Submitted to a Candid World

About half of the internet has been trying to sort out and properly react to Barack Obama’s alleged turn to center on FISA, the death penalty, and a few other issues.

The other half would’ve joined the party, but they were busy captioning pictures of cats.

I’ve resolved the issue to my personal satisfaction by reasoning that Obama’s “rightward turn” might be partly attributed to a heartfelt desire to reach across the aisle and be every person’s president, and partly chalked up to simple politics, both of which are fine by me.  But why listen to a law student when you could listen to a law professor?  Kyron Huigens of Cardozo Law reasons that Obama’s turn is not a turn at all, but rather explained by his principled beliefs in the way the law works.  I think he’s probably on the right path.

And this, my friends, is why you want an “elitist” as a president.  The Bush years have so blinded us by partisan gamesmanship that we’re looking for spin when there may not be any: “what’s that crazy Obama kid trying to prove?”  For once, we might just have a candidate who’s researched the issues, thought long and hard about them, and reached an intellectual conclusion.  He may not be as fun to sit down and have a beer with as George W. Bush, but when the tab comes, at least Barack Obama can calculate the tip.

Against the backdrop of a national tragedy, the story of the Bush years include their fair share of personal tragedies, unfolding on the national stage in untold or barely sketched stories.  Two come to mind.

Exeunt.

As told by Jeff Toobin, Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is almost Shakespearean in the magnitude of the “character arc” she’s forced to undergo, and the events that impel her along it. In Act I, faithful to Governor Bush’s message of “compassionate conservatism,” Justice O’Connor casts the tie-breaking vote to “elect” Bush, while Cheney is already scheming to betray that message. In Act II, Bush’s party proceeds to betray her firm beliefs in moderation and the law by taking a nasty anti-intellectual, anti-judicial, anti-woman, and extralegal turn. And, in the traumatic dénouement (don’t miss it!), O’Connor is forced to resign from her beloved Court to tend to her dying husband, only to watch him slip away from her while Bush drags his heels on finding her replacement, ultimately nominating her jurisprudential arch-nemesis Samuel Alito to fill her spot as the curtain falls. Just awful.

Senator John McCain’s story might be second in tragedy only to Justice O’Connor’s.  This is a man who’s served his country nobly, and done almost everything right as a politician.  He’His only mistake - now, and in 2000 - was his timing.  But for dirty politicking and a young man named Rove, McCain would have had a fair shot at the presidency in 2000.  He would also likely have been a fine president: 2000 was a good year for moderation and cross-partisan unity.  But for September 11th, he may even have had a shot at Bush’s second term, or a prestigious place in his administration: re-nominating Bush at his pre-9/11 ratings would have been suicide for the GOP.  And today, but for the Bush years, the Republican Party’s political culture may have allowed a moderate to exist, and not demanded that their candidate pander to and pretend to like the far-right.  Americans may still have had faith in the Republican party, and we may might have been willing to credit a Republican’s promises of moderation.  Today, I suspect we’re a little less willing to make Sandra Day’s mistake.  McCain might have been the right president in years prior, but this, as it always has been for him, is the wrong time.

I have a special place in my heart for Dana Hunter at “En Tequila Es Verdad,” and she quite routinely proves why she deserves that spot.  At least I know I’m not the only liberal who thinks the dangers of Obama’s moderate turn are overstated.  Check her post on the subject for that, and a little bit of snark on Rove, too.

Speaking of friends on the series of tubes, thanks to Progressive Conservative for this tribute. I won’t disappoint, and I’ll count on you and others to keep me in line if I start to stray from logic.

Barack Obama is a once in a lifetime candidate.  After eight years of divisiveness, we have a candidate who - quite apart from favoring serious, progressive policies to put America back on track - actually wants to work across the aisle and rebuild a collegial, functioning government.  We’ll have a true President of the United States, rather than a President of the Bible Belt.  There’s truth to Obama’s (considerable) hype - we have a lot to be excited about.

But.  Even for the best of candidates, there are compromises to be made, for the sake of fairness, and for the sake of expedience.  Coalitions and presidencies are never built on unswerving pursuit of an ideological party line, and even when they are, the country’s worse off for it (look where we are now).  When Democrats, like Kos, expect Obama to never deviate from Kos-style liberalism, they expect him to change the way politics works, and not for the better.  Liberalism imports subordination of passion to reason; we ought to bend when we have to, for the larger good.  Politics in a democracy, especially a democracy still suspicious of the word “Liberal,” means that Obama cannot be a model Daily-Kos-style Democrat.  Deal with it.  Certainly there’s an element of betrayal here - Kos democrats made Obama.  But candidate and (soon-) President Obama belongs to the American people, not to the narrow interests that got him to where he is.  Isn’t that independence, after all, what we admired about Obama in the first place?

