Multi Medium

Barack Obama, Statesman

I like what Pelosi and Reid are doing here:

Pelosi:

President Bush has long maintained that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq should be governed by the situation in Iraq. It is now clear that the situation in Iraq is that Prime Minister al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders want the withdrawal of our combat forces to be completed within a 16-month period, as recommended by Senator Obama.

Reid:

As Senator Obama visits Iraq to listen to our troops and commanders and meet with Iraqi leaders, it is becoming clear that America, Iraq and the world are coalescing around Senator Obama’s plan to end the war.

This weekend, Prime Minister Al-Maliki spoke in favor of the Obama plan. Today, despite pressure from the White House, Iraqi government officials publicly reiterated their support.

They are establishing the idea that Barack Obama is the man with the plan to get us out of Iraq, and that even the Iraqis are on board with it.  This will be a very effective message in November, especially when contrasted with McCain’s “We’ll stay in Iraq a hundred years even if the Iraqis clearly don’t want us there.”

Add comment July 22nd, 2008 at 08:01am Posted by Eli

More Credit Where Credit Is Due

Hooray for my representative!

Internet access may not be as important as water. But it’s now right up there with hot water.

Yet given how important broadband is to the future of our economy, our educational system, even our democracy, there is amazingly little public discussion about it.

For too long, that conversation has been happening behind closed doors among self-appointed experts, deep-pocketed lobbyists and politicians who either believe the Internet is “a series of tubes” or don’t use it at all.

A notable exception is U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who’s helping to bring the entire Federal Communications Commission to a public hearing tomorrow at Carnegie Mellon University.

He voted the right way on FISA, too.

For those of you who want to attend:

The FCC hearing on the future of the Internet will start Monday, July 21 at 4 p.m. in McConomy Auditorium at Carnegie Mellon University. For more information: www.savetheinternet.com

Add comment July 20th, 2008 at 04:56pm Posted by Eli

Holy Cameos, Patman!

Okay, Pat Leahy is officially one of my favorite senators now:

The senator steps forward. “We’re not intimidated by you thugs,” he says. The man, saying, “You remind me of my father — I hated my father,” grabs the senator’s head, and thrusts a knife to his face. The senator freezes, eyes wide.

Not your typical Capitol Hill brouhaha. No, this scene is pure Hollywood, straight out of the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight.” But that really is the senior senator from Vermont: Patrick J. Leahy — Democrat, Judiciary Committee chairman and lifelong Batman fan — has a cameo in the film and gets to be held at knifepoint by Heath Ledger’s Joker.

(…)

Batman became his favorite superhero because “he has no superpowers,” Mr. Leahy said. “He had to use his own brains and his own knowledge. He could have had an entirely different life. As a billionaire, he could have done anything.”

Mr. Leahy had a nonspeaking cameo in the 1997 film “Batman and Robin,” did a voice-over for the part of a governor in a Batman cartoon, and wrote the prefaces for a “Batman” anthology and a Batman comic book about the danger of land mines. Once he was spotted doing wheelies on his grandson’s toy Batmobile down the long marble hall outside his Senate office.

(…)

The filming of Mr. Leahy’s scene in a Chicago restaurant last summer took “all night long,” he said. Mr. Ledger would “punch or throw me halfway across the room,” and Mr. Leahy was propped up by another actor “with an arm like an oak tree” who was “brandishing a gun in my face.”

It took the senator a couple dozen tries before he got his line right.

“We tried it two different ways — one was authoritative, the other one was with a lot of fear in my voice,” Mr. Leahy said. Ultimately, he was directed to act like the prosecutor he once was, with a take-charge attitude.

So how did Mr. Leahy manage to find his character’s motivation? Was he thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2004 used profanity to curse Mr. Leahy on the Senate floor?

“No, I wasn’t visualizing Dick Cheney,” Mr. Leahy said. “They can’t use that dialogue in a PG-13 movie.”

I think we need more Batman fans in Congress.  Maybe even the White House.

