Month: May 2008

Bums Rush

by digby

Marc Ambinder notes some of the recent public hand wringing over McCain’s lousy campaign and adds some big picture perspective about why this is less about McCain and more about a general shift away from the Republicans:

(1) McCain is indelibly linked with the Bush Administration on Iraq, and he is indelibly linked with the Bush economy. On the [former], the campaign points out that McCain long ago criticized the way the war was run; that is an academic point (arguably, a true point) in a world of perceptions. (On the economy, McCain had the chance to forcefully separate himself from President Bush, and he chose not to. He is responsible for this part of the problem, to the extent that it’s a problem.) (2) Since 2005, independents have been voting Democratic, have been identifying as Democrats, and have grown incredibly resistant to the Republican brand. That’s not John McCain’s fault. There is little he can do. (3) The Democratic party’s 50-state nomination process has turned out to be a boon for the party in so many ways; millions of Democrats and independents have already practiced voting for the Democratic candidate; hundreds of state and local parties have benefited financially and existentially from the competitive presidential race; activists are spirited and enthusiastic. (4) Republican voter registration efforts are tapped out; in 2003 and 2004, the Bush campaign’s enormously successful voter registration drive essentially registered a large portion of the remaining soft Republicans in the country. The Democratic voter registration efforts are just beginning; the Obama campaign managed to register 200,000 Democrats in Pennsylvania alone; it intends to register a half a million African Americans in Georgia; millions of young Democrats in the South and West; even if the McCain campaign wanted to expand the pool, the zoning laws of the political universe are controlled by the other party. (5) There has been, and there will always be, tension and mistrust between McCain’s world and the Republican establishment. (6) Rick Davis and company have had two months to turn a shoestring campaign existing only in the person of John McCain and a few aides to a fully-staffed general election machine that is supposed to rival the one constructed by the supremely wealthy, supremely disciplined, supremely volunteer rich Bush campaign in 2004. (7) Fundraising has been the governing imperative of McCain’s schedule for most of the spring. His campaign had to raise about $50m until the convention, and in order for them to raise that money, McCain had to travel to where fundraisers live; the political schedule has been fixed around the fundraising schedule, and not vice-versa.

As I have written ad nauseam, this election is bigger than the candidates. The Republicans are tapped out from all their raping and pillaging. They sent out the old grizzled warrior and told him to do what he can — and they’ll help to the extent they’re able — but it’s a very, very long shot and they know it. They don’t particularly want to win at this point. (Why would they want to deal with this awful mess?)

Meanwhile, the Democrats have run a political show like no other, exciting, suspenseful and dramatic, featuring new and old political stars that make theirs look like the cast of Knots Landing circa 1982. All the energy is on the left right now.

McCain is running against a very strong wind from the other direction. The old boy will put up a good fight, but he can’t do it alone and the Republican machine has run out of gas. They’ll try, and they’ll inflict some damage, just out of habit.

In the end, the Republicans will blame McCain, of course. They already are. After all, he isn’t a “true conservative” which according to their dogma is what all Americans really want. But he’s, by far, the best they could hope for at this moment — a guy who is despised by all the right people and who has a (false) reputation for independence from a despised president. But it won’t be enough. This election is a throw the bums out election. And as much as he pretends to be something else, he’s the new leader of the bums.

.

What A Poor Excuse For A Political Party

by dday

Conservatism isn’t going anywhere, and I assume the Republican Party will one day get their sea legs again. But the incompetence and mismanagement that has contributed to the country turning violently against the Bush Administration has infected their campaign operations, too. Two stories highlight this.

The GOP has been boasting for months about their dark horse candidate taking on John Kerry in Massachusetts. That they’re targeting the John Kerry seat in one of the nation’s bluest states instead of finding half-decent candidates to run in friendlier states like West Virginia, South Dakota or Iowa is problem number one. Problem number two is that Jim Ogonowski, their white knight, savior of the party, young gun with the stuff to slay the dragon, couldn’t get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

When the deadline for certification passed yesterday, Jim Ogonowski, the Republican leadership’s choice to challenge US Senator John F. Kerry, was 82 signatures short of qualifying for the GOP primary ballot, according to the state’s central voter registry.

But Ogonowski’s campaign aides contend there are enough certified signatures at various town offices around the state not filed yet on the computerized registry to put him across the 10,000 threshold […]

Even if Ogonowski does get the 82 signatures he needs, his fight probably is not over.

Election specialists say he will not have the needed cushion of extra signatures to insulate himself from legal challenges.

Ogonowski’s only primary opponent, Jeff Beatty, is expected to challenge the validity of his signatures before the ballot law commission.

How weak is that? This is literally one of the only Senate challengers that the national GOP is talking up and he can’t find enough signatures? George Bush got over a million votes in Massachusetts in 2004. You can’t find 10,000 of them?

