Month: February 2008

On The Cult

by digby

It was only a matter of time before the media began to trivialize Obama and his campaign as a bunch of latte sipping left-wing hippie elites. That’s the 30 year conservative rap on liberals and it’s been fully internalized by the MSM and a whole lot of Americans, even some Democrats. When you start to hear the pundits talking about “beer track/wine track” this isn’t far behind.

We saw hints of it in the Matthews article in the NY Observer last week:

The galloping campaign, in Mr. Matthews’ estimation, was that of Senator Barack Obama. He had the momentum, was in the saddle, was holding the reigns. But had Mr. Obama become the avant-garde candidate? If so, he was in trouble. The middle-class workers would pull back in suspicion. Who was this Ivy League guy on his, um, high horse? They wouldn’t get on board. The galloping horse of history might pass them by.

Matthews got that from everybody’s favorite Republican pundit, David Brooks, who up until recently seemed to be ready to vote for Obama himself, so flatteringly did he write about him. Lately, Brooks has been dropping a few hints that his friend Obama might not be blue collar enough for the common man that he and his fellow rich, white GOP urban sophisticates so deeply understand and speak for:

His schtick makes sense if you’ve got a basic level of security in your life, if you’re looking up, not down. Meanwhile, Obama’s people are so taken with their messiah that soon they’ll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings. There’s a “Yes We Can” video floating around YouTube in which a bunch of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and the guy from the Black Eyed Peas are singing the words to an Obama speech in escalating states of righteousness and ecstasy. If that video doesn’t creep out normal working-class voters, then nothing will.

At the moment, Matthews and his pals are feeling strange zings up their legs whenever they hears Obama speak, but we all knew that once Barack looked like he might have it wrapped up the media would be mau-maued by the right so hard that they would immediately put convenient off-the-shelf narratives like that into circulation. And so they are.

In truth, the “Obama cult” meme has been out there for some time. It didn’t come, as some people have suggested, from Paul Krugman (more on that below) and it didn’t come from the Clinton campaign. As far back as a year ago, Slate was running a feature called the “Obama Messiah Watch.” Back in April, this story appeared on MSNBC:

He wears Jesus’ robes and a neon blue halo, looks like Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and is causing a stir at a Chicago art school. An undergraduate student’s papier mache sculpture of Obama as a messianic figure — entitled “Blessing” — went on display Saturday at a downtown gallery run by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

By Monday, word of the piece had spread on political blogs, and the school had been flooded with calls.

David Cordero, 24, made the sculpture for his senior show after noticing all the attention Obama has received since he first hinted he may run for the presidency.
Story continues below ↓advertisement

“All of this is a response to what I’ve been witnessing and hearing, this idea that Barack is sort of a potential savior that might come and absolve the country of all its sins,” Cordero said. “In a lot of ways it’s about caution in assigning all these inflated expectations on one individual, and expecting them to change something that many hands have shaped.”

Even members of Obama’s campaign have ironically referred to themselves as “the cult” and Barack himself joked about Morgan Freeman being “God” before he was.

Any public figure who gets the kind of rapturous crowds that Obama gets is going to be subject to this kind of critique. It goes with the territory. Nobody should take it too seriously one way or the other.

But people should keep in mind what’s really being promoted in this latest media blitz. It isn’t putting out the idea of a “Manson Family Cult.” (Only Jake Tapper has gone there.) It’s this:

Before the Iowa caucuses, an antitax group, the Club for Growth, attacked Howard Dean in a television commercial that described his campaign as a ”latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing” freak show.

Different candidate, same slam. “Out of touch, unamerican liberal elites are soooo stupid.”

History suggests that Republicans and their mindless mouthpieces in the media would never portray this alleged Obama cult as “dangerous.” That’s much too powerful. In order for it to feed into pre-existing frames, they need to show it as silly, vaporous and “feminine” (and only hint darkly in whispered tones about certain “elements” that are “behind” it.)

That’s why we saw this fluffy report from CNN’s feature reporter Carol Costello last week. (Yes, it uses the words “creepy” but that too is a puerile term):

COSTELLO: Well, you know, Wolf, you’ve heard the criticism of Barack Obama: he’s all flash and no substance. But now critics have taken that one step farther, saying the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.

[begin video clip]

COSTELLO: He takes the stage, and his supporters go wild. Cheering. Some crying. Some shouting, “I love you!”

OBAMA: And my faith in the American people has been vindicated because they are ready for change.

CROWD: Obama! Obama! Obama!

COSTELLO: Many political observers say they’ve never seen anything like it. Thousands wait in line to see him, and it seems with every speech, they always latch onto Obama’s three favorite words.

