Month: November 2008

What Religious Right?

by dday

Kathleen Parker wrote an op-ed today calling out the “oogedy-boogedy” theocratic wing of the GOP and “armband religion” as impeding conservative electoral prospects for a generation.

Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

It isn’t that culture doesn’t matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs […]

But, like it or not, we are a diverse nation, no longer predominantly white and Christian. The change Barack Obama promised has already occurred, which is why he won.

Among Jewish voters, 78 percent went for Obama. Sixty-six percent of under-30 voters did likewise. Forty-five percent of voters ages 18-29 are Democrats compared to just 26 percent Republican; in 2000, party affiliation was split almost evenly.

The young will get older, of course. Most eventually will marry, and some will become their parents. But nonwhites won’t get whiter. And the nonreligious won’t get religion through external conversion. It doesn’t work that way.

This has sent conservatives into a tizzy, as they demand, DEMAND to know what Parker is referring to. The author of “Liberal Fascism,” who has never ascribed bad motives to a political party in his life, has a representative comment.

What aspects of the Christian Right amount to oogedy-boogedyism? I take oogedy-boogedy to be a perjorative reference to absurd superstition and irrational nonsense. So where has the GOP embraced to its detriment oogedy-boogedyism? With the possible exception of some variants of creationism (which is hardly a major issue at the national level in the GOP, as much as some on the left and a few on the right try to make it one), I’m at a loss as to what Kathleen is referring to. Opposition to abortion? Opposition to gay marriage? Euthanasia? Support for prayer in school?

Hey, can I offer a piece of evidence?

The California Supreme Court will take up various legal challenges to the constitutionality of Proposition 8, with oral arguments to begin around March and a decision expected by next May. I’m sure we’ll see a host of arguments between now and March, but the amicus brief on behalf of the Lord is a new one. It’s a PDF, but here’s the opening statement:

Acting on behalf of the Almighty Eternal Creator, who is holding sole ownership to His creations, all planets, including the earth and everything above, below and on it, myself as His heiress, and the Kingdom of Heaven World Divine Mission (also known as Rebuild My Church Divine Mission), a Non-Profit Corporation in the State of California, submit this Amicus Curiae brief to the address the legal standard for granting “yes” on Proposition 8, passed with 52% of California voters votes, as the State of California Constitution Amendment: “Marriage between one man and one woman only!”

Later on, there’s this section:

After a night full of dreams, before dawn on November 11, 2008, before I woke up in the morning, the Almighty Eternal Creator ordered me, saying “You explain to them the consequences that follow each and all of their actions. Once they understand, they will listen!”

These two matters (gay-lesbian and abortion) are just a couple of many major cases where people are exercising their free-will rights for wrong purposes. This has gone on for a hundred-thousand years and has contributed heavily to extreme weather, global warming, financial crisis, recession, global hatred, lying, violence, war and murder, serious sickness and diseases – often for the purpose of gaining rights for wrong purposes, power and money.

I mean, if you want to deny that a non-trivial part of your coalition is out in la-la land, go ahead. But ultimately, conservatives are responsible for giving this kind of nonsense talk a presentable forum and a place in their party. They made a devil’s bargain and now they’re trying to act like the Dominionists in their midst are perfectly normal.

I don’t know how right Parker is (the economic royalists and the neocons can shoulder some of the blame), but let’s not pretend that the religious right is rational and benign.

John Cole has an additional bill of particulars.

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Amity Village Horror

by digby

I was going to write about this, but I see that the shrill one is there before me — and carrying a whole lot more credibility than I have in such matters):

When you hear claims that the New Deal made the depression worse, they often come directly or indirectly from the work of Amity Shlaes, whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right. Now, Ms. Shlaes has found a new target: John Maynard Keynes. There’s a lot to critique in this piece, but this one takes the cake:

But the most telling fact about the new rush to spend is that its advocates have insisted on invoking the New Deal. They tend to gloss over the period when the phrase, “We are all Keynesians now,” was actually first uttered: the mid-1960s. (Uttered by Friedman, in fact, though he meant only that we all work in the terms of the Keynesian lexicon.) The Great Society of that period was the ultimate Keynesian experiment, and it didn’t work very well.

Grr. Keynesianism says that deficit spending can help create jobs when the economy is depressed. The Great Society wasn’t deficit spending, it wasn’t intended to create jobs, and the economy of the 1960s wasn’t depressed. It was social engineering; we can talk about how well or badly it worked, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with Keynesian economics. Now, LBJ did engage in some Keynesian economics: namely, he imposed a contractionary fiscal policy in the form of a tax surcharge in an effort to cool an overheating economy. Alas, pretty soon we’ll have all the usual suspects saying that the Great Society proves that Keynesian economics doesn’t work — after all, the “experts” told them so.