The next bit is from a McCain campaign email sent today:

For a donation, you can get a personalized McCain banner for yourself. And the person they use as the example to highlight it is Frank Donatelli. Who’s a big-time corporate lobbyist.

McCain Tapped Lobbyist Frank Donatelli To Run His Efforts At RNC. McCain tapped lobbyist Frank Donatelli to become deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. The New York Times reported Donatelli will “act as the main liaison between the committee and the McCain campaign.” Donatelli is a lobbyist at McGuire Woods and previously served as a lobbyist at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. His clients have included AT&T, Exxon Mobil, PhRMA, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Verizon. [New York Times, 3/7/08; McGuire Woods, accessed 5/12/08; Senate Lobbying Disclosure Records, accessed 5/12/08]

Donatelli Enlisted to Improve Ethiopia’s Relationship with U.S. In a September 2005 letter sent to Ambassador Kassahun Ayele of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Donatelli set forth his obligations under their contract, namely to provide “government relations and related public communications services to assist and work with Ethiopia in Washington, D.C., in promoting and strengthening Ethiopia’s relations with the United States and, in general, providing such other appropriate advice and assistance as will serve to achieve these purposes.” [FARA Database, accessed 3/18/08, Letter signed by Frank Donatelli on 9/6/05]

• Human Rights Watch: “The Ethiopian Government’s Human Rights Record Remains Poor.” According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2008, “The Ethiopian government’s human rights record remains poor, both within the country and in neighboring Somalia, where since early 2007 thousands of Ethiopian troops have been fighting an insurgency alongside the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. Government forces committed serious human rights violations, including rape, torture, and village burnings, during a campaign against Ethiopian rebels in eastern Somalia Region (Region 5). Abuses took place in other parts of the country, notably in Oromia State where local officials carried out mass arrests, extra-judicial killings and economic sanctions.” [Human Rights Watch, accessed 5/12/08, emphasis added]

Really, it’s like the entire campaign arm of the party all withered up and died. They couldn’t find any random person to pose for a picture except a lobbyist?

The old adage used to be that Republicans didn’t know how to govern, but they knew how to win elections. Maybe that’s still true, but the stories here, repeated seemingly dozens of times ALREADY in this cycle, and more in 2006, aren’t promising. There’s a reason Republican incumbents are already running ads, leaving the Congress in droves, and generally frightened out of their minds about their prospects this fall. It’s the fundamentals, but it’s also the campaign operations. They can’t qualify candidates for the ballot, they can’t help but step around in scandal, their accountants are literally stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from campaign accounts, and they generally can’t manage their way out of a paper bag. Democrats have closed the gap on the traditional operations where they were always behind – microtargeting, low-dollar fundraising, etc. But on the level of simple management, it’s like there’s some kind of Bush disease and all the operatives have caught it. I guess when your governing philosophy demands no oversight and lax regulation, it’s no wonder that the same principle applies in these campaigns. The inmates are truly running the asylum.

.

Lobbyists In The Closet

by dday

John McCain might have some more dirt in the corners of his campaign that avoided last week’s spring cleaning. In addition to having Randy Scheunemann, the campaign’s top foreign policy advisor, lobbying McCain’s Senate staff for the Republic of Georgia while being paid to work on the campaign, there’s the issue of Phil Gramm, McCain’s top economic advisor, ALSO lobbying Congress on behalf of banking institution UBS in the middle of the housing crisis.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s national campaign general co-chair was being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy, federal records show. [See sidebar.]

“Countdown with Keith Olbermann” reported Tuesday night that lobbying disclosure forms, filed by the giant Swiss bank UBS, list McCain’s campaign co-chair, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, as a lobbyist dealing specifically with legislation regarding the mortgage crisis as recently as Dec. 31, 2007.

Gramm joined the bank in 2002 and had registered as a lobbyist by 2004. UBS filed paperwork deregistering Gramm on April 18 of this year. Gramm continues to serve as a UBS vice chairman.

Gramm’s execrable Senate record, which includes easing regulation on energy trading (which directly led to Enron), and undoing the Glass-Steagall Act (which almost directly led to the mortgage mess), ought to be enough to disqualify him from any advisory economic role. But his lobbying for the very companies seeking to stop homeowners facing foreclosure from rewriting their mortgages, which was SUCCESSFUL lobbying, by the way, is really just beyond the pale. The compromise bill worked out in the Senate is far more friendly to the terms set out by Gramm’s bosses, and, significantly, John McCain.

I don’t think you can go wrong making Phil Gramm a major face of the McCain campaign. The guy is as perfect a symbol of failed conservative policies as there is, and he makes the deregulation and lobbyist-run federal oversight policies of the Bush Administration look like the second coming of Teddy Roosevelt.

We could add to this the fact that Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham are violating the ethics rules laid out by the McCain campaign, serving on the board of an organization running 527 attack ads against Barack Obama. But let that go for a second. Practically McCain’s entire staff has major ties to lobbying organizations. The reformer image is virtually dead and buried.

