Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Tears Of A Klein

It turns out that Joe Klein is even thicker that I took him for. Josh Marshall put out a call to find cases where Klein explained his bizarre theory that social security would have to be privatized because we have moved from an industrial age to an information age.

Google has oodles of cites and none of them make any damned sense whatsoever. Here are a couple you might enjoy:

Joe Klein

Oh, it changed dramatically. Welfare, the Welfare Reform Programme, which I was opposed to, I was wrong, it has been a tremendous success and I’ll tell you why. Because Clinton had a coherent governing philosophy, which Tony Blair shares to a certain extent, which is that in the Information Age, you don’t deliver public services the same way you did in the Industrial Age. You don’t rule out huge bureaucracies, what you do is give targeted cash payments. He gave targeted cash payments to the working poor, so that if you were a mother on welfare, after, you know, after eight years of Clinton, you got $5,000 more a year, you kept your health benefit and your children got health benefits. That was no small thing. If you were middle class or below, you got college tuition tax credits, 10 million Americans take advantage of this. This is a social programme on a scale that dwarfs the GI Bill of Rights, which everybody speaks of as one of the great American social triumphs.

Charles Wheeler: Doesn’t dwarf the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson does it?

Joe Klein: The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

Oh my, I’ll bet that started a clatter of teaspoons in Georgtown, didn’t it? What a ballsy, no-nonsense, manly statement, and him a tried and true liberal, don’t you know. (And after he wrote that nasty book about Clinton and the black women, too.)

Yet, for some reason I still don’t quite understand why exactly in the information age you don’t deliver public services the same way you did in the industrial age. If he’s talking about automatic deposit and e-filing your taxes, then I guess he’s right. But I still don’t see what these targeted cash payments or tuition tax credits have to do with the information age or why they are so superior and don’t contribute to the social irresponsibility among the darkies … er … I mean “those at the very bottom.” (And is it even slightly believable that it dwarfs the GI Bill? is he talking about unadjusted 1953 dollars?)

Here he takes another stab at it:

Clinton did come to the presidency with a coherent, long term political philosophy and purpose. To a very great extent–a surprising extent–he lived up to it. I know because I was there and I was one of those who was involved in the formulating of this new philosophy, which has been called The Third Way. There was a general understanding that the Democratic Party had gone off the deep end and needed to come back. Clinton once told me that when he was hoping to be Mario Cuomo’s vice president, the job of the next president is going to be to move us from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

Government was, and very much still remains, the last of our major institutions that stuck in the Industrial Age, where the paradigm is top-down, centralized command and control, assembly line, standardization, and one size fits all.

In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that–the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.

The government has to be more like a computer. Bureaucracies have to be more flexible and our social safety net has to reflect that because people have more information so they have to have more choices about where they get their health care and where they put their retirement money. Huh?

I can’t find anywhere where Klein actually explains why we need to have all these choices about our safety net or why having more information compels it. Indeed, as Josh Marshall pointed out earlier, it is counterintuitive. In a world in which people are asked to take many more chances in their careers, where pensions really are a relic of the past, where health care can be yanked from beneath you in a moments notice, it seems to me that government guarantees of basic security are more important than ever.

Klein’s DLC catechism has all the markings of someone who jumped on a sexy trend when he was younger and hasn’t realized the fashion has changed. There is no there, there. He’s like one of those e-venture capitalists of the late 90’s spewing fast talking bullshit about “new organizational paradigms where knowledge is defined in terms of potential for action as distinguished from information and its more intimate link with performance.” In other words, gibberish.

It was fashionable for one brief period to think that turning government into a collection of kewl, outsourced, totally, like, stand alone pods of individualized data collection and service modules, but most people sobered up sometime in early 2000. It was always crap.

Clinton did what he could to survive, reframe the Democratic image and move the country forward while under monumental pressure from the opposition. I do not blame him for doing what he did. But I have never understood that this discredited e-commerce comic book version of government was his vision. If it was, I imagine his enthusiasm has cooled by this time. Crashing stock markets and huge crony capitalist boondoggles generally make intelligent people think twice about utopian capitalist wet dreams. Klein doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

And, by the way, who knew that Joe Klein was personally involved in formulating the “third way?” Funny, I thought he was just a bad journalist and a worse novelist. I had no idea he was such an open Democratic partisan. Frankly, I think he would have been more helpful to the cause if he’d simply shut his gossiping, moralizing, judgmental trap during the administration.

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Do What You Can

Democrats.com has a nice form to e-mail your Senators to filibuster the bankruptcy bill. They are scheduled to vote tomorrow. This is a seriously egregious bill that no Democrat (Joe Biden) should back under any circumstances, but it looks like it will pass this time unless somebody filibusters.

The most amazing thing about this is that while they are drastically reducing the ability of people to get a fresh start and seize more of their assets, they are also going to allow the credit card companies to charge usury rates to these very same people. It’s like something out of Dickens.

