Month: January 2008

Leading The Village By Their Collective Snouts

by tristero

Like Digby, I am puzzled – and appalled – by Obama invoking Reagan as some kind of icon of positve change. It’s like an aspiring surgeon saying he wants to follow in the bloody footsteps of Jack the Ripper, even if surely he disagrees with some of Saucy Jack’s procedures.

But Obama isn’t stupid, so he clearly is no Reaganite. Therefore, I am entertaining the possibility that perhaps this is an extremely clever rhetorical strategy on Obama’s part, complete with a dog whistle to people like you and me. Surely Obama knows modern rhetoric better than any other American politician and most cultural observers. So I think this may be a plausible explanation of what he’s up to:

Obama believes the country isn’t in love with conservative ideas per se. But both the voters – but especially the press – loved the way Reagan packaged them.

That is what I think Obama is saying – Republicans win merely on packaging, not on widespread support of their ideas. And he thinks he can win very wide support simply by associating liberal/moderate ideas with an updated version of Reagan’s manufactured persona. Going even further with this, Obama is addressing not “the American people” directly, but the people who serve as the mediator between politicians and the people, ie, The Village. This makes sense. After all, The Village are the ones who first have to accept and then spread a politician’s manufactured persona. As for Reagan’s conservatism, Obama understands that The Village neither knows or cares very much about that, beyond a few short slogans – “death tax, partial-birth abortion,” yadda yadda. In other words,

Obama is trying to appropriate the Reagan-Love that The Village feels – and by extension, felt by the voters they influence – for himself.

It doesn’t matter that it’s all illusion. By co-opting not the legacy of Reagan but simply his image within The Village, Obama makes it difficult for Republicans to paint themselves without a fight as the only heirs of the cheerful, confident, can-do America that Reagan’s myth says he was.

Now, we know Reagan was nothing like his image, And Obama knows we know. That’s the dog whistle. His Reagan-loving is just bait for a corrupt press corps fixated on images and perceptions. He is playing their own game against them, and he is much smarter than they.

A caveat: Obama truly is a genius at talking in a manner which makes you think he’s saying what you hope he’s saying. So I could be wrong and a President Obama could be Reagan-lite, God help us. But whatever Obama is up to here, I hope he knows what he’s doing. Despite his image, Reagan was a catastrophically bad president, the worst in my lifetime until Bush (and then his son).

Reagan is no one to hold up as an example to Democrats without a damn good reason. That is why I supect Obama has one.

You Sir, Are No Ronald Reagan

by digby

… and thank God for that.

I’m a bit baffled by this statement by Senator Obama:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

I hate to say it because I’m going to get mercilessly roasted alive, but with all that jargon about government growing and growing without “accountability in terms of how it was operating” and “dynamism” and “entrepreneurship” it sounds an awful lot like DLC boiler plate. They capitulated to the “Reagan Revolution” hype exactly that way in the 1980’s and developed an entire political strategy around it. Here’s their biggest star, with the movement fully realized in 1992:

In the global economy of the 1990s, economic growth won’t come from government spending. It will come instead from individuals working smarter and learning more, from entrepreneurs taking more risks and going after new markets, and from corporations designing better products and taking a longer view…

Too many Washington insiders of both parties think the only way to provide more services is to spend more on programs already on the books in education, housing, and health care. But if we reinvent government to deliver new services in different ways, eliminate unnecessary layers of management, and offer people more choices, we really can give taxpayers more services with fewer bureaucrats for the same or less money.

The idea was to go to the middle, work with moderate Republicans to “get things done” in new and modern ways — the third way, actually. The thanks that pragmatic Democrat got was that the Republicans (with the help of the press) mercilessly harassed him, impeached him and then stole the election from his successor. From where I sit today it didn’t work out too well for Democrats in the long run. (And I’m not sure either Bill or Hill have actually absorbed that ugly truth either — or took the right lessons from it.)

I’m not saying that Obama is DLC. But the interpretation of that election as being a reaction against liberalism and big government certainly is and that acceptance of their myth has served conservatives very well. There’s a reason their movement has developed this ridiculous St. Ronnie hagiography — it’s to inextricably associate their dark, divisive ideology with his carefully manufactured cheerful persona. It protects their movement from the harmful consequences of their wrecking ball policies. “We’re not like those losers — we’re the party of Reagan, the sunny, optimistic, winner everybody loved! Look, here’s our new Reagan! Vote for him!” (Check this scary thing out. And this from the man who said bipartisanship is date rape.)

