Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Can You Blame Me?

Matt thinks I’m a tad cynical. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

Maybe, but I’m not the only one. Read this by Todd Gitlin.

… with the respect Americans have long paid to the most efficient hucksters, since P. T. Barnum, they admire him [Schwarzenegger] for the style with which he pulls the wool over their eyes.

For all that his supporters may think they’ve outfoxed politics as usual, Schwarzenegger is “smart” the way any conventional politician is “smart”: About his positions, he’s said next to nothing. California has snookered itself, thinking it’s defeated politics as usual. What it’s done is ditch a blah celebrity in favor of a wow celebrity.

And so, once again, the Democrats reaped the bitter harvest of their own pallor and incompetence. As governor, Davis droned. As lieutenant governor, Cruz Bustamante droned. As campaigners, they droned. Neither shone. Neither made himself lovable. They gave lousy spectacle. In a world of stargazers, they were third-magnitude stars. And so they discredited politics.

Thus did the self-made demagogue spin implausibility into victory. Give him this: He struck a blow at dreariness. He pulverized doubt. He proved himself the king of demolition as self-help. Life’s a movie, after all. Don’t like the government? Go out and blow up some stuff. Nothing is real.

Just remember, it isn’t only a “California problem.” It’s a national problem. And, it ain’t going away.

[Schwarzenegger] campaign officials now concede, preparations for his candidacy and especially for the remarkably successful strategy he would follow — avoiding the traditional press and going straight to the entertainment media with vague messages and movie-style sound bites — were laid as early as June, when they conducted a series of highly revealing focus groups.

The groups, put together in San Francisco and the conservative San Fernando Valley, almost unanimously described Gov. Gray Davis as indecisive, remote and beholden to special interests. Schwarzenegger was seen in a much more positive light; the participants were generally aware of the actor’s involvement with the Special Olympics and after school programs in California. They also expressed less interest in policies and more in “leadership” when asked what it took to govern.

The focus group findings gave birth to one of the most audacious media campaigns ever waged, in which the candidate made an end run around the establishment media — newspapers and the more serious television news shows — and used talk radio, entertainment shows and televised daily events to sell himself to “viewers” (as voters became known to some inside the Schwarzenegger campaign). He presented himself as an outsider who, though light on detailed policies, was decisive, optimistic and forward-looking.

[…]

The most important element to me was striking the balance between policy Arnold and celebrity Arnold,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican consultant who worked on Peter Ueberroth’s short-lived campaign. “Schwarzenegger made people comfortable with the idea that he could govern. The lesson is that substance matters, or at least the appearance of substance.”

In fact, Schwarzenegger sat down for more lengthy interviews with print journalists than critics believe, said Walsh — 13 in 9 weeks.

But many of the articles that appeared seemed to have been influenced by the television coverage, a number of experts said, with much of the emphasis placed on Schwarzenegger’s appearance and manner, rather than his comments on policy matters.

“What we were witnessing was a highly evolved version of a tendency already in place,” said Schell. “The power of the entertainment media eclipsed the serious media. Nobody seemed to notice.”

How about this:

David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, noted: “We sometimes don’t like to admit it, but acting is part of political leadership. Franklin Roosevelt once told Orson Welles that they were the two best actors in the country.” He said that Mr. Schwarzenegger “has a window to do things that few others would have, but it’ll close fast.”

[…]

Mr. Reagan was a consummate pragmatist, but he was guided by fixed views. It is not yet clear whether Mr. Schwarzenegger is, too, but he has so far pursued his career goals single-mindedly, while reinventing himself periodically.

When asked, before he ran for office, what kind of governor he would be, Mr. Reagan famously answered: “I don’t know. I’ve never played a governor before.”

By the end of his presidency, he would confess there had been times when he “wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”

Or (save me) how about this:

The 20-year-old voted for the first time because “this year it seems like your vote counts.”

She went with the recall and was leaning toward Schwarzenegger “because he wasn’t a politician,” she said. “And I also really liked his wife.”

But at the last moment, Richardson switched her vote to Green Party candidate Peter Camejo.

Now maybe we can completely change American politics in the next 12 months by running a sincere and earnest campaign based upon the issues and good old fashioned grassroots campaigning. But after last week, I am more convinced than ever that we will lose huge if we try that.

