Month: April 2008

They Hate Him

by tristero

Wow, do they ever:

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has wriggled out…

Let’s stop right there, people. On its front page, The New York Times has just compared Jeremiah Wright to a snake (and it’s downhill from there). I sincerely doubt anyone can find over the past 7 years, say, a similar characterization of a white religious leader of Wright’s stature in the news sections of the Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, or any other mainstream daily newspaper, including the Wall Street Journal.

Did even a phony like Randall Terry “wriggle” into the spotlight recently when he exploited the hapless Schiavo family? When was the last time anyone can recall the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell described this way by the New York Times? Or Pat Robertson? Or James Dobson? Was John Hagee, McCains bff who loathes Catholics so described?

Now, why do you think that is? It’s not because they’re conservative. The mainstream media is respectful to all religious leaders. Except when they’re black.

Put another way, the mainstream press just proved one of Wright’s seemingly most preposterous and narcissistic points. These really aren’t attacks on him, but rather on the black church. What Wright calls the “corporate media” wouldn’t dare characterize a white preacher like this. Ever.

Dismayingly, you can feel the panic amongst we liberals. Bob Herbert devotes an entire column heaping contempt on Wright for attempting to “bury” Barack Obama. Salon’s editor “regrets” that she didn’t realize just how narcissistic Wright really is and hastily convened a panel of “experts” to address the urgent question: What should Obama do about Rev. Jeremiah Wright? And guess what most of them suggest? Get some “distance!” What?!!??! They seriously think Obama can “minimize” the issue of race if only Jeremiah Wright will shut the hell up! Todd Gitlin, someone who I often disagree with, is one of the rare exceptions::

Obama should say that he no more associates himself with Wright’s remarks than John McCain (by his own say-so) agrees with John Hagee about Satanic Catholics or righteous Armageddon. He should remind his interlocutors that McCain went looking for Hagee’s endorsement while he, Obama, did not do the same with Wright. He should also repeat that he’s running for president, and that therefore he wants to talk about the awful Iraq war, the awful economy, the awful Bush years and the danger of extending them with McCain. He should say all this with a smile and his customary grace.

Damn straight, especially the ironicaly-mentioned “customary grace.”

Assuming that Obama is the nominee, Republicans will make this a one issue campaign: the color of the next president’s skin. Oh, they’ll do it mostly with dog whistles, but they’ll do it. More overtly, McCain’s ad in NC (which, wink wink, he had nothing to do with and actually deplored) was just a trial balloon, a proof of concept. The issue is race, stupid, Wright or not.

Democrats and liberals have two choices. They can do as they’ve done for years with hot button issues, seek to minimize the conversation and change the subject. Well, maybe, just maybe Wright’ll go away. But the issue won’t. And Obama might very well lose. Not because of Wright’s “monomania” (to use another canard from Stanley’s article), but because liberals and Democrats are too ashamed of their own slightly crazed grandpas-in-the-attic to understand how important it is to defend them (needless to say, GOPers understand very well). This summer and fall, America will indeed have a conversation about race and the Republicans will make it a nasty, vicious one.

The other alternative is not to run for cover but take a stand. If Republicans want to put race front and center – and trust me, they do so want and they will – then be prepared to confront them on it. I’d suggest starting with Katrina, reminding the country that McCain was doling out cake while his fellow Americans were drowning in shit-filled waters, imploring their government to help them.

In truth the rightwing doesn’t have a gouty leg to stand on when it comes to race, unless Democrats are prepared to provide them with the crutch of refusing to address the issue forthrightly. What the Republicans (and their media enablers) are really saying is that Jeremiah Wright is evidence that blacks aren’t “ready to govern.” Rest assured that if it wasn’t Wright, they would just find someone else’s words to distort, someone just as unsettling to “the American people” to hang around Obama’s neck.

And yes, that is exactly what is going on right now: Republicans are seeking to lynch Obama by using Wright as the rope. And with or without this particular rope, they’re still going to find a way to lynch Obama (if we continue to let them). The more that Democrats and liberals seek to “distance” themselves from the issue of race – which is what Wright is all about, not that some of his ideas or batty, or he’s a raging egomaniac – the tauter the noose.

