real experience is that of a liar.
Chris, you seem to be under the impression a) that I don’t want to see things happen in those sectors; b) that every D elected is going to be Barney Frank; and c) that we won’t see grand plans a la Hillarycare end in the same tangle of special interests in Washington. Do you somehow think Obama is immune to the forces that reined in Bill and Hillary? If so, could you explain why?
A.L.
Yes Obama will win.
But it will be utter, utter, disaster.
First off, Obama has been, and always will be, a race-warrior. Filled with hatred towards Whites (he wrote about it in his book), no doubt by the abandonment of his Mother and hard-left angry race Warriors like “Uncle” Frank Marshall Davis, American Communist and anti-White racist.
Obama has no zilch nada bupkis experience governing on behalf of mostly White, Middle Class interests. Which are directly opposed to Black, Nationalist, Farrakhan (Obama is a creature of Farrakhan’s) interests.
Take reparations. A done deal, send money from Whites to Oprah and Will Smith over slavery. One guaranteed to create a huge, angry battle.
Take Affirmative Action. In a deep recession, one dragging on for YEARS as Obama taxes the country to death, to pay for his global tax on poverty, to send money abroad to African dictators, and embroilment in Darfur and everywhere else a dictator needs propping up (Kenya? His Cousin Raila Odinga to make Kenya safe for Sharia?) — well the fight for who has a job, White men or Black/Latino men, perhaps White women … will be ugly. Decline of marriage means White guys have zilch skin in the game. So they’ll be massively against it. If you thought fights over forced busing in the 1970’s were a fun time, wait till you get a load over the fights for Affirmative Action.
Affordable in times of plenty, disaster when in a prolonged recession.
Made worse by Obama and Dem’s play: Open Borders and citizenship to Mexicans. Obliterating the White Working class by making Mexicans instant citizens. Obama’s on the record of being in favor, like Reparations. Importing job-hungry Mexicans in a Depression/Recession? GUARANTEED fights. Brutal. Mexicans (who make up the overwhelming majority of Hispanics) always vote Dem and always will. That’s reality. They’ve never changed in 60 years of tracking.
Gun bans? Obama is in favor, though he’s backtracked for now, he’s under intense pressure to get it done. He’s not ever governed on this issue, so expect a federal gun ban under Pelosi/Reid and a 60 seat majority. Which will set the stage for MASSIVE state and local disobedience, federal raids, huge amounts of racial strife as a Black President takes away White gun owners guns and calls them RACIST. Predictably.
Obama will do his best to move Gas up to $10 a gallon, choking off economic activity.
Anyone thinking Reid/Pelosi, and particularly GAY* Barney Frank is concerned about the future is fooling themselves. Gays do not have kids, don’t care about the future like married couples with kids do. Pelosi and Reid have made themselves stinking rich — they WANT a South American economy — no limits on the rich and criminal, no middle class, lots of poor peasants to inspire.
Culturally, Gays, Black Nationalists, etc. will go nuts, like Harold Myerson telling readers that America must abolish Whiteness.
*Yes, this is not PC. It is nevertheless, true.
Likely, billions to ACORN, La Raza, “Racist” speech and hate codes will criminalize, marginalize, and make permanent minorities of the current White 75% of the population. Whites will be told they are evil, “racist” and must be abolished by the “morally” and “spiritually” superior Black and Brown population. This has been the experience in Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, and every other nation where the Hard Left took control. Obama is Hard Left.
This is just the domestic side of the disaster.
Okay, here’s my two cents:
I. OBAMA’S GOING TO WIN: Yup. A month ago today I would have disagreed. But if campaigns were houses, the financial crisis blowing up when it did was like a Volkswagen-sized meteor hitting McCain’s house with him still inside: such an unlikely, yet utterly devastating event that there’s just no way to prevent or prepare for it. And McCain’s incredibly bad fortune is, of course, Obama’s incredibly good fortune. He’s basically won the lottery here.
II. OBAMA OUGHT TO WIN: Mixed feelings about this. I still think McCain is the better overall candidate, and that if not for the financial crisis suddenly appearing he and Palin would be a lot more competitive than they are. But now that the campaign is dominated by the Wall Street mess and its threat to the economy, the incumbent party’s ticket has to give voters a damn good reason not to punish them for a bad economy, as has historically been their wont, and so far McCain-Palin has failed miserably at this (to the extent that they’re even still trying, a point I raised yesterday). Meanwhile for his part, Obama, though he may have gotten lucky, hasn’t let up by any stretch; his campaign clearly senses that a TKO is possible now and is going for it.
Earlier this summer McCain managed to whittle away at Obama’s once-big lead by basically sitting back and allowing Obama’s campaign to shoot itself in the feet. Evidently he thinks that strategy will work a second time. I doubt it.
III. IT’S GOING TO BE UGLY WHEN HE DOES: As Sarah Palin might say, you betcha. And it will start on November 5. On that day Obama’s relationship with his fellow Democrats will immediately transform from their “messiah” to something more like their “prison b**ch”. The Left, in all their various incarnations, made Obama what he is, and they will surely not hesitate to remind him that they can break him just as easily, if he wanders too far off their reservation. Meanwhile the Clintons will be seen as the spent force that they are, the PUMAs will become an amusing historical footnote, and both of these factions, along with Joe Lieberman, will likely join the GOP’s Reagan coalition in political oblivion.
Of course, plenty of heads will roll on the GOP side of the aisle as well. Anyone even tenuously connected to the Bush administration, and probably also any member of McCain’s increasingly ineffectual campaign, will be given the bum’s rush out the door ASAP. And I’d be amazed if McCain himself doesn’t retire after his current Senate term is up. The GOP menu is about to get an extreme makeover, and Palin’s presence on their ticket this year is just the appetizer.
As for the media, I’m not quite as sanguine about their demise as AL is. If President Bush can convince a hostile Congress to pony up $700B to bail o – er, rescue Wall Street, why wouldn’t President Obama and his fellow Dems in Congress do likewise for the legacy media when their turn at the edge of the abyss comes (and it is coming)?
IV. WHY THIS IS GOOD NEWS: It may or may not be. A lot depends on whether, and how quickly, Obama can get a Chicago-style political machine up and running in Washington. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid may not be keen to such a thing, if it costs them too much influence and power in Congress. Even now the Dems in Congress are rather fractious and divided, which has enabled the minority GOP to “rule from below” to a certain degree (which may explain why they get blamed for the Dems’ shortcomings), such as on the Iraq war. If this continues with an Obama administration, the Left will find it quite a bit harder to enact their agenda than you, or they, might think.
From a Foreign policy/national security aspect, Obama will get AT LEAST NYC nuked, with around 3-6 million dead. That’s just off the bat.
He will, as he said he would, immediately withdraw from Iraq, and turn over that nation to Iran and AQ. As a moral defeat for America being “good for us” as he has said in so many words, so many times. He said it, means it, and will do it. Gas of course will go up to $10 a gallon, as Obama said he wants. Iran will go nuclear, of course. With impunity, and likely launch a surprise strike wiping out Israel, to the muted applause of the Obama Administration.
He will of course do the same in Afghanistan, retreat/surrender. He has said he views the troops as terrorizers, killing innocent civilians, most Dems are intensely anti-Military and anti-American, so this is nothing new. ALL the Global Left feels that way — it’s universal. As a practical matter, there is little to be done in Afghanistan other than hold the line, and hope that a Petraeus surge-like peeling off tribes one by one could slowly do the trick. Pakistan holds the supply lines, that is reality of geography. It’s all we can do, and Obama does not have the stomach for it.
Obama wants a global defeat a humbled US, so he can make his point that by groveling and signing “negotiations” with AQ and Osama, we can make “deals.” With using “racism” charges and hate speech code to imprison critics, as above, importing brand new voters to overwhelm opposition.
He’s consistently said he wants to slash the military, and cut all defense programs, particularly missile defense, which works, and future combat systems, as well as replacement equipment for worn out stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pakistan has 100+ nukes, under dubious control, in a nation and military fractured along tribal lines, with AQ and the Taliban infiltrated into every nook and cranny. We’ve bought time by being intimidating and tough in Iraq, making an example of Saddam, and being in the neighborhood with an unsinkable Aircraft Carrier, Iraq.
Obama has repudiated toughness and the military in every instance of confronting Jihad, probably because he IS a Muslim. His work (on the Taxpayer dime, to the tune of $3 million) for cousin Raila Odinga, to win the Kenyan Presidency and establish Sharia law, speaks for itself. There are pictures of him with Odinaga, screaming through a bullhorn. Obama thinks he can grovel and promise things to Osama and Zawahari, like he did with mentor Farrakhan, and see them through. Even Farrakhan would cringe before THOSE guys …
Zawahari personally executed young boys blackmailed into spying against him, to the dismay of hardened fellow jihadis. He shot them himself. These are the men that Obama wants to make “deals with.” He’s certainly on the record against using military force to deter nuclear jihad.
We’ve lost NYC. It’s a done deal. Probably DC as well. If Obama survives a decapitation attack (he probably will, Osama/Zawahari know weakness well), his first response will be to grovel, as he suggested in the Primary debate. Guaranteeing a follow-on attack.
Eventually, after US losses mount up to 15 million or so, and Boston or Chicago or Atlanta or Dallas join NYC and DC in the charnel house, we will have to remove Obama, as a matter of survival, and wipe out ALL Muslim nations with nuclear weapons, since it won’t be clear, likely, who is responsible (indeed, it may only be factions inside weak, divided regimes). Pakistan, Iran if they too have nukes by then.
We are looking at killing around 240 million people. All for the dream of unicorns, rainbows, and butterflies. Being “nice” to enemies with nukes and divided, factionalized tribal regimes with no real authority.
Nuclear proliferation REQUIRES applied brutality. Putin understood that post Beslan. When weak, tribalized regimes have nukes (Pakistan has 100+ and is getting more), we can’t afford to be “nice” or thought weak. Deterrence does not depend on regimes, rather tribal leaders and would be leaders down to the local level. Since that is who effectively controls the nukes.
We are going to test your lunatic theory AL that being “nice” to Nuclear Jihad ensures the survival of NYC. Too bad, it was a great city.
Armed Liberal said:
bq. The amount of venom on both sides is far too high, and your own posts here are often sharp enough to suggest that you’re happy to partake when it’s your own team’s.
