“John McCain’s choice for a young (by political standards) female governor as his running mate was an extraordinary political occurrence for Republicans. It genuinely relegated to the history books the speech given the night before by Barack Obama - of which much of the press instantly stopped talking about just twelve hours after it had been called ‘historic.’”
“At 72 years of age, John McCain isn’t exactly a triathlete. To answer this, the Republican candidate himself has always said that it’s just as important to know the Republican Vice Presidential candidate as it was to know him. And what a Vice! … It was a brilliant political play. The name that most people had been talking about for the vice presidential slot was entrepreneur-governor Mitt Romney - competent, successful, monotonous. Even McCain had a half-smile when he announced Sarah Palin - the smile of an old man when he receives praise from a much younger woman.”
“These U.S. elections are the most fascinating for at least three generations. The American electorate - and the world, we could say, given the consequences of the decisions that are taken by the United States, like them or not - is confronted with a real choice. And it’s not easy to decide between one and the other.”
Why would historian Alexandre Adler, who is often characterized as France’s foremost neo-con and who greatly admires John McCain, want to see Barack Obama elected president of the United States?
“If I was an American voter, I would campaign enthusiastically for the election of Ms. Rice to enter the White House. The nature of things means that unfortunately it won’t be her, but Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who is likely to become the first Black president of the United States. … Read the rest of this entry »
– ‘his campaign’s lack of any tangible racially-based resentment.’
– ‘the fact that Reagan assured the United States a spectacular economic recovery, but nevertheless, paid for it with social inequalities that little-by-little have surpassed by way of inconvenience the advantages brought by free markets.’
– ‘the sometimes incredible stagnation of all public facilities in a country where the pressure for lower taxes has kept railroads, airports and sometimes roads at the technological level of the 1970s.’
– ‘the generation of children of humiliated communists and progressives, who are today rich and in power, and who are tempted to inflict a spectacular defeat on the American right.’
And what hope do U.S. Republicans have of beating Obama?
Read on at WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the U.S. election.
Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar and adviser to Barack Obama, has been attracting a good bit of criticalnotice mainly from the liberal side of the blogosphere. I’ve read much of it with interest; I’ve seen no defenders. After finishing KathyG’s post on Sunstein (Ken Houghton says it’s a “must read”), I took to the keyboard. A storm (a sign) knocked out my Internet and delayed this post.…
I am and have been a fan of Sunstein’s since at least the early 1990s. I was attracted to him first for his provocative thinking on the First Amendment, which has shaped and informed my own. I have never thought the liberal label a perfect fit for him. Rather, like Larry Lessig, I find him to be a fascinating and original thinker working within the existing legal framework. And stretching while refusing to be budged beyond what he sees as the boundaries set by it.
Almost every day I wish we could just tear that framework down and start fresh, but I don’t see that as a realistic possibility. And when I find myself in arguments with thinkers like Sunstein or Lessig — and I have been privileged from time to time in my life to have such occasions — I am frustrated that I can’t move them beyond those boundaries. In the end I believe that our legal and political system and structures are as inelastic as their intransigence suggests. And so I settle for working with them towards incremental change.
Speaking of change, I do consider myself a liberal (happy to have found a blog home here at TMV) and will cling to that appellation even as others insist I must move further to the Left to earn it. Obama is a fascinating study in that regard, both for the change — and the status quo — that he represents. That is, I’m convinced, the secret ingredient in his winning formula. And possibly a reason Obama and Sunstein are, in my view, such a good fit.
The change I want is not merely a liberal label tacked on to the same retaliatory, partisan, vindictive politics and practices I’ve decried since the Clinton impeachment. When I say I want a more empathetic citizenry, a less punitive legal system, and more thoughtful governance, I’m looking for it across the board. My call for restorative justice — as opposed to our too punitive retributive justice — is not one reserved only for the poor criminal.
I speak just for myself and not for Senator Obama on this, but my view is that impeachment is a remedy of last resort, that the consequences of an impeachment process, a serious one now, would be to divide the country in a way that is probably not very helpful. It would result in the presidency of Vice President Cheney, which many people enthusiastic about impeachment probably aren’t that excited about. I think it has an understandable motivation, but I don’t think it’s appropriate at this stage to attempt to impeach two presidents consecutively.