2 comments July 13th, 2008 at 11:36am Posted by Eli

More Willful Stupidity

Okay, this is really complicated, so please try to follow along with me here:

Saying that McCain’s military service does not qualify him for the presidency is not the same as saying that it disqualifies him from the presidency.  Nor is it the same as saying that his military service is bogus in any way.

Also, as McCain Source points out, McCain himself agrees with Clark.

But no, saying that getting shot down and taken prisoner and tortured for five years doesn’t qualify you to be president is the same as saying that Kerry lied about his service in Vietnam and shot himself to get a Purple Heart.  Awesome.

Add comment July 1st, 2008 at 08:59am Posted by Eli

Promising, If True

I’m not a real big fan of Harry Reid’s, but I have to say I like the sound of this (subscription only):

Since then, Reid has regularly kept the Senate operating over recesses. Additionally, he has made plain that he no longer plans to confirm any partisan Bush nominee whose appointment would tip the balance of a particular board or association to the GOP, and whose term stretches beyond the president’s tenure.

That should have been his policy all along, really.  It’s at the end of a story about Reid making a deal to confirm a whole bunch of nominees (both Republican and Democrat) to the SEC, Federal Reserve Board Of Governors, FEMA, State, DOJ, and various ambassadorships.  But I’m glad to see that he’s finally putting some limits on how much damage the lame duck can inflict past January 2009.

Add comment June 27th, 2008 at 08:21pm Posted by Eli

Dispatches From Bizarro World

Today’s installment is from one of Bizarro World’s leading citizens, Rush Limbaugh:

You want to know why the Republicans are willing to say, “Screw you,” to 30 percent or more of their voters and yet Democrats will bend over, grab the ankles, and say, “Have your way with me,” for 10 percent and 2 percent of the population [black people and gays]?

(…)

There is an answer to your — basic question is, “Why don’t the Democrats say, ‘To hell with you, you wacko nuts in the base,’ like Republicans do?”

(…)

The — there’s a complicated answer to this… but one of the simple answers that will require some elaboration is that a lot of money is coming from these kooks — and I’m not talking about just the blacks — I’m talking about a whole kook-fringe base because George Soros is running it… and they need the money.

(…)

…[T]he Republican Party, especially as currently constituted, is doing its best to deemphasize the importance or the influence of the traditional conservative base, which is not just the so-called evangelical Christian Right or the pro-lifers or whatever. But you have all kinds of people in the Republican base that are conservatives, from values conservatives, social conservatives, even fiscal economic conservatives. Conservatism has been the base of the Republican Party and because the conservative base does include pro-lifers and because many of them are from the South, there are many in the Northeastern corridors of power in the Republican Party who are embarrassed to be in the party with those people.

(…)

…[T]he politically active gay community on the left is worth a lot of money. These people send the Democrats more money than you can possibly imagine. A lot of it from Hollywood, and the arts and entertainment. They’re not — money — you know, key number one, you might be saying, well, don’t the pro-lifers donate a lot of money to the Republicans? Yeah. Yeah, they do. But it still embarrasses them. It still embarrasses a lot of the country club Rockefeller types.

The Democrats — what are they embarrassed about? They’re not embarrassed about anything. The Democrats have never set any standards for themselves. As far as they’re concerned, everybody’s a victim, even on their side. So, I mean, yeah, these victims are just fighting to be heard. Fighting for their rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The conservative rights — conservative right is viewed as trying to deny people rights, blah, blah, blah, you see.

But in addition to the money aspect of this — and don’t forget, the left-wing base is not even talked about by Mickey Edwards there — is the anti-war kook fringe. And it is huge. From MoveOn.org to Think Progress to My Base Book — whatever these things, these things — well, maybe not MySpace or Face, whatever it is. But, there are so many of these 527 groups out there that are just raising money left and right and the Democrats are scared to death if these people take their money and go away or go to a third party or what have you. And so they will cater to them left and right.