One of the things I always find most amazing about conservatives is their propensity to greet any defeat with total defiance and inverse reasoning. Hence, we have a situation where free market fundamentalism, the right wing economic creed, has been tried for several decades and has now proven to be a bust, just as it was back in the 1920s, the last time they tried it.

The reaction among the conservatives is not shame or even rationalization. It’s to look you in the eye and babble, “I know you are but what am I.” In the face of a crisis that demands the kind of intervention that we know is the only hope to prevent a more cataclysmic result along the lines of the great Depression, these people are saying that the lessons of the Great Depression aren’t just different from what we thought they were, they are the opposite of what they actually are. And then they trot out some bizarroworld conservative revisiosnist to “prove” their point, which the media happily embrace in their never ending quest to be “fair and balanced.”

“Revisionist” Amity Shlaes, the new toast of wingnutville who conveniently blames Roosevelt for the depression, is the Laurie Myleroie of conservative economics. Just thank your lucky stars that John McCain didn’t win the election or she wouldn’t just give Stephen Moore and Glen Beck thrills up their legs, her book would undoubtedly be one of the bibles guiding the administration through this crisis. It’s not like they don’t have a record.

Update: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber provides another excellent example of Shlaes’ intellectual incoherence. And of course her perfect bizarroworld column defending Phil Gramm’s comment that this is a nation of whiners is another one. Great gal.

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Urban Legend In Her Own Mind

by digby

Sometimes you just have to love conservatives. Even in the age of Youtube and the internet they think they can get away with saying “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes.” And they often do.

Take, for example, Michele Bachman, the certifiable loon who went on Hardball and did a Picasso-esque Joseph McCarthy impression just before the election. She appeared with Alan Colmes this week and this is how it went:

Colmes: You said you were concerned during the campaign that Obama had anti American views and you said the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look at the people and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America

Bachmann: Actually that’s not what I said. It’s an urban legend that was created and that’s not what I said.

Colmes: I have the tape at my website Alan.com

Bachmann: What I called on Alan was for the main stream media to do their job. They failed to vet Barack Obama the way they had John McCain. That’s what I was called for.

Colmes: “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America. Do you really want…”

Bachmann: What I said was that I’m not qualified to say whether members views are pro or anti American. That’s not my job to do.

He was quoting her directly and she still pretended that she hadn’t said what she had clearly said.

Amato has more commentary as well as the two videos and you can judge for yourself. But at what point does this sort of thing become disqualifying? I’m beginning to think — never.

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Partying Like it’s 1993

by digby

I just have to reiterate how bemused I am by Obama being harangued for breaking his promise to bring change by appointing a couple of ex-Clinton officials while simultaneously being lauded to high heaven for having the good sense to stuff as many Republicans in his administration as possible. I know that the Republicans would like to disappear the Bush administration from history, but is it really possible for them to do it while Bush is still in office?

I really think the change people voted for was far more likely to mean change from Republican rule or perhaps a mandate that politicians agree on everything (as if that were either possible or desirable) than an overriding desire to purge the government of experienced Democrats. If these gasbags want to make a case against these people on the merits, that’s fine. Or if they really believe “change” signified that Obama would only hire people who’d never been in politics before, I suppose they can make that case too. (It must be what some of them meant since they are claiming that even naming Tom Daschle, who was not a member of the Clinton administration, is a sign of Obama breaking his promise.) But to argue that he must be bipartisan and keep recent Republican administration figures like Robert Gates or hire Colin Powell, while simultaneously howling that he is choosing people with experience under the most recent Democratic administration because that isn’t “change” doesn’t make sense.

Unless, of course, by “change” they think Obama meant reverting to a time when the Clinton-obsessed political media behaved like puerile wingnut stalkers, dancing to GOP operatives’ every depraved utterance. Slavering over the Clintons, while righteously decrying the so-called soap opera (which the media itself creates), is the only thing they really do well. Overseeing a rogue presidency and a despotic congress was certainly beyond their ken and neither are they obviously interested in seriously reporting on the politics of boring junk like a crumbling economy, the planet heating up, torture and injustice or wars and destruction overseas. Indeed, those aren’t even political subjects to them. Nope, they clearly voted to change the calendar back to 1997 when they were all on easy street exchanging gossip with each other and taking bets about when they’d finally succeed in destroying Bill and Hillary Clinton. Somebody’s still hoping to collect on that one.