Click here if you have a few minutes, or make a call if you have more than a few minutes and make your wishes known.

Update: Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged pointed me to No More Mr Nice Blog’s interesting insight into Charles “Let ‘Em Eat Pancakes” Grassley’s view toward Christian charity:

Grassley now:

A national group of Christian lawyers is appealing to church leaders to join them in lobbying against the bankruptcy reform bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.

The lawyers say the legislation runs contrary to the forgiveness of debt and charity required by the Bible….

In response, Grassley said Congress could not be bound by biblical mandates because “the Constitution does not provide for a theocracy.”

“I can’t listen to Christian lawyers because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population,” Grassley said.

–Des Moines Register, 3/4/05

*****

Grassley then:

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY: … It’s odd that one of those — there has been some condemnation of him because of his religious beliefs. It’s a sad commentary that John Ashcroft’s Christian religious beliefs can’t be considered an asset in the same vein that Joseph Lieberman’s religious faith was considered an asset during the last election.

–discussing the pending confirmation of John Ashcroft, PBS NewsHour, 1/18/01

On Friday, June 19, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act, S.1244. The new law will protect tithing and charitable giving under the federal bankruptcy code.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced the legislation last year….

In addition to protecting from federal bankruptcy courts the donations made to a church through tithing or to a tax-exempt charity through an established pattern of giving, the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act also restores the right of debtors to tithe and give charitably after declaring bankruptcy under Chapter 13….

–Grassley press release

On June 12, 1995, the Senate initiated debate on the CDA [Communications Decency Act]…

The entire Senate debate, spearheaded by Senator Exon and Republicans Dan Coats and Charles Grassley, was informed by the sensibilities of the religious right. The Senators read letters from the Christian Coalition and from Bruce Taylor [of the National Law Center for Children and Families] into the record….

–“The Religious Right and Internet Censorship” by Jonathan Wallace

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Read This

Garance Franke-Ruta has a wonderful, must read piece up about the ways in which the left and right blogosphere work. When it comes to scalp hunting, the right is (as always) professional and funded. And once again the usual suspects are present:

Scratch the surface and the same names turn up in each scandal, revealing the events of mid-February to have been part of an ongoing and coordinated proxy war by Republican political operatives on the so-called liberal media, conducted through the vast, unmonitored loophole of the Internet.

[…]

But success bred change. Along has come a new group of bloggers who aren’t mere “citizens” at all. On the left side, some of these became deeply enmeshed with political parties, “527s,” and campaign advocacy groups — and are now a new generation of no-holds-barred partisans and major party fund-raisers, the liberal equivalent of George W. Bush’s “Rangers” and “Pioneers.”

On the right, a number of these bloggers were already political operatives or worked at long-standing movement institutions before taking up residence online. They are, at best, the intellectual heirs of L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and Reed Irvine, who founded the ultraconservative, media-hounding nonprofit organization Accuracy In Media (AIM) in 1969 as part of the first generation of post–Barry Goldwater right-wing institutions. At worst, they’re the protégés of conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and dirty-tricks master Morton Blackwell, who has tutored conservative activists since 1965, most recently mocking John Kerry at the Republican national convention by distributing Band-Aids with purple hearts on them.

Which brings us back to Jordan. He was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives. Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon” with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools” designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.”

Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “He advocated that people write from their experience — and not necessarily as conservatives,” a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told “a conservative firefighter” that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter — and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. “We’re definitely in serious trouble,” said the Democratic attendee.

The tactics Krempasky promotes are directly descended from those advocated by the late Reed Irvine of AIM, whose major funder was, for the past two decades, Richard Mellon Scaife. “Many bloggers and blog readers might not even know who Reed Irvine was, nor understand the debt we owe him as conservatives,” Krempasky wrote upon Irvine’s passing last year. “But that debt is tremendous.” In the late ’80s, Irvine had started the campaign to “Can Dan” Rather, coining the phrase “Rather Biased.” Last fall, Krempasky was operating the main anti-Rather site, Rathergate.com, and using Irvine’s slogan as a rallying cry to organize a vast letter-writing and e-mailing campaign “to contact CBS and express themselves,” as he put it in an interview with Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA, an activist Web site founded by Texas Republicans and now owned by Bruce Eberle (no relation), the proprietor of a conservative direct-mail firm. “Conservatives have operated through alternative media for 40 years, direct mail being the first one,” Krempasky told me, sitting in the food court of the Ronald Reagan International Building as the CPAC wound down. “As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left.”

Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for — again, the name pops up — GOPUSA and has written for AIM about “the Bush-bashing media.” Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, “a Republican community weblog” registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name “Tacitus.” The goal of RedState.org? “[T]o unite … voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism” in service of the “construction of a Republican majority.”

Just read the whole thing. And then come back and we’ll get Zephyr Teachout on the horn and get on that blogging ethics thing right away. I feel very confident that the right is going to be very happy to sign on. And then we can all sing Kumbaya and play Yahtzee.

