Despite what Kevin says, I don’t care if I ever hear any dish about Sarah Palin. Why? Because as of 11:00 PM EST on November 4, 2008, I stopped caring about Sarah Palin.
I don’t care to read about how she behaved. I don’t care whether the stories are true. I don’t care to repeat stories about her and I don’t care to defend her. I simply don’t care about Sarah Palin.
The only thing I care about when it comes to Sarah Palin is never having to care about her ever again.
There is a lot of yammering among the gasbags about the absolute necessity for a bipartisan cabinet. I agree with Stephen Hess on tonight’s Lehrer News Hour who weighed in after Norman Ornstein insisted that Obama needs to not only be bipartisan, but that he has to nominate several high profile Republicans to high profile cabinet positions:
JUDY WOODRUFF: What about, Norman, naming Republicans to the administration? How important is that, both in reality and in terms of the signal that it sends?
NORMAN ORNSTEIN: It’s important. I mean, you can’t — if you pick a token Republican, then, you know, nobody is going to much care. It looks good, but it doesn’t have great resonance.
It’s got to go a little bit deeper than that to say that your rhetoric during the campaign, that you wanted to bring the parties and people together, was more than just rhetoric.
You know, that means probably picking two or three high-profile people, including some whose political views on every issue would not be consonant with your own.
If, for example, President-elect Obama kept on Bob Gates as secretary of defense and picked Richard Lugar as secretary of state, that would send a signal that goes well beyond tokenism.
And I suspect, because he’s got a number of Republican friends, including Lugar, including Chuck Hagel and others, that we’re going to see more than one Republican in a high-profile post.
And sometimes those people can help you a little bit with their previous colleagues on Capitol Hill.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Steve…
STEPHEN HESS: I’m a little different on that. If he were to pick Lugar and retain Gates, he would be saying something about the talents in the Democratic Party.
After all, he was elected — overwhelmingly elected as a Democrat. If you’re going to pick a Republican in the inner cabinet, you’ve got to be sure that that’s the best available person.
You make these token appointments in the outer cabinet if you have to. But, after all, there are a lot of very good people who are Democrats and who want to be secretary of state and secretary of defense. And this is their opportunity.
After the closest election in American history had been decided by the Supreme Court in a partisan 5-4 decision and which left the US Senate in a 50/50 tie, one might have expected the new president to appoint a bipartisan cabinet. He had run as a “Uniter Not a Divider” after all, and the country was brutally divided after the impeachment of president Clinton and the dubious election results. Among the political establishment, he was seen as a master at reaching across the aisle. Richard Cohen, villager extrordinaire, said this:
Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”
President George W Bush has produced a cabinet team which is the most ethnically-diverse in US history, but is politically right-wing.
He promised to to take an inclusive, bi-partisan approach to government, and his cabinet nominees include four women, two African-Americans, two Hispanics an Arab-American, a Japanese-American and a Chinese-American.
But although the team includes one Democrat, the key members are hardline Republicans, and several served in George Bush senior’s administration.
I don’t recall the Villagers rending their garments over this. In fact, they criticizedDemocrats for being too partisan when they objected to Bush appointing throwbacks like John Ashcroft Justice department:
To argue too loudly that Bush’s Cabinet isn’t truly bipartisan risks opening Democratic critics up to the charge of indulging in post election sour grapes. Democratic leaders appear to realize that and have tempered the carping, say GOP staffers.
How dare those horrible Democrats indulge in post election sour grapes. Why couldn’t they just “get over it?”
Look, I am not saying that Obama can’t pick a Republican for his cabinet if he thinks he or she is the best person for the job. I can see some logic in picking one for defense, for instance, just to counter the worst impulses of the military brass who are inclined to engage in pissing contests with new Democratic presidents. (He could ask Colin Powell how that works – — he’s an expert.) But if he thinks he needs to do this in order to appease these stupid villagers and “send a message” that he is a conciliator, he should tell them to take a walk.
To paraphrase Dick Cheney: Bush proved bipartisan rhetoric doesn’t matter. This is our due.