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Note: Since the msm has decided that Jeremiah Wright is the new Scott Ritter – ie,, that Wright’s an uncouth jerk that no one needs to listen to – you can expect a full court character assassination, as if Wright were the issue rather than race. So let’s not forget that while Ritter may not be someone you’d like to spend your leisure time getting to know, he was quite right about Iraq and WMD’s when all the classy folks were perfectly happy to be bamboozled by Bush’s carny barkers.

Of course, there is much I don’t like about Wright – you can start with his defense of Farrakhan and go from there – but that is hardly the point. He was made into a campaign issue – and thereby given a national voice – by Republicans and a media who deliberately distorted his words. These are the very same people who had no trouble excusing Huckabee’s enthusiastic effort to release a serial rapist and his anti-science initiatives as governor. And who, right now, are burying McCain’s actively sought support of a Catholic-hating pastor. Some of Wright’s ideas are rotten, but hardly more so than those preached at Bob Jones. What’s different is the way those ideas are portrayed and that portrayal – which seeks to link Wright to Obama – stinks of bigotry. This is an unavoidable issue and shame on those who think it shouldn’t be raised in this context or can be finessed in general. It will be raised again and again and Obama will lose ground until liberals fight back tooth and nail rather than try to distance themselves.

The Wave

by digby

I’ve written a lot lately (to some derision from readers) about the fact that I see seismic forces at work in the coming election which I believe are due to conservative movement fatigue and the failure of the Bush administration combined with a perfect storm of issues favoring Democratic solutions. It’s hard for me to see how the Democrats lose it, although I don’t think they should take anything for granted.

But as D-Day has been writing, there’s something else going on too, and that is a rather dramatic shift to the Democratic party among the electorate. Pew has released a study today which shows some demographic shifts that bode very well for the Democratic party.

It is particularly marked among the young:

In surveys conducted between October 2007 and March 2008, 58% of voters under age 30 identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who identified or leaned toward the GOP. The Democratic Party’s current lead in party identification among young voters has more than doubled since the 2004 campaign, from 11 points to 25 points.

And the gender gap is widening to truly amazing proportions:

Fully 56% of women identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who identify or lean toward the GOP. Since 2004, the Democrats’ lead in party affiliation among women has doubled (from 11 points to 22 points)…currently, the Democrats hold a slight 46%-43% edge among men voters; in 2004, somewhat more male voters were affiliated with or leaned toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party (by 48% to 43%).

It’s excellent news for the Democratic party and it’s partly why I remain optimistic in spite of the tedious day to day of the primary campaign. As I said, I don’t think you can take anything for granted, but with the issue agenda being what it is and the combination of the Democratic campaigns’ greater use of the modern technology to get the younger voters to the polls and the tremendous appeal to women across all age groups, I just don’t see how this isn’t a win for Democrats.

Read the whole report for a fun discussion of some of the things I brought up the other day in my baby boomer post.

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Validating Voter Suppression

by digby

Following up on D-Day’s post below about the Supreme Court’s decision on voter ID in Indiana, and particularly his point that Obama is greatly expanding the pool of first time voters who might be affected by this ruling, I would just remind everyone of a couple of things.

First of all, let’s not forget that this may be the biggest political land mine the Bush administration has set for Democrats. “Voter fraud” was, you’ll remember, at the bottom of the US Attorney scandals and one of their main tools for suppressing the Democratic vote. This is the realization of a very long term plan to chip away at the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, like all aristocrats, know that if enough average people vote, they will lose. Period.

I have been writing about this since before I started this blog. It’s at the heart of the Florida debacle in 2000, where they illegitimately purged voter rolls and relied on arcane interpretations of the rules to deny people the fundamental right to have their votes counted. It goes all the way back to the reconstruction period and has continued right up to Ohio in 2004.

The Supreme Court has just legitimized the notion that “voter fraud” is a problem when, in fact, every study shows that it simply does not exist in any systematic way and that the voter disenfranchisement that results from such laws is a far more serious problem.

Here’s Rick Perlstein on the vote suppression effort in 1964, called “Operation Eagle Eye” in which Chief justice John Roberts’ predecessor, William Rehnquist, participated as a young man:

The “vote fraud” fantasies are tinged by deeply right-wing racial and anti-urban panics. I’ve talked to many conservative who seem to consider the idea of mass non-white participation in the duties of citizenship is inherently suspicious. It’s an idea all decent Americans should consider abhorrent. It is also, however, a very old conservative obsession–one that goes back to the beginnings of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party itself.

