Category Archives: Barack Obama

On second thought, I DO have something to say about Atwater…

25 Replies

After I had a good night’s sleep, I thought of something I wanted to say about the Lee Atwater documentary I saw last night.

Last night I posted something sort of neutral and didn’t offer an opinion about Atwater, probably because it just seems so long ago, and the man’s dead, and since I don’t have anything good to say about him, why say it? Unlike Kathleen Parker, I do not share the philosophy of Alice Roosevelt Longworth (someone my grandma, who grew up in Washington during that period, used to talk about a lot; one gathers Alice was sort of the Paris Hilton of her day, in the sense of being a constant subject of media attention), summarized as "If you haven’t got anything good to say about anyone, come and sit by me."

That sort of attitude appalls me. Folks who think I’m just mean as hell to the likes of Mark Sanford, or Jim Hodges before him, just don’t understand how hard I have to be pushed to be that critical. Like Billy Jack, I try; I really try. But when I get pushed too far…

Anyway, a column in the WSJ this morning — by that paper’s House Liberal, Thomas Frank — said something (in a different context) that made me think of the Atwater movie:

In our own time, a cheap cynicism has been so fully assimilated by the
governing class that the disenchantment is already there, incorporated
into the orthodoxy itself. What distinguished the late conservative
era, after all, was its caustic attitude toward the state and its loud
expressions of disgust with the media….

And indeed, that was Atwater’s contribution to American politics — cynicism of the cheapest, tawdriest, most transparent sort. The sort that brings out the Pollyanna idealist in me, that makes me want to say, "Have a little faith in people." Or in God, better yet. Or in something good and fine and worthwhile. Atwater embodied, without apology — in fact, he boasted about it — the dragging of our public life, our great legacy from our Founders (do you hear the fife in the background yet?), down to the level of professional wrestling.

He made politics — already often an ugly pursuit — uglier, as ugly as he could make it and get away with it, and reveled in doing so.

Oh, and before you Democrats get on a high horse and shake your heads at Atwater as "the Other," check the beams in your own eyes. It was fitting that one of the people in the movie who defended Atwater was Mary Matalin. And it’s no coincidence that she is married to James Carville. Nor is it a coincidence that Carville — check the picture — looks like Gollum. All those years of cynicism ("It’s the economy, stupid") have done that to him as surely as carrying the "precious" did it to Smeagol.

It’s that "Oh, grow up! This is the way the game is played, so get over it" attitude that makes politics so appalling today. (I like what this writer said about Carville-Matalin: "For the love of God, please stop enabling them.") Both parties have thoroughly embraced the Atwater ethic — or perhaps I should say, nonethic.

Good news, though: Obama just may be the cure for what ails us, since so many voted for him as an antidote to all that — especially those young folks who flocked to his banner. Time to ask what we can do for our country, rather than merely sneering at it, as Atwater did.

(Oh, and before Randy says, "Why don’t you condemn McCain for his horrible, negative campaign," I should say that you know I’m not going to do that. McCain disappointed me by not running the kind of campaign he could and should have run, emphasizing his own sterling record as an anti-partisan figure. But he didn’t disappoint me enough not to endorse him, so get over it. Everything is relative. I could, as you know, condemn Obama for tying McCain to Bush, which was deeply and profoundly offensive to me given its patent falsehood, and all that McCain had suffered at the hands of Bush. That was a cynical and offensive ploy to win an election, and it worked. But I prefer not to dwell on that, and instead to dwell upon the facets of Obama’s character that inspire us to hope for something better. Those facets are real — just as the virtues of McCain were real — and we owe it to the country to embrace them, to reinforce them, to do all we can to promote the kind of politics that lifted Obama above the hyperpartisanship of Carville and the Clintons.)

Anyway, that’s what I thought of this morning to say about Atwater.

Since when do stem cells top the agenda?

46 Replies

Obamarun1

So Obama’s hitting the ground running — jawboning Bush about Detroit, and so on — and that’s a good thing. Actually, he’s running BEFORE he hits the ground, which doesn’t happen until Jan. 20, but that’s good too. The nation needs leadership in a time of economic trouble, and it hasn’t had any lately.

Team Obama is also turning to some other priorities, such as shutting down Guantanamo (which, if and when it happens, will likely be cheered by John McCain as well — even if he may quibble over what happens with regard to trying the prisoners), and signaling that it is NOT going to dismantle our intelligence apparatus (much to the consternation of Obama’s base). All to the good, and all appropriate.

But one thing that the new team is signaling as a priority puzzles me. I first ran across it in the WSJ‘s weekend interview piece with Rahm Emanuel. Headlined with the quote, "Do What You Got Elected to Do," it looked at first as though it would make eminent good sense, invoking such themes as,  "Barack Obama’s message of change and Bush and the Republicans’ record of incompetence." Fine. But then I got to this:

Asked what Barack Obama was elected to do, and what legislation he’s
likely to find on his Oval Office desk soonest, Mr. Emanuel didn’t
hesitate. "Bucket one would have children’s health care, Schip," he
said. "It has bipartisan agreement in the House and Senate. It’s
something President-elect Obama expects to see. Second would be [ending
current restrictions on federally funded] stem-cell research. And third
would be an economic recovery package focused on the two principles of
job creation and tax relief for middle-class families."

At this point, I got whiplash. Say what? Hey, I’m all for Schip and all that — for starters (it doesn’t get us to a National Health Plan, but it’s something). But I don’t recall it being, specifically, a main topic in the election. But let it pass; it fits under the umbrella of a topic Obama DID talk a lot about.

But stem-cell research? You’re kidding me, right? An issue from the very heart of the Culture Wars, the second priority of the new president? In what universe, other than that occupied by the NARALs on one side and the Right to Life lobby on the other?

Why would this supposedly pragmatic, triangulating new chief of staff choose such a pointlessly divisive cultural issue as Priority Two for a president who so famously wants to end divisiveness in the country? Does he want to make the biggest mistake since Bill Clinton, after winning as a Third Way Democrat, both lifted regulatory restrictions on abortion and tried to eliminate the barrier to gays in the military in his first days in office?

Obama making stem cells a top priority would be like … I don’t know… like a Republican getting elected and announcing that one of the first things he’ll do is intervene in something like the Terri Schiavo case. One can quibble all day about the efficacy of different approaches to research in this field — but lifting the very narrow restriction that exists on federal funding of this activity (not on whether the research will take place, but on whether we the taxpayers will pay for it) is all about bragging rights in the Culture War. It’s a big deal to the left to lift the restrictions and a big deal to the right to keep them in place, but it doesn’t bear much on the price of fish for the rest of us. In fact, the technology may be on the way to making the political argument moot.

At first I attributed this to some sort of misunderstanding. After all, this interview was conducted on the fly, in an airport, before Mr. Emanuel had even been officially offered the post of chief of staff. And it WAS couched in terms of what Obama’s "likely to find on his … desk soonest" from Congress, which is different from what his own priorities might be.

But then I started seeing other references to this Kulturkampf issue, references that indicated this would be a priority for the new administration. And I had to wonder why. Is this a sop Obama would throw to his base so they get off his back on intelligence matters? Maybe. And maybe it’s just some partisans on his transition team getting carried away with themselves.

But it gave me pause.

Obamarun2

But what would Jubal Harshaw say?

43 Replies

Apparently, Obama’s gotten himself into hot water with some in the Blogosphere this afternoon by saying, regarding former presidents, "I have spoken to all of them that are living," but, " I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any seances."