In other news, an MSNBC host just asked, “is the honeymoon over?” Their political analyst answered that Obama should never have expected much of one in the first place. Game on.

Update: By coincidence, Eric Boehlert’s column today speaks to same issues. I’m going to excerpt a big chuck, but be sure to read the whole thing. If you don’t get the history, you’re not going to get what’s happening now:

At the outset of the Bush presidency, when it became obvious that the press had adopted a softer standard for judging the new Republican president, author Jeffrey Toobin noted that “the high emotional temperature of the Clinton years left a lot of people, including journalists, kind of exhausted.” He added, “I think it will probably take a while to sort of gin that back up again.”

Over the course of eight years of covering Bush, I’m not sure the press ever recaptured the fever it displayed during the Clinton years. So it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up that emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration.

It would also be troubling for journalism if the press responded to conservative claims today that reporters had been too soft on the Democrat during the campaign by reacting the same way journalists did when those claims were lodged during the 1992 campaign: by trashing the victorious Democrat to prove the press corps wasn’t “in the tank.”

That’s what helped fuel the stark double standard in terms of early coverage of the past two administrations.

One quick example: On January 31, 1993, 12 days after Clinton had been sworn into office, Sam Donaldson appeared on ABC and made this jarring announcement: “Last week, we could talk about, ‘Is the honeymoon over?’ This week, we can talk about, ‘Is the presidency over?’ ” (At the time, Clinton’s approval rating hovered around 65 percent.)

By contrast, on February 10, 2001, three weeks after Bush had been sworn into office, The New York Times’ Frank Bruni penned a gentle, honeymoon-mode review about how authentic and at ease Bush seemed with his new role. “George W. Bush is establishing a no-fuss, no-sweat, ‘look-Ma-no-hands’ presidency, his exertions ever measured, his outlook always mirthful,” wrote Bruni. “The gilded robes of the presidency have not obscured Mr. Bush’s innate goofiness — or, for that matter, his insistent folksiness.”

Bruni’s piece was a classic example of what in journalism is called a “beat-sweetener.” It’s where a reporter assigned to a new beat ingratiates himself with key sources by writing flattering profiles. There were precious few White House beat-sweeteners published in 1993.

“Perhaps never in our nation’s history — certainly not in its recent history — has a President so early in his term been subjected to a greater barrage of negative media coverage than Bill Clinton,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ late media critic David Shaw in 1993. (The headline to Shaw’s piece: “Not Even Getting a 1st Chance; Early Coverage of the President Seemed More Like An Autopsy.”)

“The level of hostility in the [White House] pressroom, I think, was extraordinary,” Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. For example, days after the Waco siege between federal forces and Branch Davidians ended in a deadly fireball in April of that year, a USA Today poll showed 93 percent of Americans did not blame Clinton for the outcome. Clift said she thought to herself, “The other 7 percent are in the White House press room.”

And Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield conceded she’d never seen any administration “pronounced dead” so quickly by the press.

The conventional wisdom today is that it was a cacophony of missteps made by the new Clinton-led Democratic team that generated the bad press in 1993. That reporters and pundits simply responded to the bungled attempt at transition. What’s been erased from that equation, though, is the acknowledgement that with or without the miscues, the press had already adopted an entirely new, contentious, and often disrespectful way of treating an incoming president.

What’s also glossed over is the fact that eight years later, the press then radically adjusted its standards — again — for the new Republican president.

I don’t know what will happen with Obama. But let’s just say that the zeitgeist is giving me a disorienting feeling of deja vu.

The End Of The Dingellsaurus?

by dday

Digby mentioned before the importance of getting Henry Waxman as the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Well, today he was nominated by the House’s Steering Committee to be the head of the panel, ahead of longtime chair John Dingell. The implications for such a change would be huge, but it’s not over yet.

The House Democratic Steering Committee has nominated Henry A. Waxman to be chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee next year — a stinging rebuke of the sitting chairman, John D. Dingell.

Waxman won a 25-22 vote over Dingell in a closed-door meeting Wednesday by the Steering panel. Because Dingell got more than 13 votes in the secret balloting, he can be nominated to run against Waxman at Thursday’s Democratic Caucus meeting, at which all of the Democrats elected to the 111th Congress are eligible to vote.

That means we have one day to whip our Congresspeople on this vote. Earlier this year, a majority of the House caucus has signed a letter to Nancy Pelosi asking for greater efforts to combat climate change. Waxman at Energy is a key to that happening.