Wrong. I haven’t been calling McCain a “terrorist” or yelling “kill him” or “treason” or anything remotely similar, as is becoming common at McCain/Palin rallies.
Sometimes I get the feeling you dismiss criticism like this without having a firm grasp of current events. You slag the media, but you are happy to engage in precisely the same lazy false-equivalence that underlies their greatest weakness.
AMac in #65;
You are confusing “experience” with “good judgment”.
Dubya has a lot more experience than Obama in being president…but would you vote for him on that basis, at this point?
C’mon, you surely can do better than this.
AMac in #71;
What you need to do is keep your fingers crossed that the residual Republicans that are in Congress over the next 4 years do not take it upon themselves to destroy the country to save their party.
Same goes to Armed Liberal.
[Robert M: You have already been notified that you are tempbanned at WoC until 23 October, and any posts by you here before that date will be deleted. If you persist in posting before your ban expires, you might be permabanned here. –NM]
bq. Now there’s an excellent chance we’ll get Obama in the White House and Congress fully under our control. It’s time to try out our big dreams.
Well put, Chris, well put.
And most likely at a substantially lower cost to our country (and others) in lives and dollars.
bq. Do you somehow think Obama is immune to the forces that reined in Bill and Hillary? If so, could you explain why?
What, exactly, would a politician need to do or say to convince you that they would be, perhaps not “immune” but less susceptible to, the “forces” that pull them away from their stated campaign positions and governing plans (which is what I am assuming you mean) AND get elected in America in 2008 at the same time?
Chris (#66):
You responded to my earlier comment about wanting to hear some sane, thoughtful liberalism, with this:
I am curious what you think is the voice of sane, thoughtful liberalism? MoveOn.org? The Kossacks? Josh Marshall? I’ll pass on that, both on sanity and (with the very occasional exception of people like Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum) thoughtful aspects. I’ll happily disagree with a lot of the things that AL or Dave Schuler (of The Glittering Eye, Outside the Beltway and others) say, but they are thoughtful and sane. Remember that my interest is not in partisanship, so arguments that rest solely on party affiliation are not going to get anywhere with me. My interest is in living my life on my own terms, so long as I don’t stop others from doing the same. In other words, my interest is in exercising my Natural Rights to maximize my happiness. Classical liberalism contains the foundations of the recognition of how to do that (indeed, of the existence and properties of Natural Rights), but classical liberalism has gone badly out of style since the late 1800s.
I don’t think that W has been a disaster. He has been mediocre on most things, terrible on a very few, and fairly good on foreign policy strategy (though bad at explaining it, so his ideas won’t outlast his term) since 9/11. Moreover, I don’t care if you disagree on that point, because come January, Bush is out of the picture. The question is where we go in the future, and unless you are making the same argument (guilt by association) with Bush and the other Republicans that you reject with Ayers and ACORN and Obama — in which case I will henceforth dismiss you as merely partisan, not that you likely care what I think —, then you would have to say exactly how Bush has been terrible and why that would carry over automatically (or give a mechanism, alternately) into a McCain administration. If you can do that, I’m willing to listen.
I feel similarly about the Iraq war. It was the best available policy alternative to end the war on terror without genocide, and far better than the alternatives I had contemplated for the same purpose. As Tim Oren noted above, it’s out of our hands now, and whether there will be a genocide (of us or them) is in the hands of the Muslim world. If the claimed-moderate Muslims are willing and able to restrain the jihadis and jihad-supporting states (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc) from making existential threats to the US and the West (via obtaining nuclear weapons) or very damaging attacks (large scale conventional or chemical attacks) or very atrocious attacks (like Beslan), then the world avoids a genocide.
Otherwise, we will learn the full meaning of something that I’ve been saying since 9/11. People say it’s not possible to kill a billion Muslims. What they mean is that it’s not moral to kill a billion Muslims. It’s not only possible, it’s trivial. The really, really hard part is killing the 100,000 or so people who need to be killed to ensure peace, without killing anyone else. We’re so far much closer to the latter than the former, but if a terrorist group overreaches, as I laid out above, public opinion would swing quickly, and thoroughly, into the “kill ’em all” school. Indeed, had President Bush unleashed a nuclear response against Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia on 9/12/2001, he would have been acclaimed a hero, at least for a while. And frankly, most Americans would sleep quite, quite soundly over that, as we do over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for that matter, Tokyo and Dresden.
Moreover, I think that if Iran gets close to having nuclear weapons capability, Israel will attack Iran. Israel doesn’t have the strength to end Iran’s nuclear program with conventional attacks, so Israel would have to strike Iran with nuclear weapons, or itself become the target of an Iranian nuclear attack. That we would avenge Israel is meaningless to the Israelis, as meaningless as the Nuremberg trials are to the dead in the Holocaust.
I don’t want it to come to that, which is why I support alternatives that militarily and ideologically weaken our enemies. It’s why I would be willing, if Iran continues to press for nuclear capability, to destroy their civilization utterly — every power plant, port, bridge, non-residential building, water treatment plant, dam, military facility, government facility, police station, you name it — utterly if that was what it took to end their nuclear program. I would prefer to do less, but I will accept more if the alternative is going all-in on genocide. I would also accept it if the alternative is waiting around until the Iranians start the genocide process either by destroying Israel, or by giving nuclear weapons to a terrorist group to use on America or our allies.
I do not care what Douthat and Brooks think; arguments from authority are meaningless to me, an artifact of having actually studied logic and rhetoric somewhat. I am willing to be convinced (by anyone) that there are alternatives short of those I laid out above, but those alternatives must not include people acting against their own interests, the US as the only moral agents in the world, the Republicans as the only moral agents in the US, or similarly ahistorical nonsense.
Now, all of that aside, in what way do the current Democrats evince sane and thoughtful liberalism? What policy prescriptions or doctrinal positions are both a) substantially different from what the Republicans evince and b) sane and thoughtful? If you really want to convince me, I’ll almost certainly have followup questions, and you can answer those.
But right now, I’m utterly unconvinced that the Democrats at the national level have any notable measure of sane and thoughtful liberalism.
Um, Vista, it’s just that the last Grand Plan to Solve An American Problem was Hillary’s stab at a healthcare plan, and while I absolutely agree that there is more desire to do something, I’ll suggest that the forces aligned across that one issue are as strong and more desparate than they were before. And we had a D president, D congress, and while we may have larger pluralities next year, a lot of those are going to be Blue Dogs who are unlikely to step too far to the left (it would be a hugely fin project to track – seat by seat – the pickups last election and likely pickups this election and see if there are any Barney Franks in the group.
Given Obama’s historic lack of legislative courage and core legislative skills (think LBJ), it seems unlikely that we’re going to see any particularly different this time, assuming he comes up with the playbook that you’re so excited about.
In the queue is my playbook, which I think might trigger a slightly different political alignment.
A.L.
Jeff Medcalf (#87): People say it’s not possible to kill a billion Muslims. What they mean is that it’s not moral to kill a billion Muslims. It’s not only possible, it’s trivial. The really, really hard part is killing the 100,000 or so people who need to be killed to ensure peace, without killing anyone else. We’re so far much closer to the latter than the former, but if a terrorist group overreaches, as I laid out above, public opinion would swing quickly, and thoroughly, into the “kill ’em all” school. Indeed, had President Bush unleashed a nuclear response against Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia on 9/12/2001, he would have been acclaimed a hero, at least for a while. And frankly, most Americans would sleep quite, quite soundly over that, as we do over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for that matter, Tokyo and Dresden.
I’m not so sure about that anymore, not with the PC mindset having permeated our culture as thoroughly as it has since WWII. What I fear is that after another major attack, we get up the resolve to “kill’em all” just long enough to actually do it – after which, once the sheer enormity of wiping out millions of people has sunk in, the PC guilt/shame complex reasserts itself in our culture and politics with a vengeance, making the acrimony of this campaign look like whiskey’s “unicorns, rainbows and butterflies”. In other words, outright civil war and possibly more genocide, this time of our fellow Americans.
Managing the media beast is the first job for a president, because the first job for a president isn’t governing, it’s not managing the mechanism of the government, it’s messaging. It’s running psyops on us to keep our beliefs and hopes aligned with his (and vice versa, I should add).
As street-level political theory, AL, this is one of the weakest things I think you’ve ever written. The premise simply does not lead where you want it to go, because Obama is not so much managing the media as they are deliberately playing nice for him. There is no demonstration of media management here.
If he were doing something politically clever, I might agree, but it’s a gift handed to him by virtue of party affiliation, not talent.
The GOP will start the slugfest as the Reagan coalition deconstructs itself. The GOP has been this weird accumulation of insider traders, courtiers selling favors, small government true believers, strong America advocates, and those seeking to recapture a traditional America which – while a great and necessary myth – really never existed. They are going to be seriously pissed off at each other after November.
The Democrats won’t be far behind, I believe. Obama may have deep roots in the Left, but nothing in his career has shown him to be anything but a sharp political operative with his eye on the main prize. Short of a Sierra Maestra story, which I refuse to believe because it’s just too damn implausible, what we have is a power-hungry (like all politicians) young man who came to the game with a core set of values (which are still buried in there) and who decided that what he liked was the game. And was damn good at it.
And if I’m wrong, I have a lot of faith in American institutions to rein him in. Unless George Soros buys them all, and installs Oliver Willis and Matt Yglesias as editors of the Daily Him.
But he has lashed together a coalition that includes folks who just aren’t going to be happy at all when he turns out to be a pragmatist. And while the GOP battle will be over what it will take to be relevant and win again – meaning that there is hope for introspection and rational thought – the Democratic side is going to be like a cage of rabid weasels.
And I’m not sure where to edit that down– sorry for the egregiously long quote– but I don’t see how this logically follows, either. I can see the Republican party falling apart, perhaps, and I’d probably cheer its demise, provided that the obstreperously religious wing falls the farthest. But rabid-weasel hatred makes a pretty strong social glue.
And I really don’t see the Democrats falling apart due to victory. Certainly not in a four and probably not an eight year time frame. On the assumption that the Democrats take both Congress and the White House (which I will loathe just as much as the reverse) the great social lubricant of money and power will ease those frictions.