Reports Katharine Seelye with the NYT:

Update | 3:23 p.m.
Mr. Obama is finding out just how much words matter when you’re the
president-elect — while he was extra cautious about everything he said
about the economy, careful of not influencing the financial markets, he
may have been a little flip in his reference to Nancy Reagan’s seances.
The blogosphere is already discussing whether he was being
disrespectful to the former First Lady.

Sheesh. Personally, I thought it was funny. And when’s the last time the president (or president-elect) said anything funny?

This brings us to one of my favorite instances of life imitating art. Some 30 years after Stranger In A Strange Land was written, we learned that the scenario it created — in which the most powerful man on Earth was guided by his wife, who was in turn guided by her astrologist — had actually happened during the Reagan administration.

And poor Robert Heinlein didn’t get to see it. But he knew, up there among the Old Ones.

All of which makes me wonder: What would Jubal Harshaw have to say about this? I sort of think he’d like Obama, although he wouldn’t admit it. He’d probably say something like, "I hope he’s just a scoundrel . . . because a saint can stir up ten times as much mischief as a scoundrel."

So when do we invade Pakistan?

47 Replies

OK, so now Iraq was a bad idea, because Obama was against our going into Iraq, and the people (except for 46 percent of them) voted for Obama, so that’s the new truth. Right?

And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

See? I’ve always said I love Big Brother.

But here’s my question: When do we invade Pakistan? You know, that’s where al Qaida is and all, as certain people keep telling us. As one of my interlocutors said back here, "Al-Qaida was not in Iraq until we got there." Which prompted me to say:

If al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, and we can’t get AT them in Pakistan, on
account of the fact that Pakistan gets really, REALLY upset when we go
in there after them, and they’re a sovereign country and all (which
doesn’t bother ME; I still think it was a good idea to follow the enemy
into Cambodia in 1970, but presumably a lot of folks who voted for
Obama Tuesday disagree, although not necessarily Obama himself, which
is another topic), then isn’t it kind of a good thing to draw them into
Iraq, where we happen to have troops to fight them?

Sorry about the long sentence, there.

Re-education is never an easy process, and as you see, I’m a particularly hard case.

You see, I forgot for a moment that Obama is all for doing a Cambodia and chasing al Qaeda into Pakistan, so in that sense we really didn’t need to go into Iraq (I still think we should have, for other reasons, but let’s stick with this point for now).

At least, I think Obama’s OK with that. That was the impression I had back in August 2007, when I wrote:

BARACK OBAMA was right to threaten to invade Pakistan
in order to hit al-Qaida, quite literally, where it lives. And as long
as we’re on this tack, remind me again why it is that we’re not at war
with Iran.
    OK, OK, I know the reasons: Our military is
overextended; the American people lack the appetite; the nutball factor
is only an inch deep in Iran, and once you get past Ahmadinejad and the
more radical mullahs the Iranian people aren’t so bad, but they’d get
crazy quick if we attacked, and so forth.
    I can also come up with reasons not to invade Pakistan, or even to talk about invading Pakistan. We’ve heard them often enough. Pakistan is (and say this in reverent tones) a sovereign country; Pervez Musharraf
is our “friend”; we need him helping us in the War on Terror; he is
already politically weak and this could do him in; he could be replaced
by Islamists sufficiently radical that they would actively support
Osama bin Laden and friends, rather than merely fail to look
aggressively enough to find them; fighting our way into, and seeking a
needle in, the towering, rocky haystacks of that region is easier said
than done, and on and on.
    But when you get down to it, it all
boils down to the reason I mentioned in passing in the first instance —
Americans lack the appetite. So with a long line of people vying to be
our new commander in chief, it’s helpful when one of them breaks out of
the mold of what we might want to hear, and spells out a real challenge
before us…

Anyway, this seems particularly relevant at the moment, because Obama just won the election — perhaps you heard about that — and on Election Day itself, I read this in the WSJ:

ISLAMABAD — Pakistani officials warned U.S. Gen. David Petraeus
that frequent missile strikes on militant targets in Pakistan fan
anti-American sentiment in the country, an ally in the fight against
terrorism.

The new U.S. commander of America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq met
Pakistani officials, including Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar
and army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, as part of his first international
trip since taking over U.S. Central Command three days earlier….

So what’s the new Commander in Chief going to tell Petraeus to do about all that? Keep up the pressure on al Qaida and the Taliban in their Tribal Area hidey-holes? Or back off in deference to our ally?

I’m sorry to interrupt everybody’s warm and fuzzy feelings about how we’ll be at peace with all the world now that Obama is going to be our president, but I’m ornery that way. I’ve got this habit of noticing that the real world has this way of intruding upon us…

Graham likes Obama’s 1st pick

29 Replies

Thought y’all might find this interesting:

Graham Statement on Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of
Staff

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham
(R-South Carolina) today made this statement on the news Illinois Congressman
Rahm Emanuel has accepted the job as White House Chief of Staff.  Graham spoke
by phone with Emanuel earlier today.

Graham said:

“This is a wise choice by President-elect Obama. 

“Rahm knows Capitol Hill and has great political
skills.  He can be a tough partisan but also understands the need to work
together.  He is well-suited for the position of White House Chief of Staff. 

“I worked closely with him during the presidential
debate negotiations which were completed in record time.  When we hit a rough
spot, he always looked for a path forward.  I consider Rahm to be a friend and
colleague.  He’s tough but fair.  Honest, direct, and candid.  These qualities
will serve President-elect Obama well. 

“Rahm understands the challenges facing our nation
and will, consistent with the agenda set by President-elect Obama, work to find
common ground where it exists.  I look forward to working with him in his new
position and will continue to do everything I can to help find a pathway forward
on the difficult problems facing our nation.”

            #####

After reading of Mr. Emanuel being a hard-ball operative from Clinton days, and how he was expected to play "bad cop" to Obama’s "good cop," I was prepared not to like him. I mean, didn’t we choose Obama over Hillary Clinton to get away from that stuff? But if Lindsey likes him, I need to reconsider.

By the way, I’d have included a picture of Graham from our recent interview with him, but MY LAPTOP GOT STOLEN, so all those pictures are gone!

Just in case you didn’t know.

The proper emotion, the seemly sentiment

26 Replies

Obamasmile

Yesterday morning, looking for art to go with today’s lead editorial, I picked the photo above. Along the way I had briefly considered the ones back on this post, but this one worked best worked best for my purposes in terms of expression and composition — it worked perfectly in terms of the size and shape I needed.

I hesitated to use if for only one reason: He looked so extremely YOUNG — far, far too young to be president. As young as his campaign workers that I wrote about back in this column in the summer of ’07. It brought to mind something I said to my wife recently about JFK: He was several years younger than Obama when elected, but I remember him as looking older and more mature. Is that because I was a child at the time, or did he just look more grown-up manly. Was it something about that generation — they had been to war, and that does something to a man’s face. They were the Daddy generation (in fact, somewhat older than MY dad, who was too young for WWII). My wife pointed out something I should have realized: The prednisone that Kennedy took for his back problems caused his face to fill out; before that, HE looked like a skinny, gawdy kid. True enough, I suppose.