Clearly the right blogosphere is more professional and more sophisticated than the left. They have fully incorporated it into their noise machine and added it to their bag of dirty tricks. We, on the other hand, are becoming adept internet detectives and clearing houses for citizen action. They are top down, we are grassroots. They are party apparatchiks, we are a vibrant political constituency in our own right. I’ll put my money on us for the long term. Like their Leninist mentors, their edifice will fall of its own weight.

But in the meantime, I wonder how much more of these phony blogs are out there? Maybe this is a job for DKOS-CSI.

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Seinfeld Reruns

I missed Press The Meat yesterday because it was interrupted for the LA marathon, so I didn’t have the dubious pleasure of seeing Joe Klein make my point about the DLC being an anachronism — or have the real pleasure of seeing Paul Krugman agree with me. Not that Klein is necessarily DLC but he represents the ossified views that took hold in the 90’s. When he starts using tech boom jargon, you know that he’s still lost in a haze of Monica’s thong and Pets.com.

MR. JOE KLEIN: Well, it’s kind of amazing and somewhat amusing to see the Republicans so much on the defensive on this issue right now. It’s an unusual circumstance. I agree with Paul in that private accounts have nothing to do with solvency and solvency is the issue. I disagree with Paul because I think private accounts a terrific policy and that in the information age, you’re going to need different kinds of structures in the entitlement area than you had in the industrial age. But it is very hard to do that kind of change under these political circumstances where you have the parties at such loggerheads.

I’d love to know what the logic is for his statement that we should have private accounts because we are in the information age as opposed to the industrial age. What, because we can get our account statements by e-mail? That is nothing but warmed over techno-babble you would have heard at Comdex circa 1997. He’s badly in need of an upgrade.

I wrote below about the DLC, but Klein shows that many in the elite media are probably suffering from the same problem. Obviously, Paul Krugman sees the real issue:

MR. KRUGMAN: I think it’s just wildly up in the air. I mean, you know, there’s enormous turmoil on the Democratic side trying to figure out–there’s a lot of unity but there’s a lot of turmoil about what the party stands for. And I just don’t know. I mean, I can’t–I dread the prospect of a Clinton run just because I think that would be–it would be an attempt to recreate the politics of the ’90s when you had Bill Clinton, who was a president who managed to sort of triangulate. And I think we ought to have an election that’s really about what what kind of country we’re going to be and we won’t have that if it’s Hillary Clinton running.

…

MR. KLEIN: Paul, I have a question for you: What was it about the peace and prosperity of the eight years of the Clinton administration that you didn’t like?

MR. KRUGMAN: No, I liked the way the country ran.

MR. KLEIN: I think that he had a real governing philosophy. It wasn’t triangulation. It was moving us from the industrial age to the information age, and that’s where the Democratic Party is going to have to move…

MR. KRUGMAN: There’s a radical right…

MR. KLEIN: …if it wants to have any role in American politics.

MR. KRUGMAN: There’s a radical right challenge to America as we know it that’s under way, and I think the Democrats–I mean, maybe Hillary Clinton can do this. I’m actually not opposed to her, right? But they need to make clear that they are going to turn back that tide, not blur it.

MR. KLEIN: The answer to a radical right challenge isn’t a reactionary left response.

No the answer is to keep making the same mistakes over and over again, apparently.

This is the essence of the argument within the Democratic Party right now. We either acknowledge the nature of the opposition and gather our courage to fight it with an affirmative defense of our beliefs and a willingness to take the fight to the Republicans or we continue with a constant tweaking of issues and small bore accomodation in the hopes that we can eke out a tiny win election to election, the latter of which I would find a dubious proposition what with the questionable “wins” we keep seeing in states run by Republicans.

Here’s the problem. The other side is waging a battle for total political dominance. They are willing to do anything to achieve it from cheating at elections to government propaganda to spending billions on a travelling political spectacle to entertain the folks. We will not defeat them with pocket protector arguments about the information age (although if anyone were qualified to make such an argument it would be Paul Krugman, the quintessential economist geek.) I suspect the fact that Krugman sees the big picture while Klein is still floating on a cloud of Seinfeldian nostalgia speaks more to the fact that Krugman famously does not hob knob with the in crowd while Klein famously lives for it.

As Ari Berman points out in his article in The Nation, the DLC and the allegedly liberal media are one big circle jerk.

Update: Josh Marshall is also curious about Klein’s bizarre statement that private accounts are required for this new information age. He’s scouting for some evidence that Klein wasn’t just blowing smoke because he didn’t have a clue about the subject. I’m pretty sure he won’t find it.

