EKOS Politics has a poll from Thursday of last week that shows the Conservatives and the Liberals in a statistical tie in terms of current voter intentions. While an election isn’t immanent and so I’d be careful about putting money down on these numbers, it is a pretty remarkable turn of events given that Harper and the Conservatives were in majority government territory as recently as October of last year.

As EKOS President Frank Graves notes,

For those who have been speculating as to whether Canadians really care about the ‘obscure’ issue of prorogation the evidence is now incontrovertible[.] Canadians have noticed, they do care and this is having a very negative impact on Conservative fortunes.”

The past couple of months have just been an utter PR nightmare for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and there inability to address Canadians on issues of import in regards to their government is as much a condemnation as anything else they’ve bungled lately. What I find most interesting is that throughout the Afghan detainee scandal and the prorogation of Parliament, Harper et al have seemed to rely on this notion that “average Canadians” don’t care about these issues and the more they lean on that messaging, the more it hurts them.

As Graves notes further in the release, this hasn’t resulted in a noticeable electoral boon to the Liberals, which Graves attributes as a “comfort” to Harper. I disagree, not insofar as I think that this polling indicates an immanent Liberal resurgence, but rather because I don’t think this trend is a blip on the Conservative’s radar. It seems clear that many Canadians feel as though they have been treated with disregard and contempt by their governing party and that sentiment in unlikely to fade given that Harper’s movements over the past two months have, by my lights, belied a contemptible attitude towards his fellow Canadians.

In short, the PR disaster here is less about mis-messaging on key issues as it is about communicating what Harper actually thinks on those issues vis-a-vis his fellow Canadians.

In that regard, I think Harper and the Conservatives have a much more daunting hurdle to clear here than a lot of Canadian analysts are acknowledging. That’s true in no small part because it seems as though a decent chunk of Canadians get the sincerity of that messaging and are honestly offended by it. But those same Canadians aren’t headed in the Liberal’s direction in droves and so a clear alternative has yet to emerge from the frey.

That being the case, I think the NDP need to figure out what it’s going to do in the proceeding months to convince Canadians that they are that alternative and so the next little while is pretty key for them. The NDP has been faced with these moments before and has yet to really capitalize on them, so I have little evidence for being optimistic about their chances — but a chance I do believe they have.

My own advice would be to stop tacking to the centre in an attempt to wear as an off-white version of the Liberals. Canada is honestly lacking a left-of-centre party with some soul, integrity and an air of trustworthiness. The Liberals like to sell themselves as such, except that no one is yet buying the “soul” “integrity” and “trustworthy” parts just yet. Such a strategy might not lead anywhere near forming government territory, but then, neither has anything else the NDP has done to date.

What it might do, though, is break that rouhgly 15% barrier with which the Party has been struggling for years, which would be a step in the right direction for the NDP and, concurrently, Canadians, I think. What I’d really like to see the NDP do is take the first step in dropping the pantomime of political posturing around what the various parties think Canadians want and just be the parties they are. We have a multi-party system for a reason, it’s time the major parties acknowledged that fact.

(Editorial note: American content below the fold)

If you’ve been paying attention to the prorogation of the Canadian Parliament — and I’m having a hard time paying attention to much else — you’ll know that a common talking point for those who support the decision is that “average Canadians” don’t care that much about the two week hiatus.  As Graham Fox who was on Power and Politics noted yesterday,

I don’t think that Canadians who are out there in the country getting their kids from school, doing their shopping, getting to hockey and all of those things really care about prorogation. And I think in this case that it is a very run-of-the-mill story. I don’t know that many Canadians know that in the last twenty years Parliament was prorogued fourteen times, which puts the average session of Parliament to a year and a quarter. So this is quite an ordinary thing and I think when people start looking at it, they’re not going to care. They’re going to turn on the hockey and care about that instead.

The more I hear that line — that “average Canadians” don’t care about this issue –  the angrier I get. It’s not that I think that Fox and others who are offering this line of thought intend to demean the people about whom they’re talking, but that is, to my mind, what they wind up doing. It’s a sort of subliminal line that goes as much to what trend-setters and decision-makers think the public ought to care about as it does to describing what the public in fact does care about.