Let me show you. Read this report from 1964, running down all the ways how Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party was working overtime to keep minorities from voting. The document can be found in the LBJ Library, where I researched my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that “under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd. “‘Let’s get this straight,’ Bailey added, ‘the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confience in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration. “‘But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. it is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place. “‘We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places–not to frighten or threaten anyone–but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.’

It didn’t stop there. As a result of the massive voter registration efforts of Jesse Jackson during the 1984 and 1988 campaigns, the republicans institutionalized their vote suppression efforts and created the Voting Integrity Project and the Republican National Lawyers Association to create bogus claims of voter fraud. I’ve written reams about this, but this post from last year highlights an important study that directly pertains to the voter registration drives that D-Day mentions:

With the news from Steve Benen coming out of Wisconsin and from Christy about Minnesota, regarding a couple more of those “Good Bushies” in the Justice Department, I thought it might be a good time to bring up a little something I found the other day on the blog Wot Is It Good 4. A commenter there pointed to this very interesting paper (pdf) presented to the Center For Voting Rights just before the 2004 election on the issue of voter suppression.

I was surprised to see that the Republican National Lawyers Association (where Rove delivered his speech last spring in which, among other things, he mentioned as “problems” those states from which the targeted US Attorneys hail) was pretty much formed for the express and exclusive purpose of training and deploying lawyers on matters of purported voter fraud (aka minority vote suppression.) Neither did I know before that they played a pivotal role in the Florida Recount.

The report gives the history of minority voter suppression in America (a very ugly story) and brings it right up to the 1980’s, particularly the huge voter registration effort in the black community by the Jesse Jackson campaign which apparently scared the bejeezuz out of the Republicans:

Democratic activist Donna Brazile, a Jackson worker and Albert Gore’s campaign manager in 2000, said “There were all sorts of groups out there doing voter registration. Some time after the ’86 election, massive purging started taking place. It was a wicked practice that took place all over the country, especially in the deep South. Democrats retook the Senate in 1986, and [Republican] groups went on a rampage on the premise they were cleaning up the rolls. The campaign then was targeted toward African-Americans.” As in the past, Republicans justified the purges in the name of preventing the unregistered from voting. But Democrats charged vote suppression.

[…]

The Republicans’ perceived problems arising from too heavy a reliance on volunteers began to be addressed with a different strategy in the mid-1980s. From Operation Eagle Eye onward, the major Republican ballot security programs had borne the imprimatur of the party high command, overseen by the RNC and implemented at the grassroots by local organizations and commercial political operatives. In the mid-1980s, the situation began to change. GOP ballot-security skulduggery in the city of Newark and environs had led to a consent decree in 1982 presided over by a federal judge in New Jersey, according to which the RNC promised to forego minority vote suppression.19 In 1985, several months before the RNC was hauled back before the same judge as a result of illegal purging efforts in a 1986 Louisiana senatorial campaign and agreed to submit all future ballot security programs it oversaw to the court for its inspection, a new organization was created—the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA).

A group of lawyers who had worked on the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1984 were behind its founding, and it was designed “to be a sort of Rotary Club for GOP stalwarts,” according to a contemporary article in Legal Times magazine. The RNC helped the association get off the ground with a $5,000 loan, although today the RNC claims no official connection with it. By 1987 the RNLA had active chapters in several states and the District of Columbia, and planned to hold its first annual convention early the following year. A lure for attendees, the planners hoped, would be continuing legal education credits and a possible appearance by Attorney General Edwin Meese III and President Reagan.20

The RNLA turned out to be much more than a Rotary Club for GOP lawyers, however; it became the predominant Republican organization coordinating ballot security. By its own account, in early 2004 it had grown to “a 1,900-member organization of lawyers and law students in all 50 states.”21 Its officers were experienced lawyers who knew their way around Washington as a result of having served in Republican administrations at the national and state levels and in major K Street firms. Michael Thielen, its current executive director, who earlier worked for the RNC, describes the organization as follows: Since 1985 the RNLA has nurtured and advanced lawyer involvement in public affairs generally and the Republican Party in particular. It is accurately described as a combination of a professional bar association, politically involved law firm and educational institute. . . . With members now in government, party general counsel positions, law firm management and on law school faculties, the RNLA has for many years been the principal national organization through which lawyers serve the Republican Party and its candidates.22