I admit that I’m cynical about how the process works these days. But, I also think I’m realistic. I’d like the Democrats to wise up and save this country from the radical right wing that holds all institutional pwoer in the federal government right now. And that will not happen by spending the next year deluding ourselves that the people in this country vote on the basis of 12 point plans and “Dingell-Norwood” bills.

Most people think that politics is an interactive reality TV show. We’d better be prepared to put on a good show.

Let’s Roll

I have, at long last, added the following links to the blogroll. I’m sure that most of them are already regular stops. I urge you to check out those that may be new to you. They’re all good.

My list is in no particular order, as you can see. This means absolutely nothing except that I dread alphabetizing the whole damned thing.

Smirking Chimp

The Hamster

corrente

Steve Gilliard

Whiskey Bar

Left Coaster

War Liberal

Suburban Guerrilla

Open Source Politics

Tristero

Mark Kleiman

Mad Kane

Not Geniuses

Sasha Undercover

Crisis Papers

Easter Lemming

Bohemian Mama

Nitpicker

Prometheus 6

Crooked Timber

Take Back The Media

Pen-Elayne

Brief Intelligence

Book Notes

Update: I knew this would happen. I forgot some of the links I intended to include.

I’ll add them for awhile as I think of them:

Prometheus Speaks

longstoryshortpier

discourse.net (a law professor for our side)

hellblazer

Political Spann

Atrios is featuring an interesting Novak note (Via Cosmic Iguana) about CIA disgruntlement over the leak of Johnny “Mike” Spann’s name in the media in November 2001.

You do have to wonder if Novak ran his Plame story past the same CIA contacts who expressed such outrage over Spann. Why would they have such completely differing views on what should have been the same issue — unless his CIA sources are not very well informed and didn’t know Plame’s status. (Then again, maybe Novak is a lying piece of garbage and never bothered to check it out with the CIA, always a possibility, considering his political bias and habit of believing traitors when they tell him what he wants to hear.)

There was a difference between the Spann case and Plame, though — and not just because Spann was dead.

The CIA itself made the early determination that revealing Spann’s name wouldn’t compromise anyone in the field because of the kind of operative he was. This is from the NewsHour November 29, 2001:

TED GUP: I think Jim Risen is right in his read on this. I would caution that we not read too much into this disclosure. I don’t think that it represents a sudden break with tradition or policy at the agency, a sudden rush towards revelation and openness. I think that the reason that his identity could be revealed was not only because it was somewhat compromised by the media, because in the past others have been outed, so to speak, by the media in life and in death. And the agency has not owned up to it. But in this case, I think he was purely paramilitary in his functions, as opposed to the sort of clandestine case officer working in an embassy who has a long-running relationship with foreign nationals, running them as agents, getting intelligence and documents and such.

So in this case, exposing his identity, I think, did not run the risk of endangering foreign nationals who are who were reporting to him. I think he was in country a brief time. He had only been at the agency for two years, and so I think they could afford to disclose his identity without those other ramifications.

Larry Johnson, angry Novak critic on the Plame affair, was also a big critic of the administration’s admitting Spann’s CIA affiliation. His fear in that case, was that Spann’s family would be in danger from terrorists.

Here is the CIA’s official response to critics about the Spann revelation.

It is very interesting, though, that somebody leaked Spann’s identity to the media and proceeded to turn him into the first military hero of the WOT, replete with Arlighton burial. Tenet was right out front in the beatification, most people believing at the time that he was desperately trying to salvage the CIA’s tattered reputation after having failed to predict 9/11. We must remember that the Spann revelation took place only about 6 weeks after that day. The country was in a frenzy.

But looking back it sure reeks of the administration using the CIA for self-serving politics and PR — much the same as the Plame scandal, if less dark and sinister.

Perhaps the best defense at this point for any leaker, if caught, is to say that since the administration had been leaking the names of CIA operatives since November, 2001 they just didn’t realize that there was anything wrong with it. It has been SOP from the very beginning.

And A Little Child Rode His First Pony, Too

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A powerful car bomb has killed at least 10 people outside a central Baghdad hotel used by U.S. officials, injuring many and filling the air with thick black smoke, police say.