Wow.  That almost makes me wish I lived in Rush Limbaugh’s universe, where Democrats bend over backwards (or, if you’re Rush, forwards) for their progressive base while Republicans tell conservatives to get lost.  Because George Soros and the Hollywood gay community give progressives such a huge money advantage over conservatives, who only have the world of corporations and ultra-rich people to draw from.  Those poor conservatives, they can never get a seat at the table, and progressives are in control of everything.

Which is why the Democratic Congress allows the Iraqupation to continue, and is inches away from passing a FISA revision which gives Dubya all the spying powers and unaccountability for past spying crimes he could have ever wanted.

But other than the clueless reference to “My Base Book,” I think my favorite bit is the part about how huge the “anti-war kook fringe” is.  Well, yeah, it’s huge - about 60-70% of the country are anti-war kooks now.  And they are so totally calling the shots, too.

1 comment June 26th, 2008 at 07:09am Posted by Eli

Reality-Proof Democrats

So I’m reading Chris Dodd’s brilliant statement about why the FISA “compromise” is unacceptable, and how it’s just one of the many symptoms of the Bush administration’s fundamental lawlessness, and I’m having this depressing thought:

Dodd makes a very eloquent, comprehensive, and compelling argument against the FISA bill, and… no-one cares.  I doubt that he convinced even one Democratic senator to join the paltry 15 who voted against cloture, and obviously no Republicans.  The merits of Dodd’s arguments were simply irrelevant in the face of political calculation, party loyalty, and corporate money.  There was literally nothing that he could have said to sway any of them.

And that’s what saddens me: This sense that the merits don’t matter, because hardly anyone in Congress is making decisions based on them.  Dodd is pouring his heart out, and his esteemed colleagues are looking at their watches or playing with their Blackberries, saying, “Yeah, that’s great, Chris - can we get on with servicing our corporate bosses now?”

Most dispiriting of all, that group includes our presidential nominee, who couldn’t be bothered to vote, and who has already said that he will vote for the “compromise” whether immunity has been stripped from it or not (he says he’ll work to strip it, but there’s no way he can succeed).  I don’t know whether Obama’s feeling insecure about his national security credentials as compared to McCain’s, or if he’s beholden to telecom contributions, or if he simply doesn’t want Nominee Obama to mess up President Obama’s chances at extraordinary powers, but it doesn’t really matter.  None of those reasons is an excuse for Obama’s pathetic failure to lead on something this important.

And I’m not going to give one whit of credit to anyone who voted for cloture and then votes against the bill so they can grandstand about how awful it is.  “This bill is a grave threat to our constitutional liberties and the rule of law… but I felt that it deserved an up-or-down vote” is spectacularly bad messaging.

I’m going to be pissed and resentful about this for months, and refuse to give time or money to the Obama campaign.  Way to depress your base in a presidential election year, geniuses.

1 comment June 25th, 2008 at 10:32pm Posted by Eli

Return On Investment

If you can afford it, bribing a congresscritter is just about the best deal there is.  As Politico and MAPLight report, our Democratic congresscritters sold us out on FISA, thus saving the telecoms millions and millions of dollars in liabilities, for a mere pittance - an average of less than $10,000 over three years, and a maximum of $29,500.

This happens time and time again: Senators and Representatives give away thousands, even millions on the dollar to industries for comparatively tiny amounts of campaign cash, or even some smoozing and a golf trip.  I mean, if you’re going to let yourself be bribed, at least don’t sell yourself so cheaply.

Of course, the underlying problem is, it’s not their money they’re giving away, it’s ours.  It’s akin to someone selling your car for $200 - it’s a terrible deal for you, but a great deal for them.  Unfortunately, I can’t think of any way to remedy this without creating perverse incentives that might make matters worse.

Sure, you could tie their pay to the budget surplus/deficit somehow, but we’d just end up with sky-high tax rates and no services.  Plus most congresscritters have other sources of income that dwarf their government salaries, so maybe the incentives/disincentives should apply to their campaign funding instead.  That would certainly get their attention, but then we’re back to the perverse incentives again.

If anyone has any ideas on how to give our politicians some “skin in the game” so that when they give away our money, they’re also giving away their money, I’m all ears.

