Category Archives: UnParty

The Obama-McCain meeting

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Obama_mccain

Not a lot to emerge from the president-elect’s meeting with John McCain (and Lindsey Graham and Rahm Emanuel) today, which is to be expected. Here’s the closest thing to substance I’ve seen, from their joint communique:

We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical
challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy
economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

Of those items, seems to me the greatest potential for collaboration would be on energy. (But I would think that, wouldn’t I?)

Here’s a scene-setter from the NYT politics blog:

Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama are sitting
down together now and metaphorically smoking a peace pipe in their
first face-to-face session since the bruising campaign.

The two are meeting at Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters at a federal building in Chicago, where they just posed for the cameras.

The meeting space has a stagey look, in front of the kind of thick
royal blue curtain you see in an auditorium, not the usual
campaign-rigged blue backdrop. Flags are strewn throughout, with one
planted between the two principals, who are sitting in yellow,
Oval-Office-like chairs.

To their sides are their wingmen, Rahm Emanuel on Mr. Obama’s left
and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on Mr. McCain’s right.

They’re all looking jolly (Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanual the jolliest), and we’ll soon get a read-out on the discussion.

The Obama team is hoping they can smooth any ruffled feathers and
build an alliance with the old John McCain — not the one whom the Obama
camp called “erratic” during the presidential campaign but the
self-styled “maverick” who worked across party lines for various causes
that Mr. Obama wants to advance — global warming, immigration, earmark
spending among them.

In the brief moment before the cameras, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going
to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to
fix up the country, and also to offer thanks to Senator McCain for the
outstanding service he’s already rendered.”

Mr. McCain was asked whether he would help Mr. Obama with his administration.

“Obviously,” he said.

Those pesky reporters tried to shout out other queries, like about a
possible bail-out for the auto industry, but the pool report says they
were “shouted down by the pool sherpas,” and that “Mr. Obama finally
said with a smile, ‘You’re incorrigible.’”

The last in-person meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain took place more than a month ago, at the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra, remembered chiefly as the coming-out party for Joe the Plumber.

Updated | 2:12 p.m.: A joint statement was released from President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of
all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the
bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent
challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive
conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where
we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in
order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and
opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work
together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like
solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and
protecting our nation’s security.”

Beyond that, here are versions of the story from:

Hoping, audaciously

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
BACK IN JANUARY, I said — on video; you can view it on my blog — that this year’s presidential election presented the American people with a no-lose proposition.
    It was the first time in my career when the two candidates we (and I) enthusiastically endorsed for their respective nominations actually made it onto the November ballot. So how could we lose?
    Well, there’s one way — the guy we preferred between the two guys we liked didn’t win on Nov. 4. But now that the other guy has won (and did you ever really think he wouldn’t?), I’m putting that setback behind me and looking forward to what happens next, with Barack Obama as my president.
    You could say I have no choice, but you’d be wrong. Unfortunately, we have before us a plethora of examples of how to have a perfectly rotten, stinking attitude when your preferred candidate loses, from the “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bush” bumper stickers that appeared on Republican cars before Bill Clinton was even inaugurated to all that nonsense we’ve heard for eight years from Democrats about how the election was “stolen” in 2000.
    We always have the option of being mean, petty, poor losers. But not me. Call me audacious, but every day I see fresh cause to be hopeful:

  • First, there’s Barack Obama himself. Just as John McCain was the best conceivable Republican to unify the country, Sen. Obama offered himself as the one Democrat most likely to put the bitterness of the Clinton/Bush years behind us. As we wrote when we endorsed him in the S.C. primary, “for him, American unity — transcending party — is a core value in itself.” In a column at the time, I cited “his ambition to be a president for all of us — black and white, male and female, Democrat and Republican.” When a guy like that wins an election, nobody loses.
  • Sen. McCain’s gracious (and typical, for him) concession speech left his supporters no room for bitterness, as he wished “Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president.”
  • Sen. Obama’s promise that same night, in his first flush of victory, “to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn.” He said, “I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.”
  • The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff. He’s been called a partisan attack dog, but he was defended against those who called him that by our own Sen. Lindsey Graham, John McCain’s close friend and ally. Yes, he ran the Democrats’ successful effort to take over Congress in 2006, but he did it by recruiting candidates who appealed to the political center — something his party’s more extreme elements haven’t forgiven him for. In an interview just before he was offered the job, Rep. Emanuel said, “The American people are unbelievably pragmatic. Have confidence in their pragmatism. It’s the operating philosophy of our country.” (The Associated Press says exit polls back that up: “This year 22 percent called themselves liberal, compared with 21 percent in 2004; 44 percent moderate, compared with 45 percent; and 34 percent conservative, same as four years ago.”)
  • The image of the Obamas visiting the Bushes at the White House a week after the election. No big deal, you say? It is after the way the current president has been demonized by many Democrats. The presidential election of 1800 proved the miracle of the American system — that power can change hands in a peaceful, civilized manner. That never gets old for me.
  • After days in which the more partisan types in the Senate debated just what to do to Joe Lieberman in light of his unpardonable “sin” of supporting Sen. McCain, the president-elect said that of course the senator from Connecticut should still be allowed to caucus with the Democrats.
  • The fact that on Monday, Sens. Obama and McCain will sit down at transition headquarters to chart ways to move forward together. “It’s well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government,” said an Obama spokeswoman Friday, adding that the two men “will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality.” They will be joined by Sen. Graham and Rep. Emanuel.

    You’ll notice a certain theme in my points, and just in case I haven’t hit you over the head with it hard enough, I’ll say it again: I draw my hope from signs that this country is ready to move beyond the stupid, pointless, destructive  polarization that has been thrust upon us by the two dominant political parties, their attendant Beltway interest groups, the blogosphere and the mindless yammering of 24/7 shouting-head cable TV “news.”
    You might say that mere nonpartisanship — or bipartisanship, or post-partisanship (or my favorite, UnPartisanship) — is not enough by itself. That’s true. But without it, there’s no hope. Fortunately, I see plenty of cause to believe we’re about to see something new, and better.