We’re all understandably distracted, flying high. But back in reality, Bushism still is in high gear. Here, the subject is the bailout and the writer the great Naomi Klein:
See if any of this sounds familiar: As soon as the bailout was announced, it became clear that Treasury officials would hire outsiders to perform their jobs for them — at a profit. Private companies wanting to help manage the bailout were given just two days to apply for massive, multiyear contracts. Since it was such a mad rush — after all, the entire economy was about to implode — there was no time for an open bidding process. Nor was there time to draft rigorous rules to make sure that those applying don’t have serious conflicts of interest. Instead, applicants were asked to disclose their conflicts and to explain — and this is not a joke — their “philosophy in fulfilling your duty to the Treasury and the U.S. taxpayer in light of your proprietary interests and those of other clients.” In other words, an open invitation to bullshit about how much they love their country and how they can be trusted to regulate themselves.
Yes, it sounds familiar. January 20, 2009 can’t come soon enough.
I mentioned this before, but with the cable new networks all breathlessly reporting that Sarah W. Palin is a moron — and people like Chris Matthews now opining that anyone who isn’t smart can’t possible be president, I feel it’s necessary to point out that being a moron is something the Republicans and the media have shown a rather remarkable tolerance for up until now:
Q: What do you think of tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how can we resolve conflicts between tribes and federal and state governments?
Bush: Yeah… yeah, tribal sovereignty means that, sovereign. You’re a… you’re a… you’ve been given sovereignty and you’re… viewed as a sovereign entity. (laughter) And therefore, the relationship between the federal government and the tribes is one between sovereign entities.
That man had been president for nearly four years at that point and was about to be reelected. I don’t recall anyone but a bunch of scruffy bloggers having a problem with the fact that he clearly didn’t have fucking clue what sovereignty even meant — and was nation building in Iraq at that very moment.
Q: You talk about the general threat toward Americans. You know, the Internet is crowded with all sorts of rumor and gossip and, kind of, urban myths. And people ask, what is it they’re supposed to be on the lookout for? Other than the 22 most wanted terrorists, what are Americans supposed to look for and report to the police or to the FBI?
A: Well, Ann, you know, if you find a person that you’ve never seen before getting in a crop duster that doesn’t belong to you — report it.
Seriously. Entire books have been written devoted to the stupid things that this man has said as president. He’s an idiot.
So is Sarah Palin, (which is why I’ve always called her Sarah W. Palin) but please, these gasbags helped create the myth that to be president all you need was a “gut” and an attitude and the real Americans didn’t want some smarty pants, egghead for a leader. To act as though they believe that being intelligent is some sort of requirement for high officeis just bullshit.
MATTHEWS: We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who’s 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. It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits. We don’t want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.
I guess it’s ok to be a moron if Tweety gets all hot and bothered by your manly swagger.
“Politics is not left, right or center … It’s about improving people’s lives.”
-Paul Wellstone, Election Night 1990 acceptance speech
We are 18 years on from that piercingly simple statement, and yet nobody in the Democratic Party has managed to use it as the antidote to this endless effort to analyze and re-analyze the election through a conservative frame, by claiming this is a center-right country and Obama had better be cautious in enacting an agenda too far to the left, which would anger the public. This is of course true if you believe the public is directly analogous to the Washington commentariat. I’ve had a hard time chronicling everyone who has told me that, in the wake of the largest victory for Democrats since 1964, in the wake of winning a majority of the votes cast in 4 out of the last 5 Presidential elections, in the wake of reducing the Republican Party to a regional outpost in the South and part of the Great Plains, this is a profoundly conservative nation. Here’s a partial list:
I think they call that a meme. Just for fun, here’s a textbook example of the genre:
“My own hunch is that Obama is smart enough not to want to govern as a liberal,” said Peter Wehner, a former Bush administration official.
(On our side we have Nina Easton. Whoop-de-damn-do.)
Most of these are movement conservatives masquerading as journalists, but of course they have a disproportionate impact on their Village buddies, who are just as fearful of any altering of the status quo and just as protective of it. So they fundamentally misread the Clinton years and concern troll Barack Obama against making the “same mistakes.”
This is one of the classic myths that conservatives and establishment pundits, helped in no small part by conservative Democrats, like to flog. The reality is that we lost the 1994 elections mostly because of the disappointment from working-class Democrats and independents, especially women, who had voted for us in big numbers in 1992 but didn’t show up to vote in 1994. We lost because we didn’t deliver for our voters, not because we over-reached.