I get that Obama is signaling that he sees this election as a game changing election like 1980. And he may very well be right about that. I hope so. But it’s disconcerting to hear him casually recount these Republican arguments without a clear disclaimer, as if it’s a matter of fact not opinion. People may have believed in 1980 that the “excesses” of the 1960’s and the 1970’s were the cause of all their problems and that government had “grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating” but that doesn’t make it true. Republican propaganda conveniently offered up all kinds of scapegoats for the fact that the US was reeling from Vietnam, Watergate, a terrible oil shock — and a lousy economy as a result of all those things. An awful lot of the “excesses” Reagan spoke of in carefully coded speech had to do with civil rights and more urgently at the time, integration, specifically busing, which was one of the hot buttons that drove the “Reagan Democrats” outside the south to the Republicans. And then there was the relentless, militant fear mongering about the Evil Empire …

Remember, Reagan didn’t run on “Morning in America” in 1980. That was 1984. 1980 was the much more aggressive, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Look, I know this is weedy stuff and probably doesn’t matter to the average voter under the age of 45. But to long time liberals who lived through this period as an adult, it’s like waving a red flag in our faces. Reagan ran explicitly against the left(and in the process normalized the kind of indecent talk that made Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter millionaires.) Because he won big in 1984, leaders in both parties accepted this omnipotent Reagan myth and have run against liberalism ever since — and have ended up, through both commission and omission, advancing the destructive conservative policies that brought us to a place where we are debating things like torture. It would be helpful if ending the era of Democrats running against the liberal base could be part of this new progressive “trajectory.”

Read Rick Perlstein’s excellent discussion of the fallacy of extending Reagan’s rancid myth:

… accepting the right’s successful fantasy-frame about what Reagan was all about surrenders to one of their most successful strategies: affecting innocence about the terrible consequences of their own ideology in the here and now—helping conservatism, as an ideology, survive to fight another day…

They are not dead yet, far from it. It’s not good to help them keep their myths alive while they recover from their bloodsucking overindulgence of the past couple of decades. If it’s absolutely necessary to reach out to independents and Republicans in the primary, there are better ways to do it than evoking the name of the patron saint of the radical conservative movement.

Update: I hate doing this on the wrong post, but it’s necessary. To those Obama supporters who insist on making the strawman argument that I’m saying Obama will govern like Reagan, I suggest you read the post again.

I’m saying that he advanced the Reagan Myth, which was based upon conservative propaganda devised for the specific purpose of keeping the conservative movement viable even when it is out of power and restricting any possibility of advancing progressive programs. That’s the whole point of the Reagan myth. I tried to point out that Democrats have been doing this, to their own disadvantage, for years now. Accepting the view that Reagan responded to the view that liberal excess and big government were ruining the country is a grave misreading. Reagan, and the conservative movement that nurtured him, created that view and its hellspawn have advanced it ever since.

But I was wrong is saying you should never evoke Reagan at all. There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Rick Perlstein, who as far as I know has taken absolutely no public position in this primary and has no dog in the fight, explained it elegantly in an email this morning:

Reagan didn’t praise FDR. He stole from him. As in, “This generation has a rendez vous with destiny.” We should steal from Reagan too. As in: “There is no left and right. Only up or down.” He would then use that intro to frame some outrageously right-wing notion as “common sense.” We should do the same for left-wing ideas.

Also, use Reagan to mess with righties’ heads. As in: I agree we need a Reaganite foreign policy. When Reagan realized we were caught in the crossfire of a religious civil war in Lebanon, he got the hell out. He would have done the same thing in Iraq.The rule isn’t “never say anything nice about Reagan.” It’s “use Reagan for progressive ends.”

Obama failed that test.

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Affinity For Stupidity

by digby

They can’t let it go. Jane Hamsher highlights another bozo implying that there’s something wrong with appealing to female voters:

And here we go again. Tim Dickinson, editor of Rollingstone.com’s National Affairs Daily:

There’s only one thing that makes sense of the Clinton campaign’s clumsy and classless injection of race into her primary battle with Barack Obama. And that is that her victory in New Hampshire — impressive though it was — threatened to transform her into a special-interest candidate. Hillary would not have won that battle without exaggerated support from women. Despite having campaigned vigorously as a candidate who just-so-happened to be a woman, her lifeline came from affinity voters.