Join me in hoping at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Graham likes Obama’s 1st pick

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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.

UnParty makes its move (better late than never)

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Sometimes when I see someone running unopposed — even someone I like, such as my state Rep., Ted Pitts — I feel prompted to make silly gestures. I did so today. Yes, I wrote in my own name for House District 69, partly just to try out that function on the electronic machine.

That makes Ted Pitts the first incumbent of either of the dominant parties to feel the wrath of the mighty UnParty machine. Such as it is. Sorry, Ted; I couldn’t resist the temptation when it popped into my head. I could have made my empty gesture on one of the other unopposed offices — but I don’t want to be sheriff, for instance. I just didn’t vote at all on any of the unopposed slots — except the House seat.

No, I won’t win this impromptu campaign — I started it just a tad late, even I will admit. But we’re looking at this strategically. (Who’s "we?" Just me. You may or may not have noticed that candidates often refer to themselves as "we" when they mean "I," and I believe in observing the conventions when they don’t violate my principles.)

I’m building name recognition. Sure, we’re not liable to win this one. But the experience losing to Ted will help me get ready to lose a last-minute run for governor in 2010. Then, who knows — I could decide to become an extremely minor obstacle to President Obama’s re-election plans.

A lot of quixotic candidates start off losing at the top — Ralph Nader, for instance. But I think that’s just presumptuous. As I keep telling Doug, experience is important. I need to lose races for lower offices before fumbling the brass ring.

Anyway, I gotta run now, and make the last-minute arrangements for my unvictory party….

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.

McCain’s Bob Dole problem

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No, I’m not saying Bob Dole personally is causing a problem for John McCain. I’m saying his problem is that in this election, he’s playing the Bob Dole part — and Barack Obama is Bill Clinton (but don’t tell him that — the way he and Bill have been getting along, he’s likely to take it as an insult).

You remember Bob Dole — the other disabled war hero who couldn’t win the White House, the one who always referred to himself in the Third Person, by his full name ("Bob Dole doesn’t do that! Why would you say Bob Dole does that? Leave Bob Dole alone…") .

Dole ran a lousy campaign, lousy primarily in that it utterly failed to present convincingly why he should have been president. McCain is doing the same thing now.

The big difference between the two, for me, is that I started out liking McCain a whole lot more than I liked the guy that the NYT once called the Dark Prince of Gridlock. Bob Dole was a much more wholehearted partisan warrior than McCain. He was no maverick, not by a long shot. You don’t get to lead your party in the Senate by rebelling against it.

So with me, he started off in a hole. And in the end, I still think McCain should be president — while I no longer thought that of Bob Dole by the end of the 1996 campaign. I had thought it for awhile, though, comparing him and Bill Clinton. I had liked Clinton in 92, but he had disappointed me in a lot of ways by 96. The bottom line was that I just didn’t trust the guy anymore, based on a number of things. (I have no dramatic personal story about that, but I know someone who does: Hodding Carter III told me of going to see Bill Clinton with a delegation concerned about Bosnia. I forget what the delegation wanted — that the U.S. get involved, that the U.S. stay out, whatever — but whatever it wanted, Clinton promised bald-faced he would do. They left feeling confident. About a week later, Clinton did the exact opposite, and it came out that he had known that was what he was going to do when he met with the delegation. Carter felt personally betrayed by that. It seemed consistent with the impression I had formed by then.)

Early in the campaign, I wrote some columns — and editorials, too, I think — that pretty clearly expressed a preference for Dole over Clinton. But when the time approached to do our actual endorsement, I went to then-editor Tom McLean and told him I could not in good conscience write it, because I had become convinced that Dole couldn’t govern his way out of a wet paper bag. I knew by then that I couldn’t convince the board not to endorse Dole, but I declined the honor of writing it. (Of course, you didn’t hear all of this at the time because it was long before I became editor and adopted the policies of extreme transparency that you see today. The board was Old School in those days; you didn’t see the man behind the curtain.)

I never got to that point with McCain, but in the last weeks I thought about it. Those of you who insist that this endorsement was fully decided long ago don’t understand how much I thought about it. But in the end, for me, John McCain may not be good at communicating via a political campaign that he would be the better president, but I still believe he’d be the better president — based on Iraq, based on the Gang of 14 and judicial selection, on free trade, on immigration, etc., all that stuff I’ve already told you.

Now here’s a postscript to the story that will cause you to do a double-take: Despite what I’d said to Tom, I voted for Dole in 96. Why? For the exact same reason I voted for McGovern in 72. You probably don’t know many people who can say that, but I can. (Never doubt my deep devotion to UnParty unorthodoxy.) And I don’t regret either vote.

Essentially, both were protest votes. I thought McGovern would have been a disaster as president. But I wanted to register a protest against Nixon, mainly because of Watergate (even based on what little was known by then). If McGovern had had a chance to win, I’d have held my nose and voted for Nixon, because on the whole I thought the gummint would be in more capable hands that way. And I’d have regretted it forever. But McGovern’s hapless candidacy gave me the opportunity to make the gesture.

Same deal in 96. If I’d thought Dole had a prayer, I’d have held my nose and voted for Clinton — much as I distrusted him by that point, I thought him more competent. (Note that Nixon and Clinton had an advantage with me that Obama lacks — they had shown their competence in office, as president.) But Dole had no prayer, so I voted for him as a protest. And it felt exactly like voting for McGovern.

By the way, torn as I was, I made both of those decisions in the voting booth. So I can, indeed, identify with Cindi’s indecision.

Bipartisan bailout deal reached

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Maybe this did turn out to be our fiscal 9/11, pulling Democrats and Republicans together to act in the interests of the country rather than their respective parties. If so, kudos all around. We’ll no more later in the day after the historic confab at the White House with congressional leaders and both presidential candidates.

For now, here’s what The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Here’s The New York Times version.

And here’s AP’s:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Key Republicans and Democrats reported agreement Thursday on an outline for a historic $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, but there was still resistance from rank-and-file House Republicans despite warnings of an impending panic.

"I now expect we will, indeed, have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president and bring a sense of certainty to this crisis that is sill roiling in the market," Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, said as members of both parties emerged from a two-hour negotiating session.