If you want a sense of what we’re fighting here, check out the smugness of the Blue Dogs who are fighting for their roadblock:

Dingell’s supporters said they are not worried by the vote of the Steering panel, which they say is stocked with left-leaning members who do not represent the broader makeup of Democratic caucus.

“If you look at the makeup of that committee in terms of geography and political leanings, this is not the same dynamic as our whole caucus,” said Jim Matheson , D-Utah, who is part of a team working the phones for Dingell, D-Mich.

I was skeptical that House Democrats would be pushed in the direction of progress, but with Waxman’s former chief of staff, Phil Schiliro, in the Obama White House, some pressure may be coming down from the top. It’s in all of our interests to have Henry Waxman atop this committee.

Call Congress and tell your representative you want to see a committee chair with actual ideas on energy as the head of the Energy Committee. In particular, if your member is in the Congressional Black Caucus or the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, both of which appear to be supporting Dingell, ask them if they would like their constituents to breathe clean air in the future.

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An Experienced Hand

by dday

Roll Call is reporting that Tom Daschle will be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. That’s wholly unsurprising. Obama’s Senate staff was basically Daschle’s former staff after he lost re-election. The two have been close since Obama got to Washington. What’s notable is that his jurisdiction will not just be that of a normal HHS chief.

Daschle, who served in the Senate until he lost his re-election bid in 2004, also is set to take on the position of “health care czar” in the Obama White House, ensuring that he does not get bigfooted on matters relating to health care policy, according to this source.

Daschle was a close adviser to Obama throughout the Illinois Democrat’s presidential campaign, and has been outspoken about his desire to enact a government-funded health care insurance program to help cover the approximately 40 million Americans who do not have coverage.

Ezra Klein explains why this is huge news:

You don’t tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That’s not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players. You tap him because you understand that health care reform runs through the Senate. And he accepts because he has been assured that you mean to attempt health care reform.

From the standpoint of getting something done, this is definitely positive. The most recent past effort at health-care reform was run in a top-down fashion which made it more susceptible to being torpedoed by industry. Now there appears to be a great deal of consensus. Ted Kennedy is back in the Senate and yesterday he set up a bunch of health care working groups with key leaders in each post, one of them Hillary Clinton, which is obviously subject to change. It’s significant that everyone will have their piece of the reform pie to shape. Congresscritters like the feeling that they’re putting an imprint on things, I imagine. Most important, Congress wants to move forward in a comprehensive way, and now the new White House is signaling that as well.

But it’s important to note that, while this may be a great step forward for HOW health care gets done, it’s still unclear WHAT that reform will look like. The how is quite important because the cost of doing nothing is too great. But the what is crucial as well. Daschle’s most recent book, Critical, is about how to fix the health care crisis, and there’s a lot of talk about process and getting a bill through Congress, but the “what” he comes up with is a kind of Federal Reserve board for health care, one that can administer, without being subject to political pressure, a public option health care consumers can purchase. That’s a very different vision than what is currently in the Obama plan or the consensus plan in the Senate, and it’s kind of murky and based on what may be an unrealistic set of assumptions about political power. I don’t know how far Daschle would go in shaping the policy, but what is important is that the mass of citizens who care about health care reform start pushing their legislators right now to move in the direction of serious reform. If the end goal is to get something, anything done, the product will probably be much different than if the end goal is to hew to certain core principles, like the idea that health care is a human right and not a privilege, and companies that seek profit over treatment are highly unlikely to work in the best interest of the consumer.

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(Card) Check Please

by digby

I have long been amused (and somewhat confused) by certain bizarre conservative rallying cries. At political rallies you’ll hear people chanting “USA” and cheering for low taxes, as would be expected. But then they wildly explode when the politician says the words … tort reform? It’s like some magical incantation that is only understood by those who are members of the tribe. The literal term can’t possibly be meaningful to most people unless they think this has something to do with baked goods. Yet they scream and shout in a near frenzy at the mere mention of the phrase. It’s clearly Pavlovian talk radio conditioning.

This past election I noticed a new catch phrase. The minute a conservative breathes the word “card check,” his or her supporters completely lose their minds. When he ratchets it up saying “lose your right to a secret ballot” they come completely unhinged with even more energy than they unleash when someone says “we’re going to beat the terrorists.” It’s just weird.