To see how laughable I find this pair of assertions, just turn the clock back eight years and imagine yourself predicting that a George Bush win would result in the dissolution of first the Democrat and then the Republican parties. Sure, you can make a case for it, but it clearly didn’t happen. (There are differences– mainly that I don’t think it is possible to hate Obama as much as the lunatic left hate George Bush, but I have faith that the Republicans will find a way.)
I agree that a restructuring of the parties would be an excellent thing. I just don’t see it happening by the process or for the reasons you describe.
(Okay, now I’m curious: What tripped Akismet on this one?)
#88 AL
No doubt about it, the Dem coalition, such as it is, is nowhere near as monolithic as the Reps. Blue Dogs and other conservative DINO’s will always present a problem for a liberal agenda.
But that just brings us back around to my question again: what does a Dem presidential candidate need to say or do to achieve the lofty goals of the Left? If they are more conservative (and I would classify Clinton as such, actually) then Liberal Dems won’t be on board. You see the problem.
Look, this is America, and we don’t all believe in the same thing. Speaking personally, I’m happy to compromise on most issues as long as the opposing camp does so as well (isn’t that the rub, and nub?).
Look, I’m no starry-eyed idealist…far from it. I’ve got a family, a great job, a house or three, an establishment life, and money in the stock market (unfortunately!). I am realistic about Obama’s ability to achieve any agenda at all at this point. But I do think there is something to be said for allowing oneself to be taken by the moment in history, even for a brief while, and find out whether we can achieve more as the sum of our individual parts than a fragmented, pessimistic and fratricidal collection of people who we have become over the last 8 years.
[Duplicate post, deleted without prejudice. –NM]
I meant to say something about the PSYOP thing.
It’s actually illegal to run military PSYOPs on the American people. CIA is banned by law from doing it also. There are very good reasons for that.
The reason is not: “That’s the President’s job!”
“Bill Whittle is right.”:http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=page&page-id=90 The American project depends on us being able to understand what is being done, and approve or disapprove of it. We have gone very far down the road, too far.
The President should speak with clarity, candor and honesty.
Take this current financial crisis as an example. The President (whoever he was, he would have this interest) wants you not to bail out of the market. He wants you not to make a run on the banks.
He _could_ approach this like a PSYOP, and try to soothe your concerns and make you feel that everything was fine. Everything is not fine, and if the plan didn’t work, he would find that he had no credibility left — a point our current President reached _before_ the bailout, as has our Congress. That is why their initial attempted solution failed: the public just does not trust them.
(Best question at the latest debate, and the one that gives the lie to the notion that anyone is “winning” this election in any real sense: ‘How can we possibly trust either of you, given how both your parties have behaved?’ Whoever wins any office this year — President, Representative, Senator — is going into the office hated and distrusted by tens of millions of Americans.)
That’s the whole damn problem. The government’s job is not to run PSYOPs. It is to be efficient, small, orderly, and transparent. When there is a crisis, they should speak plainly about the problem. If the President doesn’t want a run on the banks, he should tell you why he wants you to take the risk he’s asking you to take. He shouldn’t try to fool you into feeling safer than you are.
Governments are not supposed to try to be smarter than us, or guide us like children. They have duties, which may mean that on some situations they are better informed than those whose duties do not include that particular issue. However, that fact never suppresses another of their duties, a great and chief duty, which is to speak the truth about those issues to the citizens.
That duty is one now so rarely honored that people will scoff that I even suggested it. It is a duty all the same. The enforcement mechanisms have been too weak, too long. My father used to say when I was a boy that he felt a man should be allowed to serve as long as he wanted in Congress, so long as he then served an equal time in prison. I think he may have been righter than he intended.
#70 Chris:
bq. But then, based on what you said above in #9, I’m just enslaved cattle happily chewing on my meds, or something, so what else would you expect me to say?
bq. Moo!
[OK, we’re doing the “you-and-me” dance for a little bit. Have it your way. You started it.]
You’re ahead of the curve there*, assuming you actually understood my meaning: having evidently already embraced an as-yet-to-be-imposed new set of “rights” paid for by an as-yet-to-be-imposed set of taxes — magically imposed only on people who deserve to be taxed, of course.
* [How progressive of you.]
Any chance we can drop the “you-and-me” dance now, and stick closer to issues?
Today, Louis Farrakhan called Obama the Messiah.
Given that Obama has his entire life, struggled to prove he’s “Black Enough” and anti-White (his reason for in part, at least attaching himself to Farrakhan and Wright and Trinity), down to his wife (who wrote in her thesis that she wanted to live entirely separate from Whites and White “values”) … you are looking at disaster BECAUSE Obama will attempt to replicate Chicago onto America.
Putting 12% of the population, ahead of 75%, with racial and racist overtones, as in Chicago, where Farrakhan runs half the city, Daley the other, in a corrupt bargain, is not something that will work in the Federal matter.
Particularly since Chicago is not self-supporting — it depends on money from the Feds.
Hard times require sacrifices, some have to lose while others win. Obama’s budget choices, boring and mundane, will insure continued strife and hatred. He will HAVE TO reward Farrakhan, in matters money-related and policy related (same thing really), if nothing else to prove he is still “Black Enough.”
The first hip-hop President is likely to be a disaster. Particularly since he has had ZERO experience governing a White majority, responding to their interests. His means has always been voter fraud (raised to the Nth degree this time — his margin of victory is likely to be through fraud) and playing the race card. That only takes one so far.
He’ll make stupid move, after stupid move, without consequence through voter fraud and playing the race card against the Democratic leaders. Until stark disaster — it will be a race to see if we get nuked before we fall into open political warfare over Reparations or other insane ideas. So Barack Obama can prove to Farrakhan he’s still “Black Enough.”
You lost me at “I believe deeply that the innate impulses of even Barney Frank are in the right place. I believe that our leadership class does truly love the country and that they – like JFK – will try to do the right thing once they stumble once or twice.
As someone with skin in the game, I expect them to stumble, but really, really, hope they do not stumble too badly.”
The present financial crisis isn’t stumbling too badly? What damn world do you live in?
Barney Frank will never accept credit for the disaster that he was deeply involved in. Even when confronted by O’Reilly he refused to even admit that he had done one single thing wrong. Nor will more than a handful in Congress. (To his credit, one Democrat Congressman has admitted that they made a mistake.) Republicans and Democrats both sold our future down the river to save a few wealthy men. Both Obama and McCain voted for the bailout. So who do you turn to now?
My take? America is headed to hell in a handbasket. The “great experiment in democracy” is over. (Perhaps more should have realized it was a damn republic.) No matter who wins this election, we are headed for extremely hard times ahead and will eventually become a socialist tyranny. Perhaps in a few hundred years, some country somewhere in the world will rise from the ashes and the renaissance will begin anew – if the history books haven’t been wiped clean of any memory of democracy.
The only saving grace for me is that I will die some time in the next forty years, so I will be able to say that I lived more than half my life in what resembled freedom.
#68 from Armed Liberal at 11:42 pm on Oct 09, 2008
Chris –
Well, for two years it will be, yes.
A.L.
_________________________
A.L.
I think that the effects of this acute anaphalactic shock might last a bit longer than 2 years.
I’m trying to total it up. Antimedia cancels Vista. whiskey cancels Robert M. Hmmm… still maintaining a balance, but the balance is become more and more one with people out at the extremes rather than clumped in the middle. I think that sums up not just the board, but our political climate generally at the moment. I really do feel that we are spiraling towards a crisis more acute than this. I feel like we’re living since 9/11 in the period between 1929 and 1939, and I just don’t know where on that scale we are, or what ends up being Czechoslovakia or, worse, Poland. It’s why I noted above how afraid I am of genocide: feckless Europe, adjacent to a reckless totalitarian dictator, rising levels of civil dissolution coupled with repeated economic crises and the complete descent into vicious and mindless partisanship of our elected leaders — I’ve seen this (well, read of it and talked to people who saw it) before, and it was tragic. Do we have to prove Santaya right again?
Santayana? He was an optimist. So was Hegel.
bq. History
— n., def: Papa Hegel, he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from it. Hegel must have been taking the long view — I know people who can’t learn from what they had for breakfast this morning.
bq. Chad C. Mulligan, The Hipcrime Vocab, from John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar
Well, I don’t know about you folks, but I’m going back to Iraq.
Speaking of which, by God, take heart from that at least. There is a place where clear progress is being made every day, and liberty is on the uptick. We are the force behind that, and we have invested of ourselves much in that cause. A great army of men trained in that war will not accept tyranny at home. The short term may be dark, but remember: you go to war with the army you have, but someday they come home.
It may be that they will save us, too. I can think of many men, officers and NCOs, who would be fine leaders for our nation in the future.
AL-
bq. Chris, you seem to be under the impression a) that I don’t want to see things happen in those sectors;
Actually, I was just pointing out that, although the chances of something happening in those sectors goes way up with Obama in office, you haven’t mentioned that, much less showed any sign that you think it’s a good thing. Which is suggestive of your actual priorities, I think.
bq. b) that every D elected is going to be Barney Frank;
Nope, but the balance will tilt more toward Barney Frank and less towards, say, James Ihofe. Which is a good thing.
bq. and c) that we won’t see grand plans a la Hillarycare end in the same tangle of special interests in Washington. Do you somehow think Obama is immune to the forces that reined in Bill and Hillary? If so, could you explain why?
People have written several books on what happened to Hillarycare, but off the top of my head, why it’s different: 1) there’s far more of a crisis in health care now then back then, 2) the opposition Republicans are in a much weaker state, and 3) I doubt very much Obama will put his wife in charge of it (I think Hillary was qualified at the time, but it bothered a lot of people).
No, it’s much worse than all that. Oblabla is the stalking horse for some truly anti-US forces, who will be digging in with picks and axes and pitchforks. Be very afraid.
The code word for the attack will be his use of his middle name during the swearing-in. [ululululululULULULULU!!!]
Seriously, absent an evident fresh-hell catastrophe, he’ll just smile and pontificate / “reach out” and push through legislation and policies that will seem dreamy until we are forced by circumstance to shift our attention, into either wakefulness or coma or some strange swirling mix of the two. Possibly the circumstance that forces any such shift will be some “fresh hell”, which might not even happen on his watch. I wonder whether the Fourth Turning has been rescheduled in O’s honor. 1/2 🙂
Hey, negative-amortization ARMs lasted decades; W’s consequences will, easily; O’s consequences probably will too. But enterprises seldom end in the spirit in which they began. Is that good, or bad, or simply how things are?