Hello, ladies! You may make up 57% of the Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, but you’re “affinity voters.” Congratulations.

Geez, that’s annoying. He goes on to say that nobody’s talking about Hillary’s shocking inability to win over the hearts and minds of male voters. (No word on why both of the male candidates are having such a terrible time winning over the hearts and minds of the women.)

Apparently winning the votes of women equals pandering to some sort of single issue special interest group. I hate to tell him but women are more than 50% of the population and even a bigger majority in the Democratic Party so it’s actually more valid to say that men are the special interest group, not women. If you wanted to be an idiot like this fellow, that is.

As I wrote before, both parties have been playing a “gender card” for decades, going out of their way to appeal to voters by showing off their candidates’ manly credentials. Were men voting their “affinity” when they said they would like to have a beer with Bush? I don’t know. Is the Culinary Union president wrong for saying that his members like Obama because a lot of them are immigrants and his father came from Kenya? I don’t think so. Did Mitt Romney win illegitimately because some Michigan Republicans liked the idea that he was a favorite son? You tell me.

The thing that makes me hot under the collar is that this is a typical unconscious assumption among analysts that anything but white, male votes are somehow illegitimate. They’ve done it for years about the black vote.

Here’s Josh Marshall:

It’s only the African-American vote, the argument goes, that keeps the Democratic party from becoming a permanent minority party.

That’s true of course. But what’s the point exactly? Presumably if you scratch out all the votes of a major constituency of any political party that would put a bit of a dent in their electoral fortunes, right?

If you wanted to be a little nasty you might, with equal merit, note that the Republican party’s goose would be cooked if we disenfranchised everyone who doesn’t believe in evolution.

CNN’s Bill Schneider gave an almost textbook version of this line a couple years ago on CNN …

Judy, how dependent are Democrats on the African-American vote?

Without black voters, the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections would have been virtually tied, just like the 2000 election. Oh no, more Florida recounts!

What would have happened if no blacks had voted in 2000? Six states would have shifted from Al Gore to George W. Bush: Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oregon. Bush would have won by 187 electoral votes, instead of five. A Florida recount? Not necessary.

Right now, there are 50 Democrats in the Senate. How many would be there without African-American voters? We checked the state exit polls for the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections. If no blacks had voted, many Southern Democrats would not have made it to the Senate. Both Max Cleland and Zell Miller needed black votes to win in Georgia. So did Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Bill Nelson in Florida, John Edwards in North Carolina, and Ernest Hollings in South Carolina.

Black votes were also crucial for Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, and Jean Carnahan in Missouri. Washington state and Nevada don’t have many black voters, but they were still crucial to the victories of Harry Reid in Nevada and Maria Cantwell in Washington.

Nebraska and Wisconsin don’t have many black voters either, but Ben Nelson would have lost Nebraska without them and Russ Feingold would have lost Wisconsin, too, in both cases by less than half-a- percent. Bottom line? Without the African-American vote, the number of Democrats in the Senate would be reduced from 50 to 37.

A hopeless minority. And Jim Jeffords’ defection from the GOP would not have meant a thing — Judy.

I don’t want to overstate the point. But nestled down deep in this argument is some sort of perhaps unconscious notion that the Dems are just hopelessly sucking wind among real voters and thus have to resort to padding their totals with blacks.

*my emphasis.

This idea of “padding” votes is ridiculous (and insulting) enough when they are referring to various sub-sets of the electorate. Implying that Clinton is “padding” her votes (“exaggerated support”) with a group that makes up half the population and a majority of the party is just stupid.

Women vote for a whole lot of reasons, and one of them likely is that some of them like the idea that a woman might be president. And I would bet you a hundred dollars that there are more than a few men who are voting against Clinton because they don’t want to see a woman president. Maybe we should just call it a draw and let this go, kay?