Obviously the right, through the Chamber of Commerce and other business entities are working hard to prime the public to be hostile to unions being able to organize by simply having people sign up instead of requiring on-site elections in front of the boss, which is the purpose of the Employee Free Choice Act or “card check.” Here’s a set of talking points, easily obtained through Mr Google from the Associated Builders and Contractors. It features all the usual nonsense (the most hilariously hypocritical being the notion that they believe one should have the same freedom on the job that one has in civic life. Hah!) But even though it makes no sense, it gives people a way to talk about something that’s rather difficult to explain.

But where does the passion come from? How do you get people to really feel that it’s important to stop unions from getting people to do a simple opt-in? “Pollster” Frank Luntz speaking to the Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas last week, makes it clear:

“I’m afraid for employees if it passes,” Luntz said. “The level of intimidation and coercion would be unprecedented. Workers are about to lose their most important right (a secret vote). I’m very angry with the business community for not saying more about it.”

It’s the victimization, stupid,as this post from the National Right To Work web site vividly illustrates:

I had a friend in California who grew up in Michigan. His father was a UAW local official. He remembered vividly being in a coffee shop with his family one day. The guy in the next booth made some remark to a companion that was uncomplimentary to the union–and my friend’s father instinctively swung his coffee mug around and shattered it on this guy’s jaw.

There’s a long and ugly, bloody, deadly history of corporations and labor unions fighting it out in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There’s plenty of evil that was done by both sides. But this is not the situation today–not even close. Labor violence today is almost entirely by labor unions. I can easily believe that the reason that the AFL-CIO wants to “streamline” the process is that they are intimidating workers into signing authorization cards–and don’t dare risk a secret ballot.

(He doesn’t cite any specific examples of recent union violence, but then he may think “The Sopranos” was an HBO documentary series. ) This is obviously another example of the right’s post modernist inversion — these on site elections are often exercises in intimidation by management to keep the union from organizing.

Thomas Frank has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning that lays out the real framework of this debate:

During the campaign, you will recall, the debate over card check was supposed to be about principle, about democracy, about the sacredness of the secret ballot. However, as I pointed out a few months ago, union-certification elections often don’t meet the most basic democratic requirements. Supervisors routinely hold captive-audience meetings with workers in preparation for elections; management commonly threatens to close up shop if the union wins; antiunion employees are frequently rewarded and pro-union employees are sometimes fired.

So it may not surprise you to learn that democracy isn’t really the main concern of card-check’s opponents. It’s unions themselves. Changing the rules will make it easier to organize them.

[…]

Card check is about power. Management has it, workers don’t, and business doesn’t want that to change. Consider the remarks made by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott at an analyst meeting on Oct. 28, when he was asked about the possible coming of card check: “We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.”

That last, as Perlstein points out here, puts the lie to the absurdity that these businesses are fighting for their employees’ constitutional right to a secret ballot.

And it’s true that there is a lot of violent rhetoric around this subject — but it isn’t coming from the unions. Frank continues:

“This is the demise of a civilization,” moaned Bernie Marcus, cofounder and former CEO of The Home Depot, during an Oct. 17 conference call about card check. “This is how a civilization disappears. I’m sitting here as an elder statesman, and I’m watching this happen, and I don’t believe it.”

Mr. Marcus sketched out the doomsday scenario for his listeners, with unions going after what he called the “low hanging fruit” and proceeding to organize workers in industry after industry. He had taken it upon himself to notify the nation’s CEOs of the danger, but they were not yet grabbing their guns. “This is as important as anything that’s ever happened to these companies. And they’re not reacting, and they’re not fighting. The old time fighters are gone.”

But in the class war, as in the real deal, there are always ways of motivating the yellow. “If a retailer has not gotten involved with this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to Norm Coleman and these other guys,” Mr. Marcus said, apparently referring to Republican senators facing tough re-election fights, then those retailers “should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs.”

Mr. Marcus may snarl, but he doesn’t bark. His is the voice of a business class rediscovering its ancestral zeal for combat. Liberals should take heed. If they thought the “Harry and Louise” campaign that sank Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform was dirty, they should know they ain’t seen nothing yet.

It looks that way. The economic crisis, particularly the Big 3 meltdown, is offering the right what they see as a new opportunity to break unions and destroy any advances workers might have expected under a progressive government. They may be temporarily in disarray politically, but the right never forgets their primary mission — protecting the wealthy. And they are very good at advancing that agenda whether in the majority or the minority. Under the Shock Doctrine, they have a perfect opportunity to end the union movement in America and they’ll certainly do their best to take advantage of the moment.

