I don’t know how many people are following the corruption scandals in Ohio, but they are doozies — just flat out graft in the highest reaches of the Ohio Republican party. It’s one reason why Paul Hackett may just have a chance to win. Combine that with the outrages documented in “What Went Wrong In Ohio” and the GOP is becoming so discredited as an institution that its brand is suffering.
Jean Schmidt has been running from the Ohio bigwigs implicated in the scandal as fast as her bandy little legs will carry her. But it appears that in these last couple of days her lies about knowing some of the major players are unravelling. Swing State project has the story.
In another display of the GOP’s irony and history impaired lameness, the Washington Post reports today why the national GOP decided to throw a bunch of last minute money at Schmidt:
“He called the commander in chief a son-of-a-[expletive],” said NRCC spokesman Carl Forti. “We decided to bury him.”
Arthur has a must read post up dissecting Highpockets’ tribalism and the meaning of plaid pants and cultural paranoia. (If you aren’t checking in with his blog frequently you are missing some of the most consistently amazing cultural and political analysis in the blogosphere.) I’ll leave that fascinating topic to him for now, but he does mention one thing in passing that I’d like to expound on a bit; the wingnuts and the CIA.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Plame affair has brought up an interesting political contradiction: the right is now openly contemptuous of the CIA while the left is a vocal supporter. I think it’s probably a good idea to clarify that bit so we don’t get confused. The fact is that both sides have always been simultaneously vocal supporters and openly contemptuous of the CIA, but for entirely different reasons.
I usually don’t speak for “the left” but for the purpose of this discussion I will use my views as a proxy for the lefty argument. I’m not generally a big fan of secretive government departments with no accountability. I always worry that they are up to things not sanctioned by the people and it has often turned out that they are. I have long been skeptical of the CIA because of the CIA’s history of bad acts around the world that were not sanctioned or even known by more than a few people and were often, in hindsight, wrong — like rendition, for instance. I don’t believe that we should have a secret foreign policy operation that doesn’t answer to the people. They tend to do bad shit that leaves the people holding the bag.
But I didn’t just fall out of the back of Arnold’s hummer, so I understand that a nation needs intelligence to protect itself and understand the world. I also understand that the way we obtain that information must be kept secret in order to protect the lives of those who are involved in getting it. I have never objected to the idea that we have spies around the world gathering information about what our enemies are up to. I also think that intelligence should, as much as possible, be objective and apolitical. Otherwise, we cannot accurately assess real threats. If the CIA (and the other intelligence agencies) only make objective analyses, the buck will stop at the president, where it always properly should.
Therefore, I see this Plame affair — and the larger matter of the pre-war WMD threat assessment — as a matter of compromised intelligence and an extension of the 30 year war the right has waged against what it thinks is the CIA’s tepid threat analysis. Never mind that the right’s hysterical analyses have always turned out to have been completely wrong.
But then accuracy was never the point because the right takes the opposite approach to the CIA’s proper role. They have always been entirely in favor of the CIA working on behalf of any president who wanted to topple a left wing dictator or stage a coup without congressional knowledge. This is, in their view, the proper role of the CIA — to covertly advance foreign policy on behalf of an executive (of whom they approve) and basically do illegal and immoral dirty work. But they have never valued the intelligence and analysis the CIA produced since it often challenged their preconcieved beliefs and as a result didn’t validate their knee jerk impulse to invade, bomb, obliterate, topple somebody for reasons of ideology or geopolitical power. The CIA’s intelligence often backed up the success of the containment policy that kept us from a major bloody hot war with the commies — and for that they will never be trusted.(See Team B, and the Committee on the Present Danger parts I and II.)
Therefore, the right sees the Plame affair as another example of an inappropriately “independent” CIA refusing to accede to its boss’s wishes. They believe that the CIA exists to provide the president with the documentation he needs to advance his foreign policy goals — and if that includes lying to precipitate a war he feels is needed, then their job is to acquiesce. When you cut away the verbiage, what the right really believes is that the US is justified in invading and occupying any country it likes — it’s just some sissified, cowardly rule ‘o law that prevents us from doing it. The CIA’s job is to smooth the way for the president to do what he wants by keeping the citizen rubes and the allies in line with phony proof that we are following international and domestic laws. (This would be the Straussian method of governance — too bad the wise ones who are running the world while keeping the rest of us entertained with religion and bread and circuses are so fucking lame.)