Add comment June 25th, 2008 at 07:32am Posted by Eli

The More Things Change…

Over three years ago, I was urging Democrats to lay some groundwork to ensure that Republicans couldn’t turn a terrorist attack or other disaster (this was several months before Katrina) into an undeserved political windfall:

Another thing that the Democrats must keep in mind is the very high probability that Republican policies will lead to a financial or terrorist-inflicted disaster. An electoral scandal and constitutional crisis is also a possibility: I believe there are limits to just how large a margin election “gaming” and fraud can cover up without leaving behind a gun too smoky for the media to ignore. What happens if that threshold is exceeded, at least to the point where the election outcome is severely in doubt? What mechanisms do we have for resolving such a situation?

In theory, Democrats should be able to capitalize on any of these negative outcomes, as they can all be laid clearly at the doorstep of the Republicans. In reality, they would be pilloried by the Republicans and the media for opportunistically “politicizing” a national tragedy.

Therefore, what I’m advocating is that the Democrats get out in front and periodically raise a big stink (and for the love of God, don’t capitulate!) about the various ways that the 100% Republican-controlled government has made us vulnerable…

(…)

[M]y point is that the Democrats need to be vocal about these issues in advance, so that everyone knows where they stand before the unthinkable occurs. It’s very easy to denounce terrorist attacks or stock market crashes after they happen, and both sides of the aisle will be doing exactly that. But the Democrats will be on the record as having warned of disaster, while the Republicans will be on record as steamrolling and shouting them down. This will give the Democrats standing and credibility to point the finger of blame after the fact.

(…)

Am I rooting for catastrophe? Of course not. I think it is highly probable, if not inevitable, but I desperately hope to be proven wrong.

What I am rooting for is that the Democrats will not let the Republicans get away with saying, “Well, these things happen, no-one could have seen it coming, we must all pull together now and do whatever we say,” as they did after 9/11. They must be held accountable for their willful refusal to protect America from harm.

Well, here we are three years later, and (as I predicted in that same post), the Democrats haven’t really gotten that message across, much to RJ Eskow’s dismay (and mine):

I’ve been privately warning Democrats for some time that Obama and the party need emergency preparedness plans. Major events between now and November could change the course of the election - especially a U.S. strike on Iran, or a terror attack against Americans at home or abroad.

We’re not seeing any signs of such plans. Not that we should -except that one outcome would be to explain now why Americans are much less safe as the result of GOP policies.

If it seems crass to weigh political considerations in the face of war or tragedy, remember that the future safety of civilians here and elsewhere will be greatly affected by this election. And they - the Republicans - are certainly thinking politically. When McCain’s chief political advisor, lobbyist Charlie Black, said yesterday that a terror attack “would be a big advantage for him, his biggest mistake was excessive honesty. That’s one of the few imaginable scenarios that could lead to a McCain victory in November.

(…)

So what should Obama and the Democrats be doing about these two possibilities? Some of their planning should be invisible - for the speeches that Obama might gave, the surrogates (military and otherwise) that would appear on Democrats’ behalf. But we should be seeing some groundwork being laid now, and we’re not.  So, what should be happening?

[Main bullet points only - check out Eskow's post for the meat behind them]

Guanatanamo and Abu Ghraib should be described as Bush-created “terrorist factories.”

Democrats should explain that torture is un-American, that it breeds terrorists — and that it doesn’t help catch bad guys.

If we surrender our freedoms, the terrorists win.

…Democrats owe it to themselves - and more importantly, to the nation - to start telling the real story immediately. There should be no equivocation and no calculation.

Their motto should be: Hope for the best, plan for the worst, and do what’s right in the meantime.

I still believe that something terrible is going to happen, that the Republicans’ criminal mismanagement of, well, everything, has made it inevitable.  Indeed, some pretty terrible things have already happened, like Katrina and the subprime meltdown.  But when the next terrible thing happens, if Democrats haven’t already shown (or, better yet, tried to fix) how the Republicans have left us vulnerable, they will be unable to fight off the Republicans’ this-is-why-you-need-a-strong-daddy narrative.