Its prestige in Republican party circles undoubtedly got a boost from its involvement in the Florida ballot recount battles of November-December 2000, when, according to one of its members, Eric Buermann, the RNLA was “extremely helpful . . . by sending lawyers to Florida to work on the recount, providing expertise as needed, and coordinating volunteer lawyer response.” It was this helpfulness which apparently led Buermann, the state’s Republican Party general counsel, to coordinate a collaboration between the RNLA and Florida legal response teams in 2002, so that, in the words of anRNLA newsletter that year, “there will be a permanent structure in place to keep the lawyers active and organized during off-election years.”23

Actually, the collaboration was even broader, involving the National Republican Campaign Committee and the RNC as well.24 The Democrats, on the other hand, also were developing a large network of lawyers that year—10,000, by one estimate—to counter vote suppression efforts. The nationwide deployment of thousands of lawyers in both parties led one journalist to predict “a new era in US politics after the Florida debacle two years ago—the age of the lawyers.”25

Executive Director Thielen gives this account of the organization’s involvement in the 2000 recount: “After election day, RNLA members were dispatched by party organizations and campaigns to multiple locations within several states. When it became clear that the final result in Florida would determine the outcome of the presidential election, members were concentrated there.” Thielen adds, “had it not been for the preeminent litigators retained by the campaign entities and the volunteer attorneys who spent weeks defending the intent of voters before canvassing boards, the will of thenation’s voters would surely have been thwarted.”

What an odd thing to say. The “nation’s” voters clearly preferred Al Gore. It was only through that regrettable anachronism of the electoral college (and cheating in Florida) that had Bush within stealing distance.

Underlining the organization’s enhanced status among Republicans, White House counsel Albert Gonzales told the group, “You know, I must confess I groaned when I was first asked whether I would be willing to address another group of lawyers. However, when I found out this group included many lawyers that helped secure the election for George W. Bush, I quickly reconsidered.”27

The RNLA’s pride in its Florida efforts is expressed by trophies it presents to honorees at special receptions, consisting of lucite blocks that, as described on the organization’s Web site, “contain a commemorative message in honor of the Florida recount team, and contain actual ‘Chads’ from Florida dispersed throughout the Lucite. They [sic] were only a few hundred created and are not for sale but rather only presented to distinguished members and guests of the RNLA.” Not surprisingly, an RNLA lawyer, Hayden Dempsey, formerly a lawyer for Governor Jeb Bush, is heading Lawyers for Bush, the president’s legal defense team in Florida in 2004.

[…]

With the rise to prominence of the RNLA, the Republican Party’s nationally directed ballot security programs appear to have been transformed. While Operation Eagle Eye was directed from the command posts of the RNC by professionals, the people on the ground—poll-watchers and challengers—were often amateurs, which is to say Election Day volunteers who may have had only cursory training. The RNLA, born in the Reagan era, has gradually assumed the role of the party’s overarching anti-fraud enforcement agency. In the process, the organization has professionalized ballot security (its spokespersons seem to prefer the term “ballot integrity”) with a cadre of highly trained, aggressive, and mobile lawyers who can go anywhere in the nation on short notice. Indeed, they don’t even need to be mobile, in many cases. As one of the organization’s newsletters put it: “Ironically, when the Democratic National Committee bragged of sending in a thousand lawyers each to Missouri, Florida, and Texas for election day operations, the [RNLA] Field Operations Committee already had chapters organized in those states and did not need to send out of state lawyers to assist with the elections.”

Now, I realize that Obama is concentrating mostly on registering college students who are first time voters, so it’s a little bit different. But there are plenty of hurdles there too, with arcane residency requirements and the very serious possibility that some college students won’t have local “government issued” ID. I assume there will be tons of outreach using the new social networking tools to educate these voters about what’s required, but there’s always the danger that at least a few will just not bother — and say they did. That’s certainly happened in the past.