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Backing Waxman

by digby

Matt Stoller wrote a piece yesterday about the fight over the Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship between John Dingell and Henry Waxman and he points out that the outcome of this is probably far more important to a progressive agenda than all this sturm and drang about Lieberman and he’s right. Waxman is an effective, green progressive and he knows how to get things done. Dingel is an elder who is discredited by his relationship with the auto industry and the NRA. If pragmatic change rather than milquetoast status quo bipartisanship is what people voted for, this is where the action is.

Stoller lays out all the strange political machinations, with the fight over seniority (as this article in The Hill.) It’s complicated, petty politics (which should be something the netroots should be good at participating in.) He concludes:

No one really has any idea how the votes will play out, but I am surprised that the blogs have taken so little interest in this fight. The 2008 freshmen are being absorbed into the House quagmire without any protest from our quarters, or even requests that they actually take a position to help a progressive chair one of the most important committees in Congress, the one that regulates climate change, media policy, net neutrality, and trade.

Waxman is the right guy to be in charge of these things as we deal with this economic/energy crisis. Whatever threats there may or may not be to the seniority system by putting Waxman in charge pale in comparison to the necessity to have the House working properly on these issues.

Beware of Histo-tainment

by dday

I’m very glad that Matthew Pinsker penned this op-ed today taking a more critical look at Doris Kearns Goodwin’s pop pseudo-history “Team Of Rivals”. As a yarn, I hear the book is quite good, but as a piece of history it’s not exactly true to the source. And since it’s become accepted wisdom among the DC chattering class and the politicians they influence, that’s a serious problem.

There were painful trade-offs with the “team of rivals” approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.

Lincoln’s decision to embrace former rivals, for instance, inevitably meant ignoring old friends — a development they took badly. “We made Abe and, by God, we can unmake him,” complained Chicago Tribune Managing Editor Joseph Medill in 1861. Especially during 1861 and 1862, the first two years of Lincoln’s initially troubled administration, friends growled over his ingratitude as former rivals continued to play out their old political feuds […]

By December 1862, there was a full-blown Cabinet crisis.

“We are now on the brink of destruction,” Lincoln confided to a close friend after being deluged with congressional criticism and confronted by resignations from both Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Goodwin suggests that Lincoln’s quiet confidence and impressive emotional intelligence enabled him to survive and ultimately forge an effective team out of his former rivals, but that’s more wishful thinking than serious analysis.

Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term — one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust.

The Village has a more of a sense of bumper stickers than history, and Goodwin, whose scholarship is not exactly spotless, is a Villager in good standing, so this will probably pass through the Beltway without comment. But I hope someone in the office of the President-elect is paying attention. Pinsker doesn’t even tackle the false equivalence between the Civil War and our day – the real rivals were seceding from the Union and massing an Army at the time. This was a moment that called for unity between anyone who wasn’t a Confederate, necessitating Lincoln’s choice – and it STILL DIDN’T WORK VERY WELL.

That is not to say that any of these so-called rivals potentially in Obama’s cabinet would create similar controversy. And I’m actually not really talking about Hillary Clinton in this context. But Obama is talking about this “fully bipartisan government,” and he’s even exploring options for Republicans in major posts, and that ought to have you worried if he’s basing that on a work of what amounts to fiction. If you want to broaden out the analogy, is there that big a difference between the Republicans and the Confederates, in this scenario? Is it that wise to put people in positions of power, after a triumphant election, who want the country to be “avowedly with them,” as Lincoln put it?

Another question: Is it odd that the traditional media keeps parroting this concept when its application was fatally flawed and nearly sunk the Union? Or is that the point, a kind of back-door way to mandate bipartisan, “center-right” leadership on the new Administration?

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58

by digby

It appears that my Alaskan friends are on the road to redeeming the state’s reputation:

With most of the remaining ballots counted in Alaska, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich appears to have unseated long-time Senator Ted Stevens, widening the Democrat’s lead to 3,724 votes. The new count pretty much closes the door on Mr. Stevens’ hopes of re-election. According to the latest official count by the Alaska Division of Elections, Mr. Begich has 150,728 and Mr. Stevens trails with 147,004.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, declared victory on Tuesday night:

“Mark Begich will be an outstanding senator for Alaska and the country,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “And with seven seats and counting now added to the Democratic ranks in the Senate, we have an even stronger majority that will bring real change to America.”

The Hulk has been vanquished as any convicted felon should be. Huzzah.

Oh, and it goes without saying that this is yet more proof that the country wanted more Republican leadership. What could be more clear?