Back in the day, they used to just admit that they were engaging in Realpolitik, and as disgusting as that is, at least it was more honest than the current crop of neocons who insist that they are righteous and good by advancing democracy and vanquishing evil using undemocratic, illegal means. It makes me miss Kissinger. At least he didn’t sing kumbaya while he was fucking over the wogs.
I have no idea where people who don’t pay much attention to the political scene would come down on this. It may be that they think the government should have a branch that does illegal dirty work. But I suspect they would also think that the president should not be allowed to run a secret foreign policy or stage wars for inscrutable reasons. Indeed, I think most people would find it repugnant if they knew that there are people in government who think the president of the United States has a right to lie to them in order to commit their blood and treasure to a cause or plan that has nothing to do with the one that is stated.
Of course, that’s exactly what happened with Iraq. The right’s greatest challenge now is to get the public to believe that they were lied to for their own good.
Man, cellular laptop cards are great. I’m riding in Paul Hackett’s motorcade and live-blogging over at Swing State Project.
The campaign has momentum and is peaking perfectly, but needs more people. It would be great if you could post a general call for the netroots to get down to Ohio 2nd district. People have been reading about this on the blogs and coming from all over, Philly, Michigan, Florida and a whole helluva lot of netroots people from Ohio. So far, over 7,000 people have donated. Let’s see if we can get 1% to go volunteer for GOTV. We need a few hundred more people and every available Democratic volunteer in the area is already plugged in. Let’s finish the job.
Ask people to call HQ at (513) 735-4310.
It’s a long shot, but if Hackett could pull this out it might be considered the kind of bellweather that Harris Wofford was back in 1991. It could change the media dynamic considerably for ’06.
Wow. Anyone who hasn’t seen this Jean Schmidt interview with David Gregory over at Crooks and Liars needs to check it out.
Let’s just say that if the election turns on which candidate has the most winning personality, Hackett should win in a lanslide. Yikes.
Update: I hope the canvassers are armed with this information as they spread the word this week-end. It may be too late to make much of it, which is too bad. it would be a nice test case of the new libertarian red state Dem vs the religious extremist red state Republican paradigm:
…here’s one fact her side is carefully guarding, knowing only about 10 percent of those registered will vote Tuesday: her extreme views. If voters from places like Mariemont, Anderson Township or Hyde Park knew fully what Schmidt believed, they might sit out the election or switch over for once to a Democrat, especially one like Hackett.
Here’s the backup. During the campaign Schmidt is on leave as president of the Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati. Now, no one should begrudge her that commitment. It’s personal and religious. But does that commitment affect her political judgment and fitness? Second District voters must decide that.
But go to her group’s Web site, www.affirminglife.org/ index.asp, and click around through the many buttons and pages and you’ll learn she and her cohorts abhor living wills. Huh? Isn’t that the one lesson from the Republican exploitation of Terri Schiavo — that we should immediately get willed up? She says no.
Her local Right to Life site to this day says Schiavo was executed. And that you shouldn’t buy Levi jeans or anything Microsoft or Johnson & Johnson baby cream or read The New York Times. And they say no to the promise of embryonic stem cell research that could help our relatives and friends survive diseases and crippling paralysis.
Flat out, Schmidt is a political extremist. Of course, she thinks those fringe views put her in the 2nd District mainstream. I don’t think so, not with the suburban masses or even the man farming a rural field while his wife packs lunches for the kids waiting for their long school bus ride.
No doubt Schmidt will turn out her Right to Life friends on Tuesday. They believe their numbers will be enough for at least a victory.
But the more mainstream voters come to realize she’s a friend of Taft’s and the leader of such a fringe group, they might conclude she’s not Rob Portman, she’s not like them. And putting in a Democrat, especially one who still wears the Marine uniform and has economic success but with colorful, earthy edges, could be the more comfortable choice.
It all comes down to what people know, when they know it and whether they’ll care. We’ll soon know.
It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
I’ve written a lot about “up-is-downism” and “epistemic relativism” and “bizarro world” trying to analyse the Republicans’ alternate reality, wondering whether it comes from a full absorbtion into the field of public relations, a consciously created competing discourse or simple lying with a straight face. All of that is bullshit. It’s a form of mass hysteria —- along the lines of the Salem Witch trials or the audience at an NSynch NSync concert.
Via Jesse at Pandagon,(who will give you the full hilarious run-down) I see that the Cornerites are all a twitter at the new Geena Davis show “Commander In Chief.” They are having little giggle fits at the idea that a woman president would be, like, so cute when she’s negotiating and baking cookies!
