Tension between libertarian-leaning tea partiers and the GOP’s social conservative base was probably inevitable, but the most interesting part of the Politico’s story on a split within the movement is a disagreement over the protesters’ tone: [Read more →]

Scott has a thoughtful follow-up to my anti-pettiness screed.  I want to point out, however, that far more than the problems with populism, I was writing about the problems with elites manipulating it for their own purposes – which, in a sense, is the problem with populism.  It is not so much that the huddled masses are wrong, or not to be trusted, or any of that.  It is that they are all busy people.  They have kids.  They work for a living.  They don’t have as much time, money, or education as the elites do.  They don’t have the connections or the wherewithal or the behind-the-scenes knowledge of the political system. They’re not as connected to government or the media.  This doesn’t make them foolish or ignorant or bad.  Quite the contrary. 

In many ways the people out there opposing the Iraq war or the tea-partiers out there opposing big government or any of these grassroots groups are good people, honorable people doing good and important work.  Scott is involved in some activist efforts up in Canada, and if people didn’t get involved at the grassroots level or with politics in general, we’d be in much worse shape than we are now.  I am not against this sort of popular politics.  Indeed, we have a Democratic Republic so that we can elect representatives to do our will, to some degree, and in order for them to really understand our will a little bit of populism is necessary and vital to the health of our democracy.

But it can be misused and abused by the very people who so often populist anger ought to be directed.  And right now I believe we’re seeing a Republican leadership that is disingenuously manipulating populist sentiment against the president and the Democrats.  (I would argue that Obama has done much the same thing by running a very populist campaign and then following it up with a very insider-oriented administration.  He’s simply more charming than his Republican rivals.)  They are stooping to petty rhetoric and exaggeration and sometimes outright lies to rile up the base against a president who they describe as “radical” and worse. 

Now, I have no problem with opposition.  I think the Republicans should oppose Obama in many ways.  They are well within their rights and indeed within their obligations to do so.  It’s the pettiness and the dishonesty of their methods which rub me the wrong way, and I believe they stoop to these methods in order to gain populist support.  And populists are vulnerable to these elite leaders because the elites have everything the populists don’t have – high podiums, connections, funding, and so forth.  It’s a dysfunctional relationship, and one played out time and again throughout history.

So when I see Newt Gingrich on the Daily Show calling Obama a radical because we read a terrorist his rights on American soil, I just cringe.  It sounds ludicrous to me, because it is ludicrous.  We’re not talking about reading some enemy combatant over in Iraq or Afghanistan their rights after we capture them.  We’re talking about a guy we caught in a plane landing in Detroit.  There is a difference.  And of course, there is precedent with the Shoe Bomber, just as there is precedent with trying terrorists in non-military courts as George W. Bush did over five hundred times during his presidency.  Gingrich and other ostensibly smart people should know better than to dress this up as some “radical” anti-American and dangerous practice. But they do it because they believe it stokes the fires of angry populist sentiment in America, and because they want to be in charge of the narrative however absurd and petty that narrative may become.

Has it always been thus?  I suppose it has, to one degree or another.  Nor are the dividing lines so easy to define.  Some elitism is just as necessary as some populism.  Indeed, we can’t really do away with any of it can we?  The point is, however, that we can do away with some of the pettiness, some of the dishonesty, and shoot for more reason and integrity.  We don’t have to be nice or amicable either.  We don’t have to ditch partisanship in favor of some mythical bipartisan Utopia.  We can be partisan and honest at the same time.  We can be partisan and still not so petty.

I’m just not feeling the serious blogging today. So following on Will’s post noting the stoopid spat between Obama and various Nevada politicians I give you further variations on what I term, “I am duly offended, Mr. President…”

Obama: When times are tough, you tighten your belts… You don’t head on down to Boca Raton to shuffle board your worries away when you’re worried about your 401K.

McCain: I heard that…

Crist: I am not gay… unless that sort of thing would help me in a Democratic primary…

Grayson: Republicans want you to die!

—

Obama: When times are tough, you tighten your belts… You don’t suck back a bunch of cotton candy at Disneyland before riding the Matterhorn without proper health care coverage or travel insurance.

Feinstein: I think we do go slower on the Matterhorn. People do not understand it. It is so big it is beyond their comprehension. And if you don’t understand it when somebody tells you it does this or it does that and it’s not true, you tend to believe it, even though it isn’t true. It’s hard to debunk all of the myths that are out there. In my view when people are earning, when their home is secure, when their children are going to school, and they are relatively satisfied with their life and there’s a problem like the Matterhorn – they want it solved. It doesn’t threaten them. The size of this ride threatens them. And that’s one of the problems that’s got to be straightened out.