UPDATE: Along with the issues of lobbying, there could be serious criminal issues McCain has to talk about now. UBS is telling members of its staff to avoid flying to America, presumably to avoid prosecution. The DoJ and the SEC are investigating. This is related to UBS helping rich clients evade taxes. Nice company Phil Gramm keeps.

.

Upon Finishing Nixonland

by tristero

The by now hoary cliche goes that if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there, the non-too-hidden implication being we were all taking far too many herbal and chemical enhancers to recall too much.

That may be true, but Rick Perlstein’s brilliant Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America provides two other reasons those of us who were there don’t remember it very well.

First of all, there was way too much going on in too short a time – the pace of life, at least for Americans plugged into the news and culture, was much faster than it is today. In the space of one month in 1967, say, one would have to absorb news of mulitple riots, an assassination or firebombing, a steaming pile of lies about Vietnam, protests of those lies, and the release of a half dozen or more songs many of which are as beloved now as they were then. And the next month brought more of the same.

Secondly, contrary to much popular opinion amongst liberals and lefties, the sixties were a terrible time. If the regular reports of bombs and riots didn’t scare you, then the hopelessly out of touch politicians and newspapers certainly would. Perlstein, by the way is particularly good at exposing how truly awful much of the press coverage was back then. Nixon’s ascendancy – and the simultanous upheavals in the culture – was deeply traumatic. It’s too dreadful to remember that there once was a president so psychotically paranoid and petty that he punished a tennis-loving underling who dared to contradict him by bulldozing over the White House tennis court. The real crimes of this deeply disturbed Queeq-like ruler take a strong stomach, even now, to confront. No wonder so many of us were stoned so much; better to forget, even when it was happening.

But why read me when you can be reading Nixonland? It is a great, great, read and it’s an essential read. It’s the best book I know that gets you close to what the Sixties were like to live through. His description of the Newark riots is as shocking to read now as they were to hear about back then, when I was a teenager in what Perlstein describes as “leafy Short Hills,” New Jersey. And for better or worse, he’s found cultural artifacts that all too perfectly epitomize the great fracturing Nixon exploited. Why, oh why, Rick, did you have to remind me of “Letter To My Teenage Son?” I had completely suppressed it, and happily so!

In order to complete your introduction, or reacquaintance, with the Sixties, I would suggest a cultural artifact that slightly predates the focus of Perstein’s book. When you order Nixonland, pick up a copy of The Four Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows featuring the Beatles. These dvd’s contains every moment of four typical Ed Sullivan shows – every cheesy circuit act, bad comedian, and commercials so stupefyingly awful they take your breath way. And then there are The Beatles.

Watch one show a night (any more will be exceedingly dangerous to your mental health) and watch them from beginning to end, no pauses, no rewinds, so that the Beatles come through in the full context. Don’t skip or mute the commercials. Consider that this show was one of the top outlets for American pop culture. This is what America looked like, sounded like, acted like. This is how we used to relax. With Frank Gorshin doing Kirk Douglas impersonations.

And there are The Beatles. But notice how they’re treated. Their sound is much worse than other musical acts. In one show, Paul’s microphone stand collapses (deliberate sabotage by the crew? I think so). In another, Lennon is barely on camera. One other act follows the Beatles by saying something like “Here’s what real music sounds like.”  But throughout it all, the Beatles look, sound, and act radically different.

Books have been written, and rightly so, on the historical moment of Dylan’s Basement Tapes, but as far as I know, no one has troubled to analyze the content of these four shows, which is odd. Because it is clear that the world is dramatically changing, and fast. Mainstream pop culture, and culture in general, became something quite different in the US, and here is fossil evidence of exactly when it happened.

Rick Persltein’s compelling book shows us, among other things, the gritty reality of the convulsive cultural changes that took place back then. The appearances of The Beatles on the Sullivan show shows us that struggling out of the cultural spasms (the first Beatle appearance was less than three months after Kennedys assassination ) was a new kind of art, both sophisticated and direct, elegant and blunt, that was capable of deep expression.

But, just like the arrogant do-gooder liberals in Perlstein’s book, we misjudged the real impact of the cultural changes of The Beatles. And that, too contributed enormously to the geography of Nixonland. There’s a very interesting book to be written about music and art in the time of Nixon, I think, that isn’t rocknroll centric – just don’t ask me to write it!

The Villagers Defend The Perimeter

by digby

There are times lately when I feel as if I’m back in 2003. I’m being told that up is down and black is white and that what i’m seeing just isn’t real. It’s actually much more disorienting than it was then because this time it’s coming from the left side of the dial.

