Month: January 2008

Chill Pill

by digby

The comment threads have become a problem. Some people have forgotten they are interacting with fellow human beings. So we’re going to take a little break. They’ll be back in a while.

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Uptight White Guy Out Of His Element Alert

by dday

“Who Let The Dogs Out” is not exactly a new reference. In fact, it’s just what a clueless white guy would say in front of a bunch of black people to try and “relate”. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mittens Romney, and a supremely awkward moment on the campaign trail.

As he posed for a picture with a group of young people, the typically old-fashioned Romney was relaxed enough to quote from a popular hit single from a few years back.

“Who let the dogs out?” he called out, as he stood there beaming in his shirt and tie. “Who! Who!”

There’s actually video of this at the CBS site.

You can almost hear the gears grinding inside Mittens’ head, with his brain repeating in Homer Simpson-like fashion “Say something street, let them know you’re with it,” and then when he busts out with the Baha Men tune, the brain saying “That’s it, I’m outta here.”

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Sharpening Their Shivs

by digby

I’m sure a lot of people enjoyed this when they read it:

Prominent Democrats are upset with the aggressive role that Bill Clinton is playing in the 2008 campaign, a role they believe is inappropriate for a former president and the titular head of the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, both currently neutral in the Democratic contest, have told their old friend heatedly on the phone that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Sen. Barack Obama, according to two sources familiar with the conversations who asked for anonymity because of their sensitive nature. Clinton, Kennedy and Emanuel all declined to comment.

I know, it’s great fun to think about Rahm and Teddy telling Bill to STFU. But everybody ought to take a deep breath and remind themselves that this is also exactly the kind of thing Democrats do to their sitting presidents, whether named Clinton or, I dare say, Obama. They run to the press with the news that they scolded them so they can make sure everyone knows they are the ones running things.(I know everybody’s forgotten how that used to be because the Republicans don’t constantly air dirty laundry in public for their own aggrandizement. They usually work these things out among themselves for the good of the party.)

If the Democrats win the presidency, expect many more of these little dramas. The inflated egos of powerful Democratic Senators and Congressmen require that they consistently step forward to knee-cap their president whenever possible lest anyone get the idea that he (or she) is actually in charge. They’re just practicing with Bubba, kind of a reminiscence of the good old days.

Oh, and don’t worry about congressional prerogatives. They’ll rediscover them with a vengeance when there’s a Democratic president. They’ll investigate his or her every move, calling for special prosecutors and generally behaving like asses, at the smallest provocation by the press if it gives them a chance to pontificate grandly on Tim Russert about their own superiority. They don’t have the guts to do it when the Republicans are institutionalizing torture or lying the nation into an illegal invasion of another country, because well, Republicans are mean. But they’ll find plenty of things about which to get righteously indignant with the executive when its a Democrat. They’ll be in hypervenitlating, bipartisan bliss with their Republican cohorts, elbowing each other to be first to the microphone denouncing the latest shocking presidential failure to dot “i”s and cross “t”s.

The villagers love to get out the pitchforks —- against Democrats. They aren’t scared of them. It’s good fun.

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Ronnie JiuJitsu

by digby

Following up on Tristero’s post below where he says that nobody who openly criticized Reagan would be taken seriously by the Very Serious People who decide who’s allowed in the Serious club, it occurred to me that perhaps St. Ronnie himself is the best person to show us how to deal with such situations:

Here’s how he did it. From Reagan’s 1980 convention speech:

And, the time is now to redeem promises once made to the American people by another candidate, in another time and another place. He said, “For three years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government–federal, state, and local–costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching. As an immediate program of action, we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of government…we must consolidate subdivisions of government and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.”

“I propose to you, my friends, and through you that government of all kinds, big and little be made solvent and that the example be set by the president of the United States and his Cabinet.” So said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention in July 1932.

He used FDR to advance his own philosophy. It’s a great trick and I would hope that all the Democratic candidates have someone combing Republican presidents’ speeches for examples of their own. (I’m partial to Perlstein’s suggestion that they use Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon as the basis for saying they have a “Reagan foreign policy,” if only to see neocon heads explode all over Washington.)