Hunter: Yeah, that’s going to be part of this whole thing. It’s not just gays and lesbians. Its a whole gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual community. If you’re going to let anybody no matter what preference – what sexual preference they have that means the Matterhorn is going to probably let everybody in. Its going to be like civilian life and the I think that that would be detrimental for the Matterhorn.

Schwarzenegger: It’s not a tumor!

—

Obama: When times are tough, you tighten your belts… You don’t go moose hunting in Juneau without your bible close at hand.

Begich: Alaska is also not just a moose freezer.

Stevens: A moose is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s, it’s a series of tubes.

Palin: Death panels! Death panels!

Sullivan: Is Trig really the offspring of a magical moose mercilessly hunted by humankind who, ironically, handed him to Sarah Palin to give him a “normal” life? We’ll never know because Palin won’t release the medical records!

Feel free to add your own variations in the comments.

The interspheres have been aglow with the leaking of a planned spending freeze proposal by the Obama Administration.  A run down of various opinions can be found in Scott’s post.

Scott writes:

This is politics as usual, painful though it is to level that claim. And though I’m well aware of the danger in making predictions about politics, I think this announcement, more than the Brown victory, may be the moment to which people look back and see the place where the Obama dream died.

And in comment #3 (to that same post), North writes:

A lot of it is hinging on his State of the Union. If he manages to pull something remarkable and hit it out of the park then he may well turn things around. A lot of this will depend on what he decides to do leadership wise; if he tries to turn budget hawk and decides to let his HRC croak completely his base is going to revolt. If he can force HRC through and then starts clamping down on the budget I guess he might be able to thread the needle.

Now, I didn’t quote those passages to call those gentlemen out, just to note their language.  Obama can (has to?) “force health care reform through….” and, of course, “the Obama dream.”

As somewhat of a side note, it might be worth noting the Canadian pedigree of both dudes (it also might not).  As an American living in Canada, this is one aspect of American politics I can never seem to get across to non-Americans (in this case Canadians, but others as well):  that we have a presidential, not a prime ministerial, system.

The President really has no influence on domestic policy.  Presidents at best might be popular figures who become mouthpieces and/or salesmen for a policy that is already bubbling up from below the political ground.  But they rarely dictate policy.  Clinton failed to reform health care by trying to force a proposal through Congress.  Obama has (possibly?) failed to reform health care by letting Congress lead. Or perhaps neither failed, and it’s Congress who stalled out both times, as it’s the legislature’s job to formulate domestic policy, not the President’s.

Sure, presidents get to appoint various department heads at places like the EPA, Justice, etc. and will choose people who they think will bring their style, tenor, outlook and so on to the job.  And it makes some difference, I suppose, but there’s no real gap between appointments from members of the same party.  I mean, if Hillary Clinton were President, I would guess that the Justice Department, The EPA, and Homeland Security would have pretty similar outlooks.

The only real power the executive has in terms of domestic policy is through institutions like The Treasury Department, appointing a Fed Chairman, and the like.  Here Obama I think is definitely in for some well deserved criticism, but either way it’s much less influence and power than we normally assume a president holds.  American presidents have essentially unlimited, near- monarchical power when it comes to foreign policy.  There Obama has done exactly what he said he was going to do.  But I haven’t lost any sense of the Obama Dream, mainly because I never really bought into any dream in the first place.  At least with regard to domestic policy–since Presidents in my book have basically no power in that regard.  Whether they should or not is a different question, but the reality is they don’t.  I voted for Obama solely based on his foreign policy outlook, which – while far from perfect (from my view) – was vastly superior to John McCain’s.

Which leads to what I think is the rather ignorant focus by Democrats on this spending freeze idea.  It’s particularly ignorant because this is occurring in the same week it has become manifestly clear how to pass the most important piece of legislation (from the Democratic point of view) since the 1960s: Namely, have the House pass the Senate HRC bill plus the so-called “sidecar” amendments from the Senate via reconciliation.

In other words, if you are a Democrat (or in favor of health care reofrm), why the hell do you care what Obama is doing or talking about with regard to spending freezes and his State of the Union address?  It doesn’t matter one friggin’ bit.  All the Democrats should worry about now is passing the health care bill.  They should eat, sleep, drink, and think of nothing else except how to pass that bill.   [Read more →]

There has been a strain of defeatism that seems to be running through the left side of the blogosphere following the Brown win in Massachusetts that is reasonably well captured by this Daily Dish reader who says, “I’m done.” To his credit, Andrew Sullivan himself is, despite some pretty persistent gloominess, telling people not to give up,

For what it’s worth, I’m not. And for what it’s worth, I beg you not to be.

