Month: January 2008

Absurdity

Atrios is writing on Iraq but he could well be writing about presidential politics or Bush’s approval ratings or any other number of subjects:

The absurdity of everything continues. It’s just impossible for common sense and facts to penetrate our contemporary discourse anymore.

This is seen in the primary setting in Matt Yglesias’s post on Romney and the South Carolina primary titled, “Heads Romney Wins, Tails Romney Wins.”

To which Atrios writes, echoing his previous post on Iraq, “It’s amazing the degree to which the actual mechanics of winning the primary contests are ignored in favor of how various outcomes impact press narratives that the press is somehow powerless to control.”

Delegate strategies, caucus mechanics, and efforts to make it harder for people to participate are all facts that should have some penetration into press narratives. Instead we get narratives on momentum that only look forward towards the winnowing of a field, with no retrospection on what happens when the press is wrong about what voters will do with their opportunity to participate in the presidential process.

Oh and somewhere along the way it was decided that there would be no substantive coverage of policy proposals of the various candidates. But haircuts and swimsuits are OK.

Romney Wins Nevada Caucus

Giuliani in line to finish sixth, behind Ron Paul and Fred Thompson, again.

Clearly this is good news for Rudy Giuliani.

Update:

John McCain and Ron Paul are in a close race for 2nd place in Nevada. Somehow it is shocking to the crack team at MSNBC that there is a back and forth going on over the 2nd place slot with a whopping 4% of precincts reported.

Update II:

Ron Paul has come in second in Nevada, edging out John McCain by about 1%

Hillary Clinton: Wrong on Joe Lieberman

Hillary Clinton thinks Joe Lieberman is still a Democrat who should chair one of the most important committees for oversight in the Senate. She identifies Lieberman as an “Independent Democrat,” a designation of Lieberman’s creation with no meaning other than that added by Democrats and reporters who deign to give it meaning.

Lieberman ran against the Democratic nominee for Senate in Connecticut in 2006. He said he would wait to see who each party nominated for the presidency before endorsing, but ended up endorsing Republican war hawk and ideological twin John McCain before a single primary vote was cast. Lieberman has done robocalls, fundraising emails, events, and election night parties for McCain.

Joe Lieberman is not a Democrat, yet he is afforded the privilege of chairing the Senate Committee on Homeland Security. This is the Committee that would be responsible for conducting oversight hearings into the Bush administration’s non-existent response to Hurricane Katrina. Yet after a year in the majority, with Lieberman a member of the Democratic caucus and sitting in the cherry seat on Homeland Security, he hasn’t held one hearing to look into how the Bush administration erred. Brian Beutler at Mother Jones writes:

So as we all take the measure of 2007, here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly in a year’s worth of congressional oversight.

Quiet as a mouse. There certainly have been gaffes, softballs, and missed opportunities. And the most obvious are found in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security—the Senate’s version of Rep. Henry Waxman’s Oversight Committee in the House. Unlike Waxman’s enthusiastic probing, the Senate chair conducted zero proactive investigations into Bush administration malfeasance. It’s chairman? Connecticut’s Joseph Lieberman.

Lieberman holds no value to the Democratic caucus. His is arguably the most vocal supporter of the war in Iraq. He has utterly failed to use his Committee as a tool to make our government work better and be more accountable. He has endorsed a Republican war hawk for President and traveled the nation to help him win votes.

Lieberman is not a Democrat. He is not a Democratic super delegate. He does not preserve a majority in the Democratic caucus. He does us no good and should be stripped of his Committee chairmanship. Of course, that will never happen as long as Hillary Clinton defends him on national television.

I hope George Jepsen is pitching a fit with the Clinton campaign today, because this is just shameful.

Avoid Leaps of Faith

Politicians qua candidates should not have political philosophies, strategies, or motives that demand they be treated like an onion, requiring a voter (or blogger) to peal back multiple layers of meaning and subtext to get at what someone really meant when they say or do something.

