Haunting the Web Since 1999
Another reason I’ve been stepping away from the politics posts – the estimable Charlie Pierce has this beat covered. Here he eviscerates the Politico-Industrial complex’s continued infatuation with gasbag Newt Gingrich. “Not to stick up for Karl Rove but, Jesus H. Christ on a special episode of Blossom, there is no serious comparison to be made.” Naturally, CNN — home of Serious People™ like David Gergen — has recently picked him up as a political correspondent.
“John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. The war started in 2003…You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni. And you were wrong.”
I doubt y’all missed it (even if the ratings were surprisingly low.) Nonetheless, Senators Obama and McCain held their first of three debates Friday night in Mississippi, ostensibly on foreign policy matters (although the economic situation on Wall Street took up the first half-hour.) [Transcript.] And the verdict? Well, to no one’s surprise, I’m going to go with Obama on this one. I’m just not going to pretend to be as fair and balanced as John King, David Gergen, and the other seemingly randomly selected poobahs of our Fourth Estate (who was the Aussie guy holding court next to Christine Amanpour?), who went out of their way on CNN to convince me that McCain seemed knowledgable, spry, and at ease during this event. Nope, I think I’ll side with the polls, which have a cool, level-headed, and magnanimous Sen. Obama winning the event handily.
The thing is, even more than with Sen. Hillary Clinton, whom I agreed with most of the time on the issues even when I disagreed completely with her GOP-lite campaign tactics, I just can’t take John McCain at all seriously at this point, and particularly after both Palin and the non-suspension suspension. So, when McCain tries to tout a career ostensibly spent in the service of congressional ethics, my inelastic brain just keeps thinking “Uh…Keating 5?” Anybody watching the past few years knows that McCain was as AWOL in the fight against Boss DeLay as he has been in countering Dubya these past two terms. And, whatever happened to McCain since 2000, speaking-truth-to-power is not something that comes readily to him anymore, if it ever did. So most of his early “I’m a proven maverick” speel Friday night fell on deaf ears from jump street in this household, and thus I can’t speak to how it might’ve played to those still-undecideds out there willing to buy into his craven sham.
That being said, I had a sense while watching — and the polls seem to bear this out — that McCain was making a critical error with his oft-repeated “Sen. Obama doesn’t understand” routine. That might’ve worked if Obama had seemed greener up there next to McCain, or if Obama was as inarticulate and incompetent as, say, Sarah Palin. But as it was, Sen. Obama came across as unruffled, competent, and conversant on all the issues the mythical maverick tried to paint him as naive on (and/or lie about.) And thus the strategy (or was it a tactic?), imho, backfired massively. Instead, McCain — missing the soft touch of Ronald Reagan, who turned age to his advantage against Mondale in 1984 with a joke and a smile — basically came across as a cantankerous old coot, dripping with undeserved contempt toward that damn whippersnapper in his yard.
It’s mainly for this reason that I think, however much the debate is being painted as a draw by the punditariat, Obama came out the clear victor: Sen. Obama did not seem callow or inexperienced in the slightest, but lordy did McCain — squinting, smirking, and drowning in derision — come across as aged. And I may be wrong about this, but I just don’t think the Old Man Withers strategy plays with the undecides. I know that many lefties out there wanted to see a more forceful Obama on the attack Friday night, but I don’t think that was his mission: It was more important that he, like Kennedy in 1960, seemed presidential, level-headed, and the very opposite of the risky gamble that the McCain folks would try to make him seem. In that, I think, he succeeded, particularly in contrast to the snarky old man standing across from him. Advantage Obama.
“As she campaigns now, Clinton says, ‘I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.’ But the White House records confirm that this is not true. Her statement is, to be precise, a lie. When it comes to the essential test of the trade debate, Clinton has been identified as a liar — a put-in-boldface-type “L-I-A-R” liar.” Shame on you, Hillary Clinton? The Nation‘s John Nichols argues Sen. Clinton’s credibility is in the tank after ABC News discovers that, contrary to her more recent statements, she was shilling for NAFTA quite a bit back in 1993. (By the way, Nichols is not alone in this assessment of Sen. Clinton.) Moreover, it seems venerable Davos boogier David Gergen helped enable her lying about the record by conveniently forgetting that he emceed a private pro-NAFTA event held by Hillary.