In terms of holding Bush administration officials accountable for illegality, any crime has to be taken quite seriously. We want to make sure there’s a process for investigating and opening up past wrongdoing in a way that doesn’t even have the appearance of partisan retribution. So I’m sure an Obama administration will be very careful both not to turn a blind eye to illegality in the past and to institute a process that has guarantees of independence, so that there isn’t a sense of the kind of retribution we’ve seen at some points in the last decade or two that’s not healthy.
Annnnd….attempts by state and federal governments to interfere with a woman’s freedom to control what goes on inside her own personal womb continue apace. Joe Windish has an earlier piece about an 8th Circuit decision that unleashes the State of South Dakota on women who seek abortion in that state by letting the state insert a word or two on behalf of its legislature into the discussion. At this rate, I’m afraid, just having the state insist on telling women who are trying to make a decision about its legislators’ personal views is going to be the least of our worries.
Hillary Clinton is (in her words) ’sound[ing] the alarm’ regarding the Department of Health and Human Service’s pending regulations that will redefine common forms of contraception as ‘abortion.’ What’s in a name?:
These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it. (HuffPost)
That’s bad. That’s very, very bad. The ramifications are serious, both for those who think it’s not the government’s business to impose its current ideology on health care issues such as availability of contraception to the poor or who are already grumbling about all the women on welfare who expect taxpayers to pay for their children’s basic necessities.
If you’re one of those, you should definitely sign this petition. Here’s why:
At the G8, Bush departs with one of his trademark kidding-on-the-square one liners:
President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit.
As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: "Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter."
President Bush made the private joke in the summit’s closing session, senior sources said yesterday. His remarks were taken as a two-fingered salute from the President from Texas who is wedded to the oil industry. He had given some ground at the summit by saying he would "seriously consider" a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050. (Independent)
Liberal Bloggers Accuse Obama of Trying to Win Election
Nominee Called Traitor to Democrats’ Losing Tradition
The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.
Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.
“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”
But those comments were not nearly as strident as those of Tracy Klugian, whose blog LoseOn.org has backed unsuccessful Democratic candidates since 2000. Read the rest of this entry »
In her article posted on Real Clear Politics, Arianna Huffington suggests that Obama should not tack to the center this fall but should instead move to the left. She claims that the her opinion is not based on her own progressive views but instead on real political considerations.
However with all due respect I must dispute this claim. If you read between the lines there is an unspoken assumption that everyone agrees with her liberal views and therefore it makes no sense to tack to the center.
Indeed her attitude towards those it the middle is contemptuous at best and on some levels quite hostile. This does not seem to be a very wise political course but then again we are talking about Huffington. Just as many of the hard right pundits would throw away elections for the GOP, so Huffington seems intent on doing so for the left.
BooMan wants the blogosphere (espcially the progressive blogosphere) to “grow up.” From his conclusion:
Barack Obama doesn’t want to discuss John McCain’s military service. It is not a narrative that benefits him. He doesn’t want his allies gratuitously attacking the military and its generals. That is not an association that helps him. It’s nothing personal. It’s strictly politics. And if your ego gets bruised everytime the candidate stiff-arms an off message progressive, you best get into another line of work.
It’s a great post, all around, making the “Best of the Blogs” list this morning at RCP. And, in many ways, it echoes TMV’s own Shaun Mullen (or vice versa, or both).
Many Democrats have had reason to comment lately on the conventional wisdom that Democrats must always tack to the center to win an election in this country.
Count me among those who want to see more challenges to that conventional wisdom (which to me just means ‘last year’s assumptions’). While I understand the reasons why candidates do it, the fact is that eight years of neoconservatism has moved all the goal posts way to the right.
To repair the damage done by Bush and his gang of neocons, what’s needed isn’t a balancing bipartisan approach but immediate corrective action. It’s outmoded ‘conventional wisdom’ to believe that Democratic candidates always have to tack centerwards (meaning shift right) to prevail in a general election or to attract swing voters and independents. I don’t buy it.