OBAMA: Yes, we can.

COSTELLO: Obama supporters wildly respond, chanting enthusiastically along with their candidate. But it’s a scene some increasingly find not inspirational but “creepy.” L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein calls this Obama outpouring “Obamaphilia,” although he admits he’s fallen for it too. Others call it cult-like. Conservative columnist David Brooks compares Obama to a messiah and his supporters to the members of the Hare Krishna. Soon, Brooks says, Obama’s people … [will] be selling flowers at airports. Time magazine’s Joe Klein writes, “Obama’s message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is,” he says. All of this is not lost on Obama’s opponents.

CLINTON : There’s a big difference between us: speeches versus solutions. Talk versus action. You know, some people may think words are change. But you and I know better. Words are cheap. I know it takes work.

COSTELLO: But others say the criticism is unfair. Obama does talk policy. But Berekley’s George Lakoff says at this moment in time, Democrats want something different. “Yes, we can” may sound empty, but Lakoff says voters understand it intuitively.

LAKOFF: He’s comparing himself to not only Hillary but other Democrats who have said “No, we can’t. We can’t overcome Bush.”

[end video clip]

COSTELLO: And Lakoff says the pundits just don’t understand that, but the voters do. But even Obama supporters are a little mystified by Obamaphilia. Joel Stein wrote in the L.A. Times, “The dude is Urkel with a better tailor.” He went on to say, though, but how you can root against a guy who believes he can change the world? Wolf?

In one little segment, you’ve got “all flash and no substance,” Hare Krishnas, flowers in airports and Berkeley professors. It sounds stale to me, but then it’s just an opening gambit.(In fact, “Urkel with a better tailor” is the only original thing in the whole report.)

The village media is predisposed to be hostile toward Democrats generally, although in this primary their irrational desire to see Senator Clinton brought low is a huge motivator and they are egged on by the rabid right wing who love to toy with Bill and Hillary Clinton. But now that Senator Obama is the front runner, you can see the contours of the campaign against him taking form. Making sure this alleged cult is seen as “silly” is an important part of this strategy, because it will be used to project a lack of substance onto the candidate as compared to the wise, old grizzled “grown-up” who’s running against him. See David Brooks yesterday for a perfect example, or John Dickerson of Slate writing here:

Shouldn’t Democrats who have complained that George Bush was elected on the strength of a popularity contest be nervous that this blossoming Obamadulation is getting out of hand?

Uh, maybe, except that the reason Democrats were against the Bush popularity contest is that voting for someone you want to have a beer with should not be a substitute for a president who is an intelligent adult. Obama may be a guy that people want to have coffee at Starbucks with but he is also brilliant, energetic, mature and thoroughly versed in all the issues. Nobody has to worry that he’s going to do this:

On Jan. 10, a Wednesday morning 10 days before the inauguration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Powell went to the Pentagon to meet with Cohen. Afterward, Bush and his team went downstairs to the Tank, the secure domain and meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff…

Lots of acronyms and program names were thrown around — most of them familiar to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell, who had spent 35 years in the Army and been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. President-elect Bush asked a practical question about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.

The Joint Chiefs’ staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen’s mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.

As a matter of fact, I would not be surprised to see much of our critique against Bush crop up against Obama, as absurd as that would be. (See tristero’s rule #2.) The Republicans understand how to use “ear worms” to their own advantage, even if they were once associated with their own politicians. I don’t think liberal criticisms against Bush’s emptiness will work very well against Obama, but it should be entertaining to see them try.

Earlier I mentioned Paul Krugman’s column in which he said that Obama is in danger of becoming a cult of personality. I think that’s probably overstating it, but it’s a fact that a lot of the organizing has been done around the idea of “sharing conversion stories” which raises questions about the intent of the campaign to run a personality based campaign as opposed to a spontaneous outpouring of support and excitement from the public. I suspect that the Republicans are going to fold that into a new agey, “The Secret,” kind of derisive joke. And if it succeeds, the media kidz will feel compelled to pretend to be too kewl for all this Obamamania. (That’s what David Brooks was doing with his Dowd Lite column — trying to make the media elites start to feel embarrassed about liking Obama. Judging by the new tone we’re starting to see in the media regarding Obama, it’s working)

From all reports I’ve seen, some first hand from some journalist friends, Obama supporters out in the real world are nice, decent, enthusiastic, positive Americans who are seeking a meaningful politics that are more than ancient battles that never seem to end. Nobody’s vicious, nobody’s mad and nobody sees the Democratic nomination as a death match. For instance, even though it’s a tie down there in Texas right now, local Texas boy and Obama supporter Glenn Smith reports:

Right now, the enthusiasm level is high among both Clinton and Obama supporters. Not only that, but I see little of the rancor that we see nationally. For the most part, we’re all just advocating for and working for the candidate we support. No blog fights or shouting matches. I don’t think anyone’s signs have been stolen yet. It is all very civil.