And in so doing, I think it winds up feeding people a line about what the scope of interest, understanding, and engagement of the “average Canadian” happens to be that, in selling individuals fall short of a robust sense of citizenship and civic engagement, seems to me to be a clear if subtle example of the soft bigotry of low expectations. [Read more →]

(cross-posted from my blog)

I know this shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but the Nuge is an idiot:

“I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist. Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up.”

A quick observation: for as much as right-wingers like to play freedom fighter and throw around the word totalitarianism like a twelve-sided die, it’s really clear that  as an actual historial phenomena, totalitarianism means absolutely nothing to them.  Anyone with a modicum of respect for the tens of millions of lives lost during Mao Zedong’s decades-long control of China would at least hesitate before using his name as a point of reference in criticizing a U.S. president.  But that would be expecting a bit much of right-wingers like Ted Nugent* or the National Review’s Andy McCarthy, who name-drops totalitarian dictators on a fairly regular basis in his barely coherent — but always entertaining — “columns.”

The simple fact is that the constant comparison of President Obama to Mao, Stalin and Hitler is deeply offensive; hundreds of millions of people suffered and died under totalitarian regimes, and it does a gross disservice to their memory to trivialize their deaths by using “totalitarianism” as a blunt criticism for moderate, incremental domestic policy you happen not to like.

*Also, as Digby pointed out, shouldn’t he be getting the Dixie Chicks treatment or something, you know, for criticizing the president abroad.

(cross-posted from the United States of Jamerica)

Patterico, a conservative blogger, describes his “pontifications” as “harangues that make sense.”  Assuming the definition of sense has remained relatively constant, this can’t possibly be the case.  Especially when the blogger in question — in a post linked approvingly by America’s Worst Race Theorist — cites African-American discomfort with interracial marriage as a modern-day example of racism.

Ignoring the fact that it is completely ridiculous to cite a single news article as indicative of a larger trend of “Racist Black People Oppressing the White Man,” it is simply the case that black attitudes regarding interracial marriage make a lot of sense when considered in context (which I understand is a scary word for conservatives).  The simple fact is that in this culture, “blackness” is bad, and to be black and female is to be considered fundamentally problematic (see: most depictions of black women in media) and undesirable.  And the worry among a lot of black women is that black men who date “outside the race” have internalized this frame of black women as being undesirable.  Accordingly, many black women and black men feel uncomfortable when they see prominent black men dating white women, as they take it as an explicit rejection of their blackness (hence the fact that Michelle Obama bolstered Barack’s appeal among black voters – it convinced them that he wasn’t ashamed of his blackness).

To call this racist is, well, stupid.  It is no different than the in-group preference you see in any other racial or ethnic minority.  Indeed, it is best understood as another way to preserve cultural cohesion and push back against negative depictions of ones ethnic group.  Of course, seeing as how conservatives are constantly on the hunt for anything to deflect charges of racism onto minorities, it’s not really a shock that they would latch on to this as an “example” of racism.

*Now is probably a good time to add that I’ll be blogging at my own place more often. So if you’re remotely interested in reading what I have to say, you should probably head over there from time to time.

Note: This was a shitty movie.

So, if Memeorandum is any indication, a few conservative bloggers have taken to mining fourth-rate dialogue from third-rate science fiction movies in order to make an absurd point about how a modest package of insurance reforms amounts to an attack on liberty itself.

I asked something along these lines on Facebook yesterday and in light of the apoplectic conservative reaction to Saturday’s vote, it’s worth posing these questions to the linked bloggers (if they are paying attention, of course).  In what way does the health care bill constitute “socialism” or an attack on our “liberty”?  How does the contents of the bill limit your freedom of action or restrict your ability to pursue your own comprehensive conception of the good?  And, assuming you’re not similarly opposed to Medicare and Social Security, how is the health care bill categorically different from either of those programs?  Finally, I also think it’s worth asking if you have a solution.  If agree that there are serious systemic problems with our health care system, then are there any reforms you think would address – or at least mitigate – the problems of overconsumption, high cost, and inadequate coverage?