Negotiators planned to present the outline at a White House meeting later Thursday with President Bush and the rivals to replace him, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barrack Obama.

"We’re very confident that we can act expeditiously," said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., the Banking Committee chairman.

Not everyone in the closed-door talks was as optimistic. Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the only House Republican in the bargaining meeting, stopped short of saying he agreed with the other lawmakers on an imminent deal.

"There was progress today," said Bachus, the senior Republican on the House Financial Services panel.

Later, he issued a statement saying he was not empowered to strike any deals and there was "no agreement other than to continue discussions."

Both houses’ Republican leaders, Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, also issued statements saying there was no agreement.

Still, the White House called the announcement "a good sign that progress is being made."

"We’ll want to hear from (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson and take a look at the details. We look forward to a good discussion at the meeting this afternoon," said Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary.

A Treasury spokeswoman said the proposal was being reviewed there.

On Wall Street, stock prices were up late in the trading day, but not by as much as earlier in the day.

The core of the plan proposed by the administration just a few days ago envisions the government buying up sour assets of shaky financial firms in a bid to keep them from going under and to stave off a potentially severe recession.

Obama and McCain called for a bipartisan effort to deal with the crisis, little more than five weeks before national elections in which the economy has emerged as the dominant theme.

McCain on Wednesday asked Obama to agree to delay their first debate, scheduled for Friday, to deal with the meltdown. Obama said the debate should go ahead.

Congressional negotiators said Thursday there were few obstacles to a final agreement, although no details of an accord were immediately available.

"There really isn’t much of a deadlock to break," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

But there were fresh signs of trouble in the House Republican Caucus. A group of GOP lawmakers circulated an alternative designed to attract private money back into the credit markets with less government intrusion.

Under that proposal, the government would provide insurance to companies that agree to hold frozen assets, rather than purchase them directly as envisioned under the administration’s plan. The firms would have to pay insurance premiums to the Treasury Department for the coverage.

"The taxpayers haven’t done anything wrong," said Rep Eric Cantor, R-Va., adding that rather than require them to bear the cost of the bailout, the alternative "pretty much puts the burden on Wall Street over time."

Boehner, R-Ohio, the minority leader, was huddling with McCain on the rescue. When asked whether the GOP presidential nominee could corral restive Republicans to support the plan, Boehner said, "Who knows?"

Bush told the nation in a televised address Wednesday night that passage of the package his administration has proposed was urgently needed to calm the markets and restore confidence in the reeling financial system.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s agreement with Democrats on limiting pay for executives of bailed-out financial institutions and giving taxpayers an equity stake in the companies cleared a significant hurdle.

It was not immediately clear how lawmakers had resolved differences over how to phase in the unprecedented cost — a step demanded by Democrats and some Republicans who want stronger congressional control over the bailout — without spooking markets. The idea of letting the government take an ownership stake in troubled companies as part of the rescue, rather than just buying bad debt, also has been a topic of intense negotiation.

Frank told The Associated Press Thursday both elements would be included in the legislation.

Bush acknowledged Wednesday night that the bailout would be a "tough vote" for lawmakers. But he said failing to approve it would risk dire consequences for the economy and most Americans.

"Our entire economy is in danger," he said.

Our fiscal 9/11?

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Remember when Democrats and Republicans stood on the Capitol steps and sang "God Bless America?" For a moment there, the Washington crowd was stunned by the attacks of 9/11 into forgetting their stupid partisan differences and remembering they were Americans. I made a passing reference to that in a column last week.

This NYT story describes a moment last night when the shock and awe of the scope of this mounting financial crisis had a similar effect on members of Congress. It happened in a briefing Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson gave to congressional leaders:

“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd,
Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban
Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good
Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re
literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial
system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”

When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut in.
“Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have never
heard language like this.”

“What you heard last evening,” he
added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience
here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together
quickly.”

What an amazing time for a spirit of bipartisan cooperation to emerge — if that indeed happens (and if it doesn’t, we’re sunk). Now, on the eve of this too-close-to-call presidential election, the one I worried so much about in another column.

I certainly hope that happens. But you know what? As weird as you may think the fact that 9/11 made me (however briefly) optimistic about the future, here’s something you might find harder to fathom: I don’t feel that way this time. With the terror attacks of 9/11, I had very clear ideas of what I thought should happen next (short version: fully engage the world), and it was my belief that those things would happen that prompted my optimism.

Now, I’m at a loss. I don’t know what it is I want the government to coalesce around. Maybe Bush and Paulson are taking the right steps, but I don’t know. To me, a financial mess of this magnitude is more perplexing than terrorist attacks. Not as immediately horrible, but less understandable. And that leaves me uneasy.

Also, the promise of bipartisanship seems shakier here. There is a history of partisans setting aside differences in response to an external threat. But many politicians cut their teeth demagoging economic issues, and happily drawing sharp ideological distinctions about them.

But I hope the potential described above is realized. As uncertain as I am about the way forward, I would feel much better if we’d drop the party games and face it together. That would help a great deal.

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?

The hype on McCain’s speech

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Minutes before John McCain’s speech, I saw a New York Times story, based on excerpts released in advance, that said "McCain Plans to Speak of Dedication to Bipartisanship."

Obviously, this increased my anticipation. That made it sound like he was going to give the speech I had hoped Barack Obama would give last week, but was disappointed.

We’ll see. It will be hard to meet the UnParty standard, the way Joe did…

Why do these conventions run so late?

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So once again, the only thing of the evening I want to see at the convention is on at 10 p.m. Like waiting for my man Joe last night. These people are keeping me up past my bedtime.

And why is that? It’s certainly not for the benefit of the delegates. The state delegations — South Carolina, anyway — have their daily meeting at some ungodly hour like 7:30 a.m., and then the next thing worth paying attention to is some speech at 10 p.m., and they all go out afterwards. No way to live, even for a week. It’s never made any sense to me.

Do the parties not think that maybe, just maybe, kids ought to be able to watch these things and learn a bit about their country’s political system? Yeah, I know, that’s a setup for cynical jokes about things not being fit for children’s eyes, but seriously — for good or ill, it’s educational.