80% of primary voters say they will be happy with either candidate. If that’s a cult, then its members sure are open-minded about who should lead it.

Sadly, if there is any ugly cultlike behavior, I’m afraid it’s been happening mostly right here, online, in our little corner of the political universe. Krugman’s statement came from someone who has been taking non-stop flak from online Obama supporters for months, which has been a very different experience than that polite interaction between fellow Democrats in Texas described above. His criticisms of Obama on policy grounds were greeted with the kind of invective and aggression on the left you’d normally see reserved for someone like Paul Wolfowitz, not Paul Krugman. Indeed, much of it was unreasoning, angry and assuming bad faith where there is none. Having been on the receiving end of non-stop calumny from Bush supporters for years he saw parallels in the irrational reaction he got for challenging Obama on policy grounds — and being a fighter who calls it like he sees it, he wrote about what he saw. I know other bloggers who have experienced the same, including me (for different reasons.)

In recent weeks we’ve seen the emergence of roving obnoxious, online Hillary supporters as well, so obviously it isn’t entirely an Obama phenomenon, although the Obama supporters certainly pioneered it in this campaign. The sad fact is that a good portion of the blogosphere right now is nearly unreadable to anyone who doesn’t want to fight viciously over a contest in which they’d be happy with either winner —and which, in the real world, represents 80% of the Democratic party.

We are coming to the end of this primary very soon and Senator Obama is looking more and more like the nominee. I will enthusiastically support him or Hillary to beat that bloodthirsty warmonger John McCain and I’m sure that Paul Krugman will be doing what he always does, taking Republican fables apart on the op-ed page of the NY Times. And I’m hopeful that once the smoke has cleared, bloggers and their readers will once again be able to see the difference between brain dead village narratives and real journalism. (Either that or we have just made ourselves irrelevant.)

Here’s also hoping that all of those who have honed their flaming skills in this primary against fellow Democrats will take their sharpened tools out into the greater blogosphere and go after the Republicans with the same fervor they’ve shown in going after Paul Krugman. Go forth and flame, my fellow cultists. The real enemy awaits. Meanwhile, I’m going to grab a non-fat soy latte and the NY Times, jump into my Prius and head down to a psychic reading before I’m off to the homeopathic veterinarian to pick up my cat from acupuncture. I’ll see you all at the cult meeting. I’m bringing the kool-aid tonight. Is grape ok with everyone?

Update: For a thoughtful treatment of this subject, this piece by Obama supporter Kathy Geier is well worth reading. I think part of the problem is that a lot of political junkies fail to understand that most people don’t need to worship one candidate and viscerally loathe his or her rival in order to participate in politics. Since they are nearly identical on the issues, it has easily been possible this time to actually like both candidates and have a hard time choosing between them for perfectly rational reasons. In fact, the Democratic Party has been deadlocked up until recently on this nomination because as an institution it hasn’t been able to make the choice. It’s not a character flaw or an act of cowardice to be happy with either outcome or to criticize either one of them for things you find troubling.

Geier writes something terribly important about all this as we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether you are a Clinton or Obama supporter, it’s important to keep some perspective on how politics are actually done, beyond campaigning and beyond voting. Left to their own devices, powerful interests will always tip the balance in their favor.

There’s a famous story about FDR meeting with a group of reformers trying to persuade him to support one of their goals. After they finished speaking, FDR said to them, “You’ve convinced me. I want to do it. Now make me do it.”

We need to remember that — that the next president will do the right thing only if there are incentives (in the form of massive political pressure) for him or her to do so.

Once the nomination is wound up, perhaps the Netroots could take a breath to consider what we think the nominee’s priorities should be and think about what we might do to “make” him (or her) “do it.” Seeing as we have the head of the GAO resigning so that he can head up a new billion dollar new fiscal concern troll group and a Republican Fed chairman is going to be in control of monetary policy, it would be good to get a grip on some of the institutional and oppositional barriers our new president will face, even with a Democratic congress.

As much as I love the idea of putting negotiations on C-SPAN (nirvana for political junkies) I can’t help but be a little bit cynical about its efficacy after watching Republicans and Democrats take a strict party line even on whether Roger Clemens is a steroid user or not. It’s going to take a lot more than transparency (although that’s vital) to effect massive change.

What do you think should be the first priorities of a new Democratic administration and how do you think it will be accomplished?