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that neither blogger has a real answer to any of those questions.  For all of their bleating about how Saturday’s vote dealt a Mortal Kombat-esque fatal blow to “liberty,” I doubt either blogger even has a reasonably well-thought idea of what liberty is.  Indeed, I think it’s entirely fair to say that “liberty” for these folks is anything they really like and tyranny, by contrast, is anything that makes them feel sad and/or knocks them off of their (poorly) self-constructed pedestal.

Also, what John Cole said.

By Kyle (of Vogue Republic)

In the grand discussion of where should Conservative leaders lead and where do they go, it’s important to get a good lay of the land, a solid bearing of where Republicans and Conservatives are, and an accurate reading of where the competition is. Building off of Mark’s exploration of the relationship between the base and wonks and E.D. taking that ball and running with it, I hope to add another piece to the puzzle.

In talks about conservative dissidents, conservative wonks, what we really need to talk about are conservative elites, of which some of the former are included. Elites are, leaders, columnists, idea-mongers, and purveyors of vision.

In that sense, Rush Limbaugh, reviled though he may be, is certainly an elite but not a dissident nor wonk. What he does do, is project an image of what conservatism is and just as importantly what is not. Some elites are dissidents, quite a few are wonks but they are – for better and for worse- leaders of conservatism.

The conservative base and its elite leaders are fractured unlike their competition, Democrats, progressives, and/aka liberals. The very strong alignment between the liberal base and liberal elites forms an iron binary, a group whose fundamental agreement on issues joins them inviolably. Their broad agreement on social and economic issues allows them to work – more or less – in harmony. By contrast, the right has a fairly sizeable disconnect between both. For example with the bank bailout and gay marriage there are sizeable chunks of the conservative elite who either support them or simply don’t care at the same time that the huge chunks of the base have been positively apoplectic over them. There’s a reason you see one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in America working for marriage equality but zero liberal lawyers seeking to overturn Roe.

Another contrast between the two, effective signaling between elites and the base allows liberal elites to organize for health care and channel the energy of a strong base into focused issues of consensus whereas tea parties and town halls reflected a base only enough organized enough to be a disorganized mess.

We saw this contrast as early the 2008 presidential primary. The Democratic candidates came in all regions, genders, and colors but basically agreed on 90%-95% on their policy. The Democratic contest was a contest of packaging not direction or political identity.

The Republicans were the exact opposite. They were all wealthy, white, men but their ideas couldn’t have been more heterodox. Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney all presented very different visions of the future of the Republican Party and consequently conservatism’s role within the party. The only candidate whose selection and platform amounted to tinkering around the edges rather than changing directions was also the one least offensive to the most number of people, John McCain. This is also why he suffered from an enthusiasm gap until he picked Palin.

[Read more →]

E.D. has a new post up at his True/Slant digs asking why John McCain hasn’t done much to participate in the health care debate.  I don’t have much to say about the main substance of the post, but this bit did stick out to me:

Sure, there are plenty of obstacles to disrupting the status quo.

For one thing, big labor opposes just about any move toward killing the status quo, because it gives them quite a lot more bargaining power. Employer-provided benefits, sheltered from income taxes, are good for the unions. They’re good for big businesses, too, or at least they were until health care costs began to spiral out of control.

Taking on “Big Labor” is pretty fashionable around these parts and that’s understandable: most of the Leaguers are on the right side of the spectrum, and for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, hating on unions is a conservative past-time.  But in the interest of fairness, I think it’s worth pointing out that unions have good reason for wanting to maintain their bargaining power: for almost thirty years, they’ve been left to the mercies of employers and forced to deal with a federal government that was mostly cavalier about enforcing labor law.  Indeed, one of the conservative fruits of the Reagan revolution was a crippled Department of Labor that either didn’t have the resources to address labor law violations or routinely ignored them.  What’s more, with private sector union density at a historically low 7.6 percent, unions no longer have the power to resist the pressure of employers and contend with a neglectful federal government.