Here’s little taste of the more serious side of the discussion from Jonah “Doughy Pant Load” Goldberg:
The idea that a female liberal president would be more “feminine” than Bill Clinton is absurd, laughable, factually untrue. Bill Clinton was weepy, huggy and at all times pain-feeling. He’d wax eloquent on the glories of talk and empathy. At the end of one marathon meeting which accomplished nothing, he stretched out in his chair and said “That was great” as if he was about to light a cigarette. Feminists declared him the first female president. He talked of security not in the sense of blowing up terrorists but of leaving no children behind…And, sad to say, it was so successful that George W. Bush and Karl Rove copied it with their treacly “compassionate conservatism.” It took 9/11 to remind George W. Bush why Republicans are called the Daddy Party.
Actually, I’d heard about that all night meeting too, except I’d heard that at the end of it, he stretched out in his chair and said “that was great — Monica.”
And I believe he lit a cigar if I’m not mistaken.
I don’t actually blame Jonah. With a mother like his it’s hard to see how he could have come out unscathed. But this is just sad. The little guy wrote that whole thing without even realizing what he was revealing about his issues with women — and why Republican males like him hated Bill Clinton.
Crooks and Liars is featuring a rather nutty exchange on Faux news in which it’s posited that al Qaeda set up the poor Brazilian schmuck in the London subway in order to discredit the US and British governments. That’s kooky, all right.
But there’s a lot of that going around, I’m afraid. After quoting from Deborah Orrin’s breathless scoop that Valerie Wilson went to a Springsteen fundraiser for Kerry, Orrin Judd speculates:
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that MoveOn, ActUp, and the rest of them are just CIA fronts.
For those of you who aren’t following the latest line of thinking in wingnuttia, the whole Plame deal was an elaborate scheme by a cabal of evil CIA hippies who were trying to bring the president down. Just ask Senator Pat Roberts if you think I’m kidding.
Joe Conason has a nice piece here about how the right is preparing the ground to slime Pat Fitzgerald. Now that Senator Roberts has narrowed the scope of his interest in the Plame case, I think it’s pretty clear that the little trial balloon about hearings (and my speculation about them granting immunity) was premature. The Dem Senators understood that better than I did — they are keeping the heat on Roberts to hold hearings that he now quite clearly doesn’t want to have. It really didn’t make sense to pre-emptively slime Fitzgerald or haul Rove before the committee. They don’t know what Fitzgerald has. And if I’m not mistaken, the special prosecutor, unlike the Independent Counsel, has no requirement to file a report if there is no indictment.
Therefore, if Fitzgerald doesn’t indict, there is every reason to believe that all we’ll ever find out is that … no law was technically broken. The Republicans have wisely decided to back off at least until they know what they are dealing with. Why make him mad?
But if Fitzgerald does indict somebody — and the spectre of a trial looms — you can bet they’ll be ready to try to bury him.
While I have been engaging in the blogospheric pie fight over the liberal hawks’ approach to national security to some extent, I do think it’s important also to engage in a substantive response to the the DLC on this. Kevin links to a very good article at Democracy Arsenal that challenges the DLC’s overreliance on the military to solve problems. This is a huge issue, particularly in light of the threats we actually face.
I was actually quite stunned to realize that they had signed on so fully to the idea that the GWOT or the G-SAVE or whatever, is a military challenge when quite clearly it is something else entirely. After all we’ve seen from 9/11 to Bali to Madrid to London — and our our ineffectual and impotent performance in Iraq — you would think that even hawks would have done some tweaking of the old superpower handbook.
But they haven’t. And they even went a step further, indicating that criticising the methods that the Bush administration has employed thus far is naive (or vaguely anti-American) when it seems to me that it is vital to publicly reject their approach in order to repair the damage. The Bush administration has employed some catastrophically bad tactics and methods that have destroyed our credibility and our moral authority — two things that are essential in repelling terrorism, attracting allies and keeping foreign enemies from overreaching. And in squandering those things the Bush administration has created recruiting propaganda for the terrorists and probably ruined any chance the liberal hawks might have had to test their Wilsonian experiment in exporting democracy.
First, the Bush administration continues to this day to tell the entire world that our intelligence services are completely untrustworthy. By invading a country without provocation, failing to find the WMD which would have justified the preemption doctrine, failing to prepare for the post war and then blaming the CIA and the state departments for that failure, they are saying to the world that the greatest military power the world has ever known is entirely incompetent. It leads enemies to overreach and it leads friends to be wary of letting us take the lead.