One of the defenses I’ve seen from people who don’t think we should be bothered by Obama’s comments praising Reagan is that this and other rhetorical and policy moves towards the right are really some sort of political jiu jitsu akin to George W. Bush campaigning as a compassionate conservative, then bolting to the right after attaining office. This may be Obama’s intention. If it is, I’ll rejoice when I see President Obama push for any number of progressive policy proposals to the left what he has offered during the campaign.

But as Obama remains in a Democratic primary which will be decided overwhelmingly by Democratic voters, this strikes me as a very bad idea. It asks progressive partisans and movementarians to take a leap of faith and hope that his comments about Reagan, Krugman, Bill Clinton, and health care mandates are nothing more than political gamesmanship to pull the wool over the eyes of right-leaning voters.

This probably only applies to the harden Democratic base, but I think any candidate whose words and action constitutes a request by voters to take a leap of faith by voting for them is a bad idea. It might work for less committed supporters of progressive values, but it is clearly has prompted serious push back by the blogs.

Jonah Goldberg on “The Daily Show”

Jonah Goldberg’s appearance on The Daily Show is something akin to watching someone try to earnestly unravel a ball of cooked spaghetti that’s been left in a colander to cool. Jon Stewart really wants to see the noodles laid out in an orderly fashion, but Goldberg just resists all efforts to understand him. It seems his most frequent refrain is a Ray Pekurny-esque, “It’s all in that book, ri-right there.”

http://www.thedailyshow.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml

For a more substantive takedown of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, read Dave Neiwert’s comprehensive recap of his efforts with Goldberg at FireDogLake. Neiwert also has a review in The American Prospect and I highly recommend the Gavin McNett’s review for Alternet, as he and the rest of the Sadly, No! team have pwn3d Goldberg pretty much since the book was first rumored back when the smallest computers were housed in large rooms and data was transferred by punch cards in 2003.

Update:
As I found the video via Josh Bolotsky at the CREDO Blog, I didn’t realize it wasn’t from last night, but from the 16th.

Also, Jon Swift’s pre-release offer of help Goldberg meet his publishing deadline by substituting chapters with LOL cats stands out as a piece of advice that Goldberg would have been wise to follow, while still maintaining a comparable level of intellectual seriousness as his final product achieved.

Feingold’s Take Down of John Edwards

Senator Russ Feingold just demolishes his former colleague John Edwards in an interview in the Appleton Post-Cresent:

On the Democratic presidential candidates
I did notice that as the primaries heated up, all of a sudden, all the presidential candidates — none of whom voted with me on the timeframe to withdraw from Iraq — all voted with me and when we did the Patriot Act stuff.

The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.

When you had the opportunity to vote a certain way in the Senate and you didn’t, and obviously there are times when you make a mistake, the notion that you sort of vote one way when you’re playing the game in Washington and another way when you’re running for president, there’s some of that going on.

On whether he’ll make an endorsement in the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary

Probably not. I’m having a hard time deciding between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as are many people. Those are the two I take the most seriously.

I go back and forth, to be honest with you. I’m torn on this whole issue of who’s more likely to be progressive and really seek change vs. who’s ready to do the job today. It really is a true dilemma in my mind. [Emphasis added]

Feingold’s comments actually mesh fairly closely with what I’ve heard from some Senate staffers in DC about Edwards. He’s thought of as someone who started thinking about his presidential run very early in his career, though he kept voting in a way that kept him safe with his constituents. His last year in the Senate saw a large leftward shift in his voting pattern, but at that point I think the damage was done.

That doesn’t presume, though, that the criticisms of Edwards by people working in Washington are fair or his transformation from a centrist to a hardline progressive is not convincing. No one is talking about the economic crush facing America’s working and middle classes in our presidential field, save John Edwards. No one – not even Russ Feingold – has used their bully pulpit as a political icon to identify and call out the damaging effects of corporatized America to the extent or with the commitment that John Edwards has. I agree with Feingold — it would have been great if Edwards had voted what he talks now. He didn’t and I can understand why his former colleague would be angered by Edwards’ timely transformation.

Last winter I started a blog with Kombiz Lavasany and Matt Ortega (both now at the DNC) called The Right’s Field, to exclusively cover the GOP primary. One of the things that I was initially puzzled by was the willingness of the Republican base to accept Mitt Romney’s transition from pro-choice, pro-gun control moderate to a conservative of Reagan’s ilk over a few short years. While attending CPAC I spoke with a Republican blogger who explained this phenomena to me on the grounds of Christianity and redemption. The redemption narrative is powerful and common in religious conservative culture. People do wrong, but if they change their ways, they can be forgiven; the change is a good thing. Romney wouldn’t be universally savaged because most conservatives will see him as transitioning from being wrong to being right — and they want their presidential candidates to be right far more than they want them to be without flaw (one could see this evidently when you realize Giuliani, Romney, and McCain have been frontrunners while Brownback and Tancredo are dropouts).

I agree with Feingold that Edwards voted the wrong way on key issues while he was in the Senate. Frankly, he could have been a better Democratic Senator. But he has undergone a transformation, one which when I hear him talk I believe is genuine. Edwards admits he was wrong about Iraq, about bankruptcy, about the Patriot Act, and now he takes good positions on them, some of the strongest in the Democratic Party. This transformation has brought him to not just a better place as a Democrat, but a better place than most Democrats, particularly Senators and presidential candidates, currently occupy.

Attacking Edwards for inconsistency strikes me as something that we don’t need to do, though I’m sure the Clinton and Obama campaigns oppo research shops will continue to do it. I think progressives should welcome the fact that John Edwards has become a leading voice for change, for workers rights, and against corporate power. We don’t have too many people speaking about these issues who can command attention and I’m not ready to write off John Edwards.

The Upside of Dodd as Obama’s VP

Douglas Burns of the Iowa Independent has posted his list of the ten people Barack Obama should consider as his pick for vice president. Atop the list: Senator Chris Dodd. Burns argues:

1. Chris Dodd. I have had the theory that Dodd would make a strong running mate for Obama should the Illinois senator get the Democratic nomination — even though this would run counter to conventional wisdom about picking a vice presidenntial candidate from a key state (Florida or Ohio) or going with a Southerner or Latino.

As I reported earlier, Dr. Steven Kraus of Carroll observed something several weeks ago at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner: Dodd, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, and Obama clearly have respect for each other.

Dodd is simply a classy senator who can answer questions with reliable competency. Yes, the Southwest likely will determine the 2008 election, and sure, a Richardson vice presidential nomination makes sense because of this. But Dodd is fluent in Spanish as I saw firsthand when Lorena Lopez of La Prensa and I conducted a joint interview with him. If Obama gets the nomination Dodd complements him in a number of ways as a running mate — including his ability to campaign in Spanish.

Dodd won’t make mistakes out there and with his reassuring white hair, the elder statesman would be a nice balance for Obama. Youth and wisdom. Age and experience.

I worked for Chris Dodd because I thought he was the best person to be President, so it’s not surprising that I think Dodd should be on the short list for Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. I think Burns raises some very good points about Dodd’s upside for Obama, but I’ll make a few more.

I’ll start with a pre-buttal of the apparent downside of Dodd for Obama. The natural hit from the Beltway punditocracy on Obama picking Dodd will be that in picking an experienced Senator, Obama has drawn attention to his inexperience. But this argument only holds if you presume that no one – not the press, not the GOP, not off-message surrogates – will highlight Obama’s relative inexperience in Washington politics and use that as a line of critique. Of course, we know that Obama qua nominee will face a heavy line of criticism for his short tenure in the Senate. Nothing he can do, including his VP pick, will change that.

Even if he were to pick a younger, more transformational VP to go along with his message of change (Kathleen Sebelius or John Edwards come to mind), you know the Beltway set will criticize his pick for not adding the “needed” balance of experience – his own Dick Cheney – to the Democratic ticket. And trust me, they won’t just be putting Obama through this wringer – any Democratic nominee will face intense scrutiny that seeks the most negative side of any decision from both the GOP and the Beltway press.