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They’ve Really Come Full Circle

by dday

I’m sitting here watching the Tweety Show and in between plugs for his Tonight Show appearance, he’s brought on Stephen A. Smith. Who is a sportswriter. Not someone who used to be a sportswriter who writes news columns, but a sportswriter (actually the Philly Inquirer cancelled his column last year). Tweety brought on his guests as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, Margaret Carlson of Time Magazine, and Stephen A. Smith of ESPN. Without a hint of irony.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with someone who isn’t a member of the political media holding a political opinion (for example, er, me), or even espousing that opinion on television. However, take a look at Stephen A.’s “comment” about last night’s Democratic debate:

SMITH: I was totally bored, Chris, I was totally bored and I was disgusted. I thought Barack Obama took a significant step back. I think the race issue, the fact that he was being turned into the black candidate, per se, I think really affected him, and I think it showed. I thought he was entirely too deferential last night, deferring to Hillary Clinton on a number of occasions. He didn’t seem to be himself. And the reason why it was even more conspicuous is that he had been gaining momentum over the last few weeks or so. You know, winning the Iowa caucuses, coming in second in New Hampshire, really making a statement that he was going to make a run for the Presidency. I thought that the momentum was favoring him tremendously, and he took a significant step back. Because I think that he was looking at his own community looking at him, and he started wondering about himself. And we saw some trepidation on his part for the first time.

MATTHEWS: That’s interesting. Interesting assessment.

Now, I’ve seen enough editions of SportsCenter in my lifetime to know that you could have easily replaced Barack Obama’s name with Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or any other young phenom, and the above paragraph would have made the same amount of sense. Over the last few weeks, politics has devolved into the same subject matter as sports talk radio. And so a discussion between three individuals who want to lead the United States for the next four years is “boring” and devolves into freshman-year psychobabble about how one guy deferred to someone else and there weren’t any “fireworks” and the momentum stalled and it’s enough to make you “disgusted.”

I have never seen Stephen A. utter a political thought on television in his entire life, but he fit right in because the analysis has sunk to the level of sports talk, not because he elevated anything on his own. Watch the sports metaphors fly in the segment right before his:

MATTHEWS: Dana, it seems to me that if they return to their corners, as they say in boxing, there’s no fight going on. And if they are in their corners, each in their separate corner, why would anything change except Hillary leading out here in California by about 20 points and on to Super Tuesday where she takes it home to the bank?

MILBANK: Yes, conceivably that’s how it could happen. I don’t see how a debate in which they aren’t sparring is going to be exciting to the voters or allow either of them to get any momentum whatsoever. I mean, I’m not sure, maybe they do care about Yucca Mountain out there in Nevada, but I think they do want to see these guys mixing it up. We want to see that kind of fratricidal battles going on on the Republican side.

MATTHEWS: (overtalk, mumbling something incoherent about Dr. Strangelove) What do you call, bodily fluids… What are they talking, Yucca Flats, Yucca Mountain, What are they talking about?

It’s impossible to tell the sportswriter from the political reporter here. And yes, what the hell are those candidates talking about? Yucca Mountain? The safe and proper storage of nuclear waste? Who cares? Yell at each other about how the black guy did coke and the woman’s a ball-buster! Throw a chair! Mix it up!

Is it any wonder that, in the world of political broadcast media, the one man who smokes everybody else was seen as one of the more thoughtful and intellectual sportscasters at ESPN?

The debate in this country is so dumbed-down that Stephen A. Smith’s presence on Hardball actually represents a step up. At least he’s used to ascribing emotional significance to performance in the field of play, in using the events as a metaphor, as sportswriters so often do. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, but that doesn’t really put him out of place, either.

The reason those comments over race got more attention than, say, the candidates’ competing economic stimulus packages is that the traditional media doesn’t really want to understand them. They’ll hide behind the argument that nuts and bolts issues don’t post big ratings, but really, they don’t have the expertise to engage them. More often it’s rollodex analysis, where men and women from think tanks, almost all of them either center-right or certified wingnut, and all with very defined and specific agendas, are brought in to opine without resistance, when these shows pay any lip service to the issues at all. This is nothing new. I was reminded of this moment today.

KING: Okay. Were you impressed with this “fuzzy [math],” top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion bit?

KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can’t pretend for a minute that I’m really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.

And Ted Koppel is arguably one of the most serious journalists on television.

Identity and personality is how we’ve been picking Presidents for a long time. Sometimes it works, sometimes you get George Bush. But I can’t help but think that the malaise we all feel is part and parcel of a press corps that refuses to take serious matters seriously. They can’t conceive of the real-world consequences behind numbers and facts and reality, preferring to discuss elections with the depth and penetrating insight of a Sweet Valley High novel or the local high school basketball game (an epic battle where two sides will mix it up!). So many of us are starving for a process that recognizes how much this all matters, how it’s not a game played for the benefit of court jesters in ill-fitting suits, how the goal is not conflict, like a televised drama, but progress, which is too difficult for them to contemplate.