This is a terribly pernicious ruling that legitimizes the view that “voter fraud” is a bigger threat than disenfranchisement. That is the opposite of what this country needs right now, with rampant cynicism about the franchise already infecting the body politic. This ruling gives fodder to every wingnut lawyer in the country to say that if there were no voter fraud in this country, there wouldn’t be any need for a Supreme Court ruling that allows states to protect against it.

It’s important to remember that the thrust of many of these latest laws are to suppress the Latino vote, many of whom are reluctant to show up at polling places only to be treated like second class citizens and viewed with suspicion. Life is short. The same, of course, holds true for African Americans, even today. Simply slowing the lines with demands for proof of ID is enough to suppress the votes in urban precincts with too few voting machines. And then there are the handicapped and elderly who often just don’t have the same type of ID as the rest of us. But then that’s the point. These people must be made to jump through hoops in order to exercise their right to vote.

Oh wait. That’s not quite right, is it? After all it was none other than the majority in Bush vs Gore who made it a point to reaffirm that “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

Perhaps we ought to change that.

Other posts on this topic here.

Update: I’m informed in the comments that the concentration of Obama’s voter registration efforts goes far beyond college aged voters. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. IMO, it’s fair to assume that his excellent use of the new technology may work very well to entice young voters to register, but I shouldn’t have made the apparently incorrect assumption that this is where he’s concentrating his efforts.

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The Pentagon: More Responsive Than The Broadcast Media

by dday

Apparently the Defense Department felt the pressure – I have no idea from whom – sufficient to stop feeding information to retired generals who play pundits on TV.

(Robert Hastings, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs) said he is concerned about allegations that the Defense Department’s relationship with the retired military analysts was improper.

“Following the allegations, the story that is printed in the New York Times, I directed my staff to halt, to suspend the activities that may be ongoing with retired military analysts to give me time to review the situation,” Hastings said in an interview with Stripes on Friday.

Hastings said he did not discuss the matter with Defense Secretary Robert Gates prior to making his decision. He could not say Friday how long this review might take.

“We’ll take the time to do it right,” he said.

Funny, because there has not been one stitch of coverage of this important issue in virtually any broadcast news outlet, while the retired generals remain on their payrolls. You’d think that for the Pentagon to shut down a program that gave them obvious benefits, they would have to feel some public outcry, which would arise from, you know, wide reporting on the matter. True, Democrats are finally coming around to speaking out about this issue, including Rep. Ike Skelton (chair of the House Armed Services Committee), Rep. Rosa DeLauro and even the Presidential candidates. Certainly, Skelton could haul Pentagon brass into hearings and make things very uncomfortable, and their suspension of the program could be a pre-emptive strike. But the fact that DeLauro sent letters to the heads of the television networks asking for details about the Pentagon pundits, and while the Defense Department shut down the program, the broadcast media did ZIPPO, shows you how deeply corrupt and desirous of avoiding responsibility they are.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Pentagon, George Bush’s Pentagon, is showing themselves to be MORE accountable to the public than the traditional broadcast media. That’s a pretty low bar, and the media couldn’t get over it. On the other hand, they must be really proud of the Miley Cyrus topless story.

Glenn Greenwald has more.

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Flaccid Flyboy

by digby

The North Carolina GOP is saying that their ads against Obama are North Carolina business and that their presidential nominee has no power to make them do anything. Fine. Firedoglake has set up a petition, which local North Carolina bloggers will present to Elizabeth Dole, asking her to take charge of the situation since John McCain is apparently so disrespected and impotent that he has no influence in his own party. (That bodes well for his presidency, don’t you think?)

Jane Hamsher writes:

Who’s the most senior member of the NC GOP? Well that would be Liddy Dole. NC Democratic Party Chair Jerry Meek has sent a letter to Dole saying “without a doubt, you could halt this ad with a simple telephone call.” Dole is up for re-election this year (and will be running against either Kay Hagen or Blue America candidate Jim Neal). But where is she? She’s never in the state, she lives at the Watergate in DC, she rarely makes public appearances in NC. It seems she’s gone Washington — because once again, she’s nowhere to be found when it comes to a North Carolina issue. She can stop the racist attack ads against Obama, and we’re asking her to send this letter:

Dear Chairwoman Linda Daves, I disapprove of the content of the North Carolina Republican Party’s recent advertisement “Extreme”. I feel that it resorts to a type of negative politicking that betrays the best interest of North Carolinians. I call on you, as Chairwoman of the North Carolina Republican Party, to immediately stop airing this advertisement. Failure to do so will reflect negatively on all North Carolina Republicans, and would necessitate that I return the Party’s contributions to my campaign to disassociate myself from the vitriol which you appear to embrace.