Anyway, the schedules make no sense to me. But neither do a lot of other things about political parties.

But I’ll stay up. Hey, if I hadn’t stayed up last night I would have missed Joe, and that was the best speech of either convention so far. No, Joe’s no barnburner of a speaker, but it was what he had to say. The partisans in the hall didn’t know whether to clap or not at his best lines, because it was an UnParty speech, and not their sort of thing at all. I loved it.

Lieberman Agonistes

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Mccainjoe

Let me admit straight up that that headline wasn’t my idea. It’s lifted straight from a Wall Street Journal editorial today, which chides both left and right — especially the right — for their antagonism toward my man Joe.

The specific occasion is the chatter about Lieberman as running mate for John McCain. While justly dismissing the hysterical reaction such talk generates on the right, the WSJ agrees with me that veep candidate would not be the best role for the independent from Connecticut. More coincidentally, the newspaper suggests a role that I had been thinking of in connection with Mr. Lieberman not an hour before I read the editorial:

    Our own view is that Mr. Lieberman would make a fine Secretary of
State, and that, given the political risks, making him vice president
would probably be too great an election gamble. But Mr. Lieberman’s
national security credentials are first-rate…

Good thought, there. Perhaps Mr. McCain should talk it up.

What if such energy were used for Good?

11 Replies

Rovekarl

Karl Rove had an op-ed piece in the WSJ today (he writes for them a lot these days) expressing grudging respect for the "brilliant ground game" Barack Obama’s put together. For Democrats, of course, this is like receiving an admiring nod from The Devil Himself, especially since the Atwater cohort is saying that Obama is using his — Karl Rove‘s — ideas. An excerpt:

    For starters, Barack Obama’s manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor "Victory Committee" of ’00 and ’04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote….
    Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran "virtual precincts," using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.
    The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP’s "microtargeting" program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help….

All of which emphasized two points: First, people like Karl Rove think this is a "Game," and therefore alternate hitting the opposition as hard as they can with sportsmanlike expressions of admiration when the other side scores a good hit. (Subtext: I’m a professional, not one of this "true-believer" losers.) It’s not about trying to accomplish something for the country; it’s about playing hard and winning.

Second, it makes me think: Why can’t this kind of energy be devoted to accomplishing some good for the country after the hoopla of elections is over? What if we were to enlist millions of motivated and dedicated volunteers to push with all their might for National Health care, or a solution to the coming Social Security crash, or an honest-to-goodness Energy Policy that would improve our economy, our strategic position and the health of the planet?

Or, to think of it another way, what if Mr. Bush, after winning that 2004 election, had put enough boots on the ground in Iraq (the comparison to the army Rove assembled seems apt) to nip the insurgency in its bud, long before he finally agreed to the Surge?

All the money, and all the effort that goes into political campaigns… what a waste, unless an equal or greater effort is mounted after the campaign to accomplish something in office.

But that’s not the way the Game is played, is it?

Our Joe cup overfloweth

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Y‘all saw where I bragged on Joe for his fine piece in the WSJ the other day. Well, today we have a counterpoint from Joe in that same publication, so our cup overfloweth.

OK, for those of you too lazy to follow links, I’m talking Lieberman and Biden, respectively. Both of them are good guys. We endorsed the first Joe in his presidential bid in 2004, and might well have endorsed the other this time around if he hadn’t dropped out before the S.C. primary (we went with Obama instead, you’ll recall). Both are blessed with essential Joe-ness, as I’ve explained before.

And although these pieces are set against each other, there is much to love in each of them, infused as they are with Joe-ness. In other words, they are written by rational men who are not entirely enslaved by the idiotic partisan extremes of our times. Joe is much more inclined to support his party’s nominee, but that’s because he hasn’t made the radical break that Joe was forced into. But you still don’t find the kind of polarized claptrap that you usually hear from the party faithful on either side.

OK, I’ll start using last names, although it sounds unfriendly…

Here’s one of the best parts of Mr. Biden’s piece. It repeats a point that I’ve praised him for making in the past, which is that President Bush blew a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lead this nation, and the Western alliance, into a far better place than the sad situation that Joe, I mean Tom, Friedman described the other day. Anyway, here’s the Biden excerpt:

    Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush’s reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.
    The president had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead – by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan, and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests – Mr. Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

As with Lieberman, though, there are weak spots. In particular, there’s this contradictory passage:

    Terrorism is a means, not an end, and very different groups and countries are using it toward very different goals. Messrs. Bush and McCain lump together, as a single threat, extremist groups and states more at odds with each other than with us: Sunnis and Shiites, Persians and Arabs, Iraq and Iran, al Qaeda and Shiite militias. If they can’t identify the enemy or describe the war we’re fighting, it’s difficult to see how we will win.
    The results speak for themselves.
    On George Bush’s watch, Iran, not freedom, has been on the march: Iran is much closer to the bomb; its influence in Iraq is expanding; its terrorist proxy Hezbollah is ascendant in Lebanon and that country is on the brink of civil war.

The problem is that on the one hand, he feels constrained (since he’s still in the party) to state the party line that terrorism is a means, not an end, or even a coherent enemy — all of which is true, but his litany of all the different contending actors is belied by the truth he later embraces: That through it all, Iran has been on the march, and gaining against us. That would have been an excellent point to make; it’s just too bad he weakened it by making the situation seem less coherent than it is two paragraphs before (this incoherence of the enemy is essential to the modern Democratic ideology that Lieberman abhors — the refusal to clearly see and clearly state the degree to which we face a coherent, albeit complex, enemy).

I refer to another recent Friedman column, which — thanks to the fact that he isn’t carrying anybody‘s political water — states how all of these superficially disparate issues are connected, to our nation’s great disadvantage (largely due to the Bush failures that Biden refers to):

    The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president — but this cold war is with Iran.
    That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, “In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the U.S.”

Anyway, if the link works for you, I recommend you read this one as well as the last one. Between the two of them, you’ll see an intelligent way to debate foreign policy, as opposed to the idiocy of left and right, Democrat and Republican.