Leaving the foreseeable bunk flinging aside, here’s why I think Dodd is a good pick for Obama.

Dodd’s experience would be a tremendous asset for any of our nominees. From two and a half decades on the Foreign Relations Committee and extensive work negotiating ends to wars in Latin America and Northern Ireland, to one of the longest resumes of landmark domestic legislation with his name on it, to longtime experience monitoring the financial sector, Dodd brings tangible experience as a guy who gets things done in Washington. If a large part of Obama’s critique of DC partisanship preventing our government from getting substantive results for the good of the country, Dodd stands clearly as an example of someone who has been able to build bipartisan consensus around progressive Democratic principles. That strikes me as valuable.

A post-Cheney VP will have to redefine the role of the office (as well as reaffirm its existence as part of the executive branch). But that doesn’t mean that we need to regress to Dan Quayle contradicting school children on the spelling of “potato.” I don’t see inherent harm in structuring an administration in such a way that the other elected member of the executive branch plays a formative role in governance outside the halls of the Senate.

If I were Barack Obama, I would establish the role of his VP in advance of being elected and use it as a hammering point on the campaign trail. In the case of Dodd, the natural role would be as the person tasked with bottom lining the success of Obama’s legislative agenda. Obama and his policy team should pick what they want to get done in his first term and then hand the ball off to Vice President Dodd to get it done. Be up front about it: Dodd will quarterback Obama’s legislative agenda and he will get it done.

I think it’s an easy sell (but then again, I’m something of a partisan). In Obama’s narrative, change is a means to secure results. The Dodd campaign was largely framed around his career of getting results, so he could slot in on the back-end of the Obama message with relative ease while not taking away from the primacy of Obama’s change candidacy. In this scenario, Dodd is Obama’s answer to how he will ensure that an Obama presidency can bring change. Obama will be able to answer questions of his ability to get results in DC with extreme confidence, “What, are you kidding me? Dodd’s my guy – together we’ll get it done. I trust him and he’s extremely well respected on both sides of the aisle in DC. If you don’t think VP Dodd will get it done, you don’t know a one thing about Washington.”

In short, I agree with Burns that Dodd probably adds a tremendous amount to an Obama ticket. I’m not going to go into the comparative merits of Dodd over any other Democrat out there (though I cringe at Burns’ list including two prominent Republicans, Dick Lugar and Bobby Jindal). This is an exercise in pure political speculation.

And to preempt whatever questioning may come about my knowledge of Dodd’s future plans, I do not know if he would pursue or accept a request to be on anyone’s ticket as vice president. I do not know if he will endorse anyone or who he would endorse. I’m speaking solely for myself here.

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Candidate Jokes

Candidates on the campaign stump regularly take shots at their opponents. Most of it’s topical and much of it is joking. It’s part of the way that you get to see how a candidate thinks about their position in a race without necessarily including the trappings of media consultants and rigid messaging. That’s not to say it doesn’t include that, but something like this from Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton and John Edwards with regard to their self-identified weaknesses is probably pretty free of David Axelrod and David Plouffe’s editing.

So I said, ‘Well, I don’t handle paper that well. You know, my desk is a mess. I need somebody to help me file and stuff all the time.’ So the other two they say uh, they say well my biggest weakness is ‘I’m just too passionate about helping poor people. I am just too impatient to bring about change in America.

If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. I could have said, ‘Well you know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.’

Let me put this a different way. Candidates will develop their own critiques of the race separate from the one(s) their staff and advisers want them to make. And sometimes they get in front of an audience and make them.

Given that Obama prefaced those lines with a clear indication that the anecdote was meant to be funny, ““Folks, they don’t tell you what they mean,” I’m going to guess that he was out on his own today. But who knows, it might just be that I find these remarks so genuinely funny that I don’t want to credit his advisers with cooking it up. So, has anyone seen Obama use this critique elsewhere since Monday night?