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You Can’t Say They Don’t Care About The Environment

by dday

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Yesterday’s midnight filing by the White House in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, a lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve and restore millions of missing emails, raises some very troubling questions that the White House clearly does not want to answer […]

Even more troubling, the White House has now admitted that until October 2003, the White House recycled its back-up tapes, which contained the only copies of emails deleted prior to that date. What the White House has not explained is why it changed its policy of preserving all back-up tapes — instituted in March of 2000 when the Clinton administration discovered that its system did not fully preserve all email from the Office of the Vice President — at the same time it decided to dismantle the existing electronic record-keeping system, with no replacement at hand.

The deletion of millions of email beginning in March 2003 coupled with the White House’s destruction of back-up copies of those deleted email mean that there are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period March 2003 through October 2003. The significance of this time-period cannot be overstated: the U.S. went to war with Iraq, top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into their actions.

Look, if you want to criticize the White House for actually showing bold leadership in controlling our runaway back-up computer tape consumption in this country, fine. But don’t turn around and claim that you want to stop global warming then. You know how much carbon is released into the air through the production of back-up computer tapes? Maybe you want to see Florida sink into the Atlantic Ocean, and if so, go ahead and keep using those computer tapes!

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Cause And Effect, Perhaps?

by tristero

Summarizing a report from the oversight agency for the National Science Foundation, the New York Times writes,

The United States remains the world leader in scientific and technological innovation, but its dominance is threatened by economic development elsewhere, particularly in Asia, the National Science Board said Tuesday in its biennial report on science and engineering…

Many Americans remain ignorant about much of science, the board said. Many are unable to answer correctly when asked whether Earth moves around the Sun (it does).

They are not noticeably more ignorant than people in other developed countries except on two subjects, evolution and the Big Bang. Although these ideas are organizing principles underlying modern biology and physics, many Americans do not accept them.

“These differences probably indicate that many Americans hold religious beliefs that cause them to be skeptical of established scientific ideas,” the report said, “even when they have some basic familiarity with those ideas.”

Pretty funny in-joke the Times pulled by informing its readers the Earth does move around the Sun. As if they didn’t know. Hah, hah, hah! Or maybe it’s no joke at all, just tellingly pathetic.

Meanwhile, here’s what Michael Huckabee, GOP frontrunner, said two days ago:

‘I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,’ Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. ‘But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.’

Looks like Huckabee opened the kimono, as they used to say in Silicon Valley. And there, in all his naked repulsiveness, stands a ruthless, ignorant, far right theocrat, just a shade less bizarre than Rushdoony.*

No doubt there are many causes for our scientific illiteracy – American ignorance has many parents. But given the enthusiasm and ruthlessness with which christianists like Huckabee have proactively undermined education, surely anti-science intimidation by religious fanatics represents one very significant portion of the problem.

Thing I’m making too much out of the ravings of a few lunatics on county school boards and a Jim Nabors- wannabe with no real chance to become president? Well, here’s a recent chilling anecdote, one of many similar stories, all over the country:

I taught sixth grade in Texas for three years 2001-2004. During that time, I was absolutely warned to not begin to say the word “evolution” or we would have every preacher in the district, as well as the media, breathing down our necks, and then there would truly be no teaching or learning. Sadly, I needed the position, so I played the “hide the issue and hide the learning” game.

Every time I tell this story, usually at a dinner party, people look at me like I am reliving some ancient past. I remind them that this policy ruled only two years ago – and in their progressive community. Like many issues that are easier to disbelieve than to address, people inevitably choose disbelief.

It is more difficult for me to choose disbelief, but over time, even I can begin to question my experience. So several weeks ago, I decided to test the continued use of this policy. I interviewed with a high school in Fort Bend and asked if I could use current events in the English classroom to explore why real evolution education is often an inoculation against racism and eugenic posturing. The interviewer quickly replied, “We do not challenge the sensitive “beliefs” of our student community.”

Too bad, … our most ill-informed students fall easy prey to eugenic manipulation, intolerance, and gangs because they do not understand real evolution. As can easily be seen in our prisons, it is the most ignorant of our population who are the most susceptible to a twisted understanding of evolution and racism. In more affluent areas, evolution ignorance is commonly twisted into lame justification for oppression.
God forbid that we should teach knowledge over “beliefs.” No wonder our politicians keep repeating the mantra “I believe …this and I believe …that” The “belief” word demands free reign to twist reality without being questioned. It is a true tragedy when believing trumps thinking, especially in our schools.