The only thing that can set this right is to publicly hold the Bush administration accountable for its politicising of the war for its own ends. To hush it up is to make us less safe, not more.
Second, by using torture and humiliation tactics we have shown the Muslim world that we are uncivilized. This is not just a matter, as Will Marshall said, of us not being grown-ups and undertanding that bad apples will blow off steam. It is clear that these things were ordered at the highest levels. And, as it has been reported today in even greater detail than before, there was a huge amount of dissension within the military about using these tactics for a variety of reasons. The primary concern for them is that it puts our own troops in danger, both morally and physically.
Marshall says that we have no credibility on torture unless we also condemn the acts of the barbaric insurgency in Iraq. This is precisely the opposite of the truth. Civilized people take for granted that anyone who blows up innocent people is barbaric. It does not have to be individually condemned. The behavior of the insurgency is not our responsiblity. The tactics and methods of the US Military are. It is incumbent upon us to take specific note of our own people who do barbaric things and show the world that we condemn it in the harshest possible terms. We cannot hope to export our democratic freedoms and demonstrate their benefits unless we hold ourselves to this higher standard — and exporting our democratic freedoms is what these liberal hawks so fervently believe we must do.
So, they are defeating their own stated purpose of keeping the country safe by allowing the Bush administration to get away with exploding the myth that US intelligence is virtually omnipotent and possibly emboldening would be enemies.
They are defeating their own stated purpose of defending the military, by refusing to stand with those within it who objected to the way the Bush administration ignored its rules and regulations.
They are defeating their own stated purpose of spreading democracy by refusing to demonstrate our system’s higher moral and ethical standards to people who are skeptical of our power.
If we are looking to the DLC for smart thinking on national security, we’d better look elsewhere. In all these ways the policies of the DLC hawks have already failed even by their own standards.
Atrios points today to this article in the Village Voice by Rick Perlstein which I encourage you to read. It’s short and to the point. I think Perlstein has really gotten to the heart of why the Democratic party is having such a difficult problem getting through to people; we’re not staying true true to our long term vision.
However, I’d like to draw your attention to an interview this week with Perlstein in this week’s In These Times in which he discusses his book “the Stockticker and the SuperJumbo” which is only 8 bucks and is filled with interesting insights not just from him but other writers and thinkers in response to his ideas. You get a very real sense of the outlines of the debate within the party.
I’d like to discuss one thing in particular that Perlstein notes in the book and the interview and which I touched upon in my post earlier this week about Will Marshall and the DLC. I took issue with Marshall’s point that liberals had been traumatized by the “protest politics” of the 60’s to such an extent that they could not rationally deal with national security — particularly the military. He characterized this as a feature of the grassroots liberal activists which I disagreed with because the “Move-On” left is quite a diverse group and it’s certainly intergenerational. I do not believe that the grassroots were traumatized by the protest politics of the 60’s — although I’m sure there are some among us who were. We are a large group.
However, there is one group of Democrats who most certainly were traumatized by the protest politics of the 60’s. Unfortunately, contrary to what Marshall set forth in his piece, the Democrats who are still carrying around that baggage are now the leaders of the Democratic party — and particularly the leaders of the DLC. Indeed, their entire political careers have been forged in response to their early radicalism and subsequent political losses in 1972 and beyond.
The rest of us have indeed “moved on,” going with the flow of changing political tides and reassessing our priorities as most people do as they go through life. But the people who came of age as political leaders in 1972 through the Reagan losses have been forever chastened by their youthful enthusiasm and as a result have an emotional aversion to bold, confrontational politics. Perlstein says:
The trauma of the generation of people who are running the Democratic Party was being blindsided by the political failures of left-of-center boldness. If you look at a lot of the most resonant and stalwart centrists and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democrats, for a lot of them, their political coming-of-age was being blindsided by conservatism. For Bill Clinton, it was losing the governorship in 1980. For Joe Lieberman, it was losing a congressional race in 1980. For Evan Bayh, the chair of the DLC, it was seeing his dad lose his Senate seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. But the formative traumas of my generation of Democrats—and I’m 35—have been the failures of left-of-center timidity. So there really is a structural generational battle among Democrats. People of a certain age are terrified that the electorate is going to associate them with the excesses of the ’60s, but most voters are too young to remember that stuff. The Republicans keep trying to paint the Democrats as the party of the hippies and punks who burn the flag.