(h/t Elliott)

Add comment June 23rd, 2008 at 09:56pm Posted by Eli

Where’s Waldobama?

I’ll just link to Glennzilla’s post, since all the relevant info is there.  Basically, the Democratic “compromise” FISA bill is every bit as bad as we thought it would be, and probably even worse.  The “judicial review” over telecom complicity basically amounts to, “Did the Bush administration tell you it was legal?”  No determination of whether it actually was.

This is like those slasher movies (think Halloween and Friday The 13th) where every time it looks like the baddie is dead, he keeps coming back to life again and again again.  Only in this horror movie, the monster keeps coming back to life because the people who are supposed to be the good guys keep giving him CPR.

Glenn has the best argument yet that the “compromise” is, as Russ Feingold calls it, actually a capitulation:

And isn’t it so odd how this “compromise” — just like the Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act and all the other great “compromises” from the Bush era which precede this one — is producing extreme indignation only from those who believe in civil liberties and the rule of law, while GOP Bush followers seem perfectly content and happy with it? I wonder if that suggests that what the Democratic leadership is supporting isn’t really a “compromise” at all.

Yes, funny how whenever the Democrats enter into a bipartisan “compromise,” that conservatives are pleased and progressives are pissed.  Perhaps conservatives just have a milder, more accommodating temperament than we do, and aren’t as accustomed to always getting their way…

But here is the $500 million question: Where’s Obama?  Isn’t he the standard-bearer and de facto leader of the Democratic party now?  Shouldn’t he have something to say about the FISA compromise?  Does he really expect anyone to buy his lame excuse that he hasn’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet?

The fact that the Democratic leadership is trying to push this abomination through with only 24 hours for review is a disgrace in itself, but it didn’t take individual liberal bloggers very much reading time to spot the problems with the bill… but I digress.

My fear is that this may be the dark side of the strong-on-national-security pitch that Wes Clark was making on Obama’s behalf - that this is Obama’s way of showing that he’s not afraid to… give telecoms immunity and let Dubya spy on people whenever he feels like it in order to fight terrorism effectively.

Either that, or he’s another corporate sellout, hiding behind a mask of changiness while doing the telecoms’ bidding.

If Obama has a good reason for playing Moody Prince Hamlet and being unable to make up his mind or lead on this, I would sure love to hear it.

Also, oh-by-the-way, Nancy Pelosi continues to be completely worthless.

4 comments June 19th, 2008 at 09:29pm Posted by Eli

Which Is Better?

Would you rather have a right-wing Democratic wanker like Chris Carney who reliably votes with Republicans as your congresscritter, or an actual Republican?

I would argue that as long as the Democratic majority is not in danger, it is much better to have a true Republican in that seat, at least for the moment.  Why?  Two reasons:

1) Let their idiocy contribute to trashing the Republican brand instead of the Democratic one.  Bush Dogs like Carney contribute to the negative popular image of Democrats as feckless and ineffectual.

2) It’s not easy, but it’s easier for a progressive candidate to knock off a Republican incumbent than a Democratic one.  They’re not fighting the Democratic party leadership, and they’re going up against an opponent whose party’s brand is even more in the toilet than the Democrats’.  I think a lot of Bush Dogs are Democrats solely for that reason.

If you want to be a Democrat, then be a Democrat.  If not, then go join the other team.  I wish there was a mechanism to “excommunicate” the worst offenders, so that the DCCC & DSCC, and individual Democrats, would all refuse to support them in either general or primary elections.  How might the 2006 CT-SEN election might have turned out if such a policy were in place against Lieberman, I wonder.

(h/t Howie)

Add comment June 18th, 2008 at 06:52am Posted by Eli

A Rising Tide Lifts All Votes

EJ Dionne notes some very interesting and encouraging poll numbers, which I believe may be even more encouraging than he thinks:

In a report released yesterday, Gallup found that where McCain was winning 85 percent of self-identified Republicans, Obama was winning only 78 percent of Democrats.