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Our New UN Ambassador

At a 1994 panel discussion sponsored by the World Federalist Association Bolton claimed “there’s no such thing as the United Nations,” and stated ”if the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Bolton on China/Taiwan: “…diplomatic recognition of Taiwan would be just the kind of demonstration of U.S. leadership that the region needs and that many of its people hope for. The notion that China would actually respond with force is a fantasy.”AEI web site, 8/9/99

Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “The Senate vote on the CTBT actually marks the beginning of a new realism on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and their global proliferation… the Senate vote is also an unmistakable signal that America rejects the illusionary protections of unenforceable treaties.” The Jerusalem Post, 10/18/99

North Korea: “A sounder U.S. policy would start by making it clear to the North that we are indifferent to whether we ever have “normal” diplomatic relations with it, and that achieving that goal is entirely in their interests, not ours. We should also make clear that diplomatic normalization with the U.S. is only going to come when North Korea becomes a normal country.” Los Angeles Times, 09/22/99

Sen. Jesse Helms on John Bolton: “John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon.” Speech at American Enterprise Institute, 01/11/01

Past Scandals: As a young lawyer Bolton in 1978 Bolton helped Sen. Helms’ National Congressional Club form Jefferson Marketing “as a vehicle to supply candidates with such services as advertising and direct mail without having to worry about the federal laws preventing PACs, like the Congressional Club, from contributing more than $5,000 per election to any one candidate’s campaign committee” (Legal Times). He later defended the club against charges from the FEC that led to a $10,000 fine in 1986. As a reward for his service Sen. Helms “helped the career of John Bolton” by supporting him for his Department of Justice and State positions (Legal Times).

At the Justice Department, Bolton acted as the Department’s “no man” refusing to provide congressional committees documents on Supreme Court nominees William Renquist, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. He also refused to provide information, including his personal notes regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, and aided congressional Republicans who attempted to stop investigations of Contra drug smuggling.

After leaving the State Department under the first Bush Administration, Bolton headed the National Policy Forum which “reportedly pursued money from overseas” for the RNC (Los Angeles Times). The NPF defaulted on a $1.3 billion loan guaranteed by Hong Kong businessman Ambrous Young, whose lawyer claimed his willingness to absorb the debt was “contingent upon Mr. Young getting something in return,” namely “business opportunities.” The Taiwanese government “served as an intermediary for a $25,000 contribution” to the NPF(Washington Post). At his confirmation hearing Bolton acknowledged that he had received $30,000 from the Taiwanese government for writing a series of papers.

At his confirmation hearing Bolton defended his ability to separate his personal beliefs from his professional duties: “Of all the different jobs I’ve had in government, I’ve never had any allegations that I wasn’t following the policies that were set.” Actually, Bolton ignored administration policy while in the Reagan Justice Department when he held an unauthorized press conference lashing out at special prosecutors. His comments drew sharp criticism from the White House when spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called Bolton “intemperate and contentious.”

I think an intemperate and contentious UN Ambassador (who believes there is no such thing as the UN) is just what the doctor ordered, don’t you? Another excellent choice. I’m only sorry that Ted Bundy isn’t available to head up the FBI. I understand he was a Republican.

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Crybaby Casey

Kevin Drum takes issue with the assertion that Bob Casey was denied his speaking spot because he refused to endorse the ticket as Atrios and I both posted yesterday. I think he’s wrong.

Kevin cites a number of Democrats at the time who vaguely implied that Casey was axed because of his pro-life views, but none (except that clown Bob Beckel) that come out and say so. He concludes that it wasn’t because of his pro-life view per se, but because he wanted to deliver a pro-life speech.

The truth is that Bob Casey was the biggest crybaby the Party has ever known and he personally perpetuated this story for his own purposes. This story was settled long ago by Michael Crowley who investigated this a lot closer to the time these events actually happened (1996) and put the story to rest. The Republicans have kept it going because it’s such a nice example of Democratic intolerance. But it just ain’t so.

You’ll recall that Casey, a Democrat, was denied a speaking slot at his party’s 1992 convention, allegedly, as The New York Times reported as recently as August 25, “because of his opposition to abortion rights.” Now, as both parties bid up the stakes in the tolerance wars, the GOP has been using the purported muzzling of Casey to bludgeon the Democrats–and getting a free pass from the news media. “This is not like the Democratic convention in 1992, where the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, one of the biggest states in the nation, was prevented from speaking because he’s pro-life,” Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour said of his party’s tightly controlled show in San Diego.

Since leaving office in 1995, Casey himself has rehearsed the tale ad nauseam. “The raging national debate about tolerance on the issue of abortion was ignited,” Casey wrote in the August 23 Wall Street Journal, when “the party denied me … the right to speak because I am pro-life and planned to say so from the convention podium.” In Chicago, Casey delivered an impassioned pro-life speech Monday, railing against his party’s imposed conformity.