More importantly - and more cynically - we can’t expect that, because we have an honest candidate, politics will all of a sudden be 100% honest, transparent, and above-the-table.  Politics is not sunshine and blossoms. Sometimes we as Democrats have to read the signals, guess what’s going on, intercept the code, and learn to listen for the spin.

Example: Obama on gay rights.  Yes, thank you, “Confluence,” for pointing out that Obama says he isn’t a fan of gay rights.  But that’s cheap talk.  Obama can oppose gay rights all he wants, but it’s not something he will have control over as president.  His Supreme Court picks, who will be equal-protection-clause-expansion liberals like you and me, will make the call on gay rights issues.  Obama wants his Supreme Court to protect “people who may be vulnerable in the political process.” What do you think that means?  It’s barely-concealed code for “gay rights.”  Do you want to make him say it clearer, and blow the whole game?

I realize it may hurt a few feelings for Obama to stand against a group that’s already been beaten up enough - talk about picking on the Bush administration’s scapegoat! - but his anti-gay rights stance is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  He has to say things like this to get elected.  No political campaign is conducted 100% above the table.  Watch the signs; watch the hands.

So, Democrats, I realize some of you may feel neglected, or “thrown under the bus.”  But realize that compromises have to be made, and learn to separate talk from spin, and read the signs correctly.  And then, fall the hell into line.  Even if you don’t think Obama needs your help, he does.  To turn Ben Franklin’s quote around, if we don’t hang together on this one, we won’t be hanging alone come November: under four more years of Republican rule, America will be hanging with us.  Join together.  Save the state.  Fall into line.

I’ve just gotten a list of the topics for our radio debut tonight. They are -

• The threat of war in Iran,
• The upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions (I assume that topic compasses the vice presidential picks), and,
• Reports, including Zogby, that put Obama over the top in electoral votes.

While I think I’m pretty knowledgeable on all of those topics - and I’ve covered them before - if anyone has comments or links to stories on these issues, I’d sure appreciate it. And thanks for all the good luck wishes! I’ll return to more substantive topics tomorrow, I promise.

Even when you’re right, you just don’t question the experience of a war hero.  The distinction between attacking the honor of an individual’s wartime service as a footsoldier, and questioning the bearing that honorable service has on one’s executive qualifications, is a fine distinction likely to be lost when one’s words are strategically reduced for the 24-hour news cycle.

One of the sacrifices modern democracy has forced us to make, in return for cheap and quick information, is that we can no longer discuss any political issue that can’t be reduced to a sound byte three seconds or less.  This gives rise to what I call Rove’s Law.  Like Brannigan’s Law, this one is hard and fast: “if you can’t express a complex political issue without using a string of words that, reduced to a three-second byte, sounds unpatriotic or otherwise inapt, don’t express it at all.”  Questioning the relationship between McCain’s service record and McCain’s ability to be a good commanding officer was as clear a violation of Rove’s law as I’ve ever seen - right up there with the awful, but accurate, “I voted for it before I voted against it.”

In case you’re one of the three people on Earth that haven’t heard of General Clark’s error, he said, “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”  Ugh.  Video below:

As I’ve said, General Wesley Clark’s point was spot on.  Though McCain is a war hero - and one of America’s greatest war heroes, to boot - that fact merely symbolically suggests, and does not logically prove, that McCain possesses the judgment, knowledge, or intelligence to command the nation’s army, much less the nation.  Not so long ago, back when the polity’s main job was to kill invaders and subdue tributary territories, a citizen would be a fool not to vote for a war hero.  That man (inevitably a man) would be the one to lead the state into battle.  But we’re long beyond that.  Ideally, America need not entangle herself in any more wars, and may indeed be on the brink of extracting herself from this last one.  A war hero may not only be unnecessary, but downright a bad choice.

Of course, as a politician, you should never say that.  At most, you should suggest it through intermediaries… and only then if you’re a Republican.

Whenever we pay our taxes, we curse the government for taking “our money.” But is it really our money? I think, no, not entirely.

Paying taxes is all about expectations. Salaries and hourly wages are not paid in a vacuum. Your employer gives you a salary, or a wage, based on the knowledge that the tax bracket your paycheck puts you in will require you to relinquish a portion of what you’ve taken home back to the government. Your employer expects you to remit a portion of your paycheck to the government, and compensates you accordingly: if there were no taxes, you’d probably be paid less, and if taxes were hiked, you’d (hopefully) be paid more. Given the incorporation of the expectation of taxes into every American’s paycheck, the expectation that you, as a taxpayer, get to keep 100% of your paycheck is entirely unreasonable. In the sense that the government is taking “your” money, it’s not money that was given to you for your own spending in the first place: it’s money you get to keep until the inevitable tax form comes. Uncle Sam isn’t stealing any more from you than your employer expects to be stolen.