With a couple days perspective under his belt, Andrew offers the following analysis (emphasis mine),

My sense is that Obama understands that his core responsibility as president is not being a partisan figure. That’s what he ran against in many ways. And I think he sees all this in terms of eight years. He is gambling on democracy working over time, on the president setting the general direction but allowing the Congress and the public to decide how fast and how specific they want to get. He always said he wanted to be the president of the red states and the blue states. His major problems right now are a) an apoplectic and incoherent opposition that feels it is doing something by randomly harnessing populist frustration in a recession and playing the Rovian politics which is all they know and b) a useless bunch of disorganized morons and cowards who make up the Congressional Democrats.

But he’s still by far the best thing we have going for us. And this struggle has just begun. Politics is not magic; it’s not a one-off event. It’s a process of grueling argument, tussling and debate. And the deeper truth is: many Independents who are ornery right now like Obama. His decency and civility and reason are plain to see. And so this is his moment as well. To be the anchor in a turbulent time and to keep making the arguments for necessary reform.

I’m with Andrew  in terms of rejecting the notion of “politics as magic”, but I can’t help feeling like his own unwavering belief in Obama is, to some degree, underwriting the very, “I’m done” defeatism he begs his readers not to give in to. [Read more →]

Chuck Norris is much more entertaining as a conspiracy theorist than he was as an actor.  He takes teh crazy to whole new levels.

That was the title of a post from Michelle Malkin on October 27, 2008 in which she added,

It would be another sign of “insane rage” and “violent escalation of rhetoric.” And: RAAAAAAACISM.

But string up a mannequin of Sarah Palin from a rope, and it’s just all in good Halloween fun.

Well, wonder no more, Michelle, because one such effigy* was recently found in Plains, Georgia, home of 39th United States President Jimmy Carter. The reaction from the vast liberal media conspiracy? What response there has been (not a front pager, this one) has stuck to, uh, just the facts, ma’am.

Meanwhile, Instapundit author Glenn Reynolds’ proof positive image of Obama’s haughty condescension has set the blogosphere alight with speculation and debate while the Rush Limbaugh death watch has PoliGazzette’s Jason Arvak sounding the death knell for relevance, focus, and seriousness in political blogging (due exception to the League noted),

And people wonder why fewer and fewer people even bother to write for the blogosphere any more. What’s the point? It’s all just scripts and sharp-elbowed attacks these days. Relatively few bloggers care about anything but somehow “winning” in their hate-war against those who disagree, and the very few who try to sustain some kind of real discourse get shouted down or, more commonly, just plain shunned by the systematic refusal of links.

In 2009, just four short days ago, I probably would have been right there with Jason in shaking my head about all of the above stories and the range of reactions to them, but a ten day blogging sabbatical complete with time to reflect on just what the hell I do on a day-to-day basis at this very site has yielded a slightly different response. I think we need to stop running through the agonized shirt tearing about the ridiculousness of the political blogosphere every time the antics of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Al Franken, or Keith Olbermann take centre stage and reconcile ourselves to a hard truth: this is our politics. [Read more →]

I know that columnists rarely write their own titles but this Maureen Dowd column lives up to the awfulness of its headline. I suppose I just don’t see the nation actually freaking out as much as the political class is over the Nigerian bomber story, let alone the media.  The politicos and media are having a collective hissy fit, of course, but most people are worrying more about new TSA restrictions than they are about the attempted attack.

What Dowd is trying to say eludes me. Obama is too Spock-like apparently. He should panic with the rest of us. He should drag out Roman columns and fill the stadium and announce his grand plans to destroy Yemen, Nigeria, and Alabama in an even bigger, better War on Terror than the last one. Yes, the left and the right are once again uniting in their fear of the Evil Terrorists, and lambasting the president for just sitting there. Do something, Obama!  Anything!  Anything will do!

Then there’s Dick Cheney, prattling on about how Obama is insufficiently crazy – not nearly as crazy as the last administration – and is only ‘pretending’ to try to kill every last Muslim terrorist on the planet.

Cheney is trying to get the nation’s pulse racing, and Dowd is hoping to get the president’s pulse racing.  Apparently if everyone has a high enough pulse we’ll be okay. Fear is good because it keeps us safe.  Or something.

Me? I say we’re overthinking this.  I mean – who is the real enemy here?  Terrorists?  Democrats?  This guy?

No.

It’s airplanes.  And if we can’t keep people off of them with increasingly restrictive security scans, full body x-rays, no checked luggage, and hours-long lines, we should just get rid of them altogether.  It beats firing people every time something almost goes horribly wrong. And it’s relatively cheap. We could even use the dismantled craft to build low-cost housing, killing two birds, you might say, with one stone.

I’ve heard of crazier ideas before.

Allahpundit jumps on the Obama-approval-ratings-are-dropping bandwagon and, like most conservatives who try to interpret the data, totally misses the point:

More than 60 percent of indies disapprove of his handling of health care and the economy. Meanwhile, the overall 44/51 split is the widest gap yet on ObamaCare and the first time it’s been statistically significant in the WaPo poll [....]