Eyewitnesses said they saw a car crash through the security barrier at the Baghdad Hotel and explode. The hotel is widely thought to be used by members of the CIA, officials of the U.S. -led coalition, their Iraqi partners in the Governing Council as well as U.S. contractors.

A policeman at the scene said at least ten people had been killed. Hotel employees said five or six bodies lay in the hotel courtyard.

At a nearby hospital, a Reuters photographer saw more than a dozen wounded, many seriously. Several were Iraqi policemen.

Maybe we should all pitch in to sent the NBA refs to Washington and New York to teach the media how to avoid being manipulated by hectoring coaches into changing their calls. From what I’m seeing this morning, the kool-aid kidz are completely in the tank.

move along folks …

Look! A family eating dinner!

Arroz con Idiota

Rice Fails to Repair Rifts, Officials Say

Cabinet Rivalries Complicate Her Role

This is a potent issue for the Democrats.

The problem is not just Condi Rice. In fact, it isn’t really about her at all. It is about a president who doesn’t know what’s going on and who no one listens to or respects. His administration is awash in infighting and backstabbing and the result is, as the article says, a dysfunctional foreign policy that is incoherent and ineffectual.

The issue is leadership; the real deal, not the solid-gold dancer jumpsuit version. A puppet whose strings are being pulled in 5 different directions isn’t a pretty picture. But, that’s what’s happening, and it’s been clear that it’s been happening for quite some time.

[…]

In Rice, “you’ve never really had a national security adviser who’s ready to discipline the process, to drive decisions to conclusions and, once decisions are made, to enforce them,” said one former senior NSC staff member. In particular, he said, “she will never discipline Don Rumsfeld” when he undercuts decisions that have been made. “Never any sanctions. Never any discipline. He never paid a price.”

[…]

As the administration enters an election year, the situation has become worse, several officials said, because everyone understands that no one will be fired no matter how far they stray from policy.

These managerial questions have been especially acute on the administration’s policy toward the three countries identified by Bush as the “axis of evil”: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In each case, officials said, the NSC has been unable to bridge gaps in ideology and establish a clear and consistent policy.

From the start, top administration officials have waged a bitter battle over policy toward North Korea. Powell has led a group seeking to engage with the secretive and isolated communist government; Rumsfeld and Cheney believe talk is useless and have sought to destabilize and ultimately topple the government. Neither side has gained the upper hand, resulting in a policy stalemate that has left allies and North Korea perplexed.

The two factions, convinced they had the backing of the president, have pursued contradictory policies, often scheming to undermine each other. Insiders said that Rice rarely kept on top of the intramural bickering, though she seemed to lean more toward the Rumsfeld/Cheney group, and at times recommended policies to the president that he later rejected.

The debate sharpened after North Korea acknowledged a year ago it has a secret nuclear program.

North Korea demanded talks with the United States, but the administration insisted that other nations be at the table. When China agreed in April to act as a host of the talks, some State Department officials quietly hatched a plan to have Powell give instructions directly to the head of the U.S. delegation, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, that would allow him to speak to the North Koreans.

When Kelly briefed members of the Rumsfeld/Cheney faction — which opposed the talks — they moved quickly to thwart him. Within four hours, State received instructions from Rice that specifically forbade Kelly from speaking directly to the North Koreans, officials said.

The North Koreans, stunned that they would not get a one-on-one meeting, refused to attend the planned second and third day of the meetings, held in Beijing, and the talks were generally viewed as a failure. To win a new round of talks, the administration reversed itself and agreed to bilateral discussions during a six-nation conference held in August.

Similarly, the administration has veered between talking to Iran on issues of mutual interest, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and appearing to foster a revolt against the ruling clerics by street demonstrators. “Iran is an emblematic example of how this administration, when it is so deeply divided, just can’t produce a coherent policy,” said one NSC participant in interagency debates.

More than two years ago, the NSC began drafting a presidential directive on Iran that would officially set the policy. But the draft has gone through several competing versions and has yet to be approved by Bush’s senior advisers. Rice has scheduled a number of “final” meetings to approve the draft, but consensus was never reached and the president never signed the document.