For instance:

Those of us who love Chris Matthews have to rate this near the apex of our Top Ten Matthews Moments list. In the unlikely event you missed it:[insert Youtube of Matthews humiliating a random wingnut radio talk show host on the word “appeasement]

[…]
Now for the “full disclosure.” I have more reasons than most to love Chris Matthews. When I first met him, thirty or so years ago, his hair was a different color, he was skinnier, and his neckties were more random, but he was otherwise pretty much the same political jabber machine he is today. The biggest difference is that back then I was able to spend ten hours a week listening to him talk without recourse to electronic gadgetry. Nowadays that pleasure requires the use of a television set.

It goes on to describe their long friendship and what a great guy Matthews was back in the day. Apparently Rick gave Chris his first big break in “journalism” when he published in TNR his brilliant insight that Ronald Reagan’s first calling was actually as an announcer instead of an actor, which means that he was “host” for the whole country. (I’m serious.)

Anyway, Hertzberg does acknowledge that his pal went off the rails a tiny bit for a while:

In my opinion, Chris went kind of haywire during the Clinton years. I have my own theories about why. Theory one: he and Clinton are too much alike. Same age, same size, same crazed gregariousness, same gift of gab, same manic energy, same thirst for attention, roughly similar political views and non-élite backgrounds. (A similar this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-both-of-us dynamic, this one focussing on rival good-ol’-boy personae, poisoned the relationship between Howell Raines, then the editorial page of the Times, and Clinton. In my opinion.) Civil wars are always the bitterest. Theory two: it had something to do with the difference between Irish Catholic and Southern Baptist views of sin and forgiveness. As many people noticed at the time, the Lewinsky brouhaha drove not just Chris but also Michael Kelly, Tim Russert, and Maureen Dowd completely round the bend. For the Catholics, sins are to be confessed in the privacy of a closed booth to a priest who is the bottom rung on a ladder of long-established authority that runs upward through the hierarchy, the Pope, the saints, and only then to the Supreme Judge of the Universe. Forgiveness is administered via prescribed rituals sanctified by centuries of uninterrupted use. For low-church Protestants like Clinton (and Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker), confession usually comes after you get caught, is noisily public, and is so bound up with high-profile damage control that its sincerity cannot be assumed.

Right, yeah. Whatever. I guess it’s fine that the country was held hostage to a group of elites’ religious differences. But this is where it gets good:

Chris was a mildly conservative Democrat when I met him, and he still is. His Lewinsky-era anti-Clintonism built ratings for “Hardball,” but I don’t believe for a moment that it was a calculated or cynical move. Chris was quite clearly against the Iraq War when that position was unpopular with Americans in general and cable blowhards in particular. Yes, he is prone to hyperbole. Yes, he is apt to tell a guest that he or she is a “great American” whose current collection of ill-researched columns is “a great book.” Yes, his obsession with cultural-populist tropes, especially the horseshit assumption that the ideal male, maybe even the default human being, is a fortyish white non-intellectual in a baseball cap holding a can of beer, is annoying at best. Yes, the internal censor that keeps most peoples’ ids in check functions rather intermittently in his case. But that reckless freedom of his yields at least as many brilliant connections and startling metaphors as it does howlers. And his “liberal” outbursts are at least as numerous as his “conservative” ones, and maybe more heartfelt. Admittedly, I don’t have a file full of examples at hand. Nor are there any among the three hundred and fifty-two items in Media Matters’ Matthews dossier. (The clip at the top of this post, for example, doesn’t make the cut.) But it’s my impression, subjective and biased by friendship though it may be, that, certainly in the past five years or so, Matthews has been considerably tougher on the right than on the left. He was fierce on the Swift Boat slanderers. And on the war he has been magnificent.

The fact that he voted for Bush notwithstanding, of course.

And yes, on the war, he certainly has been magnificent:

• As Media Matters noted, Matthews was chief among the cheerleaders when Bush delivered a nationally televised speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, in which he declared that “[m]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended,” all the while standing under a banner reading: “Mission Accomplished.” Despite lingering questions over the continued violence in Iraq, the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction, and the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, Matthews fawned over Bush: “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. … He looks for real. … [H]e didn’t fight in a war, but he looks like he does. … We’re proud of our president. … Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president.”
• On the January 31, 2005, edition of Hardball, while praising that month’s Iraqi election, Matthews falsely claimed that no insurgent attacks had occurred at polling places on Election Day. In fact, attacks on Iraqi polling places were widely reported during the January 30 elections.
• Before Bush had even delivered his November 30, 2005, speech at the U.S. Naval Academy laying out a “Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” Matthews used variations of the word “brilliant” twice to describe it, while deriding Democratic critics of the Iraq war as “carpers and complainers.” Media Matters noted at that time that Matthews’s over-the-top praise for Bush included his claim that “[e]verybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs” and his statement that Bush sometimes “glimmers” with “sunny nobility.”
• On the December 16, 2005, edition of Hardball, Matthews stated, “If [Bush’s] gamble that he can create a democracy in the middle of the Arab world” is successful, “he belongs on Mount Rushmore.”
• On the July 31 edition of Hardball, Matthews stated that if Democratic critics recognize that Bush made a “smart decision” to invade Iraq, then Bush “deserves to have a place in history” because “[y]ou can’t say he did the right thing but he didn’t quite do it right.”
• During a roundtable discussion about the August 8 Democratic senatorial primary in Connecticut, Matthews accused Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) of having employed a “bob and weave” with her position on the Iraq war, contrasting her with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT), who Matthews said “hasn’t cut and run.” In doing so, Matthews adopted the terminology employed by the Bush administration, and repeated by many in the media, to attack Democratic critics who have called for a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq — a position polls show most Americans support.
• In recent months, Matthews and his guests on Hardball and the NBC-syndicated Chris Matthews Show have repeatedly gushed over McCain and Giuliani as potential presidential candidates in 2008, even though both have been supporters of the war and Bush. For example, Matthews stated on the May 10 edition of Hardball that he was “still hanging in there for a McCain-Giuliani ticket.”