Nancy Hentschel
Sugar Land

And the punch line is supplied by the first comment to that op-ed:

ken hargesheimer – Jan 10, 03:43 PM

It takes “faith” to beleive in evolution. There is no absolute proof of it being true.

I’m happy to say that he was rebutted rather well in subsequent comments.

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* BTW, check out the immediate reaction by the bloviating heads, as they struggle to place a clear example of Huckabee’s true nuttiness into their pre-existent narrative frames about religion and his “charm:”

When Willie Geist reported Huckabee’s opinion on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski was almost speechless, and even Joe Scarborough couldn’t immediately find much to say beyond calling it ‘interesting,’

Scarborough finally suggested that while he believes ‘evangelicals should be able to talk politics … some might find that statement very troubling, that we’re going to change the Constitution to be in line with the Bible. And that’s all I’m going to say.’

Geist further noted of Huckabee that if ‘someone without his charm,’ said that, ‘he’d be dismissed as a crackpot, but he’s Mike Huckabee and he’s bascially the front-runner.’

[UPDATE: Digby also weighed in on Huckabee’s comments.]

Just Shoot Me

by digby

Jesus Jump Up Christ. Matthews, Olbermann, Norah O’Donnell and David Gregory are sitting around interpreting the Michigan Democratic vote and examining the exit polls to determine meaningful trends about the upcoming primaries.

Michigan means nothing, good or bad, for Democrats. The people who came out to vote uncommitted were very likely people with very strong feelings about Clinton. The people who came out to vote for Clinton were also very likely people who had very strong feelings about her. SHE WAS THE ONLY ONE OF THE TOP THREE ON THE FRIGGING BALLOT! For all we know, if there had been a real campaign, Edwards would have won. (I suspect he would have…)Some of the uncommitteds even said they’d have voted for Clinton!

We have no idea what would have happened if all the candidates had been on the ballot. The turnout was low. The primary doesn’t count. There have been no ads, no canvassing, no organization to speak of. To take anything from it is highly irresponsible.

But they’re out there spewing crap anyway, trying to impact the race, making predictions, being fortune tellers as usual. There’s just no stopping them.

Update: Maddow just made an interesting point. She said the difference between the three candidates is how they define change:

Hillary believes the thing that needs to be changed is that Bush needs to be out and the Democrats need to be back in there. Edwards believes the thing that needs to be changed is that the moneyed interests and the lobbyists need to be taken out of the political game. Obama believes that what needs to change is that he needs to be the president because he is a personally unifying character…Democrats are being asked whether they believe in party, in which case they should be for Hillary, if they believe in power they should be for Edwards and if they believe in personality, they should vote for Obama.

Update II: The Sexiest Republican Man Alive is now a CNN election analyst.

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The Crat Pack

by digby

I just had the weirdest thought watching the Las Vegas debate. The three remaining candidates all more or less agree with one another on policy, are all superstars in their own right, but have very different styles. Tonight they look as if they are all even having a bit of fun. They are like the three core members of the rat pack.

Hillary is Sinatra, huge celebrity, major scrapper. Obama is Dino, cool and smooth as silk. John Edwards is Sammy, the all around entertainer. (MSNBC wouldn’t let Joey on the stage tonight.)

Clinton’s new theme song: “My Way”
Obama: “That’s Amore”
Edwards: “I Gotta be Me”

* Does this make Bill Clinton Ava Gardner? Strangely, I think it works.

Feel free to make your own theme song choices in the comments. (Be humans, ok?)

In seriousness, this rather dull debate is actually a nice antidote to what’s been going on this past week. It’s clear that Russert wants to keep flogging the race issue and the candidates aren’t going there. Both he and Williams look positively deflated that they are refusing to keep going with this deliciously nasty race and gender story line.

I don’t expect the press to stop with it, of course. They are pathological.

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Recession Cheerleaders

by dday

With Unity 08 morphing into Bloomity 08, with a grassroots movement transformed into an astroturf movement (and the ground is lined with Bloomberg’s $1,000 dollar bills), I’m really struck by this new line of argument from the post-partisan folks:

Two founders of the bipartisan Unity08 effort launched a new campaign to draft independent New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg into the presidential race Tuesday, saying he is the right candidate to overcome bitter partisanship and oncoming economic problems.