Thus, as the administration faces a showdown with Iran over its nuclear programs and needs its help in Iraq, administration officials can point only to a brief statement issued by the president in July 2002 as defining the administration’s policy toward Iran.

“All too often what you’ve had in the last two years is diametrically opposed views between OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] and others, and then no decisions being made. A lot of stuff gets papered over,” said a State Department veteran.

Rice’s hands-off approach is most evident in the aftermath of the war with Iraq. Administration officials felt that the postwar effort in Afghanistan — a diverse collection of nations doing assigned tasks — had been inefficient and ineffectual. So the Pentagon was given the primary responsibility for rebuilding Iraq.

Yet, after former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his armies vanished in early April, signs quickly emerged that the Bush administration had not completely prepared for the aftermath. The early relief and reconstruction effort, assigned by Bush to the Pentagon in January, stumbled over such basics as staffing, transportation and communications. U.S. authorities sent inconsistent messages about Iraq’s political future and proved unable to provide a clear vision to Iraqis or Congress of what the Bush White House intended.

“The NSC is not performing its traditional role, as adjudicator between agencies,” said a State Department official, who described “a very scattershot approach to staffing and management. You never knew quite what you were supposed to be doing and with whom.”

A U.S. official who served in Iraq said the NSC failed to make decisions about Iraq’s postwar reconstruction and governance until long after the war ended. Decisions that some agencies thought had been settled were unexpectedly reopened or reinterpreted by the Pentagon, he said.

Even members of Rice’s staff expressed frustration. The NSC and State Department staffers were stunned to learn, for example, that the Pentagon, with the approval of the vice president, had flown controversial Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi into southern Iraq after Bush had opposed giving Chalabi special treatment.

Some of Powell’s key lieutenants, who had gone along with the president’s decision to give the Pentagon the principal postwar role, were frustrated first by the Defense Department’s refusal to include them — and then Rice’s unwillingness to intercede.

“Everything went back to Washington, where it became tangled up in the bureaucratic food fights,” said the official who served in Iraq. “Absolutely everything.”

Yet, the president responsible for this is mess is still seen as a strong leader, despite his falling poll numbers on individual issues:

Thirteen months before the 2004 election, a solid majority of Americans say the country is seriously on the wrong track, a classic danger sign for incumbents, and only about half of Americans approve of Mr. Bush’s overall job performance. That is roughly the same as when Mr. Bush took office after the razor-close 2000 election.

But more than 6 in 10 Americans still say the president has strong qualities of leadership, more than 5 in 10 say he has more honesty and integrity than most people in public life and a majority credit him with making the country safer from terrorist attack.

Something needs to be done about that because that’s a very large part of what people are going to be voting for. And once the Republicans get through with whoever the Democratic candidate is he’s going to be bloodied and damaged, no matter how perfect he starts out. The failures of this administration have to be laid directly at the feet of George W. Bush or he and his war chest will win.

If You Have To Ask You Can’t Afford It

Looking back over the last 6 months or so, I find that Rush, surprisingly, has a big problem with the government helping people with their prescription drug needs. Whoda thunk?

Back on March 17th, he had this to say:

Rosemarie Lowry, sixty-seven, of Braintree, who lives on less than 800 dollars a month, and takes medications for everything from high blood pressure to depression, said she was harassed by a Walgreen’s pharmacy in Quincy when she said she couldn’t afford her medicare copayments. She said the pharmacy gave her one pill from each of her ten prescriptions and told her she’d get her full thirty-day supply if she came back with the copayment.

The pill-a-day-approach continued for several days until the pharmacy just cut her off. At that point, Lowry said, she borrowed the twenty dollar copayment from a friend and got her medicine. “I need my prescription,” she said, “It’s not like I’m taking the kills– pills– because I like taking pills.”

So we got a little game going on here. The copayment was fifty cents. They raised it to two bucks, but there is an out because there is a federal law: pharmacies must fill prescription even if the patient says they can’t afford the copayment. My friends, can I just tell you the way this is too–

Copayment of two dollars means that these drugs are essentially free! Two bucks! Interesting that they — don’t ask this lady if she has any family members who could pay the two bucks. But — even apart from that, in addition to Medicaid, the major drug companies offer compassionate care programs for those who can demonstrate they can’t afford their medicines.