FWIW, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has offered the most plausible reckoning of Clinton’s NAFTA view so far: She was never against NAFTA, per se, only that the timing might interfere with her health care fiefdom. Update: Clinton and NAFTA, Youtubed.
In case you missed it, debate No. 19, held in Austin, TX, came and went this evening. (Transcript.) My quick take: Not all that much news made here, and, as a tie goes to the defender, that’s a win for Barack Obama.
The big question coming in tonight was whether, after losing eleven contests in a row, Sen. Clinton would go into relentless-attack-mode (as desired by Mark Penn) or instead try to reassert her positives and perhaps prepare for a dignified exit to the race (as advised by Mandy Grunwald.) Well, the answer turned out to be yes. The first forty-five minutes or so were civil, agreeable, and thoroughly stultifying, basically a duller continuation of the LA debate of three weeks ago. Then, in the middle going, Sen. Clinton began trying to score some points, for example, by (once again) calling Obama a plagiarist and saying the Senator represented “change you can xerox.” (That canned line backfired rather badly, and drew the only boos of the night. I hope this is because most people realize the plagiarism charge is absolutely moronic.)
For his part, Sen. Obama — looking ever more presidential, as is the frontrunner’s wont — took the high road, correctly calling such maneuvers part of the “silly season” of politics and keeping the conversation mostly about substantive differences, such, as, once again, the interminable mandate question. (He had a particularly good response to the “cult” charge: “The implication has been that the people who have been voting for me or involved in my campaign are somehow delusional…The thinking is that somehow they’re being duped…and that eventually they’re going to see the reality of things. I think they perceive the reality of what’s going on in Washington very clearly.” Touche.)
The moment that’s getting a lot of the buzz right now is Sen. Clinton’s closing statement, which (Xerox alert!) borrowed heavily from both John Edwards and Bill Clinton in 1992. (I actually don’t care at all about that, but if you’re going to throw around spurious claims of plagiarism, you’d best be careful about that glass house.) More troublingly, in her close Sen. Clinton explicitly invoked her surprisingly game-changing Reverse Muskie back in New Hampshire. (She began this particular lip-quavering moment by asking herself the same goofy question she got in the diner: “How do you do it?”)
Now, I don’t want to claim Sen. Clinton is a fraud, even if she’s seemed considerably less than “absolutely honored to be here with Barack Obama” over the past three weeks of scurrilious charges and no concession speeches. If anything, I agree with CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, who was much less enthralled by the moment than that venerable Establishment Davos-boogier, David Gergen. I think she got genuinely choked up for exactly the same reasons as she did back in NH. With the writing on the wall for her candidacy, this was a valedictory moment of sorts. Fine, she’s earned it, and I applaud her for seemingly choosing, at least for a few moments, a graceful exit that will help bring the party back together. That being said, I wouldn’t get such a guilty twinge of Bernie Birnbaum-ish grandstanding about it all if she hadn’t explicitly invoked the diner tear, and/or if Clinton flunky Howard Wolfson hadn’t immediately try to tell us afterward that this was “the moment she retook the reins of this race and showed women and men why she is the best choice.” Um, no, not really.
“Forty percent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House…Does a nation of 303 million people really have only two families qualified to run the show?” The AP’s Nancy Benac reflects on the Bush-Clinton problem with our politics. “‘I think we would be fundamentally healthier if we broadened the zone of candidates who could make it to the top,’ [presidential advisor David Gergen] said. Historically, politics has been open to newcomers who rise up to reflect the grass-roots sentiment of the country, Gergen said. That’s still possible, he said, ‘but it’s harder than it used to be, especially because it’s so hard to raise money’ for expensive national campaigns. The Clintons and Bushes, he said, have built up strong ‘brand’ recognition for their names.“
Well, it may seem like they’ve been going at it for awhile now…nevertheless, the first official Democratic primary debate was held last night, co-sponsored by the good folks at CNN and YouTube. [Transcript.] (As you likely heard, this gimmick this time was that the questions were submitted by Youtube users the nation over. All in all, they turned out to be a mixed bag, but no more or less cutting than the ones usually conjured up by George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper, or some other venerable talking head of the moment. Still, not a single query on campaign finance reform managed to sneak through the vetters…so now, I kinda wish I had at least tried to submit one.)