I’m sure that everyone in the Village is thrilled to welcome Matthews and his “celebrity heat” (born, by the way, on the back of mindless sexism as Eric Boehlert demonstrates here ) on to the “A” list. After all, his only fault was that he was a good Catholic boy who couldn’t forgive presidential fellatio. Who doesn’t agree with that? On pretty much everything else, he’s been great.

Hertzberg ends his column with this:

Chris Matthews is a net plus for American politics and American society. If he decides to pack it in and run for office, I plan to max out.

You know, I hear a lot about the need for change in our politics — that we need to turn the page and inject the system with some new blood. And I hear a lot of it from allegedly liberal pundits like Hertzberg and Matthews who, without irony, tell tales of their earlier flights on Carter’s Airforce One and recount their adventures in the Reagan years and the crazed politics of the 90s. And it never occurs to anybody that it’s the liberal punditocrisy that’s stale and tired and most in need of changing.

If we are now believing that Chris Matthews is a “net plus” for American politics, then the reality based community has followed the Bush administration straight down the rabbit hole.

*Oh, and as for the “appeasement” humilation that everyone took so much pleasure in, I’m sorry, but it reminded me a great deal of an earlier episode this year where Matthews browbeat Texas state senator Kirk Watson for several minutes because he couldn’t name Obama’s legislative accomplishments. Let’s just say that I’d be a lot more impressed with Matthews’ pitbull routine if he used it, just once, on somebody with some real clout instead of low level nobodies who don’t appear on TV regularly. Bullying people without power just doesn’t impress me much, especially when you have people on the show every day who actually have some and you kiss their asses with gusto. Sorry, not impressed.

.

Real Americans Vs The Others

by digby

Mark Schmitt has a terrific piece up today on the state of conservatism and the Republican party and what it’s left with after its massive failure under George W. Bush. Do read the whole thing. The most important thing about it is that he defines something we’ve all observed as a form of identity politics, which in this election particularly, is a very, very clever insight:

David Frum calls explicitly for this brand of identity politics, declaring that while the Republican Party’s issue positions have evolved over the years, “there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood,” whereas Democrats “attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: … intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays–people who identify with the ‘pluribus’ in the nation’s motto, ‘e pluribus unum.'” In case it’s not clear, in Frum’s Latin, “pluribus” means “parasites,” and he tells us helpfully, “As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger.”In Frum’s book, this ugly bit of identity politics is carefully nestled within thousands of words about policy. And this is how the code is supposed to work. The GOP’s attack on “liberals” was always an attack on people not quite like “Americans”–secular, cosmopolitan, educated, egalitarian….

The politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it’s unpalatable otherwise. Without the helpful crutches of symbolic issues like welfare, crime, and immigration, the raw edges of the politics of people-not-like-us would be a little too uncomfortable, and not just for those of us who fall into one or more of the “pluribus” categories. But thanks to the unlikely trio of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain, the usual game is impossible. Clinton took welfare and crime off the political agenda. Bush made global belligerence and eternal tax cuts unpalatable. And McCain’s inconvenient position on immigration takes away what Republicans last fall were dreaming would be their silver bullet. As a result, with Americans saying they are willing to pay more taxes for health care and better schools, with Republicans at a disadvantage in the polls on every single issue, there is no respectable costume in which to dress up identity politics. Traditionally, the phrase “identity politics” has referred to the Democratic coalition’s caucuses, interest groups, and competitive claims of wrongs to be righted and rights to be granted. Identity politics on the left, according to this very conventional wisdom, opened the door to an alternative politics of national identity on the right. And yet in 2008, the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close. Obama is not Jesse Jackson; Hillary Clinton is not former Rep. Pat Schroeder. He chose to campaign on national reconciliation, she on bread-and-butter economics and her expertise on military affairs. Whereas McCain–a man whose known positions on the war and on the economy are deeply unpopular, whose other positions are endlessly shifting, whose party and ideology are rejected–is recast entirely in terms of his biography, his honor, his character, his American-ness. This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus “pluribus,” unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain’s slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn’t salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else–ideas, competence, governance–is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, “The American President Americans Are Waiting For.”