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Obamamentum

by digby

Congratulations to Senator Obama for a big win tonight in Wisconsin! He is making huge inroads into Clinton’s base of support among women and high school educated, lower income voters. If this keeps up, Texas and Ohio are going to be cakewalks and this is going to be over on March 4th.

(It can’t come too soon for me.)

Update: To be clear. I’m not agitating for Clinton to quit. We have all said for years that we want Democrats to be fighters and you can’t pick and choose which ones you want to do that. This race is still very close. The party is divided. But the contests since Super Tuesday have been blowouts for Obama and it’s hard to see how she can win if he wins big in Texas and Ohio, which he may very well do.

Perhaps she’ll go on to Pennsylvania if the math is close, but if Texas and Ohio are like tonight, I doubt it. She has a senate seat and he’s got a legacy to protect. Contrary to people’s imaginations lately, Bill and Hillary Clinton aren’t actually soulless zombies committed to destroying everything in their wake.

And for those of you who are rending your garments over the horrible negative campaigning we’ve been subjected to, get a hold of yourselves. This has been one of the most positive campaigns in recent memory. You can look it up.

Just wait until you see what Ari Fleischer and his quarter of a billion have in store for us..

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They Aren’t Democrats

by digby

There has been a lot of discussion, as usual, as to whether the Democrats can finally get back those Reagan Democrats we’ve been desperately trying to woo for the past 28 years. Here’s a report from the heart of Reagan Democrat country that should tell us just how possible that really is:

White Men Hold Key for Democrats
Contest May Hinge
On Blue-Collar Vote;
Opening for McCain?
By JONATHAN KAUFMAN
February 19, 2008

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — In a Democratic presidential nomination race that pits a black man against a woman, the victor may well be determined by white men.

The working-class white men who toil in the steel mills and auto plants here are part of a volatile cohort that has long helped steer the nation’s political course. Once, blue-collar males were the bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. They became “Reagan Democrats,” helping to propel Ronald Reagan into office in the 1980s. Bill Clinton won many of them back to the Democratic Party in 1992. Two years later they were “angry white males,” resentful of affirmative action and the women’s movement, who helped Republicans capture Congress.

Now this group of voters is set to help determine the Democratic nominee, and the next occupant of the White House. Working-class white men make up nearly one-quarter of the electorate, outnumbering African-American and Hispanic voters combined. As the Democratic primary race intensifies, some of these white men are finding it hard to identify with the remaining two candidates, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

“It seems like someone else should be there,” says Dan Leihgeber, a smelter in a steel plant here, who is supporting Sen. Clinton. “It’s like there’s someone missing.”

Marc Dann, Ohio’s Democratic attorney general, frets about the reluctance of some of these blue-collar Democrats to embrace either of his party’s candidates. “I worry about [the appeal of] McCain,” says Mr. Dann, who lives in Youngstown. “It’s not like watching an episode of Archie Bunker — but there are real issues” that white male voters here have with Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama.

Gee, I wonder what those might be?

In Youngstown, many working-class men say they will vote according to issues, especially economic ones including health care, free trade and the loss of manufacturing jobs. But in conversations in union halls, bars and factories, race and gender are never far from the surface.

“I don’t think the country is ready for a woman president yet,” says Duane Tkac, a burly vocational instructor at a prison here and a member of the local branch of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union. “The country is in too much turmoil. I don’t think she can handle the pressure, the terrorists.” He plans to vote for Sen. Obama.

Don Pompelia, retired from the Air Force, supports Sen. Clinton. “I’m hoping Hillary gets the nomination. But if she doesn’t, I’m not voting for that guy. I’m going Republican,” he booms as he picks up his morning coffee at McDonald’s. “There are going to be a lot of people crossing over to the Republicans because he’s black.”

Oh now, that must be wrong. We’ve been told for nearly three decades that the Democrats lost this group because of taxes or being soft on crime or being “anti-military” and so the Democrats have moved right on every issue they could think of trying to recapture these guys. The only thing they couldn’t quite successfully do was get rid of all the women and the blacks in the party. Until the Dems do that, these guys aren’t coming back. (And they aren’t going to vote for either Obama or Clinton, they’re going to vote for McCain.)

There is some good news in this, however. They seem to be more inclined these days to vote for a black man, although I’d be shocked if they come around during the general election since they haven’t voted for any Democrat for president in decades. But maybe the economy will be so bad they’ll take a flyer on Obama. They don’t appear to be ready to vote for a woman.

“For a lot of blue-collar guys over 40, Hillary Clinton is a poster child for everything about the women’s movement that they don’t like — their wife going back to work, their daughters rebelling, the rise of women in the workplace,” says Gerald Austin, an Ohio political strategist.