Joe laments loss of the party of FDR, Truman, JFK

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This is why I like Joe Lieberman so much — he’s always writing stuff that sounds like I wrote it myself, always giving me cause to think, Thank God I’m not alone here…

Specifically, he wrote in an op-ed piece in today’s WSJ:

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?…

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

He goes on to lament how this unraveled over Vietnam. He writes wistfully of efforts by such Democrats as himself (remember the Third Way?) to pull the party back from a condition in which it blamed America for all its international troubles, as the party became "prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy."

There are flaws in the piece, admittedly. He uses the inaccurate common terminology, referring to this trend toward self-loathing isolationism as a move "to the left" — when I would assert that it is the rejection of the kind of idealistic, internationalist liberalism of FDR, JFK and the rest. Isolationism is, if nothing else, a manifestation of conservatism — and not the better sort of conservatism, either.

But set that aside. He ends strongly, with a quote from "a great Democratic secretary of state," Dean Acheson (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was from Connecticut):

(N)o people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.

Why do we let THESE people run our country?

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How can any Democrat or Republican look in the mirror after the shenanigans in the House Thursday? An excerpt from the WSJ‘s story today:

WASHINGTON — The House rejected $163 billion in funding for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the first time the House has voted against funding for the Iraq war — as Republicans held back support as a protest against domestic-spending items Democrats added to the legislation.
    Some antiwar Democrats applauded as 132 Republicans voted "present" and the funding failed on a 149-to-141 vote….
    The House passed two other measures during the war debate, one placing restrictions on the Iraq war, including a timeline for troop withdrawal, and another expanding funding for veterans’ education benefits by collecting a new surtax from wealthy taxpayers.
    Democratic leaders planned the votes separately to allow their antiwar members to vote against funding operations in Iraq, while still passing a bill. But Republicans didn’t vote for the war funding and then accused Democrats of loading up the legislation with spending items "on the backs" of troops….

I propose that when the Grownup Party takes over, we should ride them all out of town on a rail. Or is that a less-than-Grownup, emotional response on my part? Maybe, but somehow making them stand in a corner seems grossly inadequate.

Did Joe Wilson do a brave and smart thing? Critic says he did

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A Democrat who wants to oppose U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson in the fall put out this release yesterday:

Beaufort, SC – Today, Democratic Congressional Candidate Rob Miller released the following statement concerning incumbent Joe Wilson’s vote yesterday against legislation that could lower gas prices as much as 24 cents a gallon. Wilson was one of only 25 members of Congress to vote against H.R. 6022, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Fill Suspension and Consumer Protection Act. Majorities in both parties voted in favor of this legislation to provide Americans some quick relief from record high gas prices.

     "Joe Wilson owes people back home an explanation on why he sided with big oil and voted against providing families much needed relief at the gas pump. People are struggling simply to pay for the gas that gets them to and from work these days. Joe Wilson seems to be too busy cozying up to oil executives to even notice," Miller said. 
     "This is just another reason I’m running for Congress to bring change to Washington and give the voters of the Second District the representation they deserve."

                ###

I have yet to see a statement from Joe himself on the subject, but Rob Miller is a recent captain in the United States Marine Corps, and they’re not trained to lie, so I’m going to take him at his word on this.

Now if Joe were running on the Grownup Party (a.k.a. UnParty, a.k.a. Energy Party) ticket, he’d be bragging about doing this. But since he’s a mere Republican, he’s not boasting.

But from this account, it sure sounds like he did the right thing.

Act your age: Join the Grownup Party

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
YOU’VE HEARD of the “UnParty” and the “Energy Party” — at least, you have if you’ve kept an eye on this space for any length of time.

But I have yet another name for my never-ending battle against the foolishness of the Democratic and Republican parties: the Grownup Party.

What is the Grownup Party? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It isn’t based on age. If it were, John McCain would win the party’s nomination this year, hands down. But John McCain recently proposed something that violated everything the Grownup Party stands for: a summerlong gasoline-tax vacation, which treats the voters of this country like children: You don’t like paying those mean ol’ nasty gas prices? Awww. Here’s a lollipop. Hillary Clinton likewise offended GP sensibilities by endorsing the McCain plan. Barack Obama, the youngest candidate out there, was the only one acting like a Grownup. (Although he did vote for a similar tax holiday as an Illinois state legislator. Presumably, he’s matured since then.)

Why do Grownups not like the gas tax vacation? Sigh. Because they understand that if it has any effect on the market at all, it will encourage more fuel consumption during the busy summer months, which is bad enough in itself, but even worse in that increased demand leads to higher prices. And that way the money will go to the oil companies (it was reported last week that investors were disappointed because Exxon Mobil made a profit of only $10.9 billion in the first quarter), to petrodictators and to terrorists, instead of into the U.S. Treasury — that is, our treasury.

Which brings us to something else about Grownups — they understand that in America, the government is us, rather than being some menacing thing out there, and that we’re very fortunate to live in this country at this time rather than in Russia under the czars — or under Vladimir Putin, for that matter. And we’re especially fortunate not to live in a place where there is no government, such as Somalia under the warlords.

When the government does something we don’t like — which is pretty often, political immaturity being rampant — we don’t stamp our feet and talk about taking our ball (or  taxes, or whatever) and going home. Instead, we take responsibility for it, and try to bring it along. Yes, it’s a thankless task, like picking up after one’s children, or explaining to them why they can’t stay out late with their friends. But someone has to do it.

The task may seem hopeless as well — but only to the sort who gives up. Grownups know they don’t have that option, so they keep putting forth ideas that make sense, day after day, just like Daddy  going to work.

Here’s an example: On Friday, I posted an item on my blog headlined, “Free Thomas Ravenel.” Yes, it’s childish to cry out for attention with such misleading stunts, but I did it in the service of a Grownup purpose (and besides, it helped my three-year-old blog reach its millionth page view later that day). That purpose was to raise the question, Why do we want to pay to feed, clothe and house Mr. Ravenel for the next 10 months?

That’s what we, the taxpayers, are going to do. Ravenel attorney Bart Daniel told the press last week that his client will report to federal prison May 29 to begin serving his sentence for conspiracy to possess cocaine with the intent to distribute.