Conservatives have been coming to this moment for a long time. The last two elections were really only lightly garbed in ideology. Here’s none other than George Will laying out what a weakened position the republicans have really been in since 2000. The ground has actually been shifting for some time now:

Republicans must remember that Bush’s 2.4 point margin of victory in 2004 was unimpressive: In the 12 previous re-elections of presidents, the average margin of victory was 12.9 points. Bush’s 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004 was the third-smallest for a re-elected president (Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton won 49.2 percent in 1916 and 1996 respectively). Kerry’s 48.3 percent was the largest ever against a president being re-elected. (In the 12 previous re-elections, no losing candidate received more than 46.1 percent; nine of the losers received less than 45 percent.)

And that was after he lost the popular vote in 2000 and then had a huge spike in popularity after 9/11. The fact is that they barely ever had a governing coalition. And yet, after 2004, we were reading endless ridiculous paeans to the all-powerful Republicans and their permanent majority of Real Americans. It was hype then and it is certainly hype now.

As Schmitt points out, it can only work again if:

… the media and many Democrats–believe it will. We are easily spooked by the confident swagger of the Republicans, who not so long ago were plotting permanent world domination. But then, so was Bear Stearns.

The Republicans were never as strong as everyone thought they were. (And, yes, they are probably not as weak as we think they are now.) The country has been on a knife’s edge for a long time, nearly evenly divided for some years now. And in my view, after eight years of failed Republican governance, the public will naturally try the other side.

The Republicans have flogged this idea that they are the party of the salt of the earth Real America for quite a while. But what they have been working toward, really, for quite some time is to be the party of the Old Confederacy with just a tiny reach beyond it with the right candidate and the right circumstances. The problem, you see, is that this mythical Real America is actually a country filled with all those undesirable identities to which they see themselves in opposition. In fact, these undesirables, from gays to uppity women to Hispanics to Asians to the ultimate interlopers, the African Americans who came over to “our” country against their will (long before “we” did) comprise a majority. So even if they Republicans manage to make this election a referendum on the “Real Americans” vs “The Other,” which is all they can do, they can’t win that way anymore. The Real Americans are outnumbered by the rest of us. The takeover is complete.

Update: It has come to my attention that I was perhaps being a bit too cutsie in my final couple of sentences. A regular reader, who writes under the name “Cap and gown” writes in:

[O]ne crucial factor that undergirded support for the New Deal and the welfare state was a change in attitudes towards the working class. Whereas at the turn of the century the working-class was viewed as un-American and thus undeserving of public sympathy or support, by the 1930s the image of the worker had decisively changed. The worker came to be seen as essentially American which in turn legitimated programs designed to help workers such as unemployment insurance, old age pensions, etc. In contrast to Schmitt’s argument, and by extension to your own, therefore, I do not believe that it is necessarily that “others” now outnumber “real Americans.” Rather, the concept of who is a real American has grown in the eyes of most voters while the Republicans cling to an older version of who is a “real American.”
That’s actually what I meant …
.

Reject Torture

by digby

Scott Horton has announced a new initiative that I think is hugely important as we move into the general election season. It may be the most important foreign policy agenda item of all and yet it’s one that all the candidates are loath to talk about in any detail and which the press seems determined to let them elude.

Horton lays it all out:

This post is about “No Torture. No Exceptions.” It’s an initiative with which I am deeply involved, dedicated to making certain that each presidential candidate makes stopping torture part of their campaign platform. In its self-declared war on terror, the Bush Administration overturned an American legacy that stretched back to General Washington’s orders at Trenton and Princeton in 1776. The administration repudiated the order that the first and greatest Republican president issued in the heat of the Civil War, in 1863, prohibiting torture and official cruelty. The consequences have been nothing less than disastrous …
The moral issue hovering over the 2008 election is the Bush Administration’s embrace of torture as a tool of statecraft. This mistake must be thoroughly repudiated, and the nation must undertake a vow never to repeat it. And this issue should not be allowed to divide the nation as a premise of partisan rancor. There is hope in this election year to reverse one of the most fateful decisions in our nation’s history–the decision after 9/11 to disregard America’s historic values and to use torture in the “war on terror.” All the remaining Presidential candidates–John McCain in the Republican Party, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party–have publicly stated their opposition to the use of torture. Now each of these presidential candidates must get their parties to adopt at their Conventions a party platform plank that returns America to its historic position of absolutely rejecting torture–anywhere, on anyone, for any reason.