Mr. Leihgeber, the steelworker, says he supports Sen. Clinton for her experience and positions. He carries a book bag to work every day with his lunch and a newspaper inside and a Clinton button pinned to the outside. Some days, he says, he turns the bag around so the Clinton button doesn’t show; he says he doesn’t like dealing with his co-workers’ derogatory comments. Mr. Leihgeber says he wouldn’t be heckled so much for an Obama pin.

“People don’t want to speak out against Obama because of the fear of being seen as racist,” he says. “It’s easier to say you want to keep a woman barefoot and pregnant….You can call a woman anything.”

[…]

In Youngstown, Sen. Obama is seen through the prism of the city’s changing racial makeup. Over the years, as Youngstown has become poorer, many whites have moved to surrounding towns and the minority population has increased. The Youngstown area is now one of the most segregated communities in the country, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

Everyday racial tensions and animosity run high. A white cook at a local bar says he won’t bother voting in this election. “What’s the point,” he says, rubbing his skin. “We’re already a minority.”

But for some white men here, Sen. Obama’s appeal is that he is different from many black leaders they have seen in the past. “The guys I work with, they know Jesse Jackson and they know Al Sharpton. They call them all sorts of terrible things,” says Robert Hagan, a locomotive engineer and a state representative, referring to these politicians’ sometimes-inflammatory rhetoric and focus on black causes. “They don’t talk about Obama like that.”

Those here who dislike Sen. Obama tend to criticize what they call his empty rhetoric, his lack of experience and the fear that he would favor blacks and other minorities.

Many working-class men here say they are being lobbied by their teenage and young adult children to vote for Sen. Obama. And some of the area’s newer businesses, such as its growing hospitals and the privately run prison, break down some of the racial and gender barriers found in the mills and auto plants that are still overwhelmingly white and male.

So, things are probably changing. But not that much:

Across town, 14 steelworkers brought together to talk about the election say they predominantly supported Sen. John Edwards before he dropped out of the race. Now 13 of them say they are leaning toward Sen. Clinton. They praise her experience and toughness in withstanding the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Former President Bill Clinton remains enormously popular here, with many blue-collar men saying that they like the fact that he would be in the White House as well.

“I think she has the right person in the bedroom with her,” says Joe Marion, who works at the local prison.

Betty Ingramn doesn’t buy it. The lone African-American in the room full of steelworkers, she works as a secretary in the steel mill and is the head of the clerical workers union.

“It’s a race thing,” she says of her colleagues’ support for Sen. Clinton. “They can’t handle it, an African-American being over them.” As an African-American union official, Ms. Ingramn says she has battled constantly to be included in meetings and decisions.

Please, tell me again why Democrats think they can appeal to people like this when we have a party that’s filled with women and minorities?

“I think if we nominate one of these two, we are talking about McCain as president,” says Bob Rodkey, a firefighter who doesn’t like either candidate but plans to vote for Sen. Clinton in the primary. “I talk to a lot of my Democratic friends and they are going to cross over in November or not vote at all. We don’t have a viable candidate. Neither of them is one of us.”

Mr. Rodkey says he will vote for a Democrat in the fall. He plans to urge his friends to do the same. “Hopefully they will listen to the message, and not who’s delivering it,” he says.

I feel for these fellows’ economic plight. They have been getting the shaft for 30 years and there’s no end in sight. But until they get over their bigotry I just don’t see them voting for the Democrats because the cognitive dissonance is just too great — the Democratic party is too diverse for them to feel comfortable. It’s good news that their kids are less bigoted and are having some influence, but they are a ways from being able to accept a liberal African American man as president and obviously even farther from being able to accept a woman.

These guys aren’t Democrats. They are Republicans who get the shaft by their own party. Not the same thing at all.

Update: Here’s a plea not to forget this important constituency, which concludes:

He might be a Republican and he might be a Democrat; he might be a Libertarian or a Green. He knows that his wife is more emotional than rational, and he guides the family in a rational manner.

He’s not a racist, but he is annoyed and disappointed when people of certain backgrounds exhibit behavior that typifies the worst stereotypes of their race. He’s willing to give everybody a fair chance if they work hard, play by the rules and learn English.

Most important, the Angry White Man is pissed off. When his job site becomes flooded with illegal workers who don’t pay taxes and his wages drop like a stone, he gets righteously angry. When his job gets shipped overseas, and he has to speak to some incomprehensible idiot in India for tech support, he simmers. When Al Sharpton comes on TV, leading some rally for reparations for slavery or some such nonsense, he bites his tongue and he remembers. When a child gets charged with carrying a concealed weapon for mistakenly bringing a penknife to school, he takes note of who the local idiots are in education and law enforcement.