Yes, he needs to be punished for flouting our laws (especially since he was our state treasurer at the time), but think about it: Mr. Ravenel is a multi-millionaire. Wouldn’t a multi-million-dollar fine — him paying us — make more sense than us paying for his incarceration? Yes, he was fined $221,000, and had to pay $28,000 in restitution. But we’re going to turn right around and spend a lot of that to keep him locked up over the next few months.

That’s on the federal level. Closer to home, South Carolina locks up more people per capita than almost any other state, and then refuses to appropriate enough money to run our prisons safely, much less to rehabilitate prisoners so that maybe we won’t have to lock them up again.
That’s why we advocated Attorney General Henry McMaster’s “middle court” idea in a Wednesday editorial. It would operate in a way similar to drug courts, combining individual attention with certain punishment for anyone who breaks the rules. But as long as offenders followed those rules, we wouldn’t waste money locking them up.

So far, the boys and girls over in the Legislature have not gone for this idea. That’s bad.
This is good: The city of Columbia is facing up to the fact that it costs money to lock people up for more offenses than Richland County does. The city has finally agreed to start paying a per diem fee for city prisoners housed in the county jail.

As we said in a Friday editorial, the good news here is that as a result, the city will encourage police officers to lock up fewer offenders who pose no physical threat to the citizenry.
This is progress. When it comes to nonviolent offenders, the “lock ’em up but don’t pay for guards” position is infantile — all emotion and immediate gratification, without a logical foundation. It’s encouraging to see our capital city moving away from it, however gradually. We await similar signs of progress on the state and federal levels.

But we’re not holding our breath. That would be childish.

To read past columns about the Grownup Party and more, please proceed at a sedate, dignified pace to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

The Energy Party Manifesto: Feb. 4, 2007

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Since, I’m on my Energy Party kick again, it occurs to me to provide you with something never previously published on the blog: My original Energy Party column from the paper. Since it was based on a blog post to start with, I didn’t post it here. Consequently, when I do my obligatory "Energy Party" link, it’s always to the incomplete, rough draft version of the party manifesto.

So, if only to give myself something more complete to link to in the future, is the full column version, published in The State on Feb. 4, 2007. Here’s a PDF of the original page, and here’s the column itself:

THE STATE
JOIN MY PARTY, AND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS WILL COME TRUE. REALLY.
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
EVERYBODY talks about the weather, which is as boring and pointless as the cliche suggests. So let’s do something about it.
    And while we’re at it, let’s win the war on terror, undermine tyrants around the globe, repair our trade imbalance, make our air more breathable, drastically reduce highway deaths and just generally make the whole world a safer, cleaner place.
    It’ll be easy, once we make up our minds to do it. But first, you Democrats and Republicans must throw off the ideological chains that bind you, and we independents must get off the sidelines and into the game.
    In other words, join my new party. No, not the Unparty I’ve written about in the past. You might say that one lacked focus.
    This one will be the Energy Party. Or the "Responsible Party," "Pragmatic Party" or "Grownup Party." Any will do as far as I’m concerned, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going with "Energy" for now.
    Like weather, everybody talks about Energy, but nobody proposes a comprehensive, hardnosed plan to git ‘er done. So let’s change that, go all the way, get real, make like we actually know there’s a war going on. Do the stuff that neither the GOP nor the Dems would ever do.
    I’ve made a start on the plan (and mind, I’m not speaking for the editorial board here). Join me, and we’ll refine it as we go along:
— * Jack up CAFE standards. No messing around with Detroit on this one. It’s possible to make cars that go 50 miles to the gallon. OK, so maybe your family won’t fit in a Prius. Let’s play nice and compromise: Set a fleet average of 40 mph within five years.
— * Raise the price of gasoline permanently to $4. When the price of gas is $2, slap on a $2 tax. When demand slacks off and forces the price down to $1.50, jack the tax up to $2.50. If somebody nukes some oil fields we depend upon, raising the price to $3, the tax drops to $1. Sure, you’ll be paying more, but only as long as you keep consuming as much of it as you have been. Which you won’t. Or if you do, we’ll go to $5.
— * You say the poor will have trouble with the tax? So will I. Good thing we’re going to have public transportation for a change (including my favorite, light rail). That’s one thing we’ll spend that new tax money on.
— * Another is a Manhattan project (or Apollo Project, or insert your favorite 20th century Herculean national initiative name) to develop clean, alternative energy. South Carolina can do hydrogen, Iowa can do bio, and the politicians who will freak out about all this can supply the wind power.
— * Reduce speed limits everywhere to no more than 55 mph. (This must be credited to Samuel Tenenbaum, who bends my ear about it almost daily. He apparently does the same to every presidential wannabe who calls his house looking for him or Inez, bless him.) This will drastically reduce our transportation-related fuel consumption, and have the happy side benefit of saving thousands of lives on our highways. And yes, you can drive 55.
— * Enforce the blasted speed limits. If states say they can’t (and right now, given our shortage of troopers, South Carolina can’t), give them the resources out of the gas tax money. No excuses.
— * Build nuclear power plants as fast as we can (safely, of course). It makes me tired to hear people who are stuck in the 1970s talk about all the dangerous waste from nuke plants. Nuclear waste is compact and containable. Coal waste (just to cite one "safe" alternative) disperses into the atmosphere, contaminates all our lungs and melts the polar ice caps. Yeah, I know; it would be keen if everyone went back to the land and stopped using electricity, but give it up — it ain’t happening.
— * Either ban SUVs for everyone who can’t demonstrate a life-ordeath need to drive one, or tax them at 100 percent of the sales price and throw that into the winthe- war kitty.
— * If we don’t ban SUVs outright, aside from taxing them, launch a huge propaganda campaign along the lines of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Say, "Hummers are Osama’s Panzer Corps." (OK, hot shot, come to my blog and post your own slogan.) Make wasting fuel the next smoking or DUI — absolutely socially unacceptable.
— * Because it will be a few years before we can be completely free of petrol, drill the ever-lovin’ slush out of the ANWR, explore for oil off Myrtle Beach, and build refinery capacity. But to keep us focused, limit all of these activities to no more than 20 years. Put the limit into the Constitution.
    You get the idea. Respect no one’s sacred cows, left or right. Yeah, I know some of this is, um, provocative. But that’s what we need. We have to wake up, go allout to win the war and, in the long run, save the Earth. Pretty soon, tyrants from Tehran to Moscow to Caracas will be tumbling down without our saying so much as "boo" to them, and global warming will slow within our lifetimes.
    Then, once we’ve done all that, we can start insisting upon some common sense on entitlements, and health care. Whatever works, whatever is practical, whatever solves our problems — no matter whose ox gets gored, or how hard you think it is to do what needs doing. Stop whining and grow up. Leave the ideologues in the dust, while we solve the problems.
    How’s that sound? Can any of y’all get behind that? Let me know, because we need to get going on this stuff.