No Torture. No Exceptions” means:

• Reaffirming America’s commitment to existing federal laws and international treaties that ban torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under all circumstances.
• Renouncing all legal interpretations and executive orders that redefine torture and permit such acts as sensory or sleep deprivation, stress positions, sexual humiliation, mock executions.
• Enforcing full transparency of information about how America treats any and all detainees held by our personnel and those in our employ anywhere in the world.
• Rejecting and abolishing the practice of rendering detainees abroad.
• Establishing a single standard of interrogation procedures to apply to all persons held in U.S. custody or by those under U.S. control, whether C.I.A., military, or civilian.
• Treating our detainees as we would have others treat detained Americans.

This doesn’t seem to me to be too much to ask.

The initiative includes McCain, but he gives nothing more than lip service on the subject and then votes against making the CIA, the primary torturers, follow the Army Field manual, which prohibits it. He’s completely unreliable on this and I actually think he will do nothing about torture because fears being called soft on the subject because of his own experience.

So this is about the Democrats, and specifically the Democratic party platform, which should, in my view, come out clearly and without hedging, against torture. If the Democratic party can’t stand up unequivocally for that principle, then I’m afraid all of its purported devotion to freedom, equality and social justice is pretty weak gruel. As Dick Cheney would say, this is a “no brainer.”

Here’s the web-site.

.

Lieberman And His Toleration Of The Unclean

by tristero

One would think that the reality-challenged, Catholic-hating, gay-hating, and Jew-hating Psychopastor Hagee would be shunned by anyone in national mainstream politics. But Joe Lieberman thinks he’s more than just a convenient ally to drum up non-Jewish support for Israel. He thinks him a “man of God,” a veritable modern Moses.

That characterization of Hagee is nothing less than a gross insult to any self-respecting Jew. Yet Lieberman has, to the best of my knowledge, refused to apologize for these remarks in the light of the recent revelations. That refusal goes a long way towards understanding, when there’s politics involved, how little value Lieberman really puts on the beliefs and heritage he claims to hold so devoutly. Remember: Hagee is a man who asserted that the Bible tells us that Hitler was sent by God as a hunter of Jews who stayed in Europe rather than return to Palestine to further the progress of Armageddon. That is simply “reasoning” so bizarre it seems psychopathic, even within the weird context of Hagee’s brand of Protestantism.

Yes, Hagee is nuts on so many levels they defy quantifying without recourse to one of those calculators that utilizes scientific notation. But I don’t give a damn about Hagee. It’s Lieberman. I guess Lieberman really finds it hard to make the case for Israel to mainstream Christians so he feels compelled to coddle this kook.

The crazy, far-right Hagee is no real friend to Israel and I suspect it is only a matter of time, if Lieberman persists on perpetuating Hagee;s national status by attending his wingdings, before more, and even less ambiguous, anti-semitic remarks from Hagee surface.

Lieberman truly seems not to understand that Hagee is far, far beyond the pale. But we don’t, and Lieberman’s embrace of this madman can and should disqualify him from further consideration as a national politician. It is up to Democrats to recognize this when Lieberman once again is up for election; Dems must make a concerted effort to recover the Senate seat Lieberman is doing his best to besmirch.

It is an insult to those of us who support Israel to associate our support with Lieberman and his friends. There are far better American friends of Israel than Joe and his pals.

They Have To Earn It

by digby

In his inimitable unpredictable, mavericky style, Senator John McCain used the occasion of Memorial Day to defend his unwillingness to support the troops:

“I am running for the office of commander in chief. That is the highest privilege in this country, and it imposes the greatest responsibilities. And this is why I am committed to our bill, despite the support Senator Webb’s bill has received,” McCain, a Navy veteran and Vietnam prisoner of war, said at the New Mexico Veterans Memorial. “It would be easier, much easier politically for me to have joined Senator Webb in offering his legislation.””More importantly, I feel just as he does, that we owe veterans the respect and generosity of a great nation because no matter how generously we show our gratitude it will never compensate them fully for all the sacrifices they have borne on our behalf,” the Arizona senator said.However, McCain said he opposed Webb’s measure because it would give the same benefit to everyone regardless of how many times he or she has enlisted. He said he feared that would depress reenlistments by those wanting to attend college after only a few years in uniform. Rather, McCain said the bill he favored would have increased scholarships based on length of service.

Right. We should be generous, but let’s not go crazy. Those bastards who think they deserve to have the government pay for their college after just a few years in uniform simply don’t deserve it. Sure, they may put themselves in the line of fire in Iraq or Afghanistan for a couple of tours and maybe they work for peanuts and their families are on food stamps while they do it. But that’s no reason for them to cheat the taxpayers by taking a college scholarship when they are needed indefinitely in the war zones. They’re nothing but a bunch ‘o big babies.

And once again I’m, reminded that the best thing about McCain is that in case you missed just how much of a maverick he is on these issues, how brave, how true, how boldly non-political — he is always the first to remind you.

.