But the story is not so simple. According to those who actually doled out the 1992 convention speaking slots, Casey was denied a turn for one simple reason: his refusal to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket. “It’s just not factual!” stammers James Carville, apoplectic over Casey’s claims. “You’d have to be idiotic to give a speaking role to a person who hadn’t even endorsed you.” “Why are you doing this to me?” moans Paul Begala, who, with Carville, managed two Casey campaigns before joining Clinton’s team in 1992. “I love Bob Casey, but my understanding was that the dispute was not about his right-to-life views, it was about the Clinton-Gore ticket.”

The man best able to explain the decision was the late Ron Brown. He addressed the topic during a roundtable discussion of Clinton campaign veterans (published as Campaign for President: The Managers Look at ’92). He explained:

We decided the convention would be totally geared towards the general election campaign, towards promoting our nominee and that everybody who had the microphone would have endorsed our nominee. That was a rule, everybody understood it, from Jesse Jackson to Jerry Brown…. The press reported incorrectly that Casey was denied access to the microphone because he was not pro-choice. He was denied access to the microphone because he had not endorsed Bill Clinton. I believe that Governor Casey knew that. I had made it clear to everybody. And yet it still got played as if it had to do with some ideological split. It had nothing to do with that.

Indeed, the more one examines the version offered by the Democratic hacks, the more compelling it seems. Casey’s claims to a speaking slot were tenuous from the outset. He was about to retire from politics, and convention speeches are usually allotted to those running for re-election. “It wasn’t like he was going to be on there and they said, `Well, you’re off now,’ or something,” Carville says. Besides, Casey repeatedly bashed Clinton during the primaries, calling Clinton’s success “very tragic.” Less than three months before the ’92 convention, he urged, “Convention rules provide for the selection of an alternative candidate. Let’s pick a winner.” Why would Clinton invite him to speak?

Casey doesn’t dispute that he refused to endorse Clinton. Instead, he notes that Jerry Brown and his sister, Kathleen, also did not endorse, yet were both allowed to speak. Theirs, however, were special cases: Jerry Brown had won several hundred delegates in the primaries, and under convention rules was allowed to speak because his name was placed in nomination. Kathleen Brown, then a candidate for governor of California, was one of the party’s highest-profile women (and, though she didn’t endorse Clinton, she didn’t endorse her own brother, either). Even a reluctant Jesse Jackson was coaxed into backing Clinton in exchange for his speaking slot. Furthermore, a slew of pro-life Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley Jr., Senators John Breaux and Howell Heflin, and five governors, did address the delegates in 1992. Though the speakers didn’t dwell on abortion, party officials say they weren’t barred from mentioning the issue.

Casey, for his part, offers little evidence for his version beyond his unswayable conviction that the party is out to get him. “I’m sure they were chagrined that I didn’t endorse the ticket,” he says. “But the overriding reason was that I was going to go up there and make the pro-life case.” As he tells it, on July 2, 1992, he wrote to Ron Brown, then the party chairman, and on July 13 to Ann Richards, the chairwoman of the delegation, asking to give a pro-life speech at the convention. He never heard from either one.

Casey also sought to speak against the platform when it was presented for a vote. This wouldn’t have entailed a prime-time speech. But in response all he received was a copy of a letter sent by the convention’s general counsel to its parliamentarian, explaining that, according to platform committee rules, his request was “out of order.” Casey found the perfunctory dismissal demeaning. He calls it “the kind of letter they might have sent Lyndon LaRouche.”

Casey’s claim that he fell victim to an orchestrated campaign to silence his pro-life views has never been proven and, based on the available evidence, isn’t very persuasive. Its currency stems mostly from his indefatigable promulgation of it. Yet the media have accepted the story at face value. At the very least they should be aware that, in so doing, they are playing into Casey’s–and the Republicans’–hands.

Here’s what Bill Clinton had to say in “My Life” about the incident:

Governor Bob Casey, whom I admired for his tenacity in running three times before he won, had been very critical of me. He was strongly anti-abortion. As he struggled with his own life-threatening health problems, the issue became more and more important to him and he had a hard time supporting pro-choice candidates.

—

There was [also] a minor flap when Ron brown refused to let governor Bob Casey speak to the convention, not because he wanted to speak against abortion but because he wouldn’t agree to endorse me. I was inclined to let Casey talk, because I liked him, respected the convictins of pro-life Democrats, and thought we could get alot of them to vote for us on other issues and on my pledge to make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” But Ron was adamant. We could disagree on issues, he said, but no one should get the microphone who whasn’t committed to victory in November. I respected the discipline with which he had built the party, and I deferred to his judgment.

It’s clear to me that rather than being denied a speaking slot because he wanted to talk about abortion, Bob Casey (Zell Miller Jr) was denied a speaking spot because he refused to endorse a pro-choice candidate for the Democratic nomination. Who is the intolerant one here? And it sounds to me as if Clinton was ready to do a little Sistah Soljah-ing with a Casey speech but since Casey had been extremely unsupportive, Brown decided to pull his chain. I see no reason to disbelieve this. Casey was behaving like a spoiled ass and they decided not to reward him for it. Good for them. It was the most successful convention we ever had.