I’m a baby boomer myself, although I’m 10 years younger than the vanguard leaders of the 60’s, and I certainly understood the tremendous frustration that we felt as Reaganism exploded across the 80’s. I was deeply demoralized for a long time and I supported the DLC’s attempt to reposition the party away from sectarian social issues to a more mainstream middle class economic focus. What I didn’t count on was that while we settled into our grown-up middle aged persona, the right wing was going to have a doozy of a mid-life crisis and hurl themselves into true radicalism. It was a failure of imagination of epic proportions on my part.
But when they impeached the president on trumped up charges, I learned. And I realized that as you fight the political battles of the day, all you have to hang on to are the core beliefs that brought you into the arena in the first place.
As Perlstein demonstrates in his book, the key to long term political success is to have big things you stand for over the long haul. People understand different political realitites. Life happens. But they want to know what you care deeply about and what you want to accomplish even when you haven’t a chance in hell of actually accomplishing it any time soon. Perlstein calls it laying down “markers:”
It’s a gambling term. A marker basically is a commitment to pay. In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit would say, “that guy holds my marker.” It’s something you can’t back out of, on pain of getting your knees broken. The marker that Republicans have is that everyone who runs for office has to sign a pledge—it’s enforced by their own knee-breaker, Grover Norquist—that on pain of political death they’re not going to raise taxes.
My thesis is that a commitment that doesn’t waver adds value by the very fact of the commitment. The evidence is that even though the individual initiatives that make up the conservative project poll quite poorly, they’ve managed to succeed simply because everyone knows what the Republicans stand for. And the most profound exit poll finding in the last election had nothing to do with moral values, it was all the people who said that they disagreed with the Republicans on individual issues, but they voted for George W. Bush anyway because they knew what he stood for.
I think this is spot on. And it applies particularly to times in which we have the strange political freedom in which to operate without the responsibility of governance. We do not have to appease the pork barrel needs of legislators. We don’t have to massage corporate donors. We can, instead, use the opportunity to advance ideas that have no particular hope of passage but that illustrate what we stand for.
And we don’t have to do it merely by submitting ten point plans and stirring manifestos, although that’s certainly legitimate. What we should do is promote big ideas and attach those ideas to the Democratic party across the spectrum of political activity.
Perlstein sugggests that every Democrat put on his or her website that they support “guaranteed health insurance for all Americans.” Simple and sweet. Do we all agree that every American should have guaranteed health care? I think so. Should we say it out loud, so that the American people know that we support guaranteed health insurance for all Americans? Uh, yes.
I would also say that there are other ways to express our long term committments to more abstract ideals, like a right to privacy. When we question Judge Roberts we should make it clear what the stakes are in that battle. We shouldn’t just talk about Roe, although that’s important, we should put Roe in the context of all the other intrusions people will suffer both by the government and corporations if we don’t acknowledge this as settled law and fundamental to our liberties. We are going to lose this nomination battle, but it is a good forum for staking out a long term position on privacy rights vis a vis everything from the Patriot Act to birth control. The libertarian strain that guys like Paul Hackett represents needs to be woven into our agenda for the long haul so that we can continue to fight for the freedom to be left alone by religious extremists and zealous police agencies alike.
I agree with Matt Yglesias that this is also a good opportunity for the Democrats to stand together and just say no. We don’t have to trash the guy, if that’s something that’s unpalatable, but we certainly don’t have to allow any free votes for a very right wing ideologue either. Unlike social security, we will not win the battle, but we stake out a position much more strongly if we hold together as a caucus instead of allowing free “gimmes” to Senators who want to appear above the fray. Nobody should be above the fray.
Tactics and strategies are, by necessity, subject to changing circumstances. Our goals and aspirations shouldn’t be. Thinking big is what progressives do, and we pay a price for that at times when people adjust to progress. But we cannot survive if people don’t know what we stand for. We need to take every opportunity to make that known and then stick to it even when it’s impossible to achieve in the next election cycle or two.
The Democratic party apparatus for a variety of reasons have become risk averse. We in the grassroots have to help them see that this is not wise. It means that we are going to be perceived by some as intemperate and unpleasant at times. But that’s ok. As Perlstein says:
We do have a timid bunch of folks in the Democratic Party, but that doesn’t mean all is lost. Timid and cautious people can often express their timidity and cautiousness by being swept up in a tide. We’ve got to provide the tide and let them surf it.
Update: Publius at legal Fiction makes a similar point about the “60’s trauma” in this excellent post.