Bless you, Grim, and all who go with you. You’re the best hope for the Iraqis, and maybe for us all.
Nortius-
bq. [OK, we’re doing the “you-and-me” dance for a little bit. Have it your way. You started it.]
Really, NM? There was not even a wee tiny bit of affront in the line:
bq. That kind of spread is striking to me. Not to you, apparently.
Could have fooled me.
bq. You’re ahead of the curve there*, assuming you actually understood my meaning: having evidently already embraced an as-yet-to-be-imposed new set of “rights” paid for by an as-yet-to-be-imposed set of taxes — magically imposed only on people who deserve to be taxed, of course.
We live in a democratic society where politics decides who gets the short end of many, many different sticks, NM. Legislation, not some divine plan, gave us a health care “market” where the wealthy essentially get comped by having great insurance (and I put myself in this group) while the working class either pay through the nose for basic procedures or go without. (My family’s been there, as well.)
And if the people decide to vote for a new health care plan that takes care of more people more efficiently, then that’s part of living in a democratic society.
bq. Any chance we can drop the “you-and-me” dance now, and stick closer to issues?
If you like – I’ll hold off on commenting further on your post #9.
Chris, you crack me up. You’re just so dogged in you determination to find something wrong with what I say, you don’t pay attention.
First, when I say
…what exactly do you think I mean? First of all, it’s the public sector unions that have to get squeezed to solve the fiscal issues – that’s a commonplace among everyone who doesn’t work for SEIU, and even for some folks who do.
And second which part of “tip the [scales of sacrifice] more in the direction I believe they ought to go” is unclear?
Second, when you suggest that the new D’s will look more like Barney Frank than Inhofe, you forget that that means they’ll look a hell of a lot like me. Which makes me quite comfy, thank you.
And yes, every disaster is particular in it’s specifics. And yet they all seem to follow a common set of patterns. And if Obama approaches the major domestic tasks – energy, healthcare, state and local finance, tax equity with the same hubris that his supporters suggest is his due, he’s gonna have quite a rough first year or two.
And, as I suggested, the GOP will be waiting.
If, on the other hand, he kicks the Firedoglake crowd to the curb and shows the skills of managing ‘up’ that he’s shown everywhere else in his career, he could do quite a lot of good.
But what do I know, I’m a Party Traitor and lucky I haven’t been liquidated yet.
A.L.
Thank you, Grim.
AL, #106:
If, on the other hand, he kicks the Firedoglake crowd to the curb and shows the skills of managing ‘up’ that he’s shown everywhere else in his career, he could do quite a lot of good.
Managing “up”?
If you’re using that in the sense that I normally do, it makes no sense– who exactly does the President of the United States “manage up?” The Pope?
Chris:
bq. [T]he working class either pay through the nose for basic procedures or go without. (My family’s been there, as well.)
I’m probably what you’d call working class. Low income, for the last little while. At the moment I do without, mostly. My pride probably qualifies me as a possessor of false consciousness, or something. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free, and delivered by the guy at the DMV. (paraphrasing P. J. O’Rourke)
Apologies. I regret my “You evidently do not” was too snarky or personal. I only meant to indicate that you might think the poll numbers at present constitute a mandate, and the spread might mean you’re in error. On reviewing what you wrote, perhaps I misinterpreted you. I don’t think even a 10% margin (if present) is a true mandate. I do agree that your original following phrase is supportable. Liberalism is not out of bounds. It is not perceived to be not-mainstream by the mainstream. I did not mean to imply otherwise.
But mainstream or not, I object to people (generally labeling themselves “liberal”) who distort the meaning of deeply fundamental-to-our-civilization concepts such as “rights”… and that sort of thing has been a lot on my mind lately. Even if they mainstream that sort of thing, I find it to be unacceptably meretricious. And I’ll fight that where I can. Mandate or no.
Chris:
bq. And if the people decide to vote for a new health care plan that takes care of more people more efficiently, then that’s part of living in a democratic society.
OK, I must have missed the bulletin when they announced there was going to be a public, national, binding referendum on the question. You did say “democratic”, right? So you couldn’t possibly be talking about some voting by the 635 Congresscritters with a lower approval rating than even W? ‘Cause, last time I checked, they’re not “the people”. And this isn’t a democracy. (Google “representative republic”, etc., etc.)
If it were, it’s quite possible we’d be in even deeper shisno than we are — not that we know how deep we really are just yet.
Now probably you’re going to tell me that I’m being overly literal or nitpicky. But I’m not. Words have meaning; we ignore that at our peril.
Marcus –
I’d say the President “manages up” to the Congress, and ultimately to us.
Then again, if the President ever decided to drive the limo and got pulled over…
A.L.
#90 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”… Obama is not so much managing the media as they are deliberately playing nice for him. There is no demonstration of media management here.”_
Yes they are deliberately playing nice for him. But, since they want to be seduced, he also seduces them. David Brooks described it. (link). This portion on an interview with Charlie Gibson shows it. (link)
#90 from Marcus Vitruvius:
bq. _”If he were doing something politically clever, I might agree, but it’s a gift handed to him by virtue of party affiliation, not talent.”_
Party affiliation alone doesn’t explain the media favoritism Barack Obama enjoyed against Hillary Clinton. Race does. And in a sufficiently race-attuned environment, which America will always have, race _is_ talent, or like height for a basketball player, it’s an important part of the package of useful traits that constitute talent.
It doesn’t have to be “clever”. It just has to work. And it works.
Jeff Medcalf-
bq. I am curious what you think is the voice of sane, thoughtful liberalism? MoveOn.org? The Kossacks? Josh Marshall? I’ll pass on that, both on sanity and (with the very occasional exception of people like Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum) thoughtful aspects. I’ll happily disagree with a lot of the things that AL or Dave Schuler (of The Glittering Eye, Outside the Beltway and others) say, but they are thoughtful and sane.
I believe you’ve largely answered my question as to who you find thoughtful and sane here – as for myself, I prefer not to point to any single source as the repository for all that is good and correct in the Democratic Party. Suffice to say, I think Obama has an awful lot of good ideas, and tend to side more with Drum and Yglesias than Kos and MoveOn.
bq. Remember that my interest is not in partisanship, so arguments that rest solely on party affiliation are not going to get anywhere with me.
I tend to be innately suspicious of pronouncements like this, since I’ve run in to too many supposed independents who ultimately end up firmly on one side of the political line. Many on this very website, come to think of it.
bq. My interest is in living my life on my own terms, so long as I don’t stop others from doing the same. In other words, my interest is in exercising my Natural Rights to maximize my happiness. Classical liberalism contains the foundations of the recognition of how to do that (indeed, of the existence and properties of Natural Rights), but classical liberalism has gone badly out of style since the late 1800s.
As has the pre-modern world, that was full of enough elbow room and inherited privilege that some few people could talk of and act on their Natural Rights without much consideration for how their actions impacted on society as a whole. Now that we’re in a situation where the vast majority of the population is intimately connected with each other – physically, technologically, economically, culturally, politically and environmentally – the rules of how we can each exercise our rights without stopping others from doing the same are vastly more complex. I see modern America as practicing the nearest thing possible to classical liberalism, given that we’re not Jefferson’s dreamed-of nation of isolationist yeoman farmers. You likely disagree, and I doubt we’ll change each other’s minds.
Rather than rehash your remarks on foreign policy, which simply suggest to me that, no, you don’t think the Iraq war was a problem, and are thus unlikely to be happy with what the Democrats are offering, let me just make a few counterpoints and move on.
– I do not buy any arguments – be they from you, Armed Liberal, or anyone else, that you or anyone else possess sufficient wisdom and tactical skill to fight a war that’ll magically forestall some potential genocide. Call it the conservatism of doubt if you like – suffice to say, you lack the authority, in my eyes, to proclaim that it is necessary to completely destroy Iranian civilization utterly “for the greater good”.
– Although I consider Israel an important ally that deserves our military and political support, I’d just as soon leave determining how best to protect Israel to the Israelis – let’s not second-guess them about when they will and won’t use nukes, and whether they’re capable of rigging sufficient dead-man’s counterstrike capabilities to deter an Iranian nuclear attack. Likewise, I find it remarkably naive to act as if Ahmenijhad’s speeches should be used to say that all Iranians, or even Iran’s political leadership, is irrational when it comes to self-preservation and nuclear deterrence.
– In short, I don’t believe you when you say you know what wars to fight now in order to prevent more wars in the future. I was just barely willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt on that in spring of ’03, but that time has long since passed.
As for Bush, I should also address this bit:
bq. Moreover, I don’t care if you disagree on that point, because come January, Bush is out of the picture. The question is where we go in the future, and unless you are making the same argument (guilt by association) with Bush and the other Republicans that you reject with Ayers and ACORN and Obama — in which case I will henceforth dismiss you as merely partisan, not that you likely care what I think —, then you would have to say exactly how Bush has been terrible and why that would carry over automatically (or give a mechanism, alternately) into a McCain administration. If you can do that, I’m willing to listen.
It’s hardly guilt by association to notice that, while links between Ayers, ACORN and Obama are all decades old, George Bush, John McCain, and the modern Republican party are all tightly and currently interconnected. It’s likewise silly to act as if McCain’s foreign policy isn’t fundamentally the same as Bush’s foreign policy, both nominally (“The Surge worked great, and now we’ll stay until we’ve won the war in Iraq… somehow!”) and practically (“It’s politically untenable for the Iraqi government to allow us to stay in the country for more than a year or so, but let’s ignore that fact and call Obama dangerously naive for wanting to adopt a withdrawal timetable that’s substantially in agreement with what the Iraqis themselves want.”) As to why that’s a terrible policy… well, I think that’s self-evident.
bq. I do not care what Douthat and Brooks think; arguments from authority are meaningless to me, an artifact of having actually studied logic and rhetoric somewhat.