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Just Say No

Atrios wisely points out that all this babble about cutting a deal to pre-fund social security even without the private accounts is nonsense. Holy Joe was on late Edition this morning moaning dolefully about how we must Do Something because, oh my, social security was in terrible trouble. And last night on Chris Matthews everyone very smugly agreed that the Democrats had to eventually come together with Republicans and craft a compromise that Bush (that clever devil) would then take credit for as he, in his awesome shrewd brilliance, always does. Norah O’Donnell was veritably gushing at how perfectly Bush will have played it. (He’s so hot!)

I call bullshit on all of this. Atrios also links to Max Sawicky who also calls bullshit by pointing out what should be evident to any sentient being on the planet by now. THERE IS NO MARGIN IN COMPROMISING WITH REPUBLICANS!!! They lie. They cheat. And for everyone but Joementum a big old smooch on the lips isn’t going to be enough to cover up the inevitable stab in the back.

I sincerely hope that any talk right now about compromise is merely poker playing because if it isn’t we are well and truly screwed. It is key that all of us on the left keep up the pressure. We have to balance out the pressure from the business interests that are going to be putting the big squeeze on these people. Gotta let ’em know which side their bread is buttered on.

Someday, when crazy people aren’t in charge, we will revisit the possible social security shortfall in 2042. Right now, we should just shut this bastard down. It’s our best chance in decades to take the momentum away from these people and we should not flinch.

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Confessions Of An Old New Democrat

Armando over on Kos has an interesting discussion going about the future of the DLC and why we can’t just all get along. He cites Ari Berman’s article in The Nation in which the DLC is portrayed as an organization that is more than a little bit frayed around the edges — while the term “New Democrat” still provides some cover in regions that require some distance from “regular” Dems (e.g. latte swilling, volvo driving, NY Times reading assholes like me.) Except that until fairly recently I was a card carrying New Democrat myself.

I think perhaps that people have either blocked from their memories or were too young to remember the impetus for the DLC in the first place. By 1988, it really seemed as if the Democratic Party might not ever gain the presidency again, and it wasn’t unreasonable to think so. We had had our asses kicked hugely every election since 1968, with the exception of Jimmy Carter who barely pulled out a win even after Richard Nixon had just been forced to resign in disgrace. And the congress was hardly a bastion of progressivism — a large number of Senators and congressmen were old school Democrats who were far more in sync with the modern Republicans and many of them stayed with the party after 1968 simply to preserve their seniority and committee assignments. The Democrats had not been functioning as a majority party for quite some time and we were becoming desperate.

The DLC came along and started making interesting sounds about new strategies and market based policies that sounded fresh and interesting. I recall reading various articles in the late 80’s in the usual places like TNR that seemed to me to be in the tradition of FDR-like experimentation. I was intrigued by the idea of trying out new ways to achieve our goals. Our rhetoric was stale and ineffective and I was longing for something different. The energy was all on the other side and I was willing to entertain new thinking to try to keep the Republicans from doing …. what they have done anyway. I thought the DLC was devilishly clever to do an end run around the Republicans and I was very interested in the prospect of co-opting their rhetoric and turning their own solutions back on them. I never bought their tactic of “distancing” themselves from Democratic interest groups but it was never very explicit in those days. It’s only recently that I’ve heard them making Stalinesque purge noises.

Mostly though, I resigned myself to continuing to lose for the foreseeable future. When a colleague said to me in 1991 that he thought Bush was out, I literally laughed in his face. It was unimaginable. If we were gong to lose anyway, I thought we might as well try to move in a new direction.

And then along came Clinton and the deck got scrambled big time. First and foremost, I think Democrats were simply dazzled to see a candidate garner such excitement after years and years of dull technocratic candidacies. We baby boomer Democrats had been waiting for our Jack Kennedy our whole lives, you see, and when they showed that film at the Democratic convention we couldn’t resist the supernatural thrill of seeing Jack reach out his hand from the past and anoint Bill. The unbelievable possibility that he might be able to unseat an incumbent Republican made everybody set aside all their differences and just enjoy the moment.

And Clinton was a bit of a Democratic Rorschach test. His history and baby boomer status led liberals to believe he was one of them and his openness to centrist and market based ideas made moderates think he was one of them. He had been president of the DLC but he had a way with African American voters and his wife was a feminist and on and on. In many ways he represented the whole baby boomer enchilada. We all saw in him what we wanted to see.

I saw him as an innovative, modern thinker who was willing to try new things. I bought into the DLC line that we could move toward the center of gravity and that would force the Republicans to move to the center as well. Indeed, the DLC strategy depended upon the Republicans acting in good will, out of principle and back in the day, they used to. Even in 1990 a deal to raise taxes was forged between centrist Dems and moderate Republicans. It wasn’t exactly the Great Society, but it showed that some positive bipartisan action could be taken and I was willing to believe that a new coalition of moderates could work together to forge some positive programs. I thought it was a way to bring ourselves back from the brink.