We’ll be working with NC bloggers (including Pam Spaulding) to deliver the petition to Dole’s office. You can cosign here.

Go to it. This is actually more than just a fun little action. McCain is going to continue to benefit from his bogus “honorable man” reputation while allowing surrogates to destroy the Democratic candidate unless we make the media judge him for being unable to “control” his people. He’s supposed to be the tough guy, right, with the bad temper? And he can’t make the North Carolina party take those ads down? Please.

We need to embarrass him every time this happens with a continuing campaign of ritual humiliation. This is just the beginning.

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Jeremiah Wright

by tristero

If you haven’t seen Bill Moyers’ interview with Jeremiah Wright, go now and see both parts. You will encounter a very remarkable man, highly intelligent, articulate, charismatic – it’s easy to see how someone as smart as Obama would find him so compelling.

You will also encounter someone entirely bereft of false modesty – or any other kind. To his credit, however, Wright appeared to have at least some genuine insight into his flaws (or lapses of character, or whatever you want to call them) and that adds to his considerable attractiveness. Most striking, and frankly refreshing if you have ever seen the likes of Pat Robertson speak, is Wright’s refusal to play holier than thou. He comes across as human, if somewhat larger than life. In other words, he’s not some cheesy plastic replicant out of a fifties fantasy of what America should be.

If the man who spoke to Moyers – and who’s shown in long excerpts (for tv, that is) of his sermons – is who Jeremiah Wright really is, the rightwing likely has committed a spectacular blunder in trying to demonize him – and by extension, Obama. The more opportunities given Wright to reach a national audience, the harder it will be to counteract him, let alone brand him as some America-hating black power radical. So, as far as I’m concerned, the more the right wants to make an issue out of him, the better. He really is that powerful, and positive, a presence (and for a variety of reasons, I was predisposed to think exactly the opposite).

I really shouldn’t need to say so, but I will anyway, that all is this is prefaced on the Jeremiah Wright persona which he showed to Moyers being who Wright is – smart, intellectual, socially active, religious, with a quick temper and a sense of grandiosity. I hardly know anything more about him. But what I saw was very impressive and made me want to learn more.

Anyone who has some substantive information on Wright – not mere reactions to the soundbites, which are utterly misleading – please drop in for some comments. Good, bad, or indifferent – who is he?

UPDATE: Some folks in comments are of the opinion that Wright should take a vacation, that he’s harming Obama with more soundbites. Oh? Well, maybe he will say something stupid and I’ll regret this but… It around time the press got used to liberals speaking out, too. You have to start somewhere and at sometime and with someone. When, when, and who would be better?

About That Voter Registration Drive

by dday

It had better come with a trip to the DMV:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana’s strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to deter fraud.

It was the most important voting rights case since the Bush v. Gore dispute that sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush.

Stevens actually wrote one of the majority opinions in this one, in addition to the conservative bloc and Kennedy joining the ruling.

This is, as we know, a solution in search of a problem. Voter fraud is a made-up conservative issue, backed by no evidence. While Stevens suggested that there are no “excessively burdensome requirements” imposed on voters who must show ID at the polls, he’s answering an unknowable question. We simply have no idea how photo ID centers (if there will be any outside the DMV) in Indiana or anywhere else would be managed, whether the same groups that truck elderly and poor voters to the polls on Election Day will be able to do the same to get people their IDs, and so on. If they require the same documentation that the DMV does, many poor and elderly people simply don’t have them. If it requires an application fee, how is that not a poll tax?

Justice Scalia’s broader ruling shows exactly what Republicans want out of this:

Scalia, favoring a broader ruling in defense of voter ID laws, said, “The universally applicable requirements of Indiana’s voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not ‘even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'”

But during the arguments, Scalia conceded that such laws would “inconvenience… a small number of people,” and the Solicitor General for the state of Indiana actually said that “an infinitesimal portion of the electorate could even be, conceivably be, burdened by” the ID law.