The first major fight was over our first federal budget. As folks may remember, Bob Rubin and other deficit hawks convinced Clinton to dramatically scale back on his campaign promises for investments in domestic programs, and to delay health care reform until we got that budget passed. While Clinton complained that we were going with an approach more like Eisenhower than like a Democrat, he went along with the green eyeshade guys. The budget got progressively more modest over the course of the legislative battle, most importantly taking out Gore’s carbon tax idea. The bill that ended up passing was reasonably progressive, but way scaled back from 1992 campaign promises or what progressive members of Congress/groups had been pushing.
The next big fight was over NAFTA, a real example of lefty over-reaching. Yeah, right. And once again, those of us in the White House pushing hard for health care reform to be prioritized early were left disappointed as once more the drive to get health reform passed got delayed. Meanwhile, our allies in the labor movement who were excited about helping us pass a health care bill had to spend millions in fighting the NAFTA battle […]
For all of our over-reaching, we didn’t deliver much to those working class voters who gave us our victory in 1992. Family and Medical Leave was a great thing, and very popular, but very modest compared to bigger picture economic issues. An increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit was also terrific, but helped only a relatively small number of people.
Not delivering much is what cost us the 1994 election. I did a thorough analysis of the 1994 exit polls after the election and did a memo to my fellow White House staffers. What I found was that the key to the election were the voters that stayed home who were non-college educated, lower and middle income, younger, more women than men, and heavily Democratic. Disproportionately large among those non-voters were working class and unmarried women. Overall, there was a 22-point difference in terms of Democratic support (in the wrong direction, of course) between those who voted and those who had in 1992 but didn’t in 1994, thereby sealing our fate.
It’s a funny thing, the public wants you to improve their lives a bit and keep your campaign promises to do so, and they don’t really seem that concerned about whether you’re moving too far to “the left” or “the right.”
In fact, the entire notion of “what kind of a country is America” becomes quickly tautological. This is a centrist country in the sense that the center would be the median ideology of everyone in it. The question becomes where is that center. And it’s completely clear that the public agrees with Obama’s agenda, which includes investments in public health, education, energy and infrastructure, an end to the war in Iraq, increased diplomacy, reproductive choice, and a more progressive tax code.
If you want to call that a progressive majority, it would be hard to argue with you. But more than anything, it’s a recognition on the part of the vast majority of the public that they would rather have a government that improves people’s lives instead of one that actively harms it. So while looking at self-described ideology shows that the electorate is in pretty much the same place as it has been, that’s a false indicator. People want to stop being screwed, and they intuitively understand that a conservative agenda was doing that repeatedly. They don’t want to be ruled by monsters anymore. The best way to show them that you’re not a monster is to marginally improve their lives, fulfilling your role as a public servant to the greater good.
Obama has a difficult task. He has a Village media culture that wants him to go slow instead of looking at what’s necessary for the historical moment. He hears every day to push aside those DFHs and mean ol’ liberals who would run his Presidency into the ground. He hears the same thing from conservative Blue Dog members of his own party who’ve suddenly found their fiscally conservative backbone, and even the party leadership, fearful of a backlash and continually stuck in early 1995 mode, weighing risk and reward and gaming out the politics of it all instead of, and let me say this one more time, IMPROVING PEOPLE’S LIVES.
I actually think Nancy Pelosi tried to say this yesterday in a soundbite that Digby flagged yesterday. If you listen to the whole quote, you’ll see that she says that raising the minimum wage, increasing CAFE standards, cutting student loans in half and creating the 21st-century GI Bill, all ideas that came out of the progressive wing, were embraced by both parties.
She ended up saying it in a very stunted way, when it doesn’t have to be that difficult. The role of government is to improve people’s lives. Through initiating projects through collective action that the individual cannot do themselves, like building roads and bridges and police and fire departments. Through equalizing opportunity for success through education programs. Through making sure the least of us doesn’t slip into grinding poverty with a social safety net, rather than just socialism for the rich and connected. Through making sure that we have a health care system that provides access and treatment as a basic human right. Through defending the nation with diplomacy and international engagement instead of sending in the military at the slightest provocation. Through adhering to a Constitution that has been ignored and mocked the last eight years.
I think Obama’s instincts in this regard may be decent.