So I hesitated to use a photo with our congratulatory editorial that in my own mind raised one of the reasons I preferred McCain, on a gut level: Obama is to me something far more dramatic than the first "black" president (a distinction regarding which I have my own rather pedantic doubts). He is the first president younger than me. Quite a bit younger. So it is that, not wanting to express doubts about the new president through my choice of a photo, I paused. But nothing else I saw was nearly as suitable, so I went with it.

Imagine my dismay last night when, flipping channels on the boob tube, I saw a news program use the very same photo quite prominently. Then imagine my further concern this morning to see that our newsroom had decided to, in the hyperbolic expression that many readers use, "splash" that photo across six columns on the front page this morning. This coincidence give grist to those who believe there is collusion between news and editorial, when the truth is that I see these things when you, the reader, do.

These "coincidences" cause me to reflect on what Tom Wolfe once said about the news media, which was to call us the Victorian Gentleman, constantly striving to evince the proper emotion, the exact right tone for the moment — which causes us to make the very same decisions simultaneously, without the slightest effort at collusion or even awareness of what each other are doing. This picture is an illustration of that phenomenon. It said "winner" better than any other photo, so everyone picked it.

By the way, my second choice of the day was the one below that I used on the op-ed page, with the David Broder column. Obama’s expression isn’t nearly as good — he almost looks apprehensive — but he has that "eyes on the distant horizon" look, and the air Biden has of presenting him to the world (Behold, your new president!) was just too good, too apt, to pass up.

So on the whole, this Victorian Gent is satisfied.

Obamabiden

What did Tuesday’s election say about race?

69 Replies

Now that Obama has won the election, we see a number of narratives emerging as to what it means in terms of race in America:

  • Some folks are just stunned that a "black man" could get elected president. They had always hoped, but hadn’t dared to expect it, what with white people being so wicked and all, but all is right with the world. Our long national nightmare is over.
  • Others are equally shocked and pleasantly surprised, but caution us not to think that we’ve put racism behind us, so don’t let your guard down, folks.
  • Then there are those who say, Of course we elected a black man president; we could have done it sooner given such a well-qualified choice. No one should be a bit surprised, and this proves that racism is something we don’t have to wring our hands about any more, so can we talk about something else now?
  • Finally, there’s me and a couple of other people who say, "What do you mean, ‘black man’?" This is a guy whose white American mother married a foreign student — someone who came to this country to avail himself of its great store of educational opportunity, NOT someone brought here from the OTHER side of the African continent as a slave. Yeah, he decided to self-identify as a black man, but does that make him one? So does this prove anything? Maybe it does since so many people, black and white, seem to have accepted his self-identification, and he was elected because of/in spite of that. But given his anomalous background (and since I share some points of commonality with him in terms of my own peripatetic childhood — things that make me think that just maybe there are things about him I understand that your average black or white voter does not — I feel some entitlement to speak on this point), does it REALLY mean what people say it means? This is a very, very talented young politician who, if anything, personally transcends race — so maybe THAT means something. But I don’t know.

Those are the strains I’ve identified so far. Y’all see any others?

Just glowing with happiness

37 Replies

Well, now, here‘s a congratulatory message I wouldn’t have anticipated:

“The nuclear energy industry congratulates Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden
on their election. One of the most important and compelling challenges facing
their administration is to put in place a national energy policy to achieve
energy security and to protect the U.S. economy and the
environment.

“If the United States is going to meet the
predicted 25 percent growth in electricity demand by the year 2030, as well as
achieve its environmental goals, we must begin that work now. And we must
recognize as a nation that we cannot reach our energy goals without the
reliable, affordable and carbon-free electricity that nuclear power plants
generate to power our homes, businesses, telecommunications, military and
transportation infrastructure. Senator Obama recognized this linkage early in
his campaign by noting, ‘It is unlikely we can meet our aggressive climate goals
if we eliminate nuclear power as an option.’

“The development of U.S. energy policy must
transcend partisan politics. There must be a bipartisan effort to develop a
diverse portfolio of energy resources, including nuclear energy, which is the
only large-scale source of carbon-free electricity that can be expanded to meet
our nation’s electricity needs. Building new nuclear power plants will expand
U.S. industry and manufacturing, creating thousands of green jobs and enabling
America over the long term to electrify its transportation sector. Affordable
around-the-clock electricity also helps to strengthen the U.S economy and
protect America’s neediest citizens.

“The executive and legislative branches have
shown considerable support across the political spectrum to work with the
nuclear industry in a public/private partnership to enable the construction of
new-generation nuclear plants and to move ahead with scientifically sound solutions for used
nuclear fuel storage and disposal. We will work with the new administration to
pursue an integrated used fuel management strategy that includes interim storage
of used nuclear fuel, research and development into advanced technologies for
recycling used fuel without contributing to proliferation concerns, and
development of an appropriate geologic repository for permanent disposal of the
used-fuel content that can’t be recycled.

“It is crucial for the new administration to
continue with these and other efforts to shape a comprehensive energy policy
that recognizes the value of nuclear energy and other low-emission electricity
sources. We look forward to working with the Obama-Biden administration and
Congress to assure that nuclear energy continues to be recognized as a key tool
to deepen economic prosperity and achieve enduring environmental
stewardship.”

###

The Nuclear Energy Institute is the nuclear energy
industry’s policy organization. This news release and additional information about nuclear
energy are available at www.nei.org.

Mind you — my jocular headline aside ("Doh!") — I’m a big fan of getting as many nuclear power plants up and running as we can, as fast as we can. But last time I checked, I don’t think Obama shared my eagerness. Or did I miss that?

One war, two wars: But who’s counting?

28 Replies

This morning we ran an editorial calling upon the nation to unite after the election, and quoting something S.C. Supt. of Ed. Jim Rex had said:

“What’s important for our students to know is that after elections, Americans come together,” Dr. Rex wrote. “We have enormous challenges ahead of us — a war on two fronts, an economy in crisis, a broken health care system, and so much more. We cannot stand to be divided one more day. Regardless of who wins, it’s time for us to work together to move this country forward and create a better, more stable America for our children and grandchildren."

Did you catch the little grace note there that made his message truly bipartisan — his reference to "a war on two fronts?" In case you missed it, that is decidedly not the official Democratic Party version.

We were reminded of that last night in Barack Obama’s otherwise gracious, affirming victory speech, in which he sincerely called on the nation to come together, but nevertheless repeated the official Democratic Party version of reality:

we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril…

And so we continue with the refusal to acknowledge either a) the global war on terror, or b) that Iraq is part of it. It makes me wonder: When we act against al Qaida in Somalia, or Yemen or Pakistan or Indonesia, are those third and fourth and fifth and sixth wars, etc.?

Sorry to be such a nitpicker. I truly thought Obama’s speech was good, and appreciated its attempts to reach beyond party.

Likewise, I appreciated the graciousness of John McCain’s acceptance speech, even though one could detect partisan difference in that even when he was trying the hardest to reach out:

In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.

Did you catch it? Yes, it’s a very Republican thing to say those Americans "WRONGLY  believed that they had little at stake or little influence." Democrats would likely leave out the "wrongly."

Bottom line, I appreciated both speeches, for what they did, and more, for what they meant to do. I can think of no recent election in which both victor and defeated were so gracious at the critical moment.

But I’m an editor; I pick at words. And even while I’m applauding, these little flaws jump out at me. File them under the heading of "how far we have yet to go," even on agreeing about the nature of reality.

Congratulations to President Obama!

67 Replies

Obamawin1

Obama’s done the expected, and done it on deadline, which certainly warms my heart toward him.

Here’s hoping his leadership as president is on a par with the highest notes he struck during the presidential campaign. And he has struck some fine ones, such as on the night of his triumph in S.C. I certainly had an undivided mind about his victory on that night.

He’s shown he can inspire; let’s all hope and pray he can unite the nation. We need it. No, I’m not as happy about this as I thought I would be several months ago. But I’m hopeful, so call me audacious.

I now turn the floor over to you, the reader — I’ll have more to say in the coming days, but I’m going to go get some sack time now.

Obamawin6

My predictions

13 Replies

Here are my predictions as to what I think will happen on the contested races that we dealt with in our endorsements. As always, endorsements are about who should win, not who will win. To fill that vacuum — and to help you see the difference — here are my prognostications (in which I place far less faith, because they are not nearly as carefully considered):

  • Obama will win the presidential election — the real one (electoral college, with at least 300 electors) as well as the popular vote. He’ll win it decisively enough that we’ll know by midnight. BUT McCain will win in South Carolina, probably 55-45. We endorsed McCain.
  • Lindsey Graham will easily win re-election. No prediction on the numbers; I have no idea. In fact, I’m only doing numbers on the presidential, because I really have no idea on any others. We endorsed Graham.
  • Joe Wilson will win against Rob Miller, but it will be close. We endorsed Wilson.
  • Jim Clyburn will have a blowout victory over his GOP opponent. We endorsed Clyburn.
  • John Spratt will win with a margin somewhere between Wilson’s and Clyburn’s. We endorsed Spratt.
  • Nikki Setzler will survive the challenge from Margaret Gamble, and thanks to the Obama Effect, it will be the first time it helped him to be a Democrat in 20 years. We endorsed Setzler.
  • Anton Gunn will beat David Herndon, but it will be fairly close. We endorsed Gunn.
  • Joe McEachern will cruise to victory over Michael Koska. We endorsed Koska.
  • Chip Huggins will roll right over Jim Nelson, who will NOT benefit appreciably from the Obama Effect. We endorsed Nelson.
  • Nikki Haley will win big, again in spite of Obama. We endorsed Ms. Haley.
  • Harry Harmon will again be Lexington County coroner. We endorsed Harmon, although we again made the point that this should NOT be an elective office.
  • Elise Partin will — I hope I hope — win the Cayce mayor’s office (this is the one I have the LEAST feel for, since we’ve never endorsed for this office before). We endorsed Ms. Partin.
  • Gwen Kennedy, despite being best known for a Hawaiian junket the last time she was on Richland County council, will ride the Obama Effect to victory over Celestine White Parker. We endorsed Ms. Parker.
  • Mike Montgomery should prevail (note my hesitation) over challenger Jim Manning, who seems to be running as much as anything because he felt like there should be a Democrat in the race with Obama running. We endorsed Montgomery.

Oh, and Ted Pitts will roll to victory over his last-second UnParty challenger. We didn’t endorse in this one, but if we had, we would have endorsed Ted.

The creeping sense of letdown

26 Replies

This feeling has been creeping up on me in recent weeks, and it’s just emerged into my consciousness in the last days. I hesitated to mention it, and it seems particularly inappropriate given the fact that people are turning out in droves to vote, but…

The election has been a real letdown for me. And I didn’t expect that.

Remember back in January, when I said that if our two endorsees for the major party nominations both made it to the November ballot, it would be a win-win proposition for the country? Well, I did say it, and I meant it. But somehow, between then and now, my enthusiasm has just dissipated, like air slowly but steadily leaking from a balloon.

Part of this is just due to the fact that I was never going to enjoy the general election campaign as much as I did the primaries, nor would I appreciate these two candidates as much as party standard-bearers. They were SO much more appealing as insurgents — McCain running and prevailing against all the diehard GOPpers, over their vehement protests, and doing it even after his candidacy was declared dead. Obama running as the alternative to continuing the vicious, pointless partisanship of the Clinton-Bush years. But the climax of this drama seems to have occurred when they triumphed over their parties’ orthodoxies. Nothing has seemed that fun or that inspiring since then.

McCain picking Sarah Palin to please the base was bad, but Obama leading the charge of the crowd pretending that John McCain was some sort of incarnation of George W. Bush was, if anything, worse. All of it was dispiriting. I first noted that during the Democratic Convention; and while there were moments in McCain’s acceptance speech where he was almost the guy he needed to be to keep me applauding, he fell short of the mark.

Beyond those factors, three things contributed to my present political ennui:

  1. McCain utterly failing to put his best foot — or even his second-best foot — forward. Every time he opened his mouth, I kept hoping he would explain clearly, in a way undecided voters couldn’t miss, why he was the guy. I still thought he was the guy myself, but it would have been nice if he had helped others see it. It’s like he was going through the motions ever since he upstaged himself with the Palin selection. This is a weird and unfair thing to say, but… you know those appearances he did on SNL Saturday and Monday nights? He was game, and I give him that, but… he just fell flat. It wasn’t funny. No, he’s not a professional comedian, but he can be funny — one moment when he was his old self, but I think too few people saw it, was at the Alfred E. Smith dinner. He was hilarious. His timing, and his feel for his audience was impeccable. But the SNL appearances were a letdown. Blame the writing if you will, but it was sort of symbolic to me of the way he generally failed to connect throughout the fall. Sometimes you click; sometimes you don’t. Yeah, I know that seems stupid, but what I’m trying to say is that he no more clicked as a presidential candidate during these weeks than he did on SNL. If you don’t know what I mean, go back and watch the debates. He was saying the right things, but not clicking. As I mentioned in a previous post, our endorsement was about his record, not about what we saw in the campaign. I’d endorse him again given the chance, but next time I would hope he’d help himself out more.
  2. That shouldn’t have mattered given the "win-win" situation I had predicted back in January. With one guy faltering, that left us with Obama. But I found myself less and less enchanted with him as the campaign wore on. He, unlike McCain, never missed a step. He was on his game at every moment of every day, with a steadiness and discipline that seemed superhuman. That wasn’t the problem. The one real up-side I saw to the future, contemplating the future with a President Obama, was that he has consistently shown such stellar abilities with the intangibles of leadership, from his general unflappability to his rhetorical talents. The problem was that I started paying more attention to what he actually had to say about some issues, and started doing so in a more critical fashion, as I pondered our upcoming endorsement. And, as I’ve said in recent days, I got really, really disturbed about some of the things he said, because they were SO off-the-shelf, liberal Democratic dogmatic. (Ironically, the debates had a big impact on me here — even as I was disappointed at McCain’s political skills on those occasions, I became more and more disturbed by precisely what Obama was saying so smoothly.) Before, I had just accepted that he and I wouldn’t agree on abortion, for instance — something I had to accept in backing Joe Lieberman or practically any other Democrat. But then I started peeling the layers, and each new layer worried me more. First, his lack of concern for the moral value of the unborn seemed to go beyond most Democrats, and I just started fully noticing that near the end. Then there was his unwillingness to consider judicial candidates who didn’t agree with him on the issue. Then there was his equating the nebulous "right to privacy" with the right to free speech. Then there was his utter dismissal of the rights or duties of the political branches to decide such issues with that "state referendums" nonsense. Then I saw similar patterns on free trade, and there was a disturbing willingness to be doctrinaire on Big Labor’s agenda, not a transformative figure at all. Combine that with the inevitability of bigger Democratic majorities, and instead of a post-partisan president, you’ve got textbook Democrat, and that set us up for more partisan warfare in the coming years, not less.
  3. Finally, there was the staggering economic news of the last couple of months. On a pure electoral plane, this as much as anything is what has delivered the election to Obama. But I gotta tell you, I sure wish I could be as sanguine as the Obamaniacs are about his ability to lead us through this. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think McCain could, either. It’s just that I have seen little to make me think Obama has a better idea of how to approach this. I wasn’t kidding when I said, several weeks back, that what we need is another FDR. And neither of these guys fills the bill, the way I see it. This factor has done as much as anything else to grind down my enthusiasm, day after day. Did you see the lead story in The Wall Street Journal today? That’s our reality, folks. I really, really hope that the Obama supporters are right and I’m wrong, and he WILL have what it takes to lead us to turn back the tide. But I remain worried.

Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe this is just physical exhaustion. Maybe it’s the wild ride of the past two years, all the excitement — all the fun we’ve had here on the blog, for that matter, with page views now essentially double the year before. And so on pure adrenaline, I’m due for a letdown. But I think it’s more than that.

In the last few weeks, I’ve said a bunch of times that I looked forward to this being over. But I just realized today that I won’t feel that way at all. Instead, I fear, the letdown will be complete rather than merely imminent, and I’ve just come to realize that. No, not because "my guy" lost the presidential election. It’s more because I thought it was win-win, and then I realized that it wasn’t, and that whoever won, we were going to have a mess that we still have to get through. The economy will still be a mess. We’ll still have the same problems with Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China… and ourselves. We won’t even be poised to solve our health care crisis, because even with a bigger Democratic majority and a liberal Democrat in the White House, no one will say "single-payer." The irony of that is palpable to me. (We’ll get the BAD stuff of liberal Democratic ideology — the activist judges, the intimidation of unwilling workers into unions, trade isolationism, and the like — without a National Health Plan. Sheesh.)

Basically, I realized fully, on an emotional level, that neither McCain nor Obama was going to deliver us from all that. And once the election is over, we no longer have the luxury of pretending that they might do so. So I think that’s why I’m down.

Sorry to rain on the parade. Y’all go ahead and have a nice time, though …

The WashPost’s endorsement of Obama: Hoping he doesn’t really mean it

11 Replies

This post is a spinoff of the last one.

In the earlier post, I mentioned The Post‘s endorsement of Obama. As I said, The Post‘s editorial board believes, as I do, that Obama has been persistently wrong about Iraq, but they rationalize that away:

Mr. Obama’s greatest deviation from current policy is also our biggest
worry: his insistence on withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq on a
fixed timeline. Thanks to the surge that Mr. Obama opposed, it may be
feasible to withdraw many troops during his first two years in office.
But if it isn’t — and U.S. generals have warned that the hard-won
gains of the past 18 months could be lost by a precipitous withdrawal
— we can only hope and assume that Mr. Obama would recognize the
strategic importance of success in Iraq and adjust his plans.

As if that’s not enough, in the very next passage they ALSO rationalize away his position on trade — you know, the thing I was trying to get readers to take a fresh look at by mentioning the Colombian FTA in our endorsement:

We also can only hope that the alarming anti-trade rhetoric we have
heard from Mr. Obama during the campaign would give way to the
understanding of the benefits of trade reflected in his writings. A
silver lining of the financial crisis may be the flexibility it gives
Mr. Obama to override some of the interest groups and members of
Congress in his own party who oppose open trade, as well as to pursue
the entitlement reform that he surely understands is needed.

Here’s the thing about that: I think Obama is an honest man. I hope he’s just boxed himself into a rhetorical corner on Iraq, and I seize hopefully on his statements about other global hotspots as an indication that maybe Iraq is just an anomaly with him. But trade? Sorry, but I’m afraid I have greater faith in Sen. Obama’s veracity than some of his supporters do. He really does believe some of the bad stuff he says — for instance, about judicial selection.

The Post and ‘liberal bias,’ then and now

19 Replies

Cal Thomas cries AHA! upon reading the Sunday column of The Washington Post‘s ombudsman, in which Deborah Howell writes:

Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage — and that’s as it should be. But it’s true that The Post, as well as much of the national news media, has written more stories and more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain. Editors have their reasons for this, but conservatives are right that they often don’t see their views reflected enough in the news pages.

For Mr. Thomas, this is an occasion for pontificating (in a column he wrote for tomorrow) about "what’s wrong with modern media." For me, I’m reminded of "All the President’s Men," which I watched again over the weekend.

There’s a great scene in which Hugh Sloan is trying to explain himself to a fidgety Woodward and Bernstein. "I’m a Republican…" he begins, to which Redford’s Woodward, eager to keep this critical source talking, says, "So am I."

In response, Dustin Hoffman’s Bernstein gives Woodward this look. As focused as he is on the goal of getting Sloan to talk, he registers surprise, for just an instant. His look seems to say, "What did you just say? Going a bit far to ingratiate ourselves with this guy, aren’t we?" The look combines incredulity with a touch of acknowledgment that maybe it IS true, and if so, this Woodward guy is really a different animal.

I really don’t know what newsrooms are like these days because I haven’t worked in one in a while, but in my day it was extremely unusual for anyone to declare a party preference, but a far greater rarity to say, "I’m a Republican." I can think of one reporter I had over the years — one out of dozens — who made a point of saying that, and it was sort of the running gag — he was the "office Republican." He left the paper in 1982 to go to work for a newly elected GOP congressman — Don Sundquist. Now he’s a lobbyist for the insurance industry. I’ve mentioned him here before: Joel Wood.

There have been reporters who, if you forced me to guess, I would guess leaned Republican, and plenty of them who leaned — some very heavily — to the Democrats. But Joel’s the only I remember who made a point of it. Come to think of it, I can only think of one reporter who made a big point about being a Democrat, and he did it to an embarrassing degree. He wasn’t nearly as cool about it as Joel. And why do I just say "leaned" when I speak of the others? Because it’s nothing I would quiz people about, not back in my news days, anyway.

So yeah, Woodward was a different sort of critter, certainly back in Ben Bradlee’s day, and probably today. In another column, Ombudsman Howell says the following:

While it’s hard to get some readers to believe this, I have found no hint of collusion between the editorial and news pages in my three years here. The editorial board’s decisions have nothing to do with news coverage. In fact, Len Downie, who just retired as executive editor, famously didn’t read editorials, and the computer system has a firewall that prevents the newsroom from seeing the editorial staff’s work.

Republican-leaning readers — along with some who say they are Democrats — have overflowed my e-mail inbox saying that The Post is biased in favor of Obama. As I’ve noted before and will again, Obama has gotten more news and photo coverage than McCain.

Of course, readers who tilt to the right will say that with news people being instinctively, reflexively liberal, you don’t need any collusion. (The Post, by the way, endorsed Obama — even after years of agreeing more with McCain on Iraq.)

I’ll close this post with a quote from yet another Howell piece, and this is an experience that everyone in the business can identify with, whatever their biases or lack thereof:

When I came to this job in October 2005, I heard more from Democrats who thought The Post was in George W. Bush’s back pocket. The Post was "Bush’s stenographer." Now I hear mainly from Republicans who think The Post is trying to elect Barack Obama president.

Yup. Been there, heard that.

Of presidents, courts and the rule of law

85 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
AT THE OUTSET, John McCain had a great head start with me — on experience, national security, foreign affairs, bipartisanship, and his oft-demonstrated willingness to do the right thing regardless of political consequences.
    As Labor Day approached, I began to doubt. First, he picked Sarah Palin. I don’t have as low an opinion of her as many seem to, but she’s no Joe Lieberman. Then, Sen. McCain ran a particularly ham-handed fall campaign, one that simply did not communicate his virtues clearly to the voters. As I had with Bob Dole in 1996, I wondered: If he can’t run a campaign, how can he run the country?
    But my doubts ended during the third debate. Sen. Barack Obama “won” on style, on cool, on demeanor, much as John Kennedy did in 1960. But I was paying attention to what they said. That’s when I decided I had to stick with McCain.
    Let’s consider several things they said about one subject, judicial selection.
    This column is not about abortion. I knew already that I disagreed with Obama about abortion. I’m a Catholic, and I’m not a Joe Biden kind of Catholic. But I’ve supported Democrats (such as Sen. Lieberman) who didn’t challenge their party on abortion; I’m not a single-issue voter.
    Aside from abortion itself, I find Roe v. Wade appalling in two ways: I don’t find a “right to privacy” in the Constitution. Secondly, the ruling has had a devastatingly polarizing effect on our politics. My respect for the rule of law is such that I’d be willing to put up with the political division for a ruling rightly decided, but this one didn’t qualify.
    So the sooner Roe is overturned, the better. Obama strongly disagrees. And in rationalizing what he sees as the imperative to protect Roe, he turns against several other important principles that I believe a president should respect, from the separation of powers to the proper role of politics.
    I’ll review each of these points briefly, starting with the one that concerns me least:
    Sen. Obama seems to judge court rulings based more on their policy effects than on legal reasoning. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, he wrote, “The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me — for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.” That hinted to me that he cares more about good outcomes than law. But I forgot about it until I heard him say in the debate that “I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.” That third qualification disturbed me because it seemed to demand a political sensibility on the part of judges, but I wasn’t sure.
    Much harder to overlook is the hard fact that despite his opposition to Roe, John McCain voted to confirm two Clinton nominees, Justices  Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Why? “Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences.” Senators should respect the president’s prerogative to the point that they should refuse to confirm only those nominees who are obviously unqualified. “This is a very important issue we’re talking about,” he added. Sen. Obama has had two opportunities in his brief Senate career to confirm highly qualified nominees — Samuel Alito and John Roberts — and voted against both. Yes, confirmation is different from nomination, but I would rather have someone who has demonstrated McCain’s relative freedom from ideology doing the nominating.
    Perhaps worst of all, Sen. Obama was dismissive and misleading regarding the proper roles of the states with regard to the federal government, and the political branches with regard to the judiciary. Regarding Roe, Sen. McCain said, “I thought it was a bad decision…. I think that… should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist.” He was saying abortion law should be returned to state legislatures, where we make most of our laws, rather than having it in a special, hands-off category.
    In answering, Mr. Obama shocked me in two ways, saying “I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.”
    If a right to privacy exists, it is at best inferred from the Constitution. The author of the “right,” Justice William O. Douglas, found it in “penumbras” and “emanations.” And yet Sen. Obama equated it to the very first rights that the Framers chose to set out in black and white, and subject to ratification. That a Harvard-trained attorney would do that may not boggle your mind, but it surely does mine.
    Then there’s that bit about not subjecting such a hallowed “right” to “state referendum,” or “popular vote.” Sen. McCain had suggested nothing of the kind. In a representative democracy, such questions are properly decided neither by plebiscite nor by judicial fiat, but by the representatives elected by the people to make the laws under which we will live.
    There are many issues to consider in this election, from national security to the current economic crisis. I can’t go into all of them in this column. But in just those few moments in that one debate, John McCain clearly demonstrated to me a far greater respect for the proper roles of the president, the Congress, the courts, the states, and the people themselves in making us a nation of laws and not of men.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Kagan’s right: Security trumps all

38 Replies

Frederick Kagan has it exactly right in today’s Wall Street Journal: "Security Should Be the Deciding Issue." An excerpt:

As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a "real" problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Americans than Haifa Street.

One problem with this emotion is that it ignores the sequel to the Great Depression — the rise of militaristic Japan marked by the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, both of which resulted in part from economic dislocations spreading outward from the U.S. The inward-focus of the U.S. and the leading Western powers (Great Britain and France) throughout the 1930s allowed these problems to metastasize, ultimately leading to World War II.

Is it possible that American inattention to the world in the coming years could lead to a similarly devastating result? You betcha.

A couple of things to note: Mr. Kagan doesn’t express a preference for either Obama or McCain. Of course, folks likely to vote for McCain are more likely to agree with him that security overrides such considerations as the economy. Democrats love it when the economy is the one thing on the table; just ask James Carville. And of course, I’ve had arguments with bud here about the relative importance of foreign affairs vs. the domestic economy. He thinks the economy is everything, and to me it’s less important (not to mention simply being something I hate to spend time talking or thinking about, because it has to do with money).

And, yeah — I trust McCain more on national security. At the same time, I don’t think Obama would be all that bad. Yes, he continues to insist upon being wrong about Iraq. But I think he has calculated that he has to be consistent there; his views on the rest of the world aren’t nearly as MoveOn.orgish.

But set all that aside, and the main thing I’m saying here is that I agree with Mr. Kagan: For us we turn inward fretting over our pocketbooks at the expense of ignoring our proper role in the world would be extraordinarily dangerous. Yeah, we can do both. But not the economy at the expense of international security.

Helen Alvaré on Obama and abortion

56 Replies

Tomorrow, I plan to write a column for Sunday about how the remarks of the candidates on judicial selection in the third debate solidified my preference for John McCain, on several levels.

It won’t be about the abortion issue. Obviously, Obama and I disagree about abortion. But so do most Democrats, and I’ve supported plenty of Democrats in my day. What I plan to get into is the less emotional aspects of that debate, those that deal with bipartisanship, pragmatism, the Constitution and the proper roles of the respective branches of government. For instance, as I’ve mentioned here, I was rather shocked to hear a Harvard-trained attorney equate the inferred (and I believe, nonexistent) "right to privacy" to the all-important First Amendment, deliberately stating that the first is just as sacrosanct a principle to him as the latter.

Here’s my text from which I’ll be working. It’s this passage from the transcript of the third presidential debate:

SCHIEFFER: All right. Let’s stop there and go to another question. And this one goes to Senator McCain. Senator McCain, you believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Senator Obama, you believe it shouldn’t.

Could either of you ever nominate someone to the Supreme Court who disagrees with you on this issue? Senator McCain?

MCCAIN: I would never and have never in all the years I’ve been there imposed a litmus test on any nominee to the court. That’s not appropriate to do.

SCHIEFFER: But you don’t want Roe v. Wade to be overturned?

MCCAIN: I thought it was a bad decision. I think there were a lot of decisions that were bad. I think that decisions should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist. And I believe strongly that we should have nominees to the United States Supreme Court based on their qualifications rather than any litmus test. Now, let me say that there was a time a few years ago when the United States Senate was about to blow up. Republicans wanted to have just a majority vote to confirm a judge and the Democrats were blocking in an unprecedented fashion.

We got together seven Republicans, seven Democrats. You were offered a chance to join. You chose not to because you were afraid of the appointment of, quote, "conservative judges."

I voted for Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg. Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences when presidents are nominated. This is a very important issue we’re talking about.

Senator Obama voted against Justice Breyer [sic — he meant Alito] and Justice Roberts on the grounds that they didn’t meet his ideological standards. That’s not the way we should judge these nominees. Elections have consequences. They should be judged on their qualifications. And so that’s what I will do.

I will find the best people in the world — in the United States of America who have a history of strict adherence to the Constitution. And not legislating from the bench.

SCHIEFFER: But even if it was someone — even someone who had a history of being for abortion rights, you would consider them?

MCCAIN: I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.

SCHIEFFER: All right.

OBAMA: Well, I think it’s true that we shouldn’t apply a strict litmus test and the most important thing in any judge is their capacity to provide fairness and justice to the American people.

And it is true that this is going to be, I think, one of the most consequential decisions of the next president. It is very likely that one of us will be making at least one and probably more than one appointments and Roe versus Wade probably hangs in the balance.

Now I would not provide a litmus test. But I am somebody who believes that Roe versus Wade was rightly decided. I think that abortion is a very difficult issue and it is a moral issue and one that I think good people on both sides can disagree on.

But what ultimately I believe is that women in consultation with their families, their doctors, their religious advisers, are in the best position to make this decision. And I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.

OBAMA: So this is going to be an important issue. I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.

I won’t get into the right or wrong about abortion per se in my column except to acknowledge that yes, I’m pro-life, so there’s a fundamental disagreement there, and I think Roe has been enormously destructive to the politics of our nation. Then I’ll move on to the more abstract stuff, where I believe I will make points that someone should be able to relate to regardless of their position on abortion itself.

Other Catholics have taken on the ethical issue head-on, however, and are actively appalled at the idea of a "President Obama." A few minutes ago, I got an op-ed submission from Helen Alvaré, as follows:

(Helen Alvaré was the planning and information director for the pro-life efforts of the nations’ Catholic bishops for 10 years. She is now an Associate Professor at the George Mason University School of Law. The opinions expressed herein are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of either of these institutions)

My name has been closely associated with Catholic Church pro-life efforts for almost two decades. For that reason, and because I believe ardently that religion cannot be reduced to politics, I have studiously avoided public commentary about particular candidates over the course of 18 years of pro-life work.  It still offends me at three or four levels when a minivan sporting a political bumper sticker arrives at carpool at my kids’ Catholic school, or parks for Sunday Mass.  I will not have one.

But Barack Obama has pushed me over the edge of anonymity.  Whatever else is true about the dangers of appearing to claim (wrongly) that God has a horse in this race, it is more dangerous to pretend that I’m less than horrified at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

For here is a man who has publicly thrown his considerable influence behind the idea that it is acceptable to let newborn infants die if their mothers wanted an abortion and the child was mistakenly delivered alive. Here is a man who can countenance doctors  partially-delivering living unborn children,  and then stabbing, suctioning and crushing their heads – all in the name of preserving “abortion rights.”   His public record is unambiguous in this regard, despite attempts by the some to torture the meanings of Senator Obama’s voting record.  The facts are simple. While an Illinois state senator, Senator Obama led the opposition to a law that would have protected children who were accidentally born alive after an abortion-attempt. He also worked with the nation’s leading chain of abortion clinics, Planned Parenthood, to strategize the defeat of bills that would have given parents information about their minor girls’ abortions.  As a U.S. Senator, he denounced an overwhelmingly popular law to ban the killing of partially-born infants. And as a presidential candidate, he told Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund on July 17, 2007 that the “first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” For emphasis, he repeated: “That’s the first thing I’d do.”  This is overwhelming on its face. Among all the first statements about the meaning of his historic presidency a President Obama could choose, it would be this: an expanded abortion license.   

What can be made of such a man?  It is no good to say he is simply acting to champion women’s rights when most American women would outlaw or more stringently regulate abortion (New York Times, April 19, 2007 Megan Thee, Public Opinion on Abortion).  Or when even Obama concedes the possibility that abortion is killing, which of course makes it a forbidden “means” to any end – woman’s rights or any other.  He cynically leaves it to others at a higher “pay grade” to determine the exact moment when life begins, but we all know the instrumental purposes of this utterance: appear to maintain common ground with both sides of the ever-churning abortion debate.

Some readers will say of my position:  “She is a single-issue voter, and those people don’t care what becomes of the rest of us.”  To the exact contrary, I am suggesting that when Obama supports allowing a parent to kill a child, at perhaps the most defenseless moment of his or her life, and when he refuses to see this killing as an intrinsic wrong, but calls it rather a cherished right,  we should understand that none of us is safe.  For where does his “reasoning” leave other defenseless persons?  What does it imply about all of the decisions a “President Obama” will make?

Some will say that the good Obama will do for some people simply outweighs the harm he will do to others. Even this calculus is absurd; Obama’s judicial appointments will ensure that legalized abortion continues to be forced upon every state, as it has been since 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court in one fell swoop overturned laws against most abortions in every state in the Union.  We’re talking millions more abortions during our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children.   Obama has even declared himself opposed to continued funding for “crisis centers” offering pregnant women a way to support the children they wish to keep.

But even were the above calculus somehow measurable and correct, it is never acceptable to endorse killing as a means to any end.  By endorsing it, then, candidate Obama has demonstrated that he doesn’t have a conscience that functions in a way Americans should even recognize.   Rather, his is a “conscience” which surely comprehends what it must be like to die violently, or by means of starvation and dehydrations; yet he votes to allow these to continue.  Elevating such a man to the most important legal and social bully pulpit in the nation is unthinkable. Worse, it is a national tragedy.

For these reasons, and for the first time in my life, I have to speak out. An Obama presidency would be a moral nightmare.

.
Professor Helen Alvaré  is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia.

I certainly understand where Ms. Alvaré is coming from on this, even though I’m going to be tackling this from another angle.

Personally, I haven’t been as shocked by Obama’s positions on this as she is. I say, you want to be shocked? Look at Joe Biden. He’s a Catholic; he should know better. And yet, as I’ve said plenty of times before, I like Joe. And I’m not horrified by the idea of an Obama presidency, he is after all my strong second choice. But pieces such as this make me wonder about myself: Maybe I’ve allowed myself to accept too much about the "political realities" of being a Democrat in America. There is an alternative — pro-life Democrats such as Bob Casey in Pennsylvania DO get elected nowadays, even with NARAL fighting tooth and nail to stop them. Obama and Biden have a moral alternative. So what excuses their position, from my own Catholic point of view?

But that’s not what my column’s going to be about.

South of the Border

14 Replies

Some of y’all really hated it that I mentioned the Colombian Free Trade Agreement in the McCain endorsement — which to me illustrates the no-win situation I saw myself in with all those loyal and devoted Obamaphiles out there. Nice people, many of them, but hard to please if you don’t agree with them.

If I had just cited the usual reasons — being right on Iraq, taking a stand on doing the right thing on immigration, being a war hero, etc. — I would have been castigated for lack of original thought. So I decided to include something you might not have thought of — and something that actually helped confirm my preference for McCain — as a way of broadening the discussion. Perhaps predictably, I got the obvious response from those determined to find fault: Obviously you don’t have any good reasons, since you drag this out of left field.

No win situation.

Doug mentions back on this post that The Economist has endorsed Obama. Well, a couple of days ago I was reading something in The Economist that reminded me of why the Colombian FTA is important to me, but also why y’all might have trouble understanding that.

Blame it on my upbringing — or part of it, anyway. I spent two years, four-and-a-half months — easily the longest I lived in one place growing up — living in Guayaquil, Ecuador. From late 1962 through spring 1965. Like Obama in Indonesia, I saw a lot during that time that most nine-to-11 year olds growing up in the States don’t see. For instance, I was not only there during a military coup, but I was in the house at the time during when the plot was being hatched, at least in part. Our landlord was a captain in the Ecuadorean Navy, and my parents had left me at the landlord’s house while they went out one day. While I was there, a man came to visit the captain; they went into a room and closed the door. The next day, the president had been put on a plane to Panama, the man who had come to visit was a member of the new military junta, and our landlord had a big post in the new government. Minister of Agriculture, I think.

My guitar teacher, who had a little shop down by the waterfront where he made his own guitars by hand, was an agent for U.S. Naval Intelligence, I would later learn. And the missionary who preached at the nondenominational English-language services we attended on Sunday was working for the CIA. But not everyone was running things or plotting to run things. I remember the men who squatted in a circle in the dust of the vacant lot near our duplex as they bet on the cockfight in the center of their circle. I remember the smell of REAL poverty, the Third World kind, that arose from the poorest barrios of the city. It was different, very different, from living in this country.

I also remember people who were there working for JFK’s Alliance for Progress program. And ever since I came back in 1965, I’ve been acutely conscious of the fact that most of my fellow Americans just don’t give a damn one way or the other about these countries in their own backyards. JFK was the last.

This cultural indifference is definitely reflected in the mass media. So it is that I have to turn to such publications as The Economist to find out what’s going on in the realm of the Monroe Doctrine. It’s weird. Anyway, I got to thinking about that when I read this piece in The Economist the other day. It was about the irony that folks in Latin America seem to prefer Obama, even though it’s McCain who cares about the region enough to learn about it:

OF THE two candidates in the American presidential election, it is John McCain who knows something about Latin America. Not only was he born in Panama, he also visited Colombia and Mexico in July. He thinks the United States should ratify a free-trade agreement with Colombia and, at least until it became politically toxic, wanted to reform immigration policy. Ask him who the United States’ most important friends around the word are and he pretty quickly mentions Brazil.

And yet if they had a vote, Latin Americans, like Europeans, would cast it for Barack Obama—though without much enthusiasm. Preliminary data from the latest Latinobarómetro poll, taken in 18 countries over the past month and published exclusively by The Economist, show that 29% of respondents think an Obama victory would be better for their country, against only 8% favouring Mr McCain. Perhaps surprisingly, 30% say that it makes no difference who wins, while 31% claim ignorance. Enthusiasm for Mr Obama is particularly high in the Dominican Republic (52%), Costa Rica, Uruguay and Brazil (41%). In Brazil, six candidates in this month’s municipal elections changed their names to include “Barack Obama” in them.

In the third presidential debate, I noticed two things (well, I noticed a lot of things, but two things related to this post): That McCain had cared enough to understand what it meant to support a trade agreement with a key ally in the region — an agreement that could only be good for this country in terms of trade and jobs, and which affirmed a country that had undertaken huge sacrifices to ally itself with U.S. interests. That was the first thing. The second was that Obama seemed not even to have scratched the surface of the issue. His answer was such Big Labor boilerplate, it seemed plain that he had not looked into the issue or thought about it beyond his party’s talking points.

To me, that spoke to things that were true about the two candidates in a broader sense — experience, and the ability to differentiate between our friends in the world and those who wish us, and their own people, ill. I had been deeply impressed by the recent piece Nicholas Kristof — a guy who almost certainly will vote for Obama — had done on this issue, and the degree that Obama’s answer utterly failed to look at the issue as knowledgeably and thoughtfully as Kristof had. And as McCain had.

I sat and talked to Ted Sorensen about Obama as the heir to Camelot, and was deeply impressed. But I’ve gathered since then that aura aside, Obama seems actually less likely to take the kind of interest in Latin America that Kennedy did. McCain is more likely to do so. Ironic, huh?

So to me it was more than, here’s a little esoteric fact I know and you don’t. To me, it mattered. But to me, South America has always mattered.

You, too, can use irony — no experience required

39 Replies

Obama_ad_wart

Wow. As cool as Barack Obama is — and he IS cool, all the time — some of his supporters are VERY emotional.

Two of them — Jennifer and Pam — got so worked up by my very mild use of irony on this previous post (referring to their guy as "The One") that they mistook me for a Republican. To wit:

I don’t understand why Republicans continue to call Senator Obama
"The One" – none of his supporters has ever used that term. Why do you
rely on mocking the man and spreading lies about him? Is it maybe
because you are obviously wrong on the issues? Crawl back into your
caves, please, and let us get to work cleaning up another one of your
messes.

Posted by: Jennifer Mullen | Oct 29, 2008 9:13:15 PM

_____________________________________

When a party has no good ideas or solutions you slander your
opponent. Just like Brad , you know " the one " comment. The consistent
theme from the RNC and the McCain campaign is fear and hate . And ,
this paper’s editorial board enforces that theme. Sad to think that
some in this state are unable to look to the future .

Posted by: pam,greenwood | Oct 30, 2008 9:58:27 AM

Talk about letting emotion override the higher faculties…

p.m., thanks for pointing out the painfully obvious:

Jennifer, Oprah Winfrey introduced Obama as "The One" years ago. I
have seen the videotape. If you would Google it, you could probably
find it….

Posted by: p.m. | Oct 29, 2008 10:43:00 PM

Yes, I got the thing about "The One" from that font of Republican bile, Oprah… We "Republicans" always go to her for our marching orders, talking points, swastika armbands, etc.

Folks, where are we when we can’t even use the smallest bits of irony in our public discourse without somebody getting all offended?

Come on, folks — Phillip gets it. He’s for Obama, and he can josh about the cheesiness:

Naturally, my biggest complaint was the syrupy Saving-Private-Ryan-ish background music.

Posted by: Phillip | Oct 30, 2008 4:40:54 AM

And I didn’t even notice the music — leave it to Phillip; he’s our music guy. I just noticed the cheesy set, which someone was careful to make ALMOST exactly like the Oval Office, but enough unlike it to allow for plausible deniability. I mean, LOOK at it, people. Now that’s artistry.

Folks, cheesy is cheesy. Joe the Plumber — cheesy. Pandering with a gas tax cut — cheesy. Picking Sarah Palin — cheesy (although, to quote from the movie Phillip cites, I find myself "strangely attracted…"). Maverick this, maverick that — cheesy.

Now, you Obama supporters — make some ironic comments about your guy. Come on, you can do it. Look, this guy’s going to be the president, and I just won’t be able to stand four years of y’all being so deadly earnest. Loosen up.

The One’s prime-time address to the nation

47 Replies

Dig the faux Oval Office! Better than the faux Greek temple, even! He couldn’t have the Brandenburg Gate, but his folks sure can whip up a presidential-looking set, can’t they? Gotta spend that money on something, and Obama’s opted to burn some of it on a 30-minute Address To The Nation in Prime Time. Hey, why bother actually becoming president, if you can do cool stuff like this when you haven’t even been elected?

Anyway, I’m gonna watch the rest of it now. I just thought I’d give y’all a place to comment on it.