With that in mind, I don’t know why anyone is shocked and scandalized to see unions oppose policies which would cost their members health care benefits and thus reduce their bargaining power, even if those policies are ultimately good for unions and their members.  Unions don’t have much of a reason to trust the government, and they especially don’t have much of a reason to trust a bill that has the support of companies and organizations that are openly hostile to unions.  Is their opposition dangerously short-sighted? Yes.  But contra E.D., it isn’t particularly sinister.

by Jaybird

There is a scene in C.S. Lewis’s _The Great Divorce that has been sticking in my craw in the last month or so. It’s the scene where they talk about Napoleon. If you haven’t read it (you should, it’s good) it’s a discussion of Hell. Hell, Lewis explains, is a place where one’s wishes are immediately granted. The problem is that people wish for things that make them feel better without actually helping them. The narrator talks to a couple of folks who say they looked up Napoleon. They spent a year spying on him and they said that all he did was pace back and forth saying “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault.” That’s all he did. For an eternity.

I’m enough of an optimist to say that the wilderness is not for *THAT*… but, goodness, measuring some of the responses to the election, one might think that it was. People explaining that it was the fault of the media, or the fault of insufficiently rigorous investigation into the whereabouts of Barack (HUSSEIN!!!) Obama’s mother at the moment of his birth, or even the fault of the faithless American People. It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault.

To be sure, much of the complaining has taken the form of something like “if only you had been more like me, you would have succeeded. Since you were more like you, of course you failed.” While this argument feels good when you say it (go on, say it), it loses much of its oomph when one realizes that social conservatives are saying it at the same time as fiscal conservatives and yet again at the same time as defense hawks at the same time as paleocons at the same time as neocons at the same time as libertarians at the same time as Lincoln Chafee is saying it. Sure, one or two of these groups may be right (I’m pretty sure that at least one is) but the argument itself is just as likely to be the letting off of steam as it is an accurate measurement of the state of affairs.

Best to take a step back and think about what really happened and what it means. What happened in 2004? The Republicans won. Big Time. They picked up seats in their majority-controlled Senate, they picked up seats in their majority-controlled House. They re-won the White House with a majority vote and that is something that people hadn’t seen since 1988. Four years later, the Democrats have a nigh-unfillibusterable lead in the Senate. The Democrats have the House. Obama won the White House with a percentage of the electoral college so large that you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to see a democrat exceed it.

This is more than can be pinned on Josephine. [Read more →]

It’s interesting to watch how conservatives and liberals treat each other.  How they categorize one another.  I’ve tried to distinguish between the two – since it seems they each have different methods of dehumanizing the other side.  I’ve boiled it down to the title of this post: caricatures and demons.

Conservatives demonize liberals, and liberals caricaturize conservatives.  And perhaps I’m picking at nits with this, but there does seem to be a difference between the two.

In popular conservative myth, liberals “hate America” and long for some neo-Stalinist socialism.  Liberals are painted as weak and yet entirely capable of running a massive state/media coup of the nation in order to redistribute wealth and impose draconian regulations and taxation on honest, hard-working Americans.  And the motivation for this?  Dread “multi-culturalism” and America hatred for hatred’s sake.

Liberals, on the other hand, act as though the loudest and most verbose of their critics in fact represent not only the conservative movement, but the very philosophy upon which conservatism draws.  Certainly the phrase “conservatism is dead” is second only to its younger cousin “rock is dead” in frequency of use.  And second, only because “rock is dead” makes for a far better t-shirt.  This supposition is drawn, often as not, from a caricaturization of the movement or philosophy based mainly on its chest-thumping class of pundits.  If Rush Limbaugh is a conservative, after all, then certainly this is how all conservatives must be – ergo, conservatism is dead.  (Man cannot live on Rush alone, after all!) [Read more →]

As I’m sure most of you have noticed by now, I write (and think!) a fair amount about racial politics.  Indeed, it goes beyond my blogging – a good chunk of my undergraduate education focused on the intersection of race and politics, and my senior thesis expanded on some ideas I have regarding the nexus of race and religion in American politics.  That said, I try not to read racial motivations into every dust-up or controversy.  Nine times out of ten, race has nothing to do with a given incident, and if it does, it usually isn’t immediately obvious or even necessarily pertinent.