The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”
But he’s going to need a great deal of help, and this is where Digby was going previously. The liberal blogosphere is uniquely positioned to act as the counterweight to this large gelatinous mass tut-tutting that we mustn’t rock the boat and have the candidate who ran on change actually change anything. Progressive organizations like Media Matters can attack this meme and treat it with the withering contempt it deserves. Obama is going to hear this in his ear (probably from his new Chief of Staff) every ten seconds from the moment he takes the oath of office. It’s important for us to make sure he hears something else.
Improve people’s lives, President-Elect.
“Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
He also took issue with Obama’s plan to roll back Bush’s tax cuts for the top brackets, as well as the Democrat’s statement to Joe the Plumber that he believes “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
“I left Europe four decades ago because socialism has killed opportunities there,” Schwarzenegger said. “. . . Now Sen. Obama says he wants to pursue the same ‘spread the wealth’ ideas that Europe had decades ago.”
Schwarzenegger’s call for tax increases puts him again at odds with legislators in his own party. Republicans, a minority in both houses but strong enough to block spending plans, were steadfastly against raising taxes in the last budget, and the state Senate’s GOP caucus chairman said that won’t change.
“The fact is that during this time of economic challenges is not the time to go back to California taxpayers and ask for more money from them,” said Sen. George Runner, of Lancaster.
The governor often has characterized California’s budget problems as being caused by runaway spending, rather than a lack of tax revenue, but he said Thursday that the severe financial crisis has flipped that.
“It is now a revenue problem rather than a spending problem,” Schwarzenegger said.
I guess there’s socialism and then there’s socialism. Those deregulated, free market fundamentalist “opportunities” have turned our economy into a Big Shitpile™.
Ok, that’s it. I agree that Sarah Palin is a disaster. She was a terrible choice for VP and undoubtedly cost McCain votes among those who couldn’t believe he’d choose someone so unqualified. I hope we never see her again. I shed no tears for her loss.
But this obsession among the gasbags and the wingnut operatives with this story of her greeting these (apparently very, very delicate) male McCain advisors in a towel is just sexist crap. They are basically trying to turn her into some kind of slutty, lowlife freak and it’s disgusting.
The woman had no business running for VP considering her complete lack of knowledge about national politics and current events. I think that’s been amply demonstrated. But the men who chose her are now obviously the ones who are trying to destroy her in order to cover their own sorry asses:
“What about Sarah Palin?” Schmidt asked.
[…]
After that first brief meeting, Davis remained in discreet but frequent contact with Palin and her staff — gathering tapes of speeches and interviews, as he was doing with all potential vice-presidential candidates. One tape in particular struck Davis as arresting: an interview with Palin and Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Democrat, on “The Charlie Rose Show” that was shown in October 2007. Reviewing the tape, it didn’t concern Davis that Palin seemed out of her depth on health-care issues or that, when asked to name her favorite candidate among the Republican field, she said, “I’m undecided.” What he liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence.
And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”
Those who were in charge of McCain’s campaign, including the man himself, chose her for her looks and robotic, unresponsive stubbornness. They are in no position to complain about what they got. And they are pigs for trying to make something out of this towel thing.
Unless she flashed you her privates and gave one of her winks, it doesn’t mean she wanted to fuck you in front of her husband, fellas. She was covered. Grow up.
I was reading through the comment section of a few posts this morning (something I rarely can bring myself to do anymore) and I realized that I need to remind people of something that’s very important for successful governance:
FDR was, of course, a consummate political leader. In one situation, a group came to him urging specific actions in support of a cause in which they deeply believed. He replied: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
He understood that a President does not rule by fiat and unilateral commands to a nation. He must build the political support that makes his decisions acceptable to our countrymen. He read the public opinion polls not to define who he was but to determine where the country was – and then to strategize how he could move the country to the objectives he thought had to be carried out.
If Obama wants to govern as liberally as the political circumstances allow, then we need to work to make sure that the political circumstances include a strong liberal base. Mindlessly cheerleading out of a misplaced sense of loyalty will not help him. As Roosevelt understood, politics are interlocking interests and constituencies that have to be brought to bear to achieve certain goals.
In the current political world, I believe that Obama and the Democrats need a strong left wing that is out there agitating in order that we can continue to build popular support and also give them a political excuse to do things that the political establishment finds too liberal. Being cheerleaders all the time, however enjoyable that is, is not going to help them. Leaving them out there with no left wing cripples them.