Clinton survived an unprecedented onslaught of character assassination and managed to govern effectively under the circumstances. But he also exposed the great weakness in the DLC strategy. The modern Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, saw any accommodation for weakness and went for the jugular. They had no use for bi-partisanship and for every step we took toward the middle they simply moved the goalposts. They had declared political war and we still thought we were having a friendly intramural game. It took me much too long to understand the way the game was now being played and I was so distracted by the scandal mongering that I failed to see that governance and results were now beside the point. (I also mistook Clinton hating for the fact that the GOP base had finally coalesced into an angry anti-democratic tribe of talk radio-fed liberal haters) I’m embarrassed to have been so naive. It took me until the stolen election — even after the bogus impeachment! — to fully understand that we were in an entirely new ballgame and any lessons we learned from the 1980’s were no longer relevant. This was a new era.

The DLC, however, seems to have over learned the lessons of the Reagan era and simply slept through the 90’s. While they were consolidating their status as DC kingmakers and building their fabulous rolodexes, they forgot to do the basic job that we liberal empiricists are supposed to do and check to see whether their experiment actually worked. The results are not so good.

First, it failed the party. People are more reluctant to identify themselves as liberals or propgressives than they wre in 1988 and one of the reasons is that people like Al From and his boys helped the Republicans degrade the label to such an extent that people don’t want to be associated with it. It is one thing to criticize your brothers; it’s another to sully the family name. They continue to do this by talking about purging Michael Moore and Move-On and generally showing such a lack of respect for the grassroots that you wonder why they don’t just call us all filthy rabble and tell us to eat cake. The lesson here is to never employ GOP rhetoric about the Democratic Party, ever. This is one thing that simply has got to stop.

Second, their strategy failed. With the modern GOP, blurring the lines is deadly, both as a matter of rhetoric and tactics. What I once thought was a clever way to muddy the waters in our favor has been a disaster. Clinton may have temporarily dispelled the myth that Democrats are nothing but tax and spenders but it doesn’t matter if the Republicans run these scorched earth campaigns in which they can get away with saying that black is white and up is down. If domestic policy ever becomes the basis of another presidential campaign, and that is questionable, there is no doubt in my mind that nothing Clinton ever did on that score will accrue to any Democrat’s benefit.

Third, their policies have never really evolved into exciting “third-way” approaches, as promised. Instead, they’ve simply softened standard GOP market wet-dreams. And as I’ve watched this process over the last twenty years I finally realized that this was just business school flim-flam. You either believe in an enlightened liberal democratic government or you don’t. There has been enough history to show us that left to their own devices the purveyors of market ideology will make things worse for more people. It’s just the way it works. The only institution that can even the playing field in a large, diverse society such as ours is government. And only government, bureaucratic as it may sometimes be, can deliver the basic services that guarantee a decent life for its citizens. We can argue about what services are needed to do that and we can argue about who should get them and how to deliver them, but never again should Democrats promote the idea that market competition is a substitute for democratic government action. We’ll get screwed every time.

But that does not mean that the DLC or its less committed adherents were all wrong to try what they tried. Liberalism cares as much about scientific speculation, experimentation, innovation and reform as it cares about the welfare of citizens, civil liberties and social progress. There is always tension between government and the market and that is as it should be. It’s not surprising at all that Democrats would look in new directions for solutions to problems because that is basic to our ideology. But, we must also be willing to admit when our hypothesis has been disproved.

In this instance, the DLC banked on the idea that consensus politics of the old school could be recreated in a Republican era. They were wrong. The Republicans desire total political hegemony. And any innovation they propose must now be clearly seen for what it is — the radical ideologues want to dismantle the New Deal and create a Randian paradise and the politicos want to further enrich their wealthy contributors. The rest of the rubes think that if the Republicans win they’ll get rich and go to heaven and the hated liberals will be vanquished from this earth. We cannot compromise with people like this. We must defeat them head on.

And we can do it. We shouldn’t throw out all common sense and run Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney in ’08. But we got very close this last time with a Massachusetts liberal up against a vicious smear machine and a wartime GOP incumbent. All this talk about white males and moral values and repositioning ourselves on abortion is outmoded political thinking in my view. This has come down to a classic philosophical fight between the two parties across the entire spectrum of issues. I don’t think that the condition exists anymore for splitting the difference. And I think we’ll win if we consistently talk about what we believe in instead of outlining a list of positions. In this era I think that’s what people are looking for.