That said, almost no-one thinks that deeply into the issue, and the emotional reaction is unavoidable: it’s painful having to give up a ton of the money you’ve kept in your bank account (or under your mattress), even if you thought ahead enough to know that you wouldn’t have it for long. Thus, of course, tax breaks are popular not just because we as citizens get more money, but because we as citizens viscerally - if inaccurately - feel less ripped off.

And the Republicans know it. Maybe it’s the cynic in me talking, but why do you think this little $300-$600 “stimulus” rebate is coming before, rather than after, the general election? It’s like Bush is saying, “Look, heh, you know we need this money (have you seen our debt, and the cost of this war?), but frankly, I care more about you feeling nice & fuzzy about the Republican Party in November than I do about America’s future.” Even regardless of its timing, though, this little rebate is an attempt to convince us to sell out our future, and smile while doing it. I say, no.

That $300 check is, for me at least, tainted by the knowledge of the hell we as a country will have to go through to recover from the debt incurred by George W. Bush, and therefore it ought to be spent to offset the damage done to the country by its disbursement. But how best to do that?

Give your check to Barack Obama. At this point in my life, as a poor law student, I could probably use that $300. But I can also live without it (I’ll just have 75 fewer $4.00 iced chai lattes from Starbucks… ack, that’s a lot!), and if we keep propelling ourselves so recklessly into debt, America may not be able to live without it. Electing a good candidate, someone who won’t put political gain over the economic health of our childrens’ America, is as good a use of $300 as I can imagine, and the irony of turning Bush’s stimulus package against him is just the icing on the cake!

If you can afford to do it, then, I urge you to take this chance to donate your check to Barack Obama. If you can’t, please use the check in good health.

Obama voted for the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - read, wiretapping) compromise. Deal with it.

Let me clarify. Apparently some Obama supporters out there in the connected series of tubes are disappointed that our man has given the go-ahead to some degree of secret wiretapping, voting for and supporting the new wiretapping bill, which includes immunity for telecom providers who complied with then-illegal warrantless taps. Covert wiretapping, of course, is a hallmark of the Bush years (who else would try to secretly circumvent a secret court?), and Obama is taking a risk by passing on even a modicum of the Bush agenda. But here’s why he’s doing the right thing.

First, the cynical. Obama may just be doing what’s politically expedient. What he says now is very important for signaling to the electorate what his values are, but his actions today also have very low predictive value for what he’ll actually do in office (Bush taught us that). Obama can praise Bush-expanded FISA up and down, and still be free to push against it once he’s elected. He may anger a few liberals - people who’ll already vote for him anyways - but a moderate tack now is one step closer to shedding the leftist label. Expedience over honor, that’s the general election, and it’s high time we played that game.

Second, the transcendent. Obama may actually believe that Bush was partially right on FISA; he may be genuinely willing to cede the issue to the Republicans, and may genuinely differ from the liberal hard-line. If that’s the case, that’s good in and of itself. As president, Obama will have to choose his battles, and compromise with Republicans and conservatives on some issues. We can’t afford another eight years of bitterly partisan, with-us-or-against-us, black & white politics. If Obama has to pick some issues to compromise on - and he does - I think FISA is a fine choice.

So, again, the parties are advised to chill. Personally, I think Obama’s acting on the second impulse, and reaping the political benefits as a side note. Maybe I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I’m actually glad to see the man who’s likely to be our next president thinking through which battles he ought to fight. I’m pretty far left (*gasp!*), but I won’t demand Total Victory the way Karl Rove and the Bush administration have: good governance requires compromise.

The same goes for Obama’s support for faith-based initiatives. If you recall these little wonders from 2001, they were the proverbial canary in the mines on the Bush administration: the signal that maybe he didn’t fully understand church/state separation. In fact, though, they’ve turned out to be low-impact, feel-good measures that haven’t, independently of the president, worn down the church/state wall. Good for Obama. I say keep ‘em, win over the evangelicals, and move visibly to the middle. Fine.

I have mixed feelings, though, about Obama’s critique of the Supreme Court’s decision to limit the death penalty to only murderers. The Court’s decision (holding that the death penalty is “cruel and unusual” as applied to convicted child rapists) is unsurprising - it’s strictly in line with precedent - and it’s also morally right. The death penalty is an abomination: take this from a man who spent eight hours today trying to exonerate an erroneously convicted, now executed, Texan. We oughtn’t compound the error, and confound our legal history, by expanding the death penalty beyond its historical limitations.

Here, Obama might’ve either done the expedient thing, or possibly just compromised too much. The death penalty enjoys wide support, and is easily spinnable against its opponents - “Obama doesn’t want to execute rapists” is a nasty little tag line - making critiquing the Supreme Court the easy thing for Obama to do. It’s still not the right thing.

But enough about Barack. Let’s consider the last issue - the death penalty - from the other side. Here’s McCain on the Supreme Court’s ruling:

It’s a peculiar kind of moral evolution that disregards the democratic process, and inures solely to the benefit of child rapists. It was such a jarring decision from the Court that my opponent, Senator Obama, immediately and to his credit expressed his disagreement. My opponent may not care for this particular decision, but it was exactly the kind of opinion we could expect from an Obama Court.

McCain’s rhetoric is disheartening, and especially ought to disabuse us of the notion that he’s a “moderate.” Instead of attacking the decision on legal grounds, he’s going entirely on emotion, declaring that nothing is too evil for certain individuals. That position is fine, and even defensible. But what’s worrying about it is that the rhetoric is entirely inconsistent with McCain’s stated belief that torture is wrong: McCain is using the same argument to justify the death penalty (”these people don’t deserve the law!”) that torture advocates use to justify “enhanced interrogation.” The root argument - that the value of human life is fungible - is the same, and McCain doesn’t bother to explain why it works for some but not others. This suggests to me that McCain either hasn’t thought the issues through, or is quite comfortable saying what needs to be said, and then changing on a dime.

In a year where a Democratic landslide is looking inevitable - Electoral-Vote.com continues to project that Barack Obama’s election night vote tally will dwarf the 270 required to win - Frank Rich of the New York Times is correct to point out, as one of McCain’s advisors did last week, that a terrorist attack would practically be a godsend for the beleagured Republicans. Political science and common sense have long held that, faced with the threat of war, citizens of a democracy rush to the sitting administration or its representatives to “rally ’round the flag,” and in America, scared voters always run to the Republicans, whose platform for the past fifty years has consisted almost solely of the words, “a stronger national defense.” As Rich points out, the irony of this trend during the past seven years has been that the Republicans have proven themselves categorically inept at managing national security: they’re long on rhetoric and short on substance, as a failed war and an unfocused hunt for our real enemy have together proven.

However, Rich stops short of the historical conclusion that naturally follows from his prospective analysis: the only reason George W. Bush is anything but a historical footnote, and the only reason he’s been allowed to wreak such havoc upon our nation for so long, is September 11th.

On September 10th, 2001, George W. Bush was nothing. With an approval rating in the fifties, the President was mocked on all sides, and set to become another “caretaker” president, coasting on the successes of the Clinton years without adding anything to them. He wasn’t good, but he wasn’t bad; he was a one-term mistake, but a harmless one.

September 11th changed all that.  Citizens rallied not only to the flag, but to its inept leader.  Valorized for simply being the sitting president in a time of war, we excused Bush’s mistakes and obvious incompetence just when they transformed him from comic to dangerous. This was a man who was completely unready for anything more challenging than a pretzel, much less a terrorist attack…

…but we let ourselves be scared into his waiting arms, for the sake of unity and certainty in uncertain times. We let Bush convince us that we needed him in war, when we barely tolerated him before.

The lesson we’ve learned from that mistake has been dearly bought.  Seven years later, after being manipulated by fear, and suckered into a second term where none was deserved (and where none would otherwise have been won), we can look back with hindsight to see that the wartime requirement of unity does not mean that a democratic electorate must tolerate error; quite the opposite, it makes error all the more dangerous. It transforms an intellectually weak executive from an annoyance and a lost opportunity into an affirmative danger. If America is in trouble today - if we have lost part of ourselves in the cells of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib - it is because we let fear consume our better judgment. More poignantly, if we have lost focus in the war on terror, and sold out our grandchildren’s economic future, it is because we let terror convince us to abandon logic.

The enduring, indirect legacy of the 9/11 attacks will be the price we paid by sticking with Bush for too long, instead of having the courage to question our leaders. By letting the events of 9/11 terrorize us into putting up with Bush, we let terrorism work. Coming back to the present, if we let the same thing happen again, the results could be even worse, by compounding the consequences. You know what Bush says: fool me once…

I’ve met this Bob Barr guy. He’s crazy, he’s a true believer, and he’s apparently out to be a Republican spoiler.  While he may not be exactly on the level, as far as his libertarian credentials go, he inspires an eager neo-conservative following, and if he can manage to hitch his wagon to the persistent Ron Paul phenomenon, he’ll give Republicans angry with McCain’s waffling form of conservatism a chance to cast the protest ballot they so dearly long to cast.

I’ve hypothesized that the only reason McCain won the primaries was because the hard-core conservative vote was split between Huckabee and Romney.  McCain’s nomination has left the hyper-conservative plurality of the Republican party furious, while failing to appeal to the independent/survivalist bloc of the party, which remains captivated by Paul.  If Barr can appeal to both - or look like a viable protest vote to both - he will matter.  In a big way.

The 2008 Presidential election is shaping up to be a perfect storm for the Republican party, and there’s nary a harbor in sight.