One of the problems for Democrats has been that there has not been an effective progressive voice pushing the edge of the envelope. Therefore, when they inevitably “go to the middle” as politicians often feel they must do, the middle become further and further right. It is my belief that one of the roles of the progressive movement is to keep pulling the politicians back to the left, which often means that we are not being publicly “supportive,” in order that we really do end up in the middle instead of farther to the right than the country actually is.
I’m not an idiot and I know very well that Obama needs room to govern. A big historic victory, a village predisposed to at least give him a chance and a set of very serious crises to confront will give him that. My role is to make sure that the progressive agenda is pushed as well, and to make sure that the village knows that we are watching. I don’t mind if they hate me, if they also have a healthy respect for the fact that I will stand up for what I believe in. I think this is necessary for successful politics. I don’t expect to win all the time (or even most of the time) and I will be very, very supportive when the Democrats come through. But I believe that they need us to keep their feet to the fire.
In addition, we need to start the long process of making progressivism the default political identity of the young. That requires rhetoric that stands strong and takes pride in being liberal. Politicians may have to say that they “represent all the people” and give lip service to bipartisanship, but there is no reason that they should have to run from the progressive label or feel the need to kick their own base in the teeth in order to govern. That’s bad for our politics in the long run.
So, everyone needs to relax a little bit about the blogosphere criticizing Obama and the Democrats. We are necessary. If all Obama has is the Villagers and the right defining what change means, then those are the parameters within which he will have to operate. He needs us to “make him do it.”
I’m sorry if that’s a buzzkill, but things move fast in politics and there’s no time to waste. The mandate is being defined as we speak. We can’t just sit back and bask in our glory while the villagers are busily narrowing Obama’s options.
Reader Bill sent me an email this morning that set me to thinking about something very fundamental:
I got up early and caught some of the discussion with Lawrence O’donnell, Chrystia Freedland, and Joe Scar as to why people who make tons of money still voted for Obama.
Well, for most people, their lives are not governed by the tax code. It ignores a world view of a social compact, and a certain amount of self interest too. Fairness, tolerance, decency are part of the human deal too.
Philosophers and political theorists have argued about this forever, so I obviously don’t have any fresh insights. But I do feel that I understand this phenomenon. People who have money are like everyone else in that they come in all sizes and political persuasions. But they often have the luxury of looking beyond their immediate personal needs to the bigger picture and I think many of them realize that their comfortable life depends upon maintaining a stable society where there isn’t horrible poverty, where the infrastructure is modern and working, where crime isn’t rampant and where their kids can breath clean air. These are things they cannot pay for as individuals and are willing to kick in in order to insure that the nice life they have, and their children will likely have, continues.
If they are entirely rational in their thinking, they can even sit down and run a spreadsheet which gives them a cost benefit analysis of those broad social expenses and they’ll realize that they come out far ahead. The more instinctive among them just know that they don’t want to live in place that isn’t fair, tolerant and decent and they are willing to pay a share of their comfortable incomes to make that more likely.
I’ve always thought this pseudo-libertarian “self-interest” argument was a crock for anyone but the most pie-in-the-sky Randian. It’s in your “self-interest” to live in a well functioning society — and that requires an organizing principle and community action like government to achieve. The only argument against taxation that really makes any sense is the one that says government is somehow intrinsically incapable of doing anything right. In a country that was founded on democracy, there’s something about that which doesn’t scan very well — after all, we are the ones who choose the government. It’s an indictment of the people themselves.
The only way you can persuade a majority to ignore their collective interest in ensuring a decent community is to stroke their tribal lizard brains into believing that their money is going to help an “enemy” rather than their own. That’s why it has worked so well in racist societies.
For those government helps directly, whether it’s through educational opportunities or unemployment insurance or health care for their kids and elderly parents, the benefits are obvious. But there’s nothing unusual about financially comfortable people also being willing to pay for a decent society in which to live and work and bring up their kids. The unnatural ones are those who think they can live a good life without contributing to such things. Apparently, they think they can live inside a castle and pull up the drawbridge behind them, leaving all the ugliness outside. And that is the perfect, time tested recipe for revolution. It’s not exactly the smart move for the long haul.