What most Democrats I know want now is an entirely different approach. With the Republicans still mechanically spouting policies consistent with Bush-era neoconservatism, what’s needed to achieve balance again isn’t compromise action, but corrective action. What most Democrats I know want is a different choice: in our government’s approach to the economy, national security, civil liberties, health care, energy policy and the environment and on and on.
And back-room deals and trade-offs between our elected representatives just aren’t going to cut it. We want to see changes that will restore to us as a nation and as individuals what we lost during Bush’s failed regime.
I don’t suffer fools gladly, so I kept MoveOn at arm’s length in 2004 and 2006, but after the General Betrayus ad controversy last year finally concluded that these trash talking and tone deaf so-called progressives are bound to do more harm than good as Barack Obama leads the charge to end the Republican hegemony in Washington.
And so it was gratifying when the presumptive Democratic nominee gently but necessarily chided MoveOn in his speech on patriotism yesterday in saying:
“[S]ome of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day. And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments - a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.”
Taking MoveOn to task does not come easily. I cut my social activist teeth in the late 60s and understood that while Students For a Democratic Society and some other groups could be off message and self absorbed, they were integral to fighting the good fight.
So is MoveOn. Indeed, I am not asking that it get with Obama’s program. Independent voices are more important than ever in this era of homogenized politics. But if MoveOn is determined to trample on Obama’s message because he is not sufficiently leftist and unwilling to jump through its hoops, then its stridency will not only be a negative force but a reliable punching bag for the right-of-center punditocracy, and the last thing Obama needs are surrogates who make things more difficult.
A final thought: Some MoveOn activists see themselves as the reincarnation of the Vietnam antiwar movement, but as someone who was in the midst of that movement, this is a bad joke and they’re the last people in the room to get it.
These adolescents have been notably unsuccessful in fashioning a cogent message, in part because they keep stepping on their willies when it comes to addressing the ancillary issue of terrorism, and opposition to the Iraq war has grown slowly but steadily without their help.
IT NEEDED TO BE SAID
While we’re kind of on the subject, former General Wesley Clark’s view that John McCain’s POW experience doesn’t automatically translate into him being prime commander in chief material has been widely criticized, taken out of context and otherwise flogged as being inappropriate.
It is in fact highly appropriate given McCain’s blindered view of Iraq and his willingness to bomb first and talk later when it comes to Iran. Too bad that Clark’s remarks have kind of upstaged Obama’s patriotism speech and the candidate himself does not approve of them, but they were a much needed pushback against the archaic and platitude driven views of what constitutes patriotism for too many Americans.
Don’t get me wrong. In my opinion — and as a Clinton supporter, I followed the exchanges extremely closely while they were happening— Bill Clinton has every right to be angry about the way Hillary was treated by the Obama campaign. I don’t think his anger is productive, mind you; and I think he is undermining Hillary’s chances. But if Hillary values her political career, she needs to give Bill a time out.
Hillary, as a mature woman, knows the best way to prove someone wrong is just to prove them wrong. You don’t get there by sulking in your tent or complaining; you get there by rising above the slurs and gossip, as Clinton-supporter and lifelong civil rights activist Maya Angelou advised Hillary to do in this poem. Bill used to know how to rise above the fray. Why isn’t he doing it now? I can understand why he would be wounded by the racism charges. To accuse someone of being a racist — a vile thing for a person to be — is, by definition, to accuse them of vileness. It is a grave insult. It seems to be principally these allegations that are fueling Bill Clinton’s outrage and wounded feelings. Most of us would feel the same.
Even so, he needs move on —for his own and Hillary’s sakes.
Glenn Greenwald has administered a swift and deadly kick to Olbermann’s credibility on the issue and to any lingering hope that Olbermann might recover sufficient detachment to be considered a reliable commenter on any issue relating to his Hero, Barack Obama.
Now that Obama has made his position on FISA crystal clear, Olbermann has apparently decided how he is going to spin the issue: by being as disingenuous as Obama man. When W was fighting for FISA, Olbermann called it "an ex post facto law, which would clear the phone giants from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive and blatant collaboration with [Bush’s] illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass email."’ (Salon)
Now that Obama has changed his mind about telecom amnesty, so has Olbermann. Now people who disagree with him and his idol — including Obama supporters sufficiently candid to admit their disappointment — are ‘the far left’, silly pie in the sky idealists with impractical and impracticable notions about civil liberties and the constitution that Obama is bravely prepared to resist: Obama won’t cower to ‘the far left’, so called; no sir!