Join the party at my — I mean, our– Web Headquarters:  http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

A Grownup Party forum

38 Replies

As I mentioned back here, sometimes I call the UnParty the Energy Party (depending on the subject at hand), and once or twice I’ve referred to the Grownup Party. That kicked off a discussion that I think has a certain relevance to some of the philosophical friction that vexes us these days. Here’s the discussion:

Doug, I give you credit for being a consistent anarchist…but don’t you support parental "authority"?

Posted by: Randy E | Apr 30, 2008 9:17:05 AM

Not coercive authority… I should be able to influence my children
through my words and actions, not by threats or intimidation.

I want a government based on ethics, productivity, and fairness.   We have a government based on lies, inefficiency, and
greed.   

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 9:48:46 AM

Actually, whenever I have disputes with libertarians, I do so as a
parent. I’m in my 32nd year of being a parent. I have five kids and
three grandchildren, and my worldview is that of a parent. Whenever I
hear people standing up for their "right" to do something stupid — such as not wear motorcycle helmets on the public roads — I hear the voice of a child. By now, it’s sort of hard-wired into me.

Lots of people look at laws in terms of "what this means to me" in
terms of "what I get to do" or "what gets done to me." I tend to look
at society as a whole and think, Is this a good idea overall? or Does this make society safer, or healthier, or wealthier? or Is this the logical way for society to function?

I don’t think, Do I want to pay this tax? or Do I think I should have to buckle my seat belt?
To me, those are unacceptably self-centered questions. This makes for
profound disagreements, because the basic cognitive processes, the
entire perspective going in, is very, very different.

Posted by: Brad Warthen | Apr 30, 2008 9:52:30 AM

Brad,

You may not understand this but my view on society is the same as
yours: Is this a good idea overall? Does this make society safer, or
healthier, or wealthier? Is this the logical way for society to
function?

And then I examine the issue using my own personal experience as
reference. Take taxes for example… I look at the issue logically
based on the taxes I pay and conclude that a) the system is illogical
b) the use of tax dollars is inefficient and c) the tax burden is
unfairly applied.
I don’t want MY taxes to be lower, I want EVERYONE’s taxes to be
lower… because I believe our economy would be far better off for
EVERYONE if we had less government. The same logic applies to my views
on Social Security, healthcare, education, etc.

Your world view is what gives us the government we have today. One
where we citizens pay people to sit around making crucial decisions
like: when can we sell beer and wine on Sunday? what time does a store
need to open on Sunday? what tax breaks does a newspaper deserve that
other companies do not? should we give people age 785 and over a 1/2%
sales tax break? how much of the taxpayers’ money should we give to the
Okra Strut? and on and on it goes. Completely wasted effort… I want
to see that abolished for EVERYONE’s benefit, not my own.

Big government types are worse than selfish – they take what isn’t theirs.

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 10:52:03 AM

And I see those as unrelated questions, not in terms of some sort of
overriding conflict between "government" and… what — "ungovernment?"
But you’re right in that government in one sense or another is involved
in all those decisions. What I wonder about is what you see as the
alternative.

Basically, we have this thing called a civilization. But even in the
most chaotic, anarchic situations, certain arrangements arise among
human beings that determine how they are going to live together (or NOT
live together). Such things seem unavoidable in a group of any sort of
social animals. With gorillas, you have a whole network of decisions
and arrangements that tend to be built around the overriding question
of, "Who gets to be the alpha male?"

Things get more complicated with humans because we are a verbalizing
race, and think in symbols and abstractions that can’t be communicated
without language. But everywhere that there are two or more humans
together, some sort of arrangement or agreement has to be arrived at in
terms of how to interact and arrange things, from the ownership of
property to acceptable behavior.

In the closest thing to a state of nature — a place where
government has utterly collapsed, such as in Somalia; or a place where
conventional government is not recognized as legitimate, such as Sicily
over the centuries — you have something closer to the "alpha male"
model found among other creatures. In Somalia, it’s warlords. In Sicily
(and sometimes among transplanted communities of Sicilians) you have a
system of bosses and underbosses who hold power through the most
elemental system of violence-backed "respect."

Now THAT is a system in which somebody is, as you say, taking what isn’t theirs.

Actually, through much of human history, the warlord model has held
sway, in such disparate settings as pre-communist China and Europe
during the middle ages. Europeans called it feudalism. Under such a
system, wealth that is coerced from weaker members of the society is
used in such capital projects as building fortresses for the warlords.
What you don’t see in a system such as that is a system of roads. For
such infrastructure as that, which might economically benefit the
society more broadly, there has to be a different governing system. For
well over 1,000 years, Europeans continued to use roads the Romans had
built because that was the last time there was a broad government with
an overarching concept of acting on behalf of something broader — in
that case, an empire in which the rule of law was only helpful if you
were a Roman.

You saw some city-states rise up in Italy, and bands of city states
along the Baltic and in other regions, in which councils and other
decision-making bodies created infrastructure and regulations that
facilitated commerce that created wealth for a somewhat larger group.