FUD

by tristero

I think by far that Digby is the more street smart observer. I only wish I shared her optimism about the fall. I do think Obama will win, assuming no rampant voter fraud, but it will be a nail-biter. As mentioned, I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s must-read masterpiece, Nixonland (I’m deep in part IV now) and I think it goes without saying that Obama, as well as all Democrats, will be hit with an extensive, well-coordinated Nixonian-style ratfucking campaign that will make ’72 look like the work of rank amateurs. Obama showed considerable skill recently in responding rapidly to Bush’s innuendos in Israel. But that strikes me as a minor effort by the Repubs. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

I am also concerned by what Sean Wilentz points out in the second half of this post. I hope that those of you who dislike the first half won’t be distracted into arguing about what he says there. I think the important material as we look forward to a difficult campaign begins at the section quoted below. To put it mildly, Wilentz is very concerned about Obama’s support among the white working class, and openly angry at what appears to him the repetition of a classic progressive mistake:

The Democratic Party, as a modern political party, dates back to 1828, when Andrew Jackson crushed John Quincy Adams to win the presidency. Yet without the votes of workers and small farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as a strong Democratic turnout in New York City, Jackson would have lost the Electoral College in a landslide…

[more history regarding the importance of white working class voters to Democratic victories]

…the perceived elitists Al Gore and John Kerry lost what Clinton had gained, as George W. Bush carried the white working-class vote by a margin of 17 percent in 2000 and a whopping 23 percent in 2004.

This year’s primary results show no sign that Obama will reverse this trend should he win the nomination. In West Virginia and Kentucky, as well as Ohio and Pennsylvania, blue collar white voters sent him down to defeat by overwhelming margins. A recent Gallup poll report has argued that claims about Obama’s weaknesses among white voters and blue collar voters have been exaggerated – yet its indisputable figures showed Obama running four percentage points below Kerry’s anemic support among whites four years ago.

Given that Obama’s vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.

Yet Obama’s handlers profess indifference – and, at times, even pride — about these trends. Asked about the white working-class vote following Obama’s ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, chief campaign strategist David Axelrod confidently told an National Public Radio interviewer that, after all, “the white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections going back even to the Clinton years” and that Obama’s winning strength lay in his ability to offset that trend and “attract independent voters… younger voters” and “expand the Democratic base.”

Now, this may strike you, as it did me when I first read it, as a rehash of one of Clinton’s arguments, and a dubious one. I also resented the “perceived elitists” line, which evades discussing the extent to which that perception was falsely created. But given all these caveats and concerns, I was struck by the fact that Wilentz’s point is similar to a very compelling one made by Perlstein in his book.

Back in the 60’s and early 70’s, Perlstein writes (and this jibes with my own memories), progressives were extremely confident that they were forging a new Democratic coalition, arrogantly ignoring the traditional ties of the Democratic party to blue collar voters and their worries. They were abetted in their arrogance by a press that completely misunderstood, and misreported, the complex political and cultural changes that Nixon’s politics produced. One important wedge Nixonism drove into American life split the Roosevelt coalition of liberals and blue collars in two, creating an enormous amount of downright hostility between the two groups. Nixon harvested the blue collar vote for himself while progressives fooled themselves into thinking those votes were irrelevant to the trend of increasing liberalism. Perhaps they were, but they were also necessary to win elections.

Wilentz is worried that today, we may be repeating that mistake. I hope he is wrong but I’d be curious to know what you think. I’d like to believe that the country is very different than it was in ’68 and ’72, that the modern Democratic messages (and in particular, Obama’s) resonate not only with me – an unabashed liberal – but with others who would never describe themselves that way. I’m not sure it is that different in the way that concerns me here.

I’m sure that some of you will say I’m just obsessing over bowling scores, but that’s not it at all. I think Howard Dean pithily summarized my concerns when he said that Democrats need to make it clear not only to me but even to the guy in the pickup with the Confederate Flag sticker that they are the party that best represents the country’s interests. I thought he was right then (as did most liberals I knew) and I think he’s still right. As I saw it, Dean wasn’t talking about pandering, but about making the positions Democrats hold, and their advantages, clear to the widest possible audience.

So, please educate me. This aspect of politicking – framing appeals to specific constituencies – is not something I have much of a feel for (and Wilentz thinks that’s a fatal insensitivity). Rather my default position, probably naive, is to go with the assumption that we should craft a smart, feasible liberal program combined with a rhetoric of common sense that is simple, direct and understandable by all. Sure, one tailors the rhetoric to the audience, and one needs to connect in specific ways, but I put the emphasis on the strength of the ideas and rhetoric rather than on the specific framing (pace Lakoff). So Wilentz’s point, or more precisely, what to do about it, is somewhat unclear to me.

Is Wilentz – who I’m sure you all realize is neither stupid, ignorant, nor anti-liberal – simply wrong? Or does he have a point? Or, are his fears of such overarching concern, we should be very worried? I look forward to your comments.