But then again, I’ve been wrong before, haven’t I? 🙂

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The Big Argument

Ezra Klein has written a rousing defense of liberalism and wonders why the Democrats aren’t using this social security battle to help illustrate our philosophy of government:

Now that Republicans are reeling from running into the brick wall of the foundational Democratic program, wouldn’t it make sense to toss their ideology an anvil? Half our number seems to think we need to close the Social Security battle now while the other half wants to draw it out and win it closer to midterms. What about widening our attack so the counteroffensive takes some time and does larger damage? How about using the “crisis” language and the fact that Bush’s Medicare pperversion is a much larger economic fiasco to propose fight for changes that’d make it more cost-effective, more progressive, and force Bush’s promised veto? How about forcing Bush to roll back his tax cuts to fix Social Security’s shortfall, and demand that he not starve government to satisfy his radical ideology?

I’m all for using this rhetoric, but needless to say we can’t actually force Bush to roll back tax cuts and we can’t actually force him to veto anything because we can’t pass anything. As the minority party we are certainly in the position, however, to take some chances and at least start setting the terms of the debate in our favor.

I think this deserves some real discussion in Democratic circles. It is past time for a passionate defense of liberalism for liberalism’s sake. That is to say its philosophy and meaning as it applies to both our opposition to the Republicans and the affirmative case for progressive policy. For instance, I was very disappointed that we didn’t draw the philosophical parallel between social security privatization and this bankruptcy bill. Essentially, the Republicans are saying in both cases that people must assume all the risk in their lives and that there are no second chances. (Interestingly, these are the same people who constantly screw up and claim that they have been redeemed by a belief in God. See Gannon, James and Bush, George W.) They are actively using the power of the government to make average people’s lives more insecure. That we aren’t standing fully in the path of legislating usury into law, especially in the current climate where people are clinging to the side of a mountain of debt with their fingernails, is just stupid. If we were smart at all we would have been talking about that right along with the social security mess at our all-star town meetings. It’s all part of the same thing.

I realize that there has been a full generation of brainwashing about how the government is always bad and that everyone will get rich, rich, rich if the government just gets off their backs. But I have a sense that the force of this argument is getting stale. The assault on social security may just be the thing that opens people’s minds to what their philosophy really means. And it may just open a window to allow the idea back in to the minds of the citizens that government programs can be an affirmative good. Social Security works. It’s more efficient, more fair and more inexpensive than any of the alternatives. People apparently instinctively know this. Since the Republicans decided to bring this to the forefront we should take credit for it and piggyback our new progressive ideas on its back. It’s been so long since anyone had the nerve to do it, that it sounds downright fresh.

Ezra quotes FDR in 1936 as an example of full throated liberalism at its peak. We aren’t struggling through the Great Depression and we aren’t in power, but the political argument still stands. The more things change and all that:

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace…business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.

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But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.

When the Republicans said that future congresses would steal the reserves, they were simply stating what they intended to do. And yes, attacking the honor and integrity of the US Government is always a winner as long as it’s a Republican who is attacking it. If a Democrat deigns to attack even a Republican administration, it’s treason. (I am reminded again that throughout the 90’s it was considered perfectly acceptable for GOP representatives to call the FBI “jack-booted thugs.”)

Clearly, they have never really believed in American democratic government. They cover their belief with bromides about “the market” selling it to the public like a magic pill, when it’s clear that the market is insufficient to do anything but efficiently allocate goods and services. Despite what that jittery romance novelist Ayn Rand told Uncle Alan Greenspan and a whole host of breast heaving, dewy eyed privateers, there is no morality intrinsic to capitalism. It’s an economic system, nothing more and nothing less. Anyone who believes in the words of our Declaration of Independence must also realize that government’s purpose is not just to protect property and defend the nation against its enemies. It also exists to level the playing field, keep the powerful from gaining more advantage than they already have and mitigate the harsh effects of the market so that we can live in a decent and moral society.

Just as in the 1930’s the Republicans of today simply don’t believe in the idea of a moral and decent society. Their policy is to align themselves with powerful moneyed forces to tilt the playing field in their favor and let everybody else fend for themselves. That’s the essence of the argument and one that I think we can win if we care to wage it.

Update: I received an e-mail admonishing me for not acknowledging the part of liberalism that defends civil rights. I hereby issue a full disclaimer that every argument I make along this line does not mean to be inclusive of every policy and position of the democratic party. However,let the word go forth that I am a huge proponent of civil rights and civil liberties (including privacy) and there is an analagous argument that can and must be made that a moral and decent society depends upon our commitment to upholding those things as well. Indeed, the civil liberties argument is, in my mind, sorely underappreciated as a liberal issue.

Update II: Check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of the Bankruptcy Bill.

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Notes:

1.) It has come to my attention that I have been given credit for the term “Manchurian Beefcake” and while I admit to having the excellent taste to use it repeatedly, sadly I did not come up with it myself. That little morsel of descriptive genius came from God, aka James Wolcott. Long may he reign.

2) I have upgraded the haloscan account so you should all be able to pontificate at length from now on. Just remember that all rhetorical brilliance is owned by this site and yours will be stolen and recyled often.

3) Go give some change to David Neiwert for his fundraising drive. His insights are more necessary by the day.

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