He also votes, and the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader. It’s not that she is a woman. It’s that she is who she is. It’s the liberal victim groups she panders to, the “poor me” attitude that she represents, her inability to give a straight answer to an honest question, his tax dollars that she wants to give to people who refuse to do anything for themselves.

There are many millions of Angry White Men. Four million Angry White Men are members of the National Rifle Association, and all of them will vote against Hillary Clinton, just as the great majority of them voted for George Bush.

He hopes that she will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, and he will make sure that she gets beaten like a drum.

Lovely.

Update II: None of this is to suggest that unions, which are traditional Democrats, are necessarily these guys, although some of these guys are union members. Unions deliver votes to Democrats and they are backing the Democrat for the presidency this time out for sure. I’m just not certain that those among the membership who call themselves “Reagan Democrats” and have the attitudes outlined above, will vote accordingly.

Democracy Part II

by digby

Now we’re talking:

Early voting starts today in Texas. In Waller County, a primarily rural county about 60 miles outside Houston, the county made the decision to offer only one early voting location: at the County Courthouse in Hempstead, TX, the county seat.

Prairie View A&M students organized to protest the decision, because they felt it hindered their ability to vote. For background, Prairie View A&M is one of Texas’ historically Black universities. It has a very different demographic feel than the rest of the county. There has been a long history of dispute over what the students feel is disenfranchisement. There was a lot of outrage in 2006, when students felt they were unfairly denied the right to vote when their registrations somehow did not get processed.

[…]

1000 students, along with an additional 1000 friends and supporters, are this morning walking the 7.3 miles between Prairie View and Hempstead in order to vote today. According to the piece I saw on the news (there’s no video up, so I can’t link to it), the students plan to all vote today. There are only 2 machines available at the courthouse for early voting, so they hope to tie them up all day and into the night.

Thanks to the students’ efforts, with a little help from the Federal Government, additional early voting sites will be open (just not right away):

Under pressure from the federal government, Waller County on Tuesday added three temporary polling places for early voting, ditching plans to open only one voting site in advance of the March 4 primary. The Justice Department questioned the county’s January decision to cut early-voting sites from a half dozen throughout the county to just one in Hempstead. The county’s about-face came on the same day that vocal critics announced a mass march to the polls next week. Commissioners made the change in an emergency session Tuesday to address questions from federal voting officials about whether one site would infringe on the rights of minority voters.

Good work.

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Democracy

by digby

I just heard Bush give one of his officious lectures about democracy with the news that Castro is stepping down. He said that he expects the Cubans to hold free and fair elections — “and I mean free and fair, not those staged elections the Castro brothers try to foist off on the people.”

I laughed when I heard that. Two political brothers staging elections and foisting them off on the people — where have I heard that before? I guess he’s saying that the 2000 election was a real exercise in democracy with the Supreme Court stepping in and saying they couldn’t count votes that hadn’t been previously counted because it would disenfranchise people whose votes had been. Funny stuff.

And then I read this:

As many as 1.5 million votes are projected to be cast in Washington State’s presidential primary on Tuesday [today]. The question is whether they will count.

The state is obliged to tally the numbers, of course, and the state Republican Party will award 19 of its 40 delegates based on the primary results. Yet Senator John McCain’s selection as the Republican nominee is pretty much assured.

More problematic is that the state Democratic Party long ago said it would award its delegates based solely on the results of the statewide caucuses that were held on Feb. 9. The party says a record 250,000 people turned out for the caucuses, which Senator Barack Obama won by 36 percentage points.

So it appears that the primary, first approved in a 1988 referendum with the goal of giving greater voice to voters who might not be able or inclined to attend a party caucus, may have the distinction of being one of the few essentially irrelevant contests in a presidential race so fierce this year that even outposts like Idaho and Alaska have nudged their way into the national spotlight for a moment or two.

The primary was moved up this year from May to February with an eye toward increasing its influence. Yet, while the presidential candidates descended on the state in the days before the caucuses, they do not appear to be coming back for the primary.

WTF?

I guess the lesson here for voters around the country is that they’d better study all the fine print and read every single mailer they get to figure out whether they are voting for any reason or if it’s all just a big show that makes no sense whatsoever. Those poor fools who go to the polls today in Washington to vote for local intitiatives or referendums should just be aware that if they vote for a Democrat on the ballot that the vote doesn’t count. And they wonder why people think voting is a waste of time. In many cases lately it’s absolutely true.