Former Republican consultant Doug Bailey and Gerald Rafshoon, a former communications director to President Carter, argued that Bloomberg is the answer to a “severe economic recession” that is threatening the country.

They said Bloomberg would be a non-ideological candidate, in large part because the billionaire business mogul can self-finance his entire campaign.

Buying the White House is now seen as a public good! (By the way, they said the same thing about Schwarzenegger, he said “I can’t be bought,” and then he had all his travel financed by corporate interests and has fundraised more than any governor in California history, so give me a break.)

But I want to pinpoint this idea that Bloomberg is the answer to a “severe economic recession.” This was reiterated in an LA Times article this morning.

Um, guys?

If the US economy is in a recession, doesn’t it also follow that New York City is likely to be… also… in a recession? Let me answer that for you.

America’s lackluster Christmas in 2007 may have been a precursor of bleaker days ahead. New York City foresees gloomy clouds ahead as the city’s leaders forecast a slower paced Wall Street, flat real estate prices and budget deficits.

A doomsayer projects only 500 new jobs to be created in 2008, although official estimates from the Independent Budget Office said jobs to be generated in the city will go up by 20,800, a paltry number compared to 41,100 new jobs in 2007.

If the city’s financial center continues to lose money, the new jobs may further downsize to 8,700, and granting the U.S. economy does not experience worse recession, the figure may go up to 15,000 new jobs in 2009.

IBO spokesman Doug Turetsky said to Daily News, “The fiscal picture has dimmed considerably.” He added, “There is a fairly significant risk that things could get worse.”

And if you want to hold up Bloomberg as this supremely competent fiscal manager, shouldn’t the fact that New York City faces a $3.1 billion dollar budget deficit be up for discussion? Shouldn’t the fact that the city’s housing market is slowing and it’s become a playground for the rich, with anyone but the upper class priced out of the market, be a topic? Shouldn’t the fact that so many of the mortgage lenders and major banks that are writing down billions as a result of their flawed system of mortgage-backed securities ORIGINATE in New York City, be a factor?

If you’re going to root, root, root for recession because you think it makes Mike Bloomberg more electable, and if you’re going to bring in his experience of economic stewardship, at some point you’re going to have to recognize that the two are in conflict. An economy built on Bushonomics cuts both ways. And we know that Bloomberg’s tax cuts have been almost entirely regressive.

The elimination of the 4 percent city sales tax on all clothing in the 2008 budget is marginally progressive, since clothing expenses as a percentage of income will be slightly lower for low-income households. But the loss of tens of millions of dollars in high-end taxes on clothing like the outfits touted in the recent fashion shows is a reminder of how much the modest gains for low-income New Yorkers have cost us.

The biggest part of the 2008 cuts – the across-the-board property tax rate cut and residential owner ($400) rebate — no doubt eased the tax burden of many lower- and middle-income homeowners who needed it (and many wealthy residential owners who didn’t), but the bulk of the rate-cut benefit went to large corporate property owners.

Further, the one significant progressive idea in recent years never made it into the adopted budget because the mayor rejected the City Council’s proposed $300 rebate to low- and middle-income renters. That’s a missed opportunity.

And there’s another thing: nobody knows who Michael Bloomberg is and those that do aren’t particularly interested in him being President (he never polls over 13%). He doesn’t get more than 28% of the vote against any set of challengers in New York City.

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Huck Goes All In

by digby

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Via LGM

Raw Story reports:

When Willie Geist reported Huckabee’s opinion on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski was almost speechless, and even Joe Scarborough couldn’t immediately find much to say beyond calling it “interesting,”

Scarborough finally suggested that while he believes “evangelicals should be able to talk politics … some might find that statement very troubling, that we’re going to change the Constitution to be in line with the Bible. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

Geist further noted of Huckabee that if “someone without his charm,” said that, “he’d be dismissed as a crackpot, but he’s Mike Huckabee and he’s basically the front-runner.”

I don’t know if I agree with that. The president of the United States interrupted his vacation (something he wouldn’t do even when faced with a terrorist threat) to sign legislation to keep one brain damaged woman alive against her will in a naked pander to the religious right. This stuff is SOP to Republicans. They agree with it.

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