And these companies spend billion dollar — billions of dollars a year on, in – in disbursing free drugs in hardship cases like this. So you come up with a law that says “uh [mumbles] if somebody says they can’t afford a copayment, you’ve got to give them medicine anyway.” So, the copayment goes up from fifty cants to two bucks, and all the patients have to do is say they can’t afford it.

Can’t afford two bucks? I’m telling you — this — this is like, free drugs!

Two bucks. It’s just — you — you think the welfare system hasn’t gotten out of hand? You think the sense of entitlement in this country hasn’t gotten out of hand? What do you mean, I’m out of touch? Don’t give me this out of touch. You mean to tell me that I — because I can afford two bucks, I’m out of touch. Is that what out of touch means now? Because I can afford two bucks? Don’t tell me this. I hear this out of touch business all too often. And it’s a bogus charge.

And it’s — this is my point. This is how ridiculous this is getting. This is how serious the entitlement mentality in this country has gotten. People — [unintelligible] — two bucks copayment! That’s all it is. For a prescipt — two dollars. Well, can you buy a can of dog food for two dollars? You can’t even say that I am faced with the choice

here of dog food or my prescription copayment. Cause dog food’s more expensive than two bucks! We don’t have dog food copays yet, but I’ll bet ya to hell they’re coming.

Dog food copays, just so Democrats’ll have some hardship cases to demonstrate how it is the country doesn’t care anymore about the seasoned citizens of America. Two bucks! Out of touch, my sizeable derriere. You know, [taps papers on console] [sighs] unbelievable. I’m — I don’t know what John Kerry’s done. John Kerry’s trying to figure out whether he’s Irish or Jewish today. You know, it’s saint Patrick’s day today, and he’s got a big identity crisis he’s facing.

I don’t know what John Kerry’s doing about the two dollar copay, for crying out loud. [sighs] But, you see folks. This is — what I mean. This is where this stuff starts. People are not now even willing to fork up two measly — and don’t give me this fixed income — two bucks! Two bucks! It’s — it’s essentially — this is nothing!

You’d certainly never guess he was fucked up out of his mind on narcotics. Why, he makes just perfect sense…

And you can bet that right after this little koo-koo rant they cut to commercial and Rush immediately swallowed a fistfull of 20-dollar-a-piece little blue babies and washed them down with a frosty Pina Colada Slim Fast. No wonder he was pissed. Just the thought of $2.00 a pill drove him to madness.

See, Rush knows from prescription drug hardship. The National Enquirer published some of his alleged e-mails in which he was very, very afraid that he wasn’t going to be able to get his “medicine” either.

100=2.5 to 3 days of the little blues[oxycontin] You know how this stuff works…the more you get used to the more it takes. But, I will try and cut down to help out. But remember, this is only for a little over two more weeks. Just two weeks….I understand your challenge and will do all I can to help. But I kind of want to go out with a bang if you get my drift. Hee hee hee.

He was going into rehab in two weeks.

Poor Rush. See, he deserved his “medicine” because he had a 250 million dollar contract to spew bile all over the airwaves condemning old people for not being able to afford their life-saving blood pressure medication. And, sometimes even that wasn’t enough.

Damn. It’s a sad, sad day when a fucked-up, filthy rich, Republican junkie propagandist has to lower himself in front of the help by promising to cut back on his Oxy just to keep his monkey fed. What’s this world coming to?

Deep Thoughts

Just for the record, I would urge all 16 people who read this blog to read the testimony of Generals Clark, Hoar, Shalikashvili and McInerney before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 29, 2002. (And pay close attention to the hostility of the Republican Senators toward all the generals except the kool-aid drunk McInerney. Dumb is much too kind a phrase to describe them.)

You will see that General Clark gives a highly nuanced view of the situation in Iraq and that he objects quite strenuously to some language in the newly drafted resolution — with which Senator John Warner sandbags the generals by asking them for an opinion without giving them the benefit of seeing it before that moment.

It is fair to criticize candidates, and Clark is going to have to find his way through this kind of minefield, so I am not accusing anyone of unfair tactics. Indeed, criticism of Clark’s approach to Iraq is similar to the item that Kerry’s staff distributed about Dean’s “threat” to seniors. Dean explained that he was bluffing his Republican legislature in order to stop them from passing some bad legislation and it worked. Clark’s view (and many others’) on Iraq was that the congress needed to give Bush the tools to get the UN to make a similar bluff to Saddam.