The Democratic Party has shown itself to be a complete mess in this primary season, apparently never considering the fact that there could be a close race with all these proportionally allocated delegates. They played games trying to keep Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina happy and have ended up with this clusterfuck.

To me, the best argument for not letting the superdelegates decide this election is that it’s the same sort of people who approved these ridiculous voting schemes to keep states from moving up their primaries. Are we supposed to trust that they can decide who is the most electable Democrat? If this kind of thing was the best they could do — along with telling Florida voters to pound sand, again — then they are clearly too incompetent to decide a presidential election.

And the United States of America is in no position to be lecturing anyone, not even Fidel Castro, on “free and fair” elections at this point. Our elections are a national embarrassment.

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The 2008 Election Just Turned

by dday

Three major developments globally have the potential to really change the dynamic in the Presidential election. Fidel Castro’s resignation, the declaration of independence in Kosovo, and the resounding defeat of General-Dictator Pervez Musharraf’s party in elections in Pakistan, are major, world-changing events that could be extremely positive for the world and the people in those nations, or profoundly destabilizing, over the next several years. Will Castro’s exit usher in political and economic reforms? Will the counter-productive embargo finally be lifted? Or will US policy toward Cuba remain in its 50-year stasis, and will more sinister possibilities reveal themselves? Will Kosovo receive their independence and spark other democratic movements in the region, or will Serbia and Russia start another war in the Balkans? Will the opposition movements force Musharraf from power in Pakistan, or will the military render the will of the people moot, and will the society remain under martial law or worse? These are important political questions, and the next President will have an opportunity to really alter the global landscape, with smarts and savvy and the use of soft-power diplomacy.

Whether you see now as a time to stick with someone with the experience to make these tough and delicate decisions, or to go with someone with a different mindset on foreign policy, this is certainly a momentous occasion. And certainly, contrasting the two candidates we have left on the Democratic side to Bush’s third term proxy John McCain, the difference is stark. Here’s an example of what can be done right now, in this case with respect to Pakistan.

Now that Musharraf is for all practical purposes about to be dispensed with, the Bush administration needs to take a new approach.

A good start would be to adopt Sen. Joseph Biden’s proposal to triple U.S. economic aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion per year. A second step should be to acknowledge that flooding military aid into the country — to the tune of $10 billion since the beginning of the Bush presidency — has done more harm than good. In this administration — if possible — and certainly in the next, the United States needs to shift from “democracy promotion” to “democracy support.” Instead of trying to impose pro-U.S. regimes by force, U.S. policy should involve supporting indigenous democratic forces with non-military assistance, taking its cues from the needs of these movements rather than trying to manipulate the results.

These really are the fundamental questions. Are we going to stick with a foreign policy of the neoconservative consensus, with bullying and unilateralism and warmongering, are we going to attempt to better our position in the world through cooperation and mutual support.

When you shrug off the posturing and the day to day of the campaign, these are the stakes.

UPDATE: The initial statements of the leading candidates on Castro’s resignation does not make me particularly hopeful, though there are some vague claims about reaching out and talking on the condition that Cuba takes legitimate steps to reform, particularly by releasing political prisoners. Sadly, our Cuba policy is still tied to electoral politics, particularly with respect to Florida.

…also, per billjpa, two truly awful rulings by the Supreme Court, one a Kafka-esque claim that victims of warrantless wiretapping have no standing to file suit becaus e the government won’t allow them to see the evidence, and another siding with insurance companies over victims of the flood caused by Hurricane Katrina, also throw this election into pretty sharp relief.

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Whoops!

by dday

Here’s a little more on that e.coli conservatism I was talking about. In this case it’s the FDA, apparently indistinguishable from the Keystone Kops.

The Chinese facility that supplies the active ingredient of the widely used blood thinner heparin was never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration because the agency confused its name with another just like it, agency officials said yesterday […]

Joseph Famulare, deputy director for compliance at the FDA’s center for drug evaluation and research, said yesterday in a conference call with reporters that when the company that makes the active ingredient for heparin applied for FDA approval, the FDA thought the application had come from a different company with a similar name that had already been inspected.

“To date this is an isolated situation, but the wrong firm was put into the database,” he said. Famulare declined to name the Chinese company approved by mistake.

I mean, we don’t have any Arabic speakers gathering intelligence, why would we have any Chinese speakers at the regulatory agency dealing with products from China? Not like they’re a big importer or anything.

It takes time to properly train regulators. They need to be experts in their respective fields and to know what to look for. This is a project that will take years and years after this Administration is gone. Bush has put us all at risk; that’s not hyperbole.