Then you may want to review my posts #57 and #66 and realize that I wasn’t mentioning Douthat and Brooks as some wise oracles that conservatives need to listen to, but rather as representatives of part of the current Republican block that are likely to split off from the party if it continues in its current direction. Insofar as you’re a Republican interested in winning elections – or merely an independent who finds the Democrats unpalatable, and wants to see different guys in charge – I suggest Douthat and Brooks’ political alignment is a noteworthy thing.
bq. Now, all of that aside, in what way do the current Democrats evince sane and thoughtful liberalism? What policy prescriptions or doctrinal positions are both a) substantially different from what the Republicans evince and b) sane and thoughtful? If you really want to convince me, I’ll almost certainly have followup questions, and you can answer those.
bq. But right now, I’m utterly unconvinced that the Democrats at the national level have any notable measure of sane and thoughtful liberalism.
And, based on axioms you’ve described here that I’m quite positive I’m powerless to change your opinion on, I doubt you’ll ever find Democratic ideas to be sane and thoughtful.
Which was the entirety of my point in #66.
Wow, take a day “off” and miss a 100-comment thread. Too late in both the day and the thread to be totally comprehensive, but I’ll hit a few points.
One. Yes, Obama is going to win. But the implosion of the economy is not a VW-meteor hitting the McCain campaign. The risk analysts at a bunch of companies going out of business, or that should be, would like to tell you that. Greenspan called it a once-in-a-century event. So what? Once a century means it’s likely to happen in your lifetime.
First, we have a long history of financial “geniuses” massively underestimating risk, generally by assuming an incorrect independence of events. Long Term Capital Management ring a bell? I notice A.L. is a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but he’s better than a shrug and a “What Happened?” on this subject.
Secondarily, let’s just assume for a minute that Clinton’s centrist Dem economic policy, with a budget in surplus and a modest tax increase on the wealthy back in 1992 (you’ll recall Republicans swore that would wreck the economy) is actually better economic policy than massive tax cuts almost entirely to the benefit of the extremely rich and huge deficits. Sarah Palin has now skipped over the part about tax increases being an economic mistake (no one would take a Republican very seriously on that right now) to the bizarre claim that it’s unpatriotic. Can someone explain this idea? That makes FDR about the most unpatriotic American who ever lived, considering how high taxes went in WWII. Tom Friedman couldn’t. Anyway, if, as I hypothesize, Republican fiscal policy has been a blunder, it isn’t a meteor-shock that the economy screws up. It’s to be expected. Only the specific form of the disaster couldn’t be predicted ahead of time, although given that asset inflation (housing bubble) started in Bush’s first term, we could have guessed what the trigger would be. So it came two months before the election instead of, say, six? Or, more accurately, was the hope it would all collapse November 5, and we would have four more years of brain-dead fiscal policy before Democrats got to the White House?
Two. The Bush/McCain remnant is increasingly unhinged. Local case in point.
Outside the local Republican Clubs, President Bush would have been mentioned in the same breath as Hitler and Stalin for the remaining history of mankind, which would probably have been quite brief. Where would we be getting our energy supplies? How do you suppose nuclear powers Russia, China, and Pakistan would have reacted? Is it now OK for Putin to nuke Tbilisi? Why not?
McCain and Palin have given up on besting Obama in the realm of ideas. Now there settling for scaring the low-information voters with fantastic stories of Obama, stalking horse for the Weather Underground. It’s no wonder that their crowds are now yelling “Terrorist” and “Kill him”. Their best remaining hope is that Americans are simply too scared to elect Obama, not for what he will do, but for what the losers will do. Watching Palin in action is the best argument I’ve ever seen for reconsidering the Second Amendement and Me.
Three. Obama has a conservative temperament to complement a left-liberal agenda. Several months ago, we touched here on Obama’s experience in passing the Illinois law requiring videotaping of police interrogations. Someone here put up some quotes from other black members of the IL legislature who were apparently angry that a bill they had been working on was grabbed by the Democratic leaders for Obama to run with (for Obama’s political gain). I think that missed the point: until Obama took over, that bill was languishing. It was a sure loser, opposed by law enforcement. For practitioners of identity politics, and for those who find it expedient to curse the darkness instead of lighting a candle (much overlap in those two groups), that situation was OK. But Obama brought LE and then the Republicans on board—listened to their objections, made changes, got the bill passed. McCain’s bipartisanship looks, now, to have been a ploy to further his ambitions. He dropped it as soon as convenient, unless you count Benedict Lieberman. We won’t know if Obama’s version is just as phony, but my guess is ‘No’, that Obama has a willingness to compromise and to work with others. Notice that Dems in conservative districts aren’t running away from him? His appeal to civil-libertarian conservatives? The Rove wing that grows increasingly desperate to defeat him is the living example of Orwell’s observation that for Big Brother, the purpose of Power is Power.
TTFN.
My small-l libertarian is coming out here. Sorry ’bout that.
Earlier I said:
bq. Words have meaning; we ignore that at our peril.
And it occurs to me that the equivocation that Chris so blithely engaged in is truly classic, and so I have to kick at it now just a little bit more.
“[T]he people” who probably will “decide to vote for a new health care plan” are fewer than a thousand in number. Got that, everyone? (“[T]he people” who decide constitutionality are reliably reported to be _nine_ in number, but let that pass for now.)
Conflating the former cadre of miracle workers with the entire citizenry of the US — “The People” — is the kind of… words fail me here, so I’ll just say mystically benighted… thinking that makes me really worry about this nation.
When such legislation passes, Chris, or someone like him, will tell us “the people decided”.
No. No, they didn’t; and to say they did is to speak an evident falsehood. Speak plainly. “Congress did thus and so.” Don’t try to pipe “the people” sunshine someplace it’s just not gonna fit.
Examples of the following abound: Once a given law is enacted, very often most of the real “the people” shrug and put up with it, or tell each other it must be for the best, or applaud, or find loopholes or payoffs, or break the law anyway, or any number of things… and get on with their lives and tell themselves they’ll get by. And the law usually stays on the books for a long time. And most of them do get by, mostly. But that’s not the same thing as “the people decid[ing]”, not by a country light year. Even if the people themselves kid themselves that it is.
[Edited]
Chris, #105:
bq. And if the people decide to vote for a new health care plan that takes care of more people more efficiently, then that’s part of living in a democratic society.
I have to ask…
“more people more efficiently”??
Do you really believe that our bloated bureaucracy of a government that brought us such wonders as the DMV can do this efficiently?
After hearing about substandard health care from the VA for veterans, are you really so confident that quality and efficiency will improve with services expanded to cover all 300 million of us?
Sure, “more people” is the plan, but “more efficiently” is just wishful thinking. I hope you get your wish, since we’ll all be forced to pay for it, whether it’s a triumph or a disaster. But I fear you’re getting your hopes too high…
In good news, Hispanics have turned against John McCain in a big way. (link)
This is good news because it takes out the man most certain to have brought in bipartisan reform that would have created enough Hispanic voters not only to doom John McCain’s re-election prospects but to cripple the hopes of all future Republican candidates.
The wretched spectacle John McCain makes, losing on this issue from every direction, will be an encouragement for other Republicans to think well before they risk being in the same position.
The Bush-Rove strategy of assuring a permanent Republican advantage based on an increased and increasingly pro-Republican Hispanic vote could never have worked, and it is a good thing that its failure can be seen.
I think Barack Obama is a less likely radical immigration reformer than John McCain. Unlike John McCain, he cares about a specific racial/ethnic group that is already in the country, that is Blacks. He won’t sacrifice their interests for the sake of a “common good” that does not exist.
Re: #55 from PD Shaw: you could be right, and I’d like you to be.
wow. I’m simply amazed at the level of naive ignorance displayed in this post. AL you are just seeing what you want to see, and ignoring whats really out there and verified. Obama will not be “pragmatic” primarily because he has no core beliefs, other than winning. And he has shown that he will say/do whatever it takes to win, but his past actions show that he will rule from the far left. There is no meeting in the middle with Obama, he has zero history of doing so. 4 years of an Obama/Dem controlled government will take a decade to unfuck.
#119
bq. I’m simply amazed at the level of naive ignorance displayed in this post.
As opposed to enlightened ignorance?
bq. Obama will not be “pragmatic” primarily because he has no core beliefs, other than winning.
As opposed to McCain and Palin, who have (in the case of the former) done a complete reversal on most of their “core” positions within the last 2 years leading up to this campaign, most shamelessly torture?
bq. And he has shown that he will say/do whatever it takes to win…
As opposed to McCain/Palin, running around talking about Obama’s “character” and making slanderous and dangerous accusations based on lies?
bq. 4 years of an Obama/Dem controlled government will take a decade to unfuck.
As opposed to the last 8 ruled by someone I’m guessing you voted for? Or as opposed to what will happen if McCain/Palin are elected?
I too am amazed, but it is no longer simple. It is frustrating and dangerous to hear people spout off like this.
bq. This guy is turning out to be the worst candidate I have ever seen.
I believe this is a variation of the “Bob Dole ‘it is my turn now’ campaign”.
Omnibus response to NM’s posts-
bq. I’m probably what you’d call working class. Low income, for the last little while. At the moment I do without, mostly. My pride probably qualifies me as a possessor of false consciousness, or something. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free, and delivered by the guy at the DMV. (paraphrasing P. J. O’Rourke)
Oddly enough, most of the current evidence suggests that the biggest example of government-provided health care we have right now is the Veterans Administration. And there’s more than a little information out there suggesting that VA health care is excellent– much better than what many people in private HMOs get, in part because they actually focus on long-term prevention, rather than on quick, cheap fixes with the assumption that your insurance will probably change and you’ll end up covered by another HMO relatively soon anyway.
Stealing a page from Matt Yglesias, what this means is that, despite what conservatives would have us believe, government provided services are not uniformly awful and shoddy. Yes, everybody likes to make fun of the DMV, but there are several aspects of the government – parts of the military, high-end law enforcement, even FEMA under Bill Clinton – that have been noted for their efficiency and professionalism. The question is, would government health care be more like the DMV, or more like the Veterans Administration? And the answer, I think, is simply that it’ll be what we demand it to be – if we put competent people in charge and demand competence, that’s what we’ll get. If, on the other hand, we put people in charge who’re already convinced that government, by definition, must always produce a lousy outcome, that’s what we’ll get – as the Bush years have clearly proven.
bq. OK, I must have missed the bulletin when they announced there was going to be a public, national, binding referendum on the question. You did say “democratic”, right? So you couldn’t possibly be talking about some voting by the 635 Congresscritters with a lower approval rating than even W? ‘Cause, last time I checked, they’re not “the people”. And this isn’t a democracy. (Google “representative republic”, etc., etc.)
[cut]
bq. Now probably you’re going to tell me that I’m being overly literal or nitpicky. But I’m not. Words have meaning; we ignore that at our peril.
Sigh… yeah, it’s a pain to have to go through this, but yeah, if you want to be this literal, let’s get to it.
Our society _is_ democratic, NM – keeping in mind that “democratic” means “relating to or supporting democracy or its principles”… but it doesn’t necessarily mean _a democracy itself_. You make the point in both this post and a later one that we’re actually a republic, or worse, that the whole shebang’s controlled by the unelected Supreme Court, and that therefore the laws that get passed by Congress don’t necessarily reflect the will of the people.
I’d suggest that’s a bad way of looking at things for two reasons, the first being that it’s substantively not true. The American people have control of and influence on their government at all times, especially in a heavily mediated society like ours – politicians are constantly aware of public opinion polling, and newspapers, the internet, call-in and write-in campaigns all can have a large effect on legislative functioning. You may think I’m being academic here – or perhaps simply delusional, but I can think of at least three examples in the past few decades where major, groundshaking legislation was shut down due to perceived public dissatisfaction: Clinton’s health care plan, Bush’s social security plan, and, at least temporarily, the recent bank bailout. In at least the first two cases, we have a president with a nominally sympathetic Congress behind him, and at least some suggestion that their recent election had given them the mandate to enact their plan. But public unease about doing so squashed it before it could even get off the ground. Democracy in action.
Second, I’ll note that claiming that legislation is somehow imposed on us from above by “less than a thousand people” is a fundamentally bad idea because it essentially undermines both faith in the system, and obscures the fact that the people, if sufficiently motivated, _can_ change the direction of their government even outside of an election. At heart, this is simply a question about responsibility – if enough people feel the government is outside of your control and not acting in your interests, then that’s what it’ll be. If enough people believe that the government _works for them_, and serves at their pleasure, depending on how effective it is, then I think history has shown the people get what they want… for good or ill.
#120 from G_Tarhune
Nice strawman. Perhaps you can address my points.
When has Obama ever practiced what he’s currently preaching? Am I just supposed to take his word at face value, even though his past actions don’t backup his rhetoric? Seriously, Obama has plenty of reversals on past positions that he held dear, FISA and Campaign Finance ring a bell?
While we are at it, lets just ignore the blatant fraud being perpetrated by his pals at ACORN (you know, those people he NEVER worked with) and the massive amounts of llegal donations pouring into his campaign coffers while his campaign does nothing to even check for legal donation status. Really, lets not pretend that Obama is any different than anyone else who has ran for office. This deification of Obama is frankly terrifying, and I for one actually have read history and believe that the last person we need leading the nation right now is a mashup of FDR and Jimmy Carter.
bq. Chris, you crack me up. You’re just so dogged in you determination to find something wrong with what I say, you don’t pay attention.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
bq. …what exactly do you think I mean? First of all, it’s the public sector unions that have to get squeezed to solve the fiscal issues – that’s a commonplace among everyone who doesn’t work for SEIU, and even for some folks who do.
Actually, AL, I think the evils of the public sector unions are on a very, very small percentage of people’s radar screens right now. At least, I haven’t seen a damn thing about them in any articles, blogs, speeches, any of the debates… in fact, I’d love to see some actual links to examples that prove this worry is “commonplace”.
bq. And second which part of “tip the [scales of sacrifice] more in the direction I believe they ought to go” is unclear?
Er… all of it? You may need an editor for your posts, AL, because, trust me, that phrase does not communicate the clear and unambiguous support for liberal policies that you seem to think it does.
Seriously.
bq. Second, when you suggest that the new D’s will look more like Barney Frank than Inhofe, you forget that that means they’ll look a hell of a lot like me. Which makes me quite comfy, thank you.
Really? Then why does Joe Lieberman – the guy that, near as I can tell, _really does_ look the most like you from a political standpoint, look to be out in the cold, influence-wise, come January 2009? I certainly wouldn’t call his ideological stances particularly well represented by what the new Congress is likely to look like…
bq. And, as I suggested, the GOP will be waiting.
bq. If, on the other hand, he kicks the Firedoglake crowd to the curb and shows the skills of managing ‘up’ that he’s shown everywhere else in his career, he could do quite a lot of good.
This is a variation on the same argument you’ve been making for the last 4 years, AL – “get rid of the guys I don’t like in the Democratic party and that’ll beat the GOP and/or keep them at bay”. You’ve been proven wrong in one election, it looks like you’ll be proven wrong in this election, and, if Republican disarray is as big as I think it is, over the next few years, there’s an excellent chance you’ll be proven wrong yet again.
Is this what you’ve been reduced to, AL – the broken clock approach to political punditry, where you keep saying the same thing over and over again in the hopes that times will come around and you’ll be proven right once more?
bq. But what do I know, I’m a Party Traitor and lucky I haven’t been liquidated yet.
Nope, just obsolete and increasingly irrelevant. You had your moment in the sun back in 2004, where “liberal hawks” such as yourself swung the election to George Bush on national security concerns (have I thanked you for that lately, btw?) but that political algebra is long since changed, and I doubt you’ll be a pivotal voter again anytime soon.
Gosh, so much to walk through here.
Let me start with a thought triggered by Andrew’s comment, which is the ritual evoking of the great Clinton economy. Andrew, correct me (like you need permission…) if I’m wrong but Clinton gave us the end of Glass-Stiegel and a bunch of other restructurings of financial regulation that made financial engineering massively profitable. The boom preceded the tech boom, and in part was foundational because it made possible the financing of the tech bubble.
We’re about to get the hangover from that financial freedom. I don’t blame Clinton for it at all – but I think we need to qualify our admiration for his economy. (Speaking of which, I’m reading the Gartner book on Clinton which is fascinating, not at all reductive so far, and not a hatchet job)
Grim, what the President does, more than anything else (in my estimation) is lead the American people. He does this both by managing the executive portion of the government and trying to manipulate the legislative (called lobbying) and judicial branches. But without that ability to reach over their heads and shape public perception, we get Jimmy Carter. I used psyops as a shorthand for this, and yes there’s a world of difference between true psyops and what I’m talking about, so point taken. But simply standing there and reciting facts – as you’re interpreting Bill Whittle as saying – won’t cut it. The President needs to show us a vision that makes those facts coherent, and calls to act on those facts in an appropriate way. that’s the job, and frankly, Obama just could turn out to be really good at it.
I’ll follow up with some more in a bit…
A.L.
Chris, thanks for your response to N.M. in #122. Cogent and well-argued explanation of where you stand; a pleasure to read and reflect on.
Chris:
bq. If enough people believe that the government works for them, and serves at their pleasure, depending on how effective it is, then I think history has shown the people get what they want… for good or ill.
Agreed, more or less, writ VERY large, in the long run, so far. But saying “the people decided” x regarding any specific bill passed by Congress is, I am sorry to report, too often only fatuous nebulous codswallop, and a lot of people (especially career politicians) say stuff like that to kid themselves and share the hallucination with their audience.
They’re called “delegates” for a reason. Most people want to feel good about the fact they can ignore the details of how laws (and sausages, as the saying goes) are made. Hell, *I* want to do that; I’m a fricking Boy Scout at heart. The statistics on incumbency are not comforting to me; neither is the size of the US government. “You can’t turn us all out, just a few more laws and agencies to write regulations with the force of law–we’re busy here so we need to delegate, too–and we’ll have it right, we promise. Well, no, we don’t, actually; we just hope you’ll think we promise.”
_”The question is, would government health care be more like the DMV, or more like the Veterans Administration?”_
First- I’d say the reports on the VA are hardly uniformly positive. Care tends to roller coaster from poor (with the accompanying horror stories) to good depending on basically how closely people are paying attention. There is a lesson here- people dont tend to pay attention for very long.
Secondly, consider the difference between the VA and the DMV. Scale. Government tends to be at its best with its scope is limited. The larger the program, the more square pegs get pounded into round holes. Our current obsession with equality of outcome being a prime culprit. Its the same reason Switzerland may have wonderful healthcare and almost zero gun violence while the US is a mess on both counts. Organizations (and societies) grown geometrically more difficult to run smoothly as their size increases.
_”And the answer, I think, is simply that it’ll be what we demand it to be – if we put competent people in charge and demand competence, that’s what we’ll get.”_
But we wont, on either count. Look at our disaproval of Congress, and yet 95% of them will be returned this year. Look at how everyone hates the TSA and FAA rules, yet they aren’t going to change. Essentially you should probably look at air travel if you want a good example of how government run healthcare would look. Are you cool with being treated like a child, waiting constantly, and being forced to obey maddeningly arbitrary rules (with the risk of government punishment) with no other choices possible?
gabriel;
Your commentary provides an interesting study in partisan thinking.
You are, apparently, more concerned about the alleged “deification” of Obama (itself a glaring strawman), rather than the very real and ongoing McCain/Palin-inspired “demonization” of him.
It’s actually pretty insulting to be told that your support for Obama is based on some irrational emotional appeal rather than genuine pragmatic enthusiasm for the man and his policies. We’ve all lived through the last 8 years of Bush together, so believe me when I tell you that most people on the left are highly jaded about politics and politicians right now. But that doesn’t mean we can’t support him, does it?
Why do you think it necessary to mock, rather than respect, his supporters? Would you feel differently if it were based on hatred of their opponent rather than enthusiasm for their candidate (as seems to be the case for Republicans)?
So tell us…do you think he is a secret muslim terrorist who should be tried for treason or “bombed” or otherwise mistreated, as many McCain/Palin supporters have loudly and angrily proclaimed in public at recent events?
It is to the point now where the McCain/Palin ticket makes one want to spend more time at the dentist. They are like an open wound on the party
1. Can we give them the hook?
2. Send them to Oregon for euthanasia?
3. Where is the Gong Show when you need it?
They are like the S&P 500, every day you get up its worse.
The only question now is whether or not McCain was a deep mole planted in the GOP by the Democrats 50 years ago, like Kevin Costner in a very bad Washington movie that he starred in with Gene Hackman 20 years ago called, called No Way Out.
AL:
_I used psyops as a shorthand for this, and yes there’s a world of difference between true psyops and what I’m talking about, so point taken._
OK — fair enough.
_But simply standing there and reciting facts – as you’re interpreting Bill Whittle as saying – won’t cut it._
No it won’t, but that isn’t quite what I’m saying either. I agree that a President needs to present a vision, although not just any vision he likes — the Republic has a well-established vision, and one that any future President is responsible for maintaining. It is his duty to remind us of our history, our traditions, of the importance of the American project and the duty we each owe to the ancestors who have been part of it.
You say that Sen. Obama could do this well, and I agree — I’ve seen him do it well. I think I’ve mentioned recently how impressed I was with his use of the ‘more perfect union’ metaphor in his speech on race; and of course, we’ve all seen him liken himself to Presiden Lincoln.
So long as he works in that vein, he may find support where he doesn’t expect it. But he will need to be a man of deeds, not just words. The problem with the man is that he swears himself to loyalty with one breath (‘I could no more disown…’) and then stabs old friends in the back in the next motion (‘Not the man I thought I knew’).
This is what I’m trying to get at when I point to the duty to speak the truth. Sometimes you may use facts; sometimes you may use emotional or visionary language. But it has to be the truth.
One of the liberals I respect most has consistently asserted to me that I shouldn’t take anything Obama says in the campaign as in any way binding; that he’ll be a wholly different man as President. Maybe that’s true — maybe your reading of him, that he ‘got into the game to do things, but found he just liked the game’ will play out when there is no higher office left to pursue. Maybe he’ll start to speak his heart and follow it, fight for it.
If he does, and if he returns to the venue of speeches and visions he once chose, he might even become a great President. Indeed, if he does that he may find me one of his supporters, once he has done it enough to convince me that he has grown to be the man ‘in deed’ that he has so long been only in words.
That’s a huge “if,” of course. I don’t expect it. Still, if this is what _you_ are expecting, I can understand your support for him. I doubt we’ll see it, but if we did, that is the sort of man I could support.
_ very bad Washington movie … called No Way Out._
TOC, on what possible basis and on what particular evidence can you make such a ludicrous claim? Does the mere presence of Kostner automatically require the knee-jerk reaction that it must be bad? I remember whatshername as being somewhat sexy and the plot twist completely unexpected, two off-setting plusses for the minus of Kostner’s involvement. Perhaps not a great movie, but a “very bad” one? I think not.
Chris (#113):
I haven’t heard much in the way of good ideas from Obama. I have heard a few very, very bad ideas. But the thing is, Obama hasn’t been campaigning on ideas, but on slogans. That’s fine as far as it goes; it’s good to get a statement of principles. But the thing is, his slogans haven’t been principled statements, either, merely platitudes. So what about his record? Reed thin. It’s no wonder people are looking at his associations; what are they supposed to judge him on if he has essentially no record and has either avoided putting forth policy ideas, or has done so only to later disavow them? I don’t like voting for a cipher, and my judgement of Obama’s character is that he’s a cult-of-personality type who wants to be very, very popular and really doesn’t care what the consequences are of getting there. He gives me no handle to vote on. I would be happier if he were thinking and talking like Drum and Yglesias in their saner moments, but I watched the primaries, where he was talking like Kos and MoveOn in their less sane moments.
Feel free to think what you will. I will only note that had Hillary been the nominee of the Democrats, my vote would have gone to her over McCain. I was saying that during the primaries, so it’s not a new statement. (In fact, it’s likely somewhere in the comments of this very blog.)
That’s a fair point, and I think that it’s reasonable to conclude that Rights are inherently limited in scope by the size of the population. It’s a very different thing to say that my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins if we live a mile apart than if we live in a loft together. All that said, I still think that the concept of Natural Rights as an ordering principle for human interaction is better than any alternative I’ve seen proposed or in action. I don’t think, though, that we are nearly as close to classical liberalism as we could be; I think we’ve drifted into social democracy. That’s not an all-bad thing, but it does have costs as well as benefits, and we ignore the costs at our peril. One of those costs is that the government interferes in the economy, causing or lengthening problems such as we are in now, and then proposes more interference to “fix” it.
That’s not the argument I was making; it’s a strawman. Systems in collapse have external symptoms. It was possible in 1936 to see WWII coming, and much the outline of who would be where in it. It was possible in the 1980s to see the collapse of the unions in America coming. Some people saw those things, but very few, and there were a lot of disagreements. I see the Westphalian system collapsing now, and knowing enough history to understand the implications, I see a lot of wars and probably more than a few genocides coming. (There are a couple of ongoing democides right now, and a few recent genocides have been attempted.) And it’s possible to look at nations’ (and other powers’, since we’re going beyond Westphalian concepts) perceptions of their own interests and make predictions in a broad sense. My reading of history and national interests and the news is that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and if it gets them, will attack Israel or possibly (much less likely) the US with them; further, that Israel will do literally anything to prevent that from even being possible. I hope I’m wrong. If I’m not, I hope we’ll do whatever it takes to forestall those events.
And if Israel acts in its own defense by obliterating Iran, then what? Is that just not worth preventing? Or is it only worth preventing an Israeli strike, and not an Iranian one?
Well, fortunately for you, I’m not in charge. Just as I am glad that you’re not in charge. But when it comes to who should be in charge, I trust McCain’s instincts and judgements and experience on foreign policy far more than Obama’s instincts and judgements. You clearly disagree, and it looks very much like you will get to see how that works out. Frankly, I hope you’re right and I’m wrong.
I’ll let Glenn Reynolds answer that point, or would if I could find the original quote. He once said that he supports support gay marriage, drug legalization, cloning research and so on, but since he also supports the war, that must make him a conservative in today’s lexicon. Me, too.
gabriel,
_the massive amounts of llegal donations pouring into his campaign coffers while his campaign does nothing to even check for legal donation status._
The link you provided contradicts your statement. The amounts under question are tiny, not massive, by any measure; they are hardly “pouring in” when you understand that they represent an almost invisibly small fraction of the total legitimate donations being received; and the over-the-limit internet donations, according to the linked report, have been returned or are being returned–as a matter of routine, not as a consequence of the report.
If you are going to make stuff up I’d say don’t link to the proof.
#132 from mark at 7:33 pm on Oct 10, 2008
Caught me out on the Costner prejudice. He makes my skin crawl.
Go see “A Perfect World.” It’ll change your mind.
A.L.
AL,
Please take this as a straight, honest question. If it sounds inflammatory somehow, I apologize. I’d really like to know your answer.
You said, “We need to stir the pot. And since I’m convinced that nothing we do can or will tip the balance if the GOP stays in power, they need to take one for the team and lose. I believe deeply that the innate impulses of even Barney Frank are in the right place. I believe that our leadership class does truly love the country an that they – like JFK – will try to do the right thing once they stumble once or twice.”
So the Republicans need to “take one for the team” and hand all levers of power to the Democrats because the rift won’t be healed until they do.
A MoveOn supporter might read this as, “If we make the country ungovernable as long as Republicans still hold the house or the presidency, eventually the voters will get tired of it all and elect us.”
Now what lesson does this teach to Republican supporters? Sure, they might all go high-minded and support their (Democrat) President and Congress as they go about implementing their programs. Or they might pour sand into all exposed wheels of government to grind everything to a halt – _because it worked for the other side_.
Does this worry you at all? I’ve been hearing this “Republicans must lose for the country to be reunited” thing before, and I’d like _someone_ to tell me why it won’t throw our country into a terminal obstructors’ contest instead – by what mechanism will this heal any fissures and fractures, in your opinion? What’s the optimist’s path forward once the Democrats hold all the cards? Preferably without assuming that Republicans are more high-minded in defeat than Democrats…
Thanks
— perry
Mmmm.
An interesting week.
A. My stomach’s settled a bit, now that the market’s closed for the weekend. Sure hope the present Admin leaves an economy to fix. I will remain calm and benevolent, and will not yank that portion of Cam The Man’s college money out of the market yet…
B.. Christopher Buckley just endorsed Obama, for reasons which seem similar to yours, A.L..
C. I’m guessing that as more and more of McCain’s supporters, and campaigners, start to sound like whiskey at #79 and 81 (“RACE WAR! NUKE HOLOCAUST! UPPITY COLORED PEOPLE SUBJUGATING US, AND MAKING US LISTEN TO NEGRO MUSIC, LIKE THEY DO IN SWEDEN! AND, BTW, DID YOU KNOW THAT BARNEY FRANK IS A ***HOMOSEXUAL***!?!?!?!”) more and more moderate Republicans will continue to jump ship, or just not vote in the Presidentiad. I’m certainly HOPING they will…
Good post RGS.
Struck a cord with me.
Perry – absolutely it worries me. I’ve talked about a “Cold Civil War” before and I think the increasing “drive to crazy” on the part of our political class is a big problem.
But…the GOP made a big part of this problem. They made it because Bush deliberately set out on a policy that made the war a GOP issue – figuring that they would use it to electoral advantage.
That’s a lesson that needs to be unlearned as well.
So no, I’m not happy about rewarding Kos. In fact, if I had tipped the other way that would have been the primary reason why. But on reflection, that seemed petty to me. We have a larger game afoot, and we need to keep our eyes on it.
A.L.
BTW, if whiskey’s feared cultural subjugation of the Swedes had actually had consisted of re-education camps where they made the assembled embattled white majority listen to Charles Mingus, Ray Charles, and Stevie Wonder, all day, every day, and as a result, we could be assured that the EU would never produce anything like ABBA again, I might actually support it….
;[)
NM-
bq. Agreed, more or less, writ VERY large, in the long run, so far. But saying “the people decided” x regarding any specific bill passed by Congress is, I am sorry to report, too often only fatuous nebulous codswallop, and a lot of people (especially career politicians) say stuff like that to kid themselves and share the hallucination with their audience.
As I said, I disagree, simply because we have seen examples in the past where sufficient public unease prevented certain legislation from going through, even though the pure electoral system would have indicated otherwise.
bq. They’re called “delegates” for a reason. Most people want to feel good about the fact they can ignore the details of how laws (and sausages, as the saying goes) are made. Hell, I want to do that; I’m a fricking Boy Scout at heart. The statistics on incumbency are not comforting to me; neither is the size of the US government. “You can’t turn us all out, just a few more laws and agencies to write regulations with the force of law–we’re busy here so we need to delegate, too–and we’ll have it right, we promise. Well, no, we don’t, actually; we just hope you’ll think we promise.”
There’s some truth to that, especially at the edges of government where not a lot of attention gets paid. Competency and attention are in short supply, and as a result, expensive, and especially when citizenry gives the impression that it doesn’t _care_ if government gets the details right, the government will do a half-assed job and call it a day. (Note that this is less likely to happen in, say, Scandinavian countries, where the expectation of competency is much higher, in my experience.)
That said, especially with regard to national health care, especially anything likely to be passed by the Obama administration, I don’t think you can argue that this was something the American people don’t want or didn’t vote for: certainly Obama and most Democrats are running very hard on the question, and it polls well throughout the country. Put simply, this is as fair as the electoral process gets when we’re deciding such things, and I really don’t know what more to say if you have a problem with it.
And, AMac, thanks very much for the compliment.
Chris:
I don’t think you can argue that this was something the American people don’t want
I wanted a pony and a boat and a rocketship. Lots of kids want them.
Sorry, lost a line in the editor. The following line was supposed to be:
Let’s see what really turns out to be under the tree n years from now, shall we?
AL,
“But…the GOP made a big part of this problem. They made it because Bush deliberately set out on a policy that made the war a GOP issue – figuring that they would use it to electoral advantage.
That’s a lesson that needs to be unlearned as well.”
I agree that it needs to be unlearned. What I’m unclear on, is what conceivable political or social mechanism is supposed to do the teaching here. The lesson, on balance, seems to be “shrill works,” on both sides. How are we to pry the bipartisan screaming squad off their megaphones?
“So no, I’m not happy about rewarding Kos. In fact, if I had tipped the other way that would have been the primary reason why. But on reflection, that seemed petty to me. We have a larger game afoot, and we need to keep our eyes on it.”
I understand. “Rewarding Kos” is no more or less distasteful at heart as “rewarding fat-cat CEOs” (if only by not expropriating them wholesale as an object lesson :-). It’s not the main game. But saying that the real game’s larger doesn’t tell me how to play it. Not every game worth winning has a winning strategy. I’d love to see yours. I’ll settle for an optimistic story of hope and change… 🙂
Cheers
— perry
#140 from Armed Liberal:
bq. _”But…the GOP made a big part of this problem. They made it because Bush deliberately set out on a policy that made the war a GOP issue – figuring that they would use it to electoral advantage.”_
An alternative view is that George W. Bush in 2002, _after liberals had already shown crumbling or nonexistent support for the war effort, after his efforts to be bipartisan had been unsuccessful_ tried to elect legislators more likely to support the war effort. And if he had not done so, the war effort would years ago have crumbled into utter defeat.
Chris:
bq. As I said, I disagree, simply because we have seen examples in the past where sufficient public unease prevented certain legislation from going through, even though the pure electoral system would have indicated otherwise.
Sure we have. We have also seen clear examples where, figurative moments after enactment, “the people” didn’t want what “the people” wanted (viz> Prohibition), as well as where laws the people putatively wanted were enacted without any funding or enforcement provisions (too numerous to count at the moment), and where a state supreme court decided that the electorate couldn’t possibly have known what they were doing when they voted in a direct initiative (here in CA). The people wanted it, but they didn’t. Say what?
This is a glass-half-full / glass-half-empty kind of deal. You want to say “the people did” [x/y/z] for reasons that suffice to you, including the genuine desire for people to own their government and hold it accountable.
We actually agree on these ideals. However, I find that expression’s casual use dangerous, on the scale somewhere from fatuous to fascist — even as I wish it were much more true than it is, idealistically, with a wise, informed electorate. But we govern (and are governed) with the electorate we have, not the one I wish we had. The electorate has been distracting itself to death for decades, in my view. Maybe that’ll change during the shakeout.
I anticipate that more central planning in any area of my circle of concern, if imposed, will have predictable and “unintended” negative consequences, which the central planners will blame on something else. I will be happily astonished if that turns out to have a meaningful exception in my lifetime.
Cheerio, and thanks for the dialog. Happy to be sharing the country with you.
Jeff Medcalf-
bq. _I tend to be innately suspicious of pronouncements like this, since I’ve run in to too many supposed independents who ultimately end up firmly on one side of the political line. Many on this very website, come to think of it._
bq. Feel free to think what you will. I will only note that had Hillary been the nominee of the Democrats, my vote would have gone to her over McCain. I was saying that during the primaries, so it’s not a new statement. (In fact, it’s likely somewhere in the comments of this very blog.)
Except that there’s not a great deal of policy difference between Clinton and Obama, as they’ve both admitted, and up until now you’ve complained that you _haven’t_ heard any sane, thoughtful ideas from the Democratic party… so it’s odd that you’d embrace the idea of voting for Hillary.
It’s also noteworthy that, for someone who’s supposedly beyond partisan politics, you opened up this last post with as polished a chunk of Republican anti-Obama talking points as I’ve yet seen. That said, it’s flatly not true that Obama hasn’t been campaigning on ideas – from day one his campaign’s impressed me with just how many details they’ve put out there, and the policy documents on his website absolutely dwarf what any of the other candidates – Democratic or Republican – had out there in terms of depth.
bq. One of those costs is that the government interferes in the economy, causing or lengthening problems such as we are in now, and then proposes more interference to “fix” it.
Suffice to say, I don’t think government regulations – Democratic or Republican – are entirely – or even mostly – to blame for what looks like a classic commodity bubble that’s had disastrous consequences. But this is likely one more point we’ll never be able to convince each other on.
bq. _- I do not buy any arguments – be they from you, Armed Liberal, or anyone else, that you or anyone else possess sufficient wisdom and tactical skill to fight a war that’ll magically forestall some potential genocide. Call it the conservatism of doubt if you like – suffice to say, you lack the authority, in my eyes, to proclaim that it is necessary to completely destroy Iranian civilization utterly “for the greater good”._
bq. That’s not the argument I was making; it’s a strawman.
Actually, no, that is the argument you were – and are – making. You may not like how I’m characterizing it, but even in this current post you’re willing to completely obliterate Iran’s civilization to prevent the supposed use of nuclear weapons.
bq. Systems in collapse have external symptoms. It was possible in 1936 to see WWII coming, and much the outline of who would be where in it. It was possible in the 1980s to see the collapse of the unions in America coming. Some people saw those things, but very few, and there were a lot of disagreements.
And that’s pure and simple hubris, to say that you have wisdom to prevent a holocaust that the rest of us don’t, or can’t, see coming. Some people saw World War 2 coming in 1936 – or at least the vague outlines of it – but most did did not… and there was no way of telling, at the time, who was right and who was wrong. More importantly, many people predicted World War 3 was coming in the early 60’s or the early 80’s, with every bit of seriousness that you’re now predicting a nuclear attack on Iran or Israel, and they were wrong. And that’s the basic problem with your logic – you act as if these dread predictions are a dead certainty because someone’s put together an impressive-sounding argument, and then propose an only slightly less terrible course of action to fix the hypothetical problem. I didn’t like it when Steven Den Beste did that crap back in 2003, and I like it even less now.
bq. And if Israel acts in its own defense by obliterating Iran, then what? Is that just not worth preventing? Or is it only worth preventing an Israeli strike, and not an Iranian one?
Spare me the backhanded accusations of anti-Semitism, please. There are diplomatic, economic, and military levers we can use prevent war between Israel and Iran – even a nuclear-armed Iran – that don’t involve bombing Iran into the Stone Age. I’m also far from convinced that Israel is as trigger-happy as you say it is – in fact, I find that, as a rule, Israel’s supporters in the US are far, far more willing to see Israel go to war than Israel itself is.
bq. I’ll let Glenn Reynolds answer that point, or would if I could find the original quote. He once said that he supports support gay marriage, drug legalization, cloning research and so on, but since he also supports the war, that must make him a conservative in today’s lexicon. Me, too.
And apparently the irony of such a quote coming from Glenn Reynolds – a man who was pretty much ground zero for the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, and who’s been utterly relentless in advancing any and all attacks on Democrats while largely turning a blind eye to the faults of the Bush administration – escapes you.
I repeat what I’ve been saying all along – we’re not going to convince each other of anything. Partially because I’m suspicious that you’re as unbiased as you claim – something I’ve become more suspicious of as time’s gone on – but mostly because I know plenty of people in real life who hold similar viewpoints. Some of them are friends of mine, and we’ve held long, respectful conversations about this stuff, but at the end of the day nothing changes. If you really and truly believe that we’re one Iranian nuke away from the death of Israel, or Iran, or both, or that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Western freedoms and pluralism, or that the government is forever doomed to corrupt everything it touches, then based on past experience there’s nothing I can do to dissuade you from those beliefs, and there’s nothing I can do except try my darnedest to defeat people with your ideas at the ballot box, because my own beliefs say that way lies chaos and ruin. You likely feel the same way – let’s just accept that and move on.
The lesson, on balance, seems to be “shrill works,” on both sides. How are we to pry the bipartisan screaming squad off their megaphones?”
As long as it works, people will keep doing it. Obama has been trying to make the case that this election should be about issues rather than personal attacks, but when McCain’s campaign announced it way going after the Ayers connection, the Obama campaign immediately hit back with the Keating 5 video and web site. I don’t know whether either of these issues will persuade very many people, but if Obama simply tries to refute the Ayers accusation, he almost certainly loses. An effective refutation would reduce the effect of the Ayers accusation, but probably not reduce it to zero.
What really locks us into this is that the country is so divided over where the country should be headed. I don’t think that Bush was a slightly less effective President than Gore would have been; I think that Bush has been the worst President in my lifetime. And apparently people on the right look back at the Clinton years with equal horror. I haven’t been happy to see the political left copying the techniques of the political right, but I can’t really argue against this because the cost of losing is too high.
Putin, for one, and Ahmadinejad, for another (and his boss, Ali Khamani) will kick right through Obama.
They’re scared to death of McCain.
Iran wants to start a nuclear war. Obama has no clue what to do. Maybe he’ll hold hands with Ahmadinejad and sing Kumbaya. Lives are at stake.
In economics, they’ll do the same thing: hire a good treasury secretary and let them work.