And the verdict this time? Well, no one broke out of the pack as a result of their performance last night, which — the talking heads tell me (hey, David Gergen’s gotta eat) — means a win for Clinton. But, as with the past few debates, I still find my position further solidifying in favor of Obama and Edwards, and against the Senator from New York. (My reasons have been put forth previously here and here.) In fact, the most irritating moment of the debate for me, and I’ll admit that this’ll be considered well beyond stupid and pedantic to most people, was Senator Clinton’s butchering of the distinction between “liberal” and “progressive” to contort her way out of having to name herself the former. For what it’s worth, the key element of a turn-of-the-century progressive was never “someone who believes strongly in individual rights and freedoms” — that would be a liberal. Indeed, arguably the major flaw in the progressive movement — until after WWI — was its inattentiveness to individual rights and freedoms…hence, Prohibition, or, to take an even more sordid example, the proliferation of Jim Crow in the South.
But, more importantly, and this is what really irked me, Hillary Clinton has proven herself to be the least progressive of the Democratic candidates, in that she’s been the most willing to get into bed with corporate interests time and time again. (And, for you historians reading this, yes, I’m calling shenanigans on Kolko.)
Ok, I’ll concede, Clinton can’t honestly be expected to deliver a comprehensive historical disquisition about liberalism v. progressivism in a 45-second debate answer. But, please don’t chalk up my concern simply to being an aggrieved aspiring egghead just yet. (And, hey, speaking of parochial, Obama mentioned my hometown, Florence, SC, tonight, albeit not in a positive light. But I digress again.) The fact is, the differences between liberalism and progressivism do matter, particularly when you consider [a] how often politicians in our party seem confused, or even ignorant, about the Left’s guiding political philosophies these days, and [b] how different a truly progressive presidential candidate would seem from what Hillary Clinton has yet offered us.
Most importantly, a true “modern progressive” would push campaign finance reform, ethics in government, and voting reform though the heavens fall. These are hardly central tenets of the Clinton campaign, to say the least. And, along with the obvious necessities of a sane, competent, foreign policy, accessible, affordable health care, and comprehensively reworked environmental and energy plans, a real “modern progressive” would also extol education, civics reform, universal (if not mandatory) service, community-building, a vast increase in arts and science funding, an end to child poverty…all ways to help renew the bonds of citizenship, to help encourage an active, engaged, self-governing electorate, and to help foster a new generation of Americans more attuned and responsive to the concerns of their fellow men and women — here and around the globe — than they are to the self-absorbed and increasingly inescapable dictates of rapacious consumerism and the corporate bottom line.
It’s late, and I’ve clearly started soapboxing. Still, what I wrote back in 2000 here, before I came to Columbia, still holds: “I know it all sounds a bit academic and removed from reality, but, what can I say? This is where my idealism (or what vestiges of it that survive this election cycle) lies.” Well, it’s been a few election cycles since then, and in many other ways the years since have not been kind, in terms of progressivism or otherwise. I’d very much like to continue indulging in “the audacity of hope” when it comes to such matters — I know it’s way early in the game, and that we’re probably still at least a good 3 or 4 “Macaca moments” out before this all gets decided. But increasingly, and particularly after listening to these debates thus far and the virtual Clinton coronation by the talking heads thereafter, other quotes often come to mind as well. For example: “Look for your friends, but do not trust to hope. It has forsaken these lands.”
I’m not saying Clinton would make a terrible president — Obviously, she’d be much better than the current fiasco of an administration. (But, as always, who wouldn’t be?) But I do increasingly fear her tenure — if it’s marked by the same confused, wishy-washy and corporate-friendly Republican-lite “centrism” her campaign and the DLC have pushed in the past — will make for yet another missed opportunity in terms of fostering real progressive change in this country. (And Senator Clinton, to get to the point: I know progressives. I’ve spent the past six years and change studying progressives. And, you, Madam, have been no progressive.)