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Spinning Away The Shamelessness

by dday

Nick Kristof is being a moron here, but there’s a serious subtext to it. If John McCain can keep taking multiple positions on issues, or say one thing and do another with abandon, and the media will give it a pass, that’s a tremendous detriment for the Democratic nominee. They’re coating McCain with teflon.

With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is … McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste … McCain himself would probably acknowledge every one of these flaws, and he is a rare politician with the courage not just to follow the crowd but also to lead it. It is refreshing to see that courage rewarded by voters.

If you’re going to read his mind, then sure, I guess you can find whatever you want in McCain. But the actuality kind of deviates from that. I mean, McCain has made Iraq the centerpiece of his campaign by lying about his record of calling for the ouster of Donald Rumsfeld and the repudiation of his war strategy, which he, um, didn’t. He claims to be a leader on fighting climate change in the US Senate, yet he actually doesn’t know anything about his own policy, including whether or not his plan has a mandatory cap on carbon emissions. He makes an argument about Barack Obama being all talk but having little in the way of accomplishments, and yet he actually doesn’t have many substantial accomplishments to speak of. And in the one accomplishment he can name, campaign finance reform, this growing story about how McCain sought to have the taxpayers bail him out if he lost the election is only going to make him look even more bogus.

As The Washington Post reported on Saturday, John McCain’s campaign struck a canny deal with a bank in December. If his campaign tanked, public funds would be there to bail him out. But if he emerged as the nominee, there’d be no need for public financing, since the contributions would come flowing.

It’s an arrangement that no one has ever tried before. And it appears that McCain, who has built his reputation on campaign finance reform, was gaming the system. Or as a campaign finance expert who preferred to remain anonymous told me, referring to the prominent role that lobbyists have as advisers to his campaign, “This places McCain’s grandstanding on public financing in a new light. True reformers believe public financing is a way to replace the lobbyists’ influence, not a slush fund that the lobbyists use to pay off campaign debts.”

Hilzoy has more. But none of this matters if everyone fails to report it factually. And Kristof’s op-ed is a shot across the bow. If the truth on McCain is only going to be revealed in blogs and on Olbermann (who just had a nice segment on the campaign finance issue), then the impact will be severely blunted. This worries me.

McCain is going to be running on his integrity. The facts reveal that he has none. But those who would hold him accountable would rather spin it away. So, how to get around this? Unless the nominee is going to be forceful and basically demand that the press looks at the reality, I’m not sure.

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For More Of The Same, Vote McCain

by tristero

[UPDATE: Ht to mm123161 in comments for the much better title.]

In a silly article, written as if McCain had already been anointed by Bush’s dad King of all JesusLand – gosh, I’m sorry, take two:

In a silly article, written as if McCain had already been elected President of the United States, the reporter collects some “common guesses” as to the prospective makeup of McCain’s cabinet. Translated: He and his drinking buddies had a real good time the other night (and that’s right, play your cards right and you can be paid to write shit like that, too!). Nevertheless there is something very important to learn from this article. So I urge you to read it but only while you’re sitting down. It’s scarier than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, creepier than Larry Craig in the next stall, more horrifying than Cheney with a brewsky and a shotgun:

• Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., in a prominent job, possibly even secretary of state.

• Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., as attorney general.

• Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as homeland security secretary.

• Former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas as treasury secretary.

• Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as health and human services secretary.

Like I said, the reporter had a lot of fun with his pals last night. But even so – and this is the serious part, folks – you can rest assured that if not these, McCain will pick others for his cabinet who are equally incompetent and ill-qualified.*

It seems obvious, but let’s state it anyway. When you elect a president, you’re not just voting into The Most Powerful Job Ever the prettiest face, the straightest shooter, the amplest codpiece, the most fun guy or gal to have a beer with. No, you’re also voting into hundreds of offices an entire horde – I prefer the word “clutch” but horde will do nicely as well – of people who damn well better be honest, qualified, and level-headed. “George W. Bush” is as much a disastrous administration as it is a single miserable failure. “John McCain” is more of the same.

So let’s not forget it: A vote for McCain is a vote for an incompetent, sclerotic American executive at the precise moment in our history when we, and the world, badly need the ablest people in the country to serve.

*That list is interesting is so many different ways, isn’t it? Notice the subtle blending of ethnicities. And the diversity of genders. And the emphasis on young ideas. Aren’t you dizzy with excitement imagining the country’s treasury overseen by Philip Gramm? And Joseph Lieberman as Secretary of State…the mind boggles.

Happy B-Day

by digby

Today is the last day of Atrios’s fundraiser and it’s his birthday too! If you haven’t sent him a couple of bucks yet, you should do it, or you’ll be a wanker of the day.

Go here.

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