Part of politics, war and diplomacy is playing devils advocate or bluffing your opponents. If you take a literalist approach you will find many odd statements by politicians as they attempt to finesse certain issues publicly. Politicians have to be able to deal with those accusations and frankly, Dean did it a lot better than Clark did yesterday.

But, the issue is pretty much the same. If you read this testimony, you will see that Clark accepted that dealing with Iraq in the near future was a done deal. He expressed reservations about that, but moved quickly on to the importance of multilateral rather than unilateral action, and he spoke at great length about the political risks both in Iraq and around the world of a badly planned post-war and the pre-emption policy in general.

If Joe Lieberman took this testimony as proof that Clark was unreservedly supporting the resolution, he was mistaken.

As I have written before, Clark made the rookie mistake of musing aloud to the NY Times and others about his hypothetical thought processes if he had been a Senator who was required to cast a vote. He allowed them to see him turning over a complex issue in complex terms, something they are incapable of conveying properly. Due to his belief that a resolution of some sort was required to get the UN on board, a very important goal in order to prevent Bush from setting the precedent of pre-emption, like may others, he found the issue challenging.

This was a big mistake. He should have simply said then — and yesterday — “I took the president at his word when he said he needed the Senate resolution to get UN backing to force Saddam to allow inspections and disarm. If I had known then that he was misleading the congress and the nation about his true intentions to go to war no matter what, I would not have voted for it.”

Unfortunately, Clark’s going to have to learn how to dumb himself down like that if he wants to be a politician in 2003 America. He needs to smile a lot and tell people about what it was like to claw his way back from being seriously wounded in Vietnam. He needs to humbly admit that it was a privilege to personally command the mighty NATO forces to save the Muslims of Kosovo — all without losing a single American life in combat. That is what sets him apart from the others. That’s his narrative.

His intellectual depth and integrity are (sadly) irrelevant (if not downright liabilities) except as they advance his personal story — the up from the bootstraps, self-made man stuff. He needs to talk as little as possible about policy prescriptions and concentrate on his vision for America. He needs to get over any modesty he has about being a hero and a born leader. He’s a politician now, which means that bragging and whoring his story is the job description.

Wesley Clark is now in the entertainment industry, just like everybody else in politics.

Narrative Politics

From The Guardian:

But the key to the election of Governor Arnie is a phenomenon which might be called narrative politics. American electoral campaigns have tended to be driven by the theory of “retail politics”: the candidate made as many speeches, shook the maximum number of hands, accrued the largest air-mile account as possible. Races were won by imprinting a face and a few simple policies through ceaseless repetition.

But, in recent American elections, the centrality of chapped hands and battered soles to a candidate’s chances has been balanced against the quicker, simpler power of narrative politics. The victor was likely to be not the man who put in most hours but the one who told the most extraordinary story about himself.

Hence George W Bush – a notoriously indolent campaigner – was able to match the more assiduous Gore because his candidacy was a better yarn: a son following his dad into the Oval Office, a drunk sorting himself out, a child taking revenge on the administration that beat his father.

Previously, the election of the wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota was an extreme example of narrative politics – voters bored with the process waking themselves up with an unlikely plot twist – but even Clinton can be seen as a beneficiary of this electoral mentality. In 1992, the entry into the White House of a womanising, draft-dodging poor Southern boy whose father had died before he was born was simply a better story to tell history than the re-election of the patrician George Bush senior.

A rough rule of narrative politics is that the candidate whose life story makes the best Hollywood movie will win the race. Which is why Schwarzenegger represents the greatest triumph of the theory to date. In the past, narrative politics has had to be combined with retail politics: Clinton, like Reagan before him, had spent years shaking hands and practising legislation.

Schwarzenegger, who had done the retail part unknowingly in multiplexes over decades, relied during his campaign entirely on his narrative: his pitch. Beginning with the neatness that a man who had made a film called Total Recall should be competing in a recall election, his run for governor was such a bold and ridiculous tale that you kept thinking it needed a script editor.