Sixty-three percent support the recently deceased Medicare buy-in. Then again, majorities also consistently say they support the public option even though most of them don’t understand it, so it’s anyone’s guess what that “support” means in practice. Remember: It’s amazing what a follow-up question about trade-offs can do to the numbers when polling on ObamaCare. Which probably explains why one wasn’t asked here.

Somehow this leads Allahpundit to imply that disapproval of Obama’s job performance among independents has led more people to lean Republican, closing the partisan gap.  That doesn’t seem very likely to me.  I think a huge portion of independents who disapprove of Obama’s performance are actually hoping for more progressive reforms and are disappointed with how conservative the healthcare bill has become.  These folks might stay home in November, but they won’t come out to vote Republican.

What we’re seeing here is more wishful thinking on the right, interpreting every sign of disappointment with Obama as an indication of the right’s success.  That is simply wrong-headed.  If 63% of independents support the Medicare buy-in and majorities support a public option, then I’d say it’s fairly unlikely that most indies will come out and vote for the GOP in 2010 or 2012.

Remember, people are naturally inclined to vote for the lesser of two evils, and the Republicans are moving more to the right, not more to the center where a good chunk of independents reside.  Even those indies who “lean right” might be scared away by the prospect of a Sarah Palin nomination.

Tennessee Mayor accuses Obama of deliberately preempting “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in his speech at West Point because he’s “a secret Muslim.”

Once again, I was listening to On Point, this time checking out their review of Obama’s Afghanistan speech with Robert Kaplan and John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer, who recently penned a critical piece on America’s involvement in Afghanistan for Foreign Policy, made a comment that immediately caught my attention. In response to a caller who voiced similar criticisms of Obama’s announcement, Mearsheimer said,

I think that the caller Tom is absolutely correct when he says that this talk was supremely political, it was all about domestic politics. Look, what’s going on here is that Obama is a smart man who understands that we can’t win in Afghanistan and that we can’t stay there for ten more years. It’s just politially not possible in the United States. At the same time, he understands that we can’t get out now because the Democrats would be punished by the Republicans greatly over time for cutting and running. Therefore, what he’s trying to do is finesse this, as Tom the caller said, “kick the can down the road.” That’s really what’s going on here.

This isn’t a serious formula for how to win in Afghanistan because nobody knows how to win in Afghanistan. We’ve been there for eight years and things are much worse than they were eight years ago. The idea that we’re going to stay there for another ten years, greatly increase the number of troops, and spend one hundred billion dollars a year given the unemployment and economic problems we have at home is unrealistic. So this is all a very sad situation and Obama is in a situation where he can’t win.

The implications here are pretty stunning, certainly enough to rock me back on my proverbial heels on my way into work this morning. In essence, if Mearsheimer’s analysis is accurate, then he’s applying the same basic analysis to Obama’s decision making with regards to Afghanistan as many have ascribed to Bush and the Rovian politics that dominated his eight years. Certainly Mearsheimer seems to be offering a much sympathetic condemnation to Obama when he says that the President, “is in a situation where he can’t win,” but the underlying motives present in the analysis are the same:you make decisions based not on what’s right or wrong, or on what seems the best course of action, or what your personal convictions are, but rather on what impact(s) your decision will have on the next election.

Of course, to a certain degree one can only say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?” And there is some truth to that. Political decisions don’t happen in a vacuum and what the fallout of a particular decision might be electorally is present in the back of any elected representative’s mind, there’s no avoiding that. But to make a decision to delay the impacts of a challenge you’re facing until such a time as it has fewer potential negative ramifications on an election in which you have a stake that, at the same time, places  and additional thirty thousand soldier’s (one hundred thousand total) soldiers’ lives at risk seems as bald-faced and odious an example of realpolitik as one might imagine. And it is blatant enough that it seems like we ought not to throw our arms up and simply say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?” [Read more →]

It’s striking, when you stop to think about it, how large an unspoken role symbolism plays in our understanding of the world and the ways in which we organize our lives. There are words, sounds, colours, images, clothing, objects, and even intonations that we don’t acknowledge on an almost second by second basis that trigger certain deeply held meanings for us and fundamentally inform how we wind up understanding a given experience. These symbols and the impact on our perception of things are so pervasive that one can stand side-by-side with a good friend, become exposed to the same set of variables and dynamics making up an experience, and interpret what happened in totally divergent ways.

That symbolism seems to operate on a myriad of levels and in an infinite number of contexts, from the tiniest of everyday interactions to the most expansive of meta-narratives. And more often than not, I think, we remain largely unconscious of this component of our perception and conception of the world. It was against the backdrop of that thinking that I happened to listen again to On Point’s November 16 podcast about the upcoming trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed et al. and it was just that kind of thinking that has lead me to see the whole trial within the prism of a lose-lose matrix of outcomes. [Read more →]