Yet Obama led McCain 48 percent to 42 percent in the survey, which was conducted June 5-10. Obama enjoyed a seven-point advantage among independents, but Gallup noted that even when independents were excluded, Obama still had a five-point lead because Democrats now outnumber Republicans 37 to 28 percent. When independents were asked their partisan leanings, the Democratic advantage reached 13 points.

In 2004, Kerry carried 89 percent of the vote among self-identified Democrats, according to the network exit poll, but Democrats and Republicans accounted for equal shares of the electorate. President Bush won with an even larger share (93 percent) of supporters of his own party.

(…)

The good news for McCain is that this year he has consistently run ahead of his party. The bad news is that the GOP is in such a deep hole McCain may not be able to climb out. When voters in a recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll were asked, without candidates’ names, which party they wanted in the White House, Democrats had a 16-point lead. But when they were asked to choose between Obama and McCain, Obama led by only six points.

Here’s the thing, though: These polls were taken right at the very end of the primary process, when there were still a lot of Clinton supporters who were pretty much hating Obama’s guts.  While there will certainly be some stubborn diehards who will never vote for Obama no matter what, I think that most of Hillary’s supporters will eventually come around, especially if Hillary works to bring them around.

In other words, I think that 78% number is pretty much the floor for Obama, and it’s going to keep rising as the election draws closer.  If the party identification numbers hold, and if Obama can get close to the 89% range that Kerry got, then Obama should win pretty handily.  Maybe enough to claim a mandate, even…

Add comment June 14th, 2008 at 10:17am Posted by Eli

Phrases I Never Thought I Would See In Print

“The Kathleen Sebelius experience”

The story also points out that Sebelius couldn’t even deliver Obama her home state if she were his running mate, but so what?  It’s six electoral votes, and it’s probably not a state that he’s going to be counting on.  If she can deliver votes elsewhere, then I see no reason not to consider her.  Especially if he gets the “George Bush screwed us by sending all the National Guard to Iraq” version rather than the State Of The Union rebuttal version.

Add comment June 10th, 2008 at 11:40pm Posted by Eli

Thanks, I Needed That.

Pessimist that I am, I have a tendency to imagine the worst-case scenario, and then get myself all worked up and furious about my own dark imaginings.  Fortunately, Barry Crimmins was there to reel me in this time:

Lots of people voted for Hillary Clinton this year for lots of reasons. Few believed they were doing anything but expressing their preference concerning the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. The vast majority of these people will vote for Barack Obama this fall. A deluded minority think that they remain in a cohesive unit with all of Senator Clinton’s other primary and caucus supporters and hold great sway by doing so.

Good luck to them. Primary season voters chose Clinton for myriad reasons, including:

[Insert myriad reasons here]

…and so on and so forth. The point is, these people have not been alloyed into some sort of political super element.

Today, Mrs. Clinton will formally encourage her supporters to join the Obama camp. This gesture is as much for her as it is for Senator Obama because she will be suggesting that people do what would have done anyway. Despite this, some Clinton dead-enders will continue to threaten to break with Democrats while talking as if they represent that mythical super-alloyed bloc of 18 million voters.

But most of those millions didn’t intend to hand their perpetual political proxy to Mrs. Clinton when they cast a ballot or walked to her side of a caucus. They simply weighed in on which candidate they most supported in the Democratic field. Prior to making their decision, had Mrs. Clinton’s supporters known anyone would suggest that their vote would represent an eternal splinter affiliation, it’s likely many would have chosen Mr. Obama instead.

Most Clinton voters chose her as their first preference in a campaign during which they plan to vote for anyone who will end an eight-year nightmare of Republican rule. A few tough months on the campaign trail hardly trumps eight years getting ground under the boot-heels of Bush, Cheney and their operatives. This nation is involved in protracted, foolhardy war. The economy is in petroleum-fueled flames. The environment is on the verge of epochal ruin. On the other hand, a few bumps and bruises were incurