Category Archives: The Nation

DeMint sticks up for Sarah Palin

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If you’re a Republican looking for cred on Iraq, then you want Lindsey Graham to stand up and tell everybody you were for the "surge" when nobody else was — as Lindsey did for best buddy John McCain last week.

But if you’re looking to bolster your rep as a fiscal hawk, then you want South Carolina’s junior senator.

Jim DeMint has made a name for himself nationally as the scourge of earmarks. So it is that Sarah Palin’s got to be grateful for his op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal this morning, headlined "Yes, Palin Did Stop That Bridge." An excerpt:

In politics, words are cheap. What really counts are actions. Democrats and Republicans have talked about fiscal responsibility for years. In reality, both parties have a shameful record of wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars on pork-barrel projects.

My Senate colleague Barack Obama is now attacking Gov. Sarah Palin over earmarks. Having worked with both John McCain and Mr. Obama on earmarks, and as a recovering earmarker myself, I can tell you that Mrs. Palin’s leadership and record of reform stands well above that of Mr. Obama.

DOH! We forgot the ‘national will’ part!

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Following up on my call earlier to Dave looking for resources about DIME, he e-mailed me something he got from a friend who teaches at West Point:

DIME is a list of the instruments of national power:

The ability of the United States to achieve its national
strategic objectives is dependent on the effectiveness of the US Government
(USG) in employing the instruments of national power. These instruments of
national power (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic), are normally
coordinated by the appropriate governmental officials, often with National
Security Council (NSC) direction. They are the tools the United States uses to
apply its sources of power, including its culture, human potential, industry,
science and technology, academic institutions, geography, and national
will.

To which I responded,

National will! We forgot about national will! DOH! That’s the problem!…

And kidding aside, that IS the problem. As long as our conversations about strategy is grounded in the kind of political vocabulary we’ve heard for the last few years — mostly based either in trying to appeal to bases or win elections — we’re not going to be able to assemble the national will to focus all of our resources toward international goals that are beneficial not only to this country, but to the world at large.

Where George W. Bush has failed, more than in any other way, is in assembling that national will and leading us to act upon it.

Unfortunately, so far I haven’t seen either McCain or Obama state a whole strategy that the nation can get behind — that is, something that goes beyond the either-or oversimplification of "soft power vs. hard power." If they did it and I missed it, I’d appreciate a heads-up.

9/11 plus seven years

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The way we split up duties on the editorial board, Cindi Scoppe handles scheduling. For instance, she maintains "the budget," which has nothing to do with money — it’s newspaperese for a written summary of what you plan to publish in upcoming editions.

A couple of weeks back, Cindi put a bold notice on the budget to this effect: 9/11 ???? Beyond that, she’s mentioned it a couple of times. Each time I’ve sort of grunted. The most recent time was Monday, and I felt compelled to be somewhat more articulate. I explained that I hate marking anniversaries. Such pieces are so artificial. The points one might make 365 days after an event should not differ from what you would say the day before, or the day after — if you’re saying the right things.

Nevertheless, I’m kicking around a column idea, one that I’m not sure will work. If I can pull it together between now and Wednesday morning, we can run it Thursday.

Actually, it’s a couple of column ideas. One would simply be a bullet list of things to think about: the movement of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be one bullet, another would be Osama bin Laden, another would be the state of the NATO alliance — or something like that. Something acknowledging that it’s tough to isolate One Thing to say on a topic so complex.

The other would be to hark back to the editorial I wrote for the Sunday after 9/11 — 9/16/01. In it, I set out a vision of how the U.S. needed to engage the world going forward. A key passage:

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

There’s nothing profound about it — it seems as obvious to me as the need to breathe. But America is a long way from embracing the concept holistically. We seem to lack the vocabulary for it, or something.

A couple of months ago, former State staffer Dave Moniz — who is now a civilian employee of the Air Force with the civilian rank of a brigadier general, operating out of Washington — brought a couple of Air Force guys to talk broadly about that service and how it’s doing these days. In passing, one of them mentioned the concept of DIME (which refers to "Diplomatic," "Information," "Military" and "Economic" as the four main elements of national power), which apparently is widely understood among military officers these days, even though it doesn’t enter much into civilian discussions.

We’ve wasted much of the last seven years arguing about the legitimacy of the exercise of military power, to the exclusion of the other parts. It’s sucked up all the oxygen. Occasionally we talk about "soft power," but as some sort of alternative, not as a necessary complement. And as long as our discussions are thus hobbled, it’s tough for us ever to get to the point of accomplishing the overall goals of making the world safer for liberal democracies:

    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

With rescue workers still seeking survivors in the smoking rubble of the twin towers, it didn’t occur to me that the military part would be such a political barrier. I couldn’t see then how quickly political partisanship would reassert itself, or how quickly we would split into a nation of Iraq hawks and the antiwar movement.

I’m encouraged that the surge in Iraq has been successful enough — Gen. Petraeus was thinking in DIME terms as he suppressed the insurgencies — that we are prepared to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (Which reminds me of something I often thought over the last few years when antiwar types would talk about "bringing our troops home." I didn’t see how anyone would think we could do that, with the battles still to be fought against the Taliban. The most compelling argument those opposed to our involvement in Iraq had was that it consumed resources that should be devoted to Afghanistan. Obviously, as we turn from one we turn more to the other — not because we want to exhaust our all-volunteer military with multiple deployments, but because until we have a larger military, we have no choice — no credible person has asserted that Afghanistan is a "war of choice.")

You know what — I’m just going to copy that whole Sept. 16, 2001, editorial here. Maybe it will inspire y’all to say something that will help me write a meaningful column. Maybe not. But I share it anyway… wait, first I’ll make one more point: What the editorial set out was not all that different from the concept of "Forward Engagement" that Al Gore had set out in the 2000 campaign to describe his foreign policy vision — although after he unveiled it, he hardly mentioned it. Too bad that between his own party’s post-Vietnam isolationism and the GOP’s aversion to "nation-building," we’ve had trouble coalescing around anything like this.

Anyway, here’s the editorial:

THE STATE
IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD
Published on: 09/16/2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A8

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words "missile defense shield" to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.
    That’s about the only way it might have helped.
    Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn’t going to work.
    We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term – military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.
    Essentially, we have wasted a decade.
    After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren’t interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War – then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.
    We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was "It’s the economy, stupid." Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world’s "policeman."
    Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.
    Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.
    Well, the rest of the world isn’t going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.
    In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won’t just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, "When we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.
    At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.
    Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world’s most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics – in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.
    We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don’t even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call "humint" – human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.
    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn’t live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do – if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us – they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.
    This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it’s the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.
    We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

Obama and McCain: The Halo Effect

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Obama_halo

After the Democratic Convention, I grabbed the above picture of Barack Obama, thinking I had not yet seen a more perfect photographic invocation of the notion that Sen. Obama was The One.

I didn’t think Republican lighting engineers could top that, and they didn’t, but they certainly tried. Note the photo below from Sen. McCain’s Thursday night address. Now you see why he has made some long-delayed inroads among his evangelical base.

Mccainhalo

Community organizers strike back

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I‘m beginning to suspect that community organizers are organized on a level somewhat larger than the "community."

The first letter on tomorrow’s editorial page sticking up for community organizers as a breed. Last week, within a day after Sarah Palin’s remark about their ilk vis-a-vis being a mayor, I got TWO e-mails sticking up for community organizers. Then, when I got home Friday, there was a panel discussion on PBS, and the person speaking when I walked into the room was defending community organizers.

The two e-mail releases came in within two hours of each other on Thursday. Here’s the first one:

Leading National Organization Responds To Attacks On Community Organizing Statement from the Center for Community Change
Washington, dc- Recently, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and several commentators and surrogates surrounding the presidential contest have attacked and misrepresented community organizing.  The following is a statement from Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, a 40-year-old national organization that builds the field of community organizing with hundreds of local organizations nationwide:

“When Sarah Palin demeaned community organizing, she didn’t attack another candidate.  She attacked an American tradition — one that has helped everyday Americans engage with the political process and make a difference in their lives and the lives of their neighbors. 

"All across the country, in every state and every community, there are community organizers helping people find shared solutions to the shared problems they face.  The candidates for President and Vice President should be working to solve our shared problems, too, rather than attack others who are trying to do the same.

"From winning living wages to expanding affordable housing to improving the quality of public schools to getting health coverage for the poor and elderly, community organizers have made and will continue to make our communities and our country better for all of us.

"The values that community organizers and grassroots leaders represent are not Washington values or Wall Street values but American values–that we care for each other and look out for each other and know we’re all interconnected and have a valuable role to play in making our country work for all of us.  Candidates should be courting these Community Values, not condemning them.”

Since 1968, the Center for Community Change has strengthened the leadership, voice and power of low-income communities nationwide to confront the vital issues of today and build the social movements of tomorrow.  The Center leads the Campaign for Community Values, a national movement of more than 300 grassroots, community-led organizations mobilizing voters in this election and beyond to demand policy changes that reflect our nation’s founding principles of shared responsibility, inclusion and interconnectedness. 
                  ###

Here’s the second one:

America is Built on the Contributions of Community Organizers
Statement of Wade Henderson, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

“The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is a coalition of nearly 200 organizations, much of whose work is done through community organizers. These advocates have provided the leverage for Americans to organize themselves into unions, get the five-day work week, voting rights for every citizen, paid maternity leave and the curb cuts used by people with disabilities and young mothers with strollers.

We’re a nonpartisan coalition but we do take exception when anyone disparages the vast contributions of community organizers to American society.

The United States has had a long and proud history of contributions made by community organizers, from Benjamin Franklin who organized the first volunteer fire department in this country to Clara Barton, who organized assistance for soldiers during the Civil War, to Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped our great nation correct a historic wrong. Over the years, many more community organizers have brought changes to American society that benefit all of us.

Nothing is done in a vacuum.  Someone has to organize it to get it done.  That is the simple and great role of a community organizer.”

               # # #

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) is the nation’s oldest, largest, and most diverse civil and human rights coalition. For more information on LCCR and its nearly 200 member organizations, visit www.civilrights.org.

So, however you define "community," one can’t say that these folks aren’t organized.

How are we feeling about the Electoral College?

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Back on my post about recent polls, I agreed with Phillip that what matters is NOT these national popular-vote numbers we’re seeing, but how the candidates are stacking up in the battleground states. Then, I asked:

Taking that to another level — while Phillip and I agree that the state-by-state is what matters, can we agree that the state-by-state is what SHOULD matter?

That one was a tough question to get folks to agree on in November 2000, but right now, when we don’t know how this one is going to come out, how are we feeling about that old Electoral College?

So how about it. Without knowing yet how the popular vote comes out — and it could go either way at this point — how do YOU feel about the Electoral College? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

Personally, I think it’s a fine thing. It forces a candidate to have appeal across the country, rather than just in a few population centers. At least, it’s fine in the abstract.

Woodward: ‘Surge’ not the main factor

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The WashPost is touting its serialization of Bob Woodward’s latest book, The War Within. Here’s a summary of today’s installment:

In the fall of 2006, the nation’s military leaders found themselves badly out of sync with the White House over what to do in Iraq, with one of the Joint Chiefs telling Bush, “You’re stressing the force, Mr. President, and these kids just see deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan for the indefinite future.” But as the surge progressed in 2007, violent attacks began to drop dramatically in Iraq. Was the surge the reason for this reversal? Knowledgeable officials say the influx of troops was just one of four factors, and not the most consequential one.

By the way, in a quick skim of the excerpt, I did not find the reference to the "four factors" mentioned in the summary sent to me today. But I did find them in a WashPost news story from three days ago:

The book also says that the U.S. troop "surge" of 2007, in which President Bush sent nearly 30,000 additional U.S. combat forces and support troops to Iraq, was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.

Rather, Woodward reports, "groundbreaking" new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to locate, target and kill insurgent leaders and key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward does not disclose the code names of these covert programs or provide much detail about them, saying in the book that White House and other officials cited national security concerns in asking him to withhold specifics.

Overall, Woodward writes, four factors combined to reduce the violence: the covert operations; the influx of troops; the decision by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his powerful Mahdi Army; and the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with U.S. forces.

Gallup shows McCain leading

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This morning I see that, while Nielsen sees Obama and McCain tied in "buzz" (whatever that means), Gallup sees McCain leading by 5 points. A week ago, after the Democratic Convention and before the Republican, Obama had led by 7 points in the same poll.

From the USAToday story:

WASHINGTON — The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an "enthusiasm gap" that has dogged the GOP all year.

McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican’s biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.

More on that "enthusiasm gap:"

Before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-24%, a sweeping change that narrows a key Democratic advantage. Democrats report being more enthusiastic by 67%-19%

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Surfing in Minnesota

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LISTENING to John McCain’s acceptance speech Thursday night was like surfing. That is, it was like surfing if you’re me:

    Paddle, paddle, here comes the wave, can I catch it, paddle, paddle, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, can I get on my feet, yes I’m getting up, I can’t believe it I’m standing, I’m doing this, can I straighten up, yes this is it, whoa, whoa, yow, WIPEOUT, long fall forward, interminable period way under water, scraping on coral, pop back up, swim to board, paddle, paddle, paddle….

    Exhausting.
    I haven’t surfed since 1971, because that’s the last time I was in Hawaii, therefore the last time I saw a wave worth the effort. A long wait. But I’ve waited my whole life for someone to give the speech Sen. McCain set out to give Thursday night. And, in stretches that practically made my heart stop — stretches where I thought, he’s going for broke, standing up, can he ride it all the way? — he actually gave it.
    Earlier in the week, I had thought I’d have to settle for Joe Lieberman’s paean to post-partisanship, the best bits of which went over like a lead butterfly with that partisan crowd. Most of the week was just like the week before in Denver, the usual party pooge. Sarah Palin did a great job for a rookie her first time at bat, but hers was the usual veep role — take down the opposition.
    But in the hours leading up to the McCain speech, the word went out that he was going to try the thing that had not been tried before: to accept a major party’s nomination while simultaneously rejecting and opposing all the vicious nonsense that parties have stood for over the past 16 years. Just minutes before he started, I read on The New York Times Web site: “McCain Plans to Speak of Dedication to Bipartisanship.” He was going to try the thing that I had hoped Barack Obama would try the week before — but which, except for a few encouraging passages, he passed on, delivering a pretty standard crowd-pleasing acceptance in Denver.
    McCain was better positioned to attempt the unprecedented. Poor Obama had to please all those Clintonistas who hadn’t wanted him. McCain had greatly appeased those in his party who least wanted him with his choice of Gov. Palin, which freed him to reach out over the heads of the convention delegates to the rest of America.
    And for the first 26 minutes and 44 seconds, he delivered a speech that was all that I’d hoped for. “I don’t work for a party,” he said, and you knew he meant it.
    Then, just when you thought he had decided to give a speech that told all partisans where to get off, wipeout, he’d spend several moments underwater. But then he’d climb back up and gamely start paddling again.
    There were so many indelible impressions to be gained from that speech, but here are some of the highs and lows for me:

  • He mentioned, as so many had before him (to the point of monotony), his reputation as a “maverick,” saying “Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment; sometimes it’s not.” That was a mild way to describe the central ironic tension of the moment. That hall was filled with people who had long despised him for going his own way, and now he was their nominee, and what could they do but grin and bear it?
  • The passage about education was just embarrassing, a wipeout of stupendous proportions. In almost the same breath, he promised the ideologues who hate public schools their “choice” and then implied he’d improve public schools by renewing the teacher corps — attracting and rewarding the best, running off the worst. Let me give you two clues, John: First, the American taxpayer will never foot the bill for both turning around failing public schools and paying people to leave them; it’s one or the other. Second, Ronald Reagan had it right — the federal government has no business trying to run our schools.
  • “Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, and that’s an association that means more to me than any other.” No one could doubt that this man truly believed that. He has lived it.
  • “His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat… stands between you and your doctor.” Oh, spare me. The one thing wrong with what Obama wants to do on health care is that he doesn’t have the guts to say, “single-payer” — and nothing short of that will solve the problem. At about this point, I started thinking how Obama and McCain are a complementary pair: One can sound dangerously naive on foreign affairs, the other on domestic.
  • The very best part was the part that could have gone very bad: talking about his own heroism. He made it a parable of why radical individualism is a dead end. “I thought I was tougher than anyone. I was pretty independent….” But God sent him misfortune as a gift. “I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even feed myself. They did it for me. I was beginning to learn the limits of my selfish independence.” And that’s when he truly learned to love his country.
  • At other points he vacillated between the self-centered ideology that Obama has decried as “you’re on your own,” and assurances that he’d make “government start working for you again,” even extending New Dealish assistance to those workers displaced in the shifting global economy.

    On the whole a noble effort, but the occasional dunkings in waves of cold ideology left me worn out. I’m so glad these conventions are over. Maybe once they escape the suffocating embraces of their respective parties, both Obama and McCain can better remind me of why I wanted them to win those nominations to start with.
    McCain made a good start on that Thursday.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

The NYT’s very, very cool video/text software

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Have you had occasion to check out the way The New York Times has been posting the major speeches from the conventions? It’s about the coolest — and to me, most useful — software I’ve ever seen. Certainly the coolest since Google Maps came up with the "street level" view, and without the Big Brother overtones.

Here’s what it does: First, there’s a high-quality video window. Then, there’s a transcript of the speech posted next to the video, but that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that if you click on the paragraph you want, the video jumps to the beginning of that paragraph. Then, on top of that, there’s a topical outline to the right of the transcript. Click on the subject you want, and it jumps to that part of the transcript and video. It’s amazing.

Not only that, but the paper’s site search engine — which unfortunately often frustrates me; it doesn’t read my mind as well as, say, Google does — will take you straight to these miraculous pages with the simplest, most intuitive input, such as "Barack Obama’s speech."

Since I subscribe to the NYT, I don’t know whether these are accessible just to subscribers, or to everyone. But in the hope that you can go check them out and groove on them, here are a few of the top speeches from the two conventions:

Did it work for you? I hope so. This is too cool not to be able to share.

What did you think of John McCain’s speech?

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Mccainspeak

Well, I’m exhausted. Exhausted from holding my breath through the speech that started — and finished — with such promise. In the middle, it let me down several times, such as with that silly litany about "I will do this; Obama will do that." (Yeah, a certain amount of that is called for — a candidate is obliged to tell us why we should vote for him and not the other guy — but that bit was contrived.)

This was … a great speech, delivered by someone who is not a great speaker… with bits and pieces that dragged it back down to mediocrity (and sometimes worse). If he’d cut out about a quarter of it, maybe less (and cut the right parts), it would have been magnificent. In the morning, when I have the full text in front of me, it might be an interesting exercise to see what a little editing can do…

The great parts (or the ones that leap to mind; I’m sure I’m forgetting some; I look forward to reviewing it in the morning):

  • He called repeatedly on Americans to come together, to reject the foolishness of partisan estrangement. In those parts he was in touch with his essential Joe-ness, his UnPartisanship.
  • He dealt with a heckler by saying the American people want us to come together.
  • He spoke unflinchingly of the failings of his own party.
  • When he decried the failed policies of the past and taking on the culture of Washington in which he has so often been a misfit, it was clear he was talking about the failures of Republicans AND Democrats.
  • He told his story of heroism not in terms of his own achievement, but of how it taught him that radical individualism, his worship of himSELF as opposed to something larger, was a dead end.

Where the speech disappointed was where he extolled the values of that same selfishness, and did it in ways that were downright schizophrenic, from the prattling about tax cuts to that bizarre passage in which he promised private school "choice" in one breath, and promised to fix public schools by encouraging and rewarding good teachers and getting rid of bad ones (two news flashes: America will never pay for both, and education is NOT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S BUSINESS!).

Those bits made the speech sound like it was written in places by a committee, one engaged in a tug of war between vision and cant.

He inspired when he spoke of foreign affair, and he sometimes sounded dangerously naive when speaking of domestic. That sort of makes him and Obama a complementary pair. Yes, that’s an oversimplification (if Obama really knew what to do domestically, he’d push for single-payer).

So I was often deeply inspired, and at other times saying, DOH! Why’d he say that?

So I’m exhausted. I’m so glad these conventions are over.

What did y’all think?

What’s Bill Moyers talking about?

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Last week and this week I’ve been watching PBS because it’s been covering more of the conventions than the networks (did I mention I didn’t go to the conventions this year?).

So I’ve heard, over and over, this promo from Bill Moyers in which, speaking of the 2008 election (I think), he says, "The stakes have never been higher."

Really? How about 1932? Or 1800, when we didn’t know whether a peaceful transition of power from one party to the other was possible in this revolutionary republic until we actually DID it, and after an election that still stands as being as vituperative as any?

How, pray tell, about 1860? Pretty doggoned high stakes there, I’d venture to say.

Yep, this is an extremely interesting election offering starkly different choices for the nation’s future. It is more exciting than any in my adult life (and not, I think, just because I like both McCain and Obama, which is a first for me). But the stakes have been higher.

All of you whiny partisans: Get over it!

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A normally sober fellow blogger helped me crystallize something when he posted this on a recent post of mine:

C’mon, Brad, after devoting a whole column to how disappointing you
found Obama’s speech, and your conviction that McCain is The One Who
Can Reach Across The Aisle, I want to hear what you have to say about
the hatred that filled that room last night. Forget the hug.

"The hatred?" You know, I never know when you guys are kidding. You are kidding, right?

Because if you Dems are serious about the stuff I’ve seen about
"hate" (a verb that I believe, translated from the Democratese, means
"to disagree with me"), and you Repubs are serious about the… well, I
don’t even remember the words, but there were a lot of stupid ones
about how mean and nasty "the media" was supposedly being to your
precious Sarah (come on, Dems, remind me of some of the dumb words they
used), then I think all of y’all need to take a chill pill.

Dems, the woman delivered a boilerplate veep speech. I’ve tried to
think back and remember what she said that y’all might think was so
mean, and all I remember was something about a mayor being like a
community organizer but with responsibility, and a candidate who’s
authored two memoirs but no major legislation, both of which seemed
like solid, above-the-belt shots to me. This is what veep candidates
do, people — they criticize the opposition. The question about Palin
was whether she could do it. She could.

And you whiny Repubs, give me a freaking break with your Spiro Agnew
Revisited hyperventilation about the fact that the "media" — which,
although you don’t believe it, is a plural word, and does not refer to
a monolithic beast — was so terrible and awful to this woman. Come on.
She sprang from McCain’s brow like Minerva from Zeus. Nobody knew squat
about her, and there was a huge, sucking vacuum demanding such info. Of
COURSE her daughter’s pregnancy was reported when she made a statement
about it. (What I objected to in a previous post what that anyone was
idiotic enough to mistake that for an "issue." Here’s a handy-dandy
guide: Abuse of power as governor, issue. Daughter’s reproductive
status: Not an issue. Think you can keep that straight, folks?)

Or did you mean, Tim, the reaction of the GOP partisans in the room?
They like stuff like that, Tim. Just as the Dems in Denver like shots
at the GOP team. They’re partisans. They cheer. Seems like you could
let them have their moment; it’s the first time anybody in that party
has looked even mildly animated this year. Dems have been cheering themselves
hoarse since about 2006.

‘Fear our Fecundity’

12 Replies

Families

Years and years ago, way back before immigration was anywhere near the issue it is today (or was last year, anyway; seems like I don’t hear nearly as much about it in this season), I read a piece either in the Atlantic or Harper’s. Written by a Mexican-American, it explored resistance in this country to immigration from south of the border (the "South of the Border" Gene Autry sang about, not the one in Dillon County). I don’t remember whether it was talking about illegals or not, but based on what I do remember from the piece, legality was probably irrelevant.

Anyway, the part I remember went like this: "They fear our fecundity." I remember it because I had to look up the word. I had seen it for years and never been sure of its meaning. Having learned it, I made a note to use it sometime. Having five kids of my own, I thought it might come in handy.

Twins_007It never did. I don’t think I’ve ever used it in the newspaper, and it doesn’t creep into my daily
conversation, even around the twins. (That’s them at the right, by the way, from over the weekend — just in case you haven’t had your full allotment of Cute today. Note the serious expressions — they’re thinking about politics. That’s Baby A on the left, Baby B on the right.)

But the word popped into my head when I saw the photo above. It’s of the McCain and Palin families together. It’s almost like they’re saying to Democrats, Fear our Fecundity…

Here’s a key to the photo, courtesy of The Associated Press:

The families of Republican presidential candidate, Sen., John McCain, R-Ariz., and his running mate, Alaska Gov., Sarah Palin pose for a photograph at the airport in Minneapolis, Minn., after McCain arrived for the Republican National Convention Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008. Left to Right: Doug McCain, Bridgett McCain, Meghan McCain, Sidney McCain, Jack McCain,Jimmy McCain, Cindy McCain, Andy McCain, Sen. John McCain Gov. Sarah Palin, Todd Plain, Bristol Palin, Levi Johnston, Willow Palin, Trig Palin, Piper Palin, Track Palin.

But hold on! Fear not, Dems! Joe Biden can top them without any help from the four Obamas. Do not try to out-fecund us Catholics, baby! Unfortunately, AP did not bother to list all the members of the Biden clan in the caption to this photo…
Biden_fam

The Hug

11 Replies

Hug1

Yes, I know what you were thinking when John McCain and Sarah Palin hugged on stage last night: Does this mean she’s got Bush cooties now?

That’s not what you were thinking? Well, what then? Surely you were thinking something.

You say it didn’t strike you as worth thinking about? Then you’re just not trying. Someone on PBS last night — I forget which of the talking heads — DID see it as fraught with meaning. It was noted that Walter Mondale scrupulously avoided hugging Geraldine Ferraro during the 1984 campaign. The point being, apparently, look how far we’ve come, yadda-yadda…

Here’s what I was thinking: I noted the expression on Gov. Palin’s face. It seemed to say, "Yeah, OK, I’ve got to hug this guy; it’s expected. But I don’t have to like it. And don’t get any ideas, buster…"

Or something along those lines. I admit, my ability to read minds isn’t perfect. But I’m pretty sure she wasn’t delighted.

In any case, it’s an expression I haven’t seen on her face at any other time, so far.

What did you think of Sarah Palin’s speech?

76 Replies

Palinspeak

For my part, not knowing what to expect,
I was impressed. She fought her cornerPalinstand_3
well, if you’ll permit the sports metaphor. If nothing else, she showed she could use a teleprompter more naturally and with greater poise than the guy at the head of the ticket.

She sort of turned my sitcom analogy around. Rather than whipping off her glasses and letting down her hair to reveal the beauty queen, she kept the specs on and unveiled a smart woman, an Earth Mother type from the small-town frontier who is a tough cookie, unintimidated by the condescension of the cosmopolitan types Rudy had mocked so earlier in the evening.

But write in and tell us what y’all thought. I’ll read it in the morning; gotta hit the sack.

Please don’t tell me there are people who think Palin’s daughter is an ‘issue’

77 Replies

A day or so after John McCain announced his choice of Sarah Palin, sometime over that long weekend, I remarked to someone that her great disadvantage was that she was a blank slate, and the Very First Thing she said — that is, the very first thing anyone focused on — would be blown out of all proportion and define her for the rest of the campaign, if not the rest of her life.

Joe Biden — or Joe Lieberman, or McCain, or anyone we’ve known, or think we’ve known, for years — can say something outrageous, and we’ll set it alongside all the other things we know he’s said or done, and it won’t be a make or break thing (and the reason Joe B. came first to mind is that one of the things we know about ol’ Joe, from long experience, is that he has a penchant for saying things that some regard as outrageous).

Not so with Sarah P. The first thing she says or does that makes an impression — which hasn’t happened yet — will fill up the vacuum in her "conventional wisdom" dossier.

Therefore, the stakes for her speech tonight would be extremely high. And so it should be; we don’t have years to get to know her.

Of course, I reckoned without the idiocy of the 24/7 TV "news" spin machine. It has to have something to masticate EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY, and whatever it’s chewing at a given moment is by its foolish definition THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD, so it couldn’t possibly wait until her speech Wednesday night.

If she had made the mistake of saying sometime since Friday that she doesn’t like the color blue, THAT would be the object of endless, fascinated conjecture, "analysis" and "judgment" by the talking heads: How could she not like blue? What sort of person is this? Everybody likes blue — all Americans, anyway. And what hypocrisy to be running with a Navy man, not liking blue! Or will she now claim, implausibly, that it’s only SKY blue that she dislikes? Watch for campaign releases claiming that she’s always liked NAVY blue…

And so forth. The cable TV talking heads make me think of Ford Prefect’s theory about Earthlings: "If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."

So yesterday — or the day before; I get all confused in weeks that contain holidays — we heard that Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant. To which I responded — to myself — Uh-huh. Well, I’m sure that’s been hard for them. And then I continued with my life, waiting for someone to say something that actually had any bearing whatsoever on this young woman’s suitability to be vice president.

But, apparently because her speech wasn’t until tonight, the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s daughter, of all absurd things, was dubbed an "issue" worthy of discussion, and even more implausibly, sufficient grist for snap conclusions as to Sarah Palin’s viability as a candidate. And yet it’s not even anything that I had deemed relevant (OR appropriate) to discuss on the blog, and as y’all know, I don’t have a high standard for such things.

Yes, I know; I should have expected this. Yet I was actually surprised when I picked up newspapers this morning and read that the McCain campaign (which had known about the pregnancy, the husband’s DUI, etc., and didn’t think any more of it than I did) was actually having to COPE with this "issue," that it was causing consternation throughout the GOP convention, yadda-yadda.

Oh, come ON, people! Get a freakin’ life!

Get back to me when you have something of substance to say about this woman…

What the locals say about Palin (not much)

71 Replies

As you know, the nation dodged a bullet last week — at least, a rumored bullet — when John McCain didn’t go off his rocker and choose Mark Sanford as his running mate.

Even though his status as a likely choice was the figment of fevered imaginations on the WSJ editorial board and elsewhere on the libertarian fringe, they mentioned him often enough, and their pulpit was bully enough, that I still worried a tiny bit right up to the last. In that corner of my mind, I pictured myself turning into Paul Greenberg, the Arkansas editorialist who has spent years of his life explaining to the country what a mess Bill Clinton is.

I didn’t want that role.

Anyway, having that perspective, I was curious as to what the Alaska press would tell us that we didn’t know about Sarah Palin. Editor & Publisher anticipated that curiosity on my part, but its first offering in that vein is pretty vanilla. The closest thing to a local insight provided by the Daily News-Miner in Fairbanks — going by the E&P excerpt, was this:

There was also some pandering right from the start.
“I told Congress `Thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere,’ ”
Palin reported to the crowd in Dayton, Ohio. “If our state wanted a
bridge, I said, we’d build it ourselves.”


But the state kept the bridge money. That’s because
Alaskans pay federal gas taxes and they expect a good share to come
back, just like people do in every other state. We build very little by
ourselves, and any governor who would turn that tax money down likely
would be turned out of office.

That’s it? The woman’s been governor for two years and that’s all you’ve got to tell us that we didn’t know? That could have been written by somebody in Washington, for Pete’s sake! E&P says that’s the first installment in a series; let’s hope later installments get into some substance. It’s not like I’ve got time to browse Alaskan Web sites.

Anyway, until I read something out of Alaska in the vein of what I wrote about the Sanford rumors, I’ll assume McCain did all right choosing Sarah Palin.

To bounce or not to bounce

7 Replies

My Dad does something I don’t do — he watches the 24/7 cable TV "news" channels — so he’s usually much more up on the latest spin than I am. Yesterday, while I was pulling nails from a large pile of lumber in my driveway so I could reuse it, he mentioned having seen that Obama didn’t get a "bounce" in the polls from the convention.