You know, that’s how the 14th Amendment WORKS, with equal protection for all, even that “infinitesimal portion of the electorate”. And, as Amanda Terkel notes, that’s a major soft-pedal of the impact:

Voter ID laws, however, affect more than an “infinitesimal” number of Americans and are more than a “minor inconvenience.” According to the federal government, there are as many as 21 million voting-age Americans without driver’s licenses. In Indiana, 13 percent of registered voters lack the documents needed to obtain a license, and therefore, cast a ballot. These restrictions disproportionately hit low-income, minority, handicapped, and elderly voters the hardest, leading to lower levels of voter participation.

Those affected also tend to vote Democratic, which may explain why Karl Rove and his colleagues have pursued so-called voter fraud with such zeal. Several U.S. attorneys ousted in the Bush administration’s infamous prosecutor purge even alleged that they were fired because they refused to aggressively prosecute baseless voter fraud claims.

Considering that we have at least one Democratic campaign predicated on bringing new voters to the process, this is an incredibly calamitous outcome that could upset the entire effort. Somebody in the Obama campaign had better get out in front of this; the courts are already stacked against them.

UPDATE: I found the part of the majority opinion referring to whether or not there’s an application fee for a driver’s license. Some of this is unbelievable (emphasis mine):

(c) The relevant burdens here are those imposed on eligible voters who lack photo identification cards that comply with SEA 483. Because Indiana’s cards are free, the inconvenience of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering required documents, and posing for a photograph does not qualify as a substantial burden on most voters’ right to vote, or represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting. The severity of the somewhat heavier burden that may be placed on a limited number of persons—e.g., elderly persons born out-of-state, who may have difficulty obtaining a birth certificate—is mitigated by the fact that eligible voters without photo identification may cast provisional ballots that will be counted if they execute the required affidavit at the circuit court clerk’s office. Even assuming that the burden may not be justified as to a few voters, that conclusion is by no means sufficient to establish petitioners’ right to the relief they seek.

See, they can just cast provisional ballots! And we all know that every single one of those are counted.

UPDATE II: Let me promote this comment, which is all too typical of depressed areas, I suspect:

Being a Hoosier, I have another piece of news, many of our BMV locations have been closed, especially up around Gary (a horribly depressed industrial area, neighboring Chicago).

OOh…I guess all those poor working class minority types will have to drive three counties away. QUICK, LOOK, Obama scored 37 bowling!

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Well, Technically, He Didn’t Call Him Unpatriotic

by tristero

Reality imitates art. In a boneheaded error straight out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, a high-level muckymuck at the Times must have barked, “Get me Billy Crystal for the Op-Ed page!” and some poor schnook thumbed through a rolodex and called The Wrong Guy. Not to worry. In William Kristol, the Times still got a clown::

[Obama’s] happy to have fantasy debates with unnamed people who are allegedly challenging his patriotism.

What a joker Billy Kristol is! He knows perfectly well who’s been challenging Obama’s patriotism. Why, in one remarkable column but two weeks ago, Kristol all but called Obama a Commie pinko rat. He also typed that Obama’s “disdainful of small-town America” and wound up with

If he were a war hero, if he had a career of remarkable civic achievement or public service — then he could perhaps be excused an unattractive but in a sense understandable hauteur. But what has Barack Obama accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?

And in an earlier column, Kristol tackled Obama’s patriotism head on:

Leave aside [Obama’s] claim that “speaking out on issues” constitutes true patriotism…

It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”

Yes, it’s quite true that Kristol hasn’t impugned Obama’s patriotism. All he did was merely imply Obama was a Marxist AND an elitist who holds “bourgeois America” (Kristol’s phrase) in disdain AND a person whose quality of patriotism fails miserably when compared with St. John McCain’s. Sure sounds like Kristol thinks Obama has no love of country, but he doesn’t quite say so, now does he?. (And I could go on: y’gotta read the columns for the full effect, such as the way Kristol pulls remarks by Obama’s wife out of context to make her seem unpatriotic as well.)

Call this tactic – where you pretend not to say what everyone knows you think, but rather you just coyly hint at it – the Sixteen Words Ploy. You remember the Sixteen Words, of course. But what you probably recall is that Bush asserted Saddam had tried to procure nuke fuel from Africa. Not true!