Even apart from his own compelling back story – body-building to nation-building – there was also the B-plot that his marriage to Maria Shriver (niece of JFK and Bobby) also made the race a strange and wonderful pay-off to one of America’s greatest political storylines: the Kennedys. The advantage of narrative politics is that weaknesses are reclassified as strengths. A politician who knows nothing about politics? What a premise. A leader who can barely speak an American sentence aloud? Such a gripping yarn. A candidate whose answer to the bankruptcy of California is to propose tax cuts? We sure want to stay and see how this turns out.

The paradox of narrative politics is that it is the very improbability of the campaign that gives it plausibility. In voting booths now – as always in cinemas – audiences will sacrifice coherence for surprise. This is democracy played by the rules of a Hollywood script conference and so, in this context, the coming of the machine governor ceases to be a surprise. Arnie may know nothing much about politics but he’s a proven genius at the business of getting Americans to swallow preposterous propositions and outcomes.

I know it’s difficult for us political junkies to view something we take very seriously in this way. But, I am convinced that it is a very important key to advancing our cause.

As a good friend of mine once said, “it’s all about who you want to watch on television for the next four years.” I used to think that was ridiculously cynical. But, with the ascension of Clinton, Bush and (mind-bogglingly) Schwarzenegger, I think it’s obvious that there is merit in this concept.

Recognizing the power of this type of politics does not require that we choose candidates who are as vapid and empty as Schwarzenegger and Bush are. It just means that we must pick candidates who also have the story and charisma that modern media requires and be prepared to tell that story to the American people.

The framing of the campaign and the arena in which it will be engaged is likely to be chosen by the Republicans purely because of their natural domination, as incumbents, of the free media, their Mighty Wurlitzer and the period between the primaries and the convention during which Democrats are going to be financially dead in the water. We will probably be fighting on their terms, even though we will win on ours.

Whoever gets the nomination must appeal strongly on this narrative level or we will lose to a 300 million dollar advertising campaign in which steely eyed George W. Bush, underestimated all his life, is sold as having risen to the occasion when the chips were down proving his courage and fortitude in the face of the greatest challenge any man of his generation has ever faced.

Even if his show is getting less and less believable, people are not likely to switch channels unless they are guaranteed something more satisfying.

FUBAR

Army investigators are leaning toward filing slap-on-the-wrist charges versus a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay who was investigated for espionage, a military source told the Daily News yesterday.

The “handful” of minor charges against Capt. Yousef Yee could be leveled by next week and are not expected to include the more serious allegations of spying, sedition or aiding the enemy, according to the source familiar with the probe.

“It’s very weak,” the military source said, saying the charges are likely to be related to dereliction of duty and disobeying a general order. “It’s nothing compared to espionage or anything like that.”

And, here I got the impression that Yee was this year’s little Johnnie Walker Lindh.

Yee’s arrest came six weeks after the arrest of Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, an Arabic translator at Gitmo. Al-Halabi was charged with 30 counts of spying for Syria and Qatar, and his case touched off a broad espionage investigation at Camp Delta

Syria and Qatar. At Gitmo. Where we’re holding the Al Qaeda and Taliban we captured in Afghanistan. Sure.

Is anybody getting the feeling that, with the exception of 9/11, every single thing connected with the WOT is complete bullshit?

Good News

I have to wonder why the news media are spending so much time covering the Kobe Bryant and Lacey Peterson cases without giving equal time to the many non-alleged rapist basketball players and happily married couples who’ve managed to work through their problems without resorting to violence? And, why is it that every time some crazy dude shoots up his office or an old man drives through a street market or an airplane crashes, the media rush to cover it without also showing footage of harmonious workplaces and good driving elderly and safe air travel? You’d almost think they believe that “dog bites man” stories aren’t newsworthy or something.

Thank goodness we’ve managed to shame them into fulfilling their duty with Iraq, at least. Now, for every story of car bombing and carnage, huge street protests, daily military casualties and political chaos, we are seeing two equally important stories about a first grader going to school or a pick-up soccer game between a GI and an Iraqi. Life goes on (even for weird foreigners!) in the middle of a hated, chaotic, foreign military occupation. Now, isn’t that good news?