This is all by way of saying that I have struggled to give Obama’s more vocal critics something of the benefit of the doubt.  Even the most outlandish attacks are grounded in something approaching a legitimate fear, and dismissing those folks is as simply prejudiced is as unfair as it is incomplete (as far as explanatory value goes).  But, at the risk of sounding a little predictable, I can’t help but reconsider my reticence at using the “prejudiced” card, especially in light of this completely ridiculous “controversy” over President Obama’s address to the nation’s students.  It’s something of an understatement to say that this outrage, over a routine presidential address to children, is absolutely absurd, even granting the fact that the right-wing completely freaks out over the reality of a Democratic president.  And while there are certainly a few possibilities as to why conservatives have latched on to this particular address as a rallying point, I think the simplest explanation – and the one which goes further to explain a good deal of this irrational opposition – is that these folks are (still) terrified and bewildered at the fact that our president doesn’t look like them.  Their sincere ideological opposition is mixed up with a unconscious – or conscious, for that matter – fear of blackness and what they perceive as its “contaminating” effects.

That is, the narrative of white supremacy in this country is a narrative of “purity.”  In this story, America was built white hands, and it’s the job of those hands to keep the country – and her virtues – free of contamination from “mongrel” races.  Hence Jim Crow, and anti-miscegenation laws, and the “one-drop” rule*, as well as the fierce obsession with racial purity in Southern religious traditions.   Of course, this is something of an oversimplification (I’m setting aside a whole lot about economics and power relations), but it gets the basic outline right: an initial prejudice transformed, over the course of American history, into a distinctive narrative of white supremacy and racial purity.  And one that still holds quite a bit of currency; a recent study (and unfortunately, I can’t find the link) suggests that most Americans continue to associate “black” with dirtiness and “white” with cleanliness.  The study doesn’t draw any conclusions about the impact this might have on race relations, but you’d be delusional to think that it doesn’t influence the ways in which Americans – of all races – see each other.

This all said, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that its children and health care which are sending the right-wing into a rabid froth.  After all, both are associated with purity; parents – terrified of a fifteen minute presidential address – are yanking their children out of school in an effort to protect their “innocent” children from contamination by the words of a “socialist” (which, historically, is a charge often thrown at prominent black leaders).  And retirees are denouncing health care reform as an attempt by socialists/communists to, essentially, taint their benefits by “giving them away” to illegal immigrants and other non-white “others.”

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, so I want to end it with this link to a LA Times article on President Obama’s rapidly declining support among white voters.  Read it, and the explanations by various analysts and strategists, and I think you’ll come away with a solid impression that underneath all of the controversy, there is a real and palatable racial anxiety on part of white voters, and that’s driving a good chunk of the opposition to Obama’s presidency.

Like many bloggers, on November 4, 2008 I was feverishly watching election results come in and manically trying to live-blog something of importance from what information I had available to me. It was a good night, regardless of what side of the ideological street on which you happened to be set up. It was good because watching election results roll in on a contest as heralded as the presidential election is a thrilling experience, especially when you’ve been paying obsessive attention to it for months on end. This particular night was important not just in terms of Obama’s historicity, but also because it marked the end to what had been the longest and in some people’s eyes the most grueling presidential election in some time. We were all ready for a bit of a rest.

I was in touch with a number of good friend throughout the night, sharing impressions and predictions, and at one point following Obama’s official acceptance speech we all wound up on Skype to record our thoughts on the night for posterity. There were nine of us in total and we each took turns offering our insights and proposing questions to one another. The most interesting question I received was what I thought of Obama’s victory as the closest thing to a conservative on the call.

My answer was relatively simple. I said that I felt that Obama represented probably the best possible world for both conservatives and Republicans. Undoubtedly Republicans and conservatives would have rather seen McCain win, I noted, but given the damage that Bush-Cheney had inflicted to the conservative/Republican brand, that just wasn’t in the cards and of all the Democratic potentials Obama offered an administration that was likely to be the most hospitable to conservatives and Republicans as they prepared for their time in the wilderness to figure out just where they went wrong and what to do about it.

Listening to Mitch McConnell on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, it struck me how poorly conservatives and Republicans are using this moment. [Read more →]