What Bush actually said was:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Get it? “The British Government has learned” and that’s a fact. Bush never claimed Saddam tried to procure uranium, what’s wrong with your hearing? How could you be so malicious as to assume he had?

Uh huh. And Kristol never questioned Obama’s patriotism. Riiiiight.

Obama Tries To Rewrite The Script

by dday

This is a very good article by Digby, noting the correct prediction that the conservative movement would go all-out to use the well-worn, 50-year narrative of Democratic leaders as elitist egghead America-haters and define Barack Obama in this fashion. Today Obama appeared on Fox News and was pretty openly confronted with this label, and he gave almost as good as he got, but the very act of appearing on the network led many to suggest that he was validating the charges and pivoting away from the “far left” in response. He pointedly mentioned how he was attacked on Daily Kos for writing a diary about the Roberts Supreme Court appointment back in 2005, a pretty light Sista Souljah moment but certainly notable.

Digby writes:

Maybe this election will change all that. I hope so. But so far, I’m seeing the narrative playing out exactly as I thought it would and it leads me right back to where I started. I believe that Democrats are nearly guaranteed to win due to the fundamental forces driving this election. But I’m not so sure the Democrats will win with any kind of progressive mandate if they let the media frame the election in these terms and I’m definitely not so sure that our new president will be able to enact a progressive agenda if he (or she) moves right thinking to disable this narrative. (That’s the whole point.) The silver lining is that it’s being deployed early in the game due to the long primary and that offers a chance to change the storyline before the general. They need to get to it.

Some would say that the Fox News appearance was a signal of this right-wing pivot to disable the narrative, which of course won’t work, and would debilitate the effort to enact anything progressive in 2009 and beyond. We’d be looking at Triangulation Part II.

That may be part of it, which is sad to note. But I think the Obama campaign’s official response was actually this.

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is planning to unveil a “massive” voter registration drive, one that will reach all 50 states and seeks to boost confidence in him as a potential general election candidate […]

“That’s why I’m so proud that today our campaign announced a massive volunteer-led voter registration drive in all 50 states to help ensure every single eligible voter takes part in this election so we can take back Washington for the American people,” Obama said at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place.

The Obama campaign has plenty more on this effort. The candidate’s work as a community organizer included a huge voter registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun as the first female black US Senator in history.

I think Obama’s gambit is to register so many voters and find so many new people to enter the process that he isn’t bound to any particular political structure, from the right or the left or the middle. He really is trying to make his new mass of supporters his power base. It’s an audacious strategy, one that doesn’t have a lot of historical basis that you can really look to on the national level. But without question there’s a tremendous upside to reaching new voters; you’re essentially talking about over half the country, between those who don’t vote and those who don’t even register. And the technology is now in place to more easily find them, target them and talk to them.

There’s certainly a danger here of relying on projected numbers instead of traditional power bases, though I don’t think he’ll be abandoning groups like unions and black churches, nor will any progressive movement structures abandon him. But I really think that the Obama campaign is reacting to this demonization campaign from the right by saying “OK, I’ll find voters in so many nooks and crannies and make you work in so many states that you won’t have a chance to make this narrative work.” His response is not necessarily building a progressive electorate; that would be accomplished by plugging into the nascent progressive structures that already exist. Obama appears to want to build an electorate aligned with Obama’s principles and values, and fostering greater participation in politics as a means to move the country forward and break the current polarization. Some Democrats would play on the same playing field and try to win it; Obama’s building an entirely new field, one where these narratives and negative ads and the need to tailor the entire general election to 10 independent voters in the middle of Ohio won’t matter anymore.

I can’t say if it will totally work, but that looks to be the strategy. We’ve been tantalized with these kinds of efforts before; it’s actually a very traditional belief that increased turnout is good for Democrats. There’s no question, however, that this is a truly different kind of political campaign, and the benefits could be absolutely earth-shattering.

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Schmarties

by digby

Oh Lookee. Foreign Policy and The Prospect have announced their list of the top 100 public intellectuals.

I’m not entirely sure why the Pope, Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman and future presidential candidate David Petraeus would be included, but there you are. You can vote for the top five. (How about Chomsky, Dawkins, Krugman, Singer and Gore just for fun?)

via Corrente

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