Certainly he’s disappointed many of his supporters. As I said, while I more or less expected it, I felt a distinct thrill of disappointment when I read his statement. While I realize that liberal Dems tend to tack to the right once they know they’ve got the nod, it seems a bit…previous. We haven’t even had the convention yet.
The problem is, Obama can’t win if he looks ’soft’ on terrorism because the Dems have let the Republicans own the whole national security issue and define the requirements. I guess it’s too much to hope that the Dems would wrest the issue away from the right and challenge the Bush administration’s (and the nation’s) assumptions about the most effective way to fight it. Why did the left let this issue become the right’s sole property? I see it as a stunning failure of imagination as well as a failure in courage and leadership.
Realistically, it’s probably too much to expect him to take this on single-handedly right as he’s initiating his campaign for the general election. Isn’t it? I am too cynical — or, as I prefer to frame it, ‘pragmatic’ — to expect him to push a progressive platform while he’s trying to beat McCain and yet….I can’t help feeling that Edwards would have repudiated this terrible legislation. But isn’t that precisely why people said that Edwards could never win in the general? And Obama never really presented himself as an Edwards sort of progressive.
Bear in mind I don’t feel particularly inclined to defend him — he was never my choice for presumptive nominee. I am trying to understand the thinking behind this decision and to spin it in a way I can stomach.
While I pretty much expected it, I still felt a frisson of disappointment. I admit it. It’s not a piece of legislation I could ever support. Greenwald has it right, I think.
At TPM, Greg Sargent says tersely, ‘Obama’s statement on the FISA “compromise” is in, and suffice it to say that it won’t make opponents of the Dem cave-in very happy. He’s supporting it.’ He’s set out Obama’s statement. Sargent finds it a ‘downer.’
There’s much consternation among progressives and the Republicans over recent developments in Obama’s unmasking as the tough, take-no-prisoners politician — and centrist Democrat — he is and has always been. Jazz Shaw comments here at TMV on Obama’s ‘Rovian’ roleplaying here.
In a piece which seems to me to be simultaneously mean-spirited and [very] grudgingly admiring David Brooks writes of ‘The Two Obamas.’ Andrew Sullivan — who seemingly admires the trait — calls his comment on Obama’s [intelligent, strategically unexceptionable] decision not to go the public funding route ‘Niccolo Obama.’
Economist Paul Krugman pointed out back in January that Obama was less progressive than either Clinton or Edwards on certain issues affecting domestic policy. With respect to today’s article in Fortune — certain to cause alarm and despondency among progressive supporters who were carried away by his Message of Hope — color me unsurprised. Forewarned by Krugman and others, I checked the fine print.
His campaign was quick to point out that this isn’t really a reversal as such. He’s just worked back round to his original position.
His spokesman, Bill Burton said, ‘Obama-as the candidate noted in Fortune’s interview-has not changed his core position on NAFTA, and that he has always said he would talk to the leaders of Canada and Mexico in an effort to include enforceable labor and environmental standards in the pact’.(The Nation)] Of course what he said during the interview is a little different, as The Nation
points out, from what he said when he was trying to beat Hillary in the Rust Belt.
People who didn’t reach the stage of political awareness before 1980 probably think the “L” word, liberal, is a pejorative term. For more than a quarter century, since Ronald Reagan’s first term, virtually every progressive idea that came into the political arena was pilloried, and often outright trashed, when the dreaded L label was pinned on it.
This was no accidental happening, no natural political turn of the wheel, no inevitable evolution. It was largely the product of a systematic, well financed campaign by right-leaning think tanks and kindred media manipulators to discredit an approach to governing they didn’t like.
Which brings us to the present. After long years during which money and effort expended on progressive causes went into individual political campaigns or simply renting the ear of politicians, left-leaning think tanks are now almost equal in number and staffing as their right-leaning counterparts, and churning out endless reams of policy papers, some rather good, a few even innovative. Read the rest of this entry »