My reaction: Well, of course not — that was not a convention designed to appeal to independents. It was aimed at the hearts and minds of the already committed. Even Obama’s speech, which I had expected to go well beyond that, was (for him) pretty much party boilerplate. If you want a bump up in the polls, you have to appeal to people who aren’t already for you, and the Obama campaign didn’t do that last week. Hence my Sunday column.

Of course, there are different schools of thought as to whether Obama got a bounce or not. CNN says not. Gallup says he did. The WSJ today handled it about right, saying merely that "Early polls gave mixed readings on how much of a bounce Sen. Barack Obama got from the Democratic convention."

Then of course there’s the usual silly back-and-forth over expectations.

The bottom line is, this is what it was before the Democratic convention — a close race. And the only poll that counts is the one in November.

Yelling at the television

35 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE DEMOCRATIC convention forced me to an unpleasant realization: I’ve become one of those crotchety old guys who yell at the television in helpless frustration: “Lies! How can they say such things? How can anyone sit still for this stuff?”
    And this week, I’m in for more of the same with the Republicans.
    What sets me off? Oh, take your pick — the hyperbole, the self-importance, the us-against-them talk, the stuff that Huck Finn called “tears and flapdoodle.”
    Take, for instance, this typical bit from Hillary Clinton’s speech:

    My friends, it is time to take back the country we love. And whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team. And none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. This is a fight for the future. And it’s a fight we must win together. I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise…

    Let’s deconstruct that a bit.
    Take back the country? From whom? Did I miss something? Did the Russians roll right on through Gori and into Washington? No? You say Americans are still in charge, just the “wrong” Americans, of the wrong party? But your party controls Congress! Take it back from whom?
    … a single party with a single purpose. Now there you’ve hit on the biggest lie propagated by each of the major parties, the conceit that there is something coherent and consistent about such loose confederations of often-incompatible interest groups. Did you not just spend the last few months playing with all the force you could muster upon those very differences, those very tensions — between feminists and black voters, between the working class and the wine and cheese set? What single purpose, aside from winning an election?
    This is a fight… No, it isn’t, however much you love to say that. Again, I refer you to what the Russians are doing in Georgia — that’s a fight, albeit a one-sided one.
    … that we must win together. Actually, that raises a particularly pertinent point, which is that the only “fights” that “must” be won are the ones in which “together” is defined as all Americans, or all freedom-loving peoples, whereas such divisive factions as your party and that other one that will meet in St. Paul militate against our being able to win such fights together.
    I haven’t spent the past 35 years in the trenches… You’re absolutely right; you haven’t. So spare us the war metaphors.
    … to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise… Like that’s what matters, the stupid party label. Like there isn’t more difference between you and Barack Obama in terms of philosophy and goals and experience and what you would bring to office than there is between John McCain and Joe Biden. Come on! Please!…
    Sigh. Fume. Mutter.
    This stuff wouldn’t upset me quite so much if not for the fact that this was to be the year that we rose above this stuff. That’s why I so happily supported both John McCain and Barack Obama in their parallel bids for the White House. Both men offered themselves as alternatives from the incessant, bitter, destructive partisan warfare of the Clinton-Bush years.
    John McCain is the man the GOP’s partisans love to hate, the guy they call a “Republican In Name Only,” the man they stooped to new lows to destroy in 2000, the senator who’d just as soon work with Democrats as Republicans, the candidate who, coincidentally, has been giving Sen. Clinton a lot of love in his latest campaign ads.
    Barack Obama was the Democrat who made it abundantly, eloquently clear that he was not running in order to “fight” against his fellow Americans. So all week, I looked forward to his acceptance speech, and when it came I was… disappointed.
    Maybe I had built it up too much in my mind, depended too much on it to wash away the bad taste of all those boilerplate party speeches I had heard. He said many of the right things. He said “Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past,” but as for most of it — well, read David Broder’s column on the facing page.
    When he said “part of what has been lost these past eight years… is our sense of common purpose,” I thought, yes, but it’s been happening a lot more than eight years, and you know that. But he said it that way because of his audience. That’s what made the speech flat, by Obama standards. He had to avoid offending the kind of people who love the bitter politics that he had been running against.
    What I had wanted to hear was the kind of thing that caused me, while blogging on live TV the night of his South Carolina primary victory, to write “What a TREMENDOUS victory speech!” A sample of what impressed me so that night:

    “We are looking for more than just a change of party in the White House…. We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents… That kind of politics is bad for our party, it’s bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all.”

    That sort of anti-partisan vehemence would not have played well in Mile-High Stadium. Maybe, as he escapes the gravitational pull of Denver, the Obama of January will come out to inspire us again. I hope so. In the meantime, on to the Republicans….
    Just moments ago as I write this, as he announced he’d chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, Sen. McCain promised the GOP crowd that he’d “fight for you.”
    Lord help us.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.