Anyway, to speed ahead… in this country we came up with
representative democracy as a means for a free people to work out
questions of how they would arrange themselves socially and make the
decisions that WILL BE MADE one way or another among any group of
humans. Once everyone gets a voice like that, all sorts of questions
will come up: Do we need a new road? OK, how will we pay for it? Some
people will not want to see alcohol sold at all, others will have an
opposite view. Perhaps for a time, the community will strike a
compromise: OK, we’ll allow alcohol to be sold in our community, but
not on Sunday, because there is a critical mass in the community that
finds such activities on a Sunday beyond the pale, and those who don’t
feel that way go along to get what they want on the other six days.

Of course, laws governing alcohol get far more complicated than
that, with debates over where to draw the lines in terms of operating a
car on the PUBLIC roads after drinking, whether minors can drink or
even hang out in drinking establishments, and so forth. And all of
these are legitimate areas for regulation as long as we, acting through
this system of representative democracy, decide they ARE legitimate
areas for such.

Government, and politics, are in our system the proper place for deciding where all those lines are.

In our constitutional system, we have in writing certain guarantees
to prevent a government answering to a majority doesn’t trample certain
fundamental rights (life, liberty, and such) of any individuals,
including those in political minorities. This does not, of course, mean
that individuals can blow off the more general will. You can’t commit
murder just because it’s in keeping with your personal value system.
Nor can you take your neighbor’s car without his permission, or poison
his cat, or engage in insider trading, or sell beer in a community that
has legitimately (acting through the proper processes) decided to make
that illegal.

This is a great system; it beats the hell out of doing things
according to the whim of the local warlord. And everyone —
libertarians, authoritarians, Christians, Wiccans, what have you — get
to make their case in the public square.

Some libertarians, unfortunately, seem to regard the political and
governmental decisions that THEY DISAGREE WITH — a tax they don’t want
to pay, for instance — as being illegitimate. But they aren’t.

Each and every one of us accepts losing political arguments, and
submitting to the resulting regulations or laws or lack thereof — as
the price of living in this (I would argue) highly enlightened system
of making social decisions. We accept it rather than go live in a place
where only brute force counts.

That doesn’t mean we don’t make our case for the next election, and so forth.

Is anything I’m saying here making sense to you?

Posted by: Brad Warthen | Apr 30, 2008 11:51:33 AM

Also, Brad, your view of government is what gets us things like rebate checks to stimulate the economy and gas tax holidays.   

McCain claims both of those are great ideas designed to help
everybody out when, in reality, he supports them for purely selfish
reasons – to dupe voters so he can get elected President. He hasn’t got
the guts to tell the truth. His own personal ambition means more to him
than the truth. Guess he’d make a good libertarian, huh?

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 11:56:27 AM

You can’t commit murder just because it’s in keeping with your
personal value system. Nor can you take your neighbor’s car without his
permission, or poison his cat, or engage in insider trading, or sell
beer in a community that has legitimately (acting through the proper
processes) decided to make that illegal.
-Brad

Murder or killing the neighbor’s cat are issues not in dispute by
anyone, libertarians or otherwise. Those are acts that clearly affect
other people and clearly must involve intervention by the government.
Doug nor anyone else has suggested the legalization of murder. Clearly
that is the mother of all non-sequetors.

But selling or buying beer on Sunday is completely different. That
is a decision which rightly belongs in a class of activities that can
and should best be handled by individuals without interference from the
government because it has no affect on others. That is true regardless
of who has their say in the public square. If I want to buy beer on
Sunday that is a decision that should be made on the basis of my own
conscience, religious views and other factors that only I can evaluate.
It’s no one else’s business if I buy beer on Sunday. Same with video
poker, pot smoking, what I do with my own body – including who I sleep
with. It’s no one’s damn business, period.

Let’s try another example that perhaps Brad can understand. What if
some religious extremist came to power and, with the help of Congress,
decided that only their religion could be exercised. The majority of
the people agree. The folks from the banned religions had their say in
the public square but were overruled. Brad could no longer attend the
Catholic Church he’s been a member of for decades.

Or, let’s say that all movies that depict the political process in
an unflattering light must now be banned. The Manchurian Candidate can
not be shown any longer as a result.

Or, perhaps hitting close to home, what if the only newspaper
allowed is the one run by the government. Even though The State has run
editorials oppossing this the law passes anyway. The day after the law
passes the government troops occupy The State paper’s operation and
begin publishing their own spin on the world.

According to Brad’s world view all of these events are a legitimate intrusion into the way people conduct their lives. 

Posted by: bud | Apr 30, 2008 12:51:57 PM

Right, Bud. I don’t want all government abolished, just some of it.
I don’t want to abolish all taxes, just some of them. I don’t want to
repeal all laws, just those that intrude on personal rights.

The whole drug issue is a perfect example. Nobody should ever go to
jail for using drugs unless they end up doing some harm to another
person. We have a society filled with people popping anti-depressants
and sleeping pills, abusing alcohol, etc. and yet we have law
enforcement people spending time and resources making sure adults don’t
smoke a joint. This is a case where the moral minority in power feels a
need to enforce its will upon people.

Posted by: Doug Ross | Apr 30, 2008 1:27:26 PM

Actually, bud, what you just said is completely inconsistent with what I wrote. So this is a non-argument.

And Doug, come on: When a majority wants cocaine to be legal
(again), it will be. I direct you to the Volstead Act and the
Eighteenth Amendment, which were followed by the 21st Amendment…

A lot of people (primarily libertarians) point to Prohibition as
evidence that such things "don’t work." Nonsense. Prohibition went away
for the same reason it came in– the prevailing political will of the
time, acting with sufficient force to change the constitution (which is
what would be necessary for bud’s farcical scenario to work, and good
luck that that one, by the way).

In other words, "Prohibition doesn’t work" only makes sense when you say, "Prohibition doesn’t work if we don’t want it."

Doug is using the reasoning of the child — someone OUT THERE is
imposing something on my in contradiction of my sovereign will. With
the child, it’s the parent; with Doug, it’s this alleged "minority in
power."

I don’t look at the world that way, because I am not alienated from
the American political system. Therefore I can say WE decide something,
whether it was my idea or not. I don’t see the decision-making
apparatus as being something OUT THERE.

Posted by: Brad Warthen | Apr 30, 2008 1:43:56 PM

Anyway, I decided to create the separate post to call more attention to the exchange.