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The Maverick’s History

by dday

Just to add on to Digby’s post about the true history of the conservative movement with respect to MLK, it should be noted that one of the two candidates most likely to get their Presidential nomination, John McCain, voted against making today a national holiday in 1983, and is spending today among some interesting company:

Nearly 24 years after voting against creating a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, John McCain is spending today at the inauguration of Alabama Governor Bob Riley who is a member of an organization that has been criticized for excluding African Americans. The “Grand Master” of the Grand Lodge of Alabama admits he knows of no African American members among the groups 30,000 plus membership. [AP, 9/30/2006] […]

In past efforts to pander to a far right base that doesn’t trust him, McCain campaigned in Alabama for George Wallace Jr., a popular speaker at a white supremacist hate group, continues to employ a strategist who denounced the creation of a Federal holiday honoring Dr. King as “vicious” and “profane,” and even hired the man responsible for the racist ads against Harold Ford in the Senate race in Tennessee in 2006. [New York Times, 4/20/00, San Diego Union Tribune, 1/18/00; Associated Press, 11/17/05, Southern Poverty Law Center, Intelligence Report, Summer 2005; AP, 6/6/05; New York Times, 10/27/06; New York Times, 10/26/06; Union Leader, 12/8/06]

Here’s a little more about Bob Riley and this secretive Masonic organization known as the Grand Lodge of Alabama, which has quite a ring to it, no?

“This is not rocket science: Bob Riley is the Governor of Alabama and is running for re-election. The President of the United States came to Birmingham, yesterday, September 28th, to help raise more money for Riley’s re-election campaign.

However, that which the mainstream media fails to address or conveniently chooses to ignore is that Bob Riley is a Mason; a member of the Grand Lodge of Alabama. So far so good. No big deal. Lots of well-known people are Masons. But, when we learned and then exposed on our former morning drive radio talk show that Governor Bob Riley’s Grand Masonic Lodge discriminates against African Americans, by formal resolution that they will not allow a black man to become a member we knew that his affiliation ­ because he is the governor and wants to be the governor for four more years ­ was and is 100% wrong.”

(Incidentally, Russ and Dee Fine, two conservatives who have a radio show in Birmingham, publicized this heavily in the fall of 2006, and were then fired in the middle of their show shortly thereafter.)

So that’s who Mr. Straight Talk is consorting with today. Is it a Reagan-style dogwhistle? You be the judge.

UPDATE: I am completely sorry. This happened a year ago on Martin Luther King day. I was sent the link today and mistakenly assumed it was current. The fact that there’s a primary in Alabama on Feb. 5 added to it. McCain’s in Florida today.

Mr. Straight Talk’s history remains accurate, however.

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Oh, No. No No No No No No!!!

by tristero

I am putting this on my calendar to skip. Stone is filming a Bush biopic. Can you spell “BOMB?” For one thing, the casting of Bush sucks. But I suppose it can’t be helped: The perfect person to impersonate the 43rd president is unavailable at present:

ht The Mother of All Mothers

True History

by digby

On this particular Martin Luther King day, Rick Perlstein’s piece from last year is an important and timely reminder:

Day of Reckoning Conservatives still don’t get Martin Luther King. When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: “Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation’s interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest–that nation can and shall and will overcome.” Richard Nixon called King “a great leader–a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation.” Even one of King’s most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president’s call to unity by terming the murder “a dastardly act.” Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, “[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they’d break–in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. … Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.” That’s not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them–or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives–both Democrats and Republicans–hated King’s doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism. “>read on.

And when you saw some of the vile commentary about the funeral of Mrs King a couple of years ago among some on the right, it was clear they most loyal conservatives hadn’t changed much despite all the phony posturing at the top:

Bush should take back New Orleans money and force these aholes to come begging for it.

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Krugman And The Rhetoric Of Obama/Reagan

by tristero

While utterly appalled by them, I’ve argued that Obama must have had his reasons for his vague remarks in praise of Reagan. I speculated that they were intended both to acknowledge and co-opt the Village’s myth of St. Ron of Hollywood. Krugman thinks it was more specific than that:

…Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan’s political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.)

But Krugman does more than simply call attention to Obama’s motive. He makes it clear Obama’s remarks were quite disingenuous:

But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail.

Good point, and an example of Obama’s sheer genius at saying things in such a way that we assume he agrees with us. Simultaneously, Obama was unclear enough in his “declaration” to provide the impression that he only was discussing ephemera, ie, Reagan’s image, while also expressing enough admiration of that image to gain the editorial endorsement he needed.

Krugman doesn’t like this one bit:

I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.

Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.

Did you catch that? No? Read it again, and remember: Krugman’s as sophisticated a rhetorician in his own way as Obama:

I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration…

Got it now? Krugman criticized Obama by bashing Clinton. Krugman seems to be saying that for all his criticism of Obama, and he’s criticized him often, he is not going to give the Clintons, despite having approvingly quoted Bill earlier, any kind of unambiguous endorsement.

Krugman’s final point is that all the Dem candidates are missing an excellent opportunity to debunk the rightwing myths that have made it so difficult for liberal, Democratic, and even moderate candidates to wield national influence. I think that is absolutely true. But that is far more difficult for a serious national candidate to do than it is to say. Let’s not forget that in Krugman’s own paper serious people don’t include those favoring withdrawal from Iraq. That means that most of the world, including its political and cultural leaders, do not hold realistic-enough views on Iraq to be worthy of Mr. Gordon’s keen attention.

In other words, the “acceptable” mainstream discourse really is, as the liberal blogosphere has argued since time immemorial, incredibly restricted. It is doubtful that any potential candidate who criticized St. Ron of Hollywood would ever be granted the standing the press has willingly accorded the less-than-worthless Huckabee. To criticize Reagan is the height of unseriousness.

Of course, I’m not saying that’s appropriate. I’m saying that is how corrupted and claustrophobic our public discourse has become. I don’t think any candidate who dared to bash Reagan would receive that much coverage – good, bad, or indifferent. S/he’d be ignored.

As, I believe, Erich Fromm once said, free speech matters little if They own all the microphones.

Are Democrats over 45 Racists?

by digby

Apparently, some people think so. Here’s a headline on CBS:

Obama’s Age Gap: Is It Race?

CBS’s Dick Meyer Says Older Americans Have So Far Proven Unwilling To Vote For Barack Obama

How about young voters have so far proven unwilling to vote for an older person? Is it ageism? Really, this is ridiculous.

It’s not all that hard to figure out that older voters would vote for the person who is running on “experience” just as it’s not surprising that younger voters would vote for the man who promised “change.” Fergawdsake, it’s obviously not racism inside the Democratic party among a generation of liberal baby boomers who fought for civil rights alongside African Americans.

The people who don’t like blacks are in the party where there are none. To say that Democrats over 45 are voting for Hillary because they are racists is calumny. There’s no evidence that racism is involved at all.

Look, people often vote for those with whom they identify. That’s what all that stupid “president I’d like to have a beer with” stuff was all about, which until about a month ago was considered an article of faith among the beltway chatterers. Nobody questioned that Bush won because all those Real Americans thought he was a regular guy just like them. Now that people are identifying with someone who isn’t a “traditional politician”, it’s somehow illegitimate.

In this case you have a couple of candidates who are breaking down barriers and there are quite a few Democrats out there who find that exciting and meaningful. A lot of women, many of them older, look at the two candidates, don’t see much difference between them on policies they care about and decide for the woman. Many African Americans are now looking at Obama and make the same calculation. Younger voters see someone of a new generation and think he sees the world as they do. Older people factor in experience, both life and political. There’s nothing unusual or wrong about this.

The day after New Hampshire the first thing I saw was the media flogging The Bradley Effect and knew that we were going to see the press portray any “division” as an ugly battle between old vs young, male vs female, black vs white. I really hope people don’t fall for it. There’s no reason to believe that’s what’s happening. There is a much simpler explanation: Democrats aren’t voting against candidates because they don’t like women or blacks or young or old. They are voting for them because they are women or blacks or old or young. It’s not the same thing at all.

The candidates are nearly indistinguishable on policy. On what basis are we supposed to make the choice? Flip a coin?

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Las Vegas And Its Discontents

by dday

So there were two big charges coming from the Obama campaign out of Nevada: that there were numerous incidents of voter suppression and intimidation at the local precinct sites that swung the vote to Clinton; and, that they actually won Nevada (the front page of Obama’s campaign website has a graphic showing the Nevada results with “Obama 13 delegates, Clinton 12 delegates”). Based on being there and talking to a lot of precinct captains and people in the know, I can speak to both of these issues.

First, the delegate count. When I spoke with Jill Derby in the immediate aftermath of the caucuses, she basically tried to dismiss the Obama campaign statement, by saying that no national delegates had been selected and that would be determined by an election at the state party convention in April. I pressed her further a little later, asking her essentially “All things being equal, assuming he remained in the race, would Obama wind up with more DNC delegates?” And she refused to give a straight answer. I later learned that Derby is pretty much known as a Clinton supporter, and she was pretty much trying to tell me “We’ll make the delegate count reflect the will of the voters.” But now, the NSDP has backtracked on that.

“No national convention delegates were awarded. That said, if the delegate preferences remain unchanged between now and April 2008, the calculations of national convention delegates being circulated by the Associated Press are correct. We look forward to our county and state conventions where we will choose the delegates for the nominee that Nevadans support.”

On the face of this, many have made the argument that it invalidates the caucus process. I agree, but it’s in the same way that the electoral college subverts the national election process. States weight their caucuses to get candidates out to the rural areas (in Nevada’s case, it’s really a rounding error that gives a little more importance to areas outside of Las Vegas and Clark County). In the aftermath of the election, they can’t just renege on that. I agree with Chris Bowers that the media and the conventional wisdom can’t just dismiss the real delegate count because they want to. Unfortunately, they are.

The other thing is that you have to understand the significance of the caucuses for party building. A primary is controlled (and paid for) by the state; a caucus is controlled (and paid for) by the parties. The Democrats had 115,800 Nevadans turn out; in 2004 they had 9,000. If you can get 116,000 people out to what amounts to a Democratic Party meeting, you can capture their information, excite them, and turn them out on Election Day. In states where the Democratic Party isn’t very organized and politics is not part of the DNA (and believe me, that’s Vegas to a T), caucuses actually play a very important role. They’re HORRIBLE at picking a President, but they are great at strengthening the party.

The downside to this, especially in a state like Nevada with new caucuses and inexperienced caucus-goers, is that they’re a disorganized mess. And this brings me to the charges of voting rights violations. Matt Stoller covers a fair bit of this today, and I was in the same caucus room as him and talked to a lot of the same people after the caucus, so our takes will track somewhat. The Nevada State Democratic Party, in setting up these caucuses, had to find over 1,700 precinct chairs to run them. There aren’t 1,700 nonpartisan activists sitting around Nevada ready to run caucuses, so the chairs ended up being people who supported one candidate or another, and I would guess that a disproportionate amount supported Clinton. This is not to say that those precinct chairs cheated or anything, but the perception of bias was already ingrained before any votes were cast (a lot of those organizers ended up coming in from California and Colorado, too). In addition, the state put multiple precnicts on the same site (there were 1,700-some precincts and only 560 sites), NEVER TOLD THE VOTERS, and expected people who had never caucused before to show up and implicitly know where to go, leading to more chaos. Furthermore, the precinct CAPTAINS (those tasked with organizing voters for their respective candidates) weren’t entirely knowledgeable about the process either. But they were told that they had to be assertive in working the rules. And many of them were.

There was a lot of hoopla surrounding the at-large caucuses on the Strip for the employees of the big hotels. Piecing together the evidence, it’s clear that there were strong efforts by the labor leaders within the Culinary Workers union to get their folks to vote for Obama. It’s also clear that invited a backlash. The picture at the top is from a sign, “I Support My Union, And I Support Hillary,” that was paid for by the Clinton campaign, and handed out to Culinary Workers union members. AFSMCE organizers from Iowa and all over the country were organizing inside the union and getting people to caucus for Clinton. In addition, I heard that the rank and file of the union wasn’t all that happy with their leadership to begin with, as dues have gone up without an accompanying increase in wages. The result of the Strip caucuses were that Hillary won 7 out of 9, when the projection was 2 to 1 for Obama.

But there WAS a real-world impact to the lawsuit brought by Clinton allies to shut down the Strip caucuses, and particularly Bill Clinton’s comments that those employees’ votes would “count five times as much” as regular Nevadans. This is a complete and utter falsehood, but coming from a former President, it had weight. Apparently that soundbite was played over and over on Las Vegas TV and radio. There were statements from the teacher’s union that the lawsuit was designed to protect voter rights, when the impact would have only been to shut down the Strip caucuses and prevent people from participating. They were making wild claims about how all employees would get to vote at their workplace, which weren’t true. And on the ground, people got that message, and the Culinary Workers union were absolutely painted as the caricature of “powerful union bosses” trying to steal the vote. So Hillary’s success in Clark County must be attributed to that in part.

Like the rest of the media, I went to one of the casinos to observe a caucus (Hillary beat Barack at the Wynn, 189-187). It was fascinating and hilarious and I can’t wait to write about it, and I don’t regret it. But the media’s obsession with those caucuses diverted attention from all of the other ones in the Vegas area. And this is where most of the alleged voter intimidation and voter suppression took place (See here, here, and here). With more transparency and a media spotlight, I think there would have been less opportunity.

But let’s be clear about these charges. In many cases, the rules weren’t properly explained. Here’s Stoller:

The central claim of the Obama camp is that Clinton-affiliated chairs were telling their people to show up at 11:30 and then shutting doors to caucus-goers at 11:30 instead of 12. Aside from the fact that party rules conflict with each other on this point, many of the caucus goers really wanted the event to start and end quickly, because they were working. In the middle of the caucus I attended, about a third of the room emptied out because of a shift change (their votes had been counted). In other words, there were good reasons to shut the doors at 11:30.

I heard one report of an Obama precinct captain trying to get the doors shut at 11:30. In truth, the precinct chair had the discretion to keep them open. So it was very muddled.

There are other charges, like voter cards moved into the Hillary camp (it appears the party didn’t expect the high turnout and didn’t have enough cards or voter registration forms), Hillary caucus-goers attempting to be counted in different precincts on the same site, precinct captains telling caucus goers for non-viable candidates that they had to go home instead of their right to make a new choice, electioneering in places where it was forbidden, etc. My take on all of this is that there were a lot of sharp elbows thrown. Supporters of each candidate were very assertive and trying to do their best. The Hillary precinct captains may have been a little more prepared and a little more experienced for this kind of hardball politics. But that’s not universally true. Here’s my favorite on-the-ground story from desmoulins at MyDD, an Edwards precinct captain (who I talked a lot of this over with last night):

As the end of the first allignment approached, Clinton had 80, Obama 46, Edwards 13, Kucinic 2 and uncommitted 2. Each of the 3 campaigns made a short pitch for the 2 Kucinic supporters who then said they would come to Edwards if it would make us viable. The uncommitted voters also agreed to come if it would make us viable, as did one Obama voter and one Clinton voter. I was now only three voters short, but I could not let the 15 minutes expire without at least getting 3 more uncommitted (because members of viable groups cannot reallign under NV rules). So I went to the Clinton group and explained that if they helped me reach viability, they could deprive Obama of at least 2 delegates without hurting their own cause. I urged them to move at least 3 people to uncommitted, which would at least make it mathematically possible for us to reach the 22 we needed for viability.

To my surprise, the Clinton captain had no idea what I was talking about and could not understand either why they should move supporters to uncommitted, or why I would suggest that most of the Edwards supporters would go to Obama if we failed to be viable. I explained quickly and had more or less convinced her when time ran out. I pointed out she had to do it now and that if my math was wrong, she could get her voters back in the 2nd 15 minutes. She agreed but only one Clinton supporter volunteered to move. As I pleaded for her and one of the two others assisting her to move themselves, the Obama captain quite rightly began to point out that time was up. (I had told the Obama captain I would come to their group if I were not viable, but to her credit, she was not put off that I was trying to help Edwards at her expense.)

You had a lot of inexperienced caucus goers and inexperienced precinct captains and inexperienced precinct chairs, and there’s no question that some people took advantage of that opportunity. The idea that it impacted the vote one way or the other is just not very realistic. Clinton’s precinct organizers were more ORGANIZED, and they took advantage of a lot of opportunities. Is that suppression? I can’t say that it is, really. I’d be more concerned by the Barack Hussein Obama robocall, if I were the Obama people.

What I do know is that the Obama campaign taking this up as a rallying cry has the potential to be very dangerous. If they are trying to leverage an idea that the Clinton campaign cheated into winning with black voters in South Carolina, that could get extremely ugly. I would hope they would step back from the brink. And the same with the Clinton campaign; Bill Clinton saying that he personally heard a union rep threaten an employee is just not credible. This plays into a growing racial gap that I saw on display a little bit at the Wynn casino caucus. It’s a scorched-earth strategy for the Obama campaign to call up the ghosts of 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio in the context of a Democratic primary where the allegations are murky. It will cause a severe rift in the party and could have implications into November. I don’t think anybody comes out of Nevada looking good, sadly. The election has gotten very high school and petty, as issues have been pushed to the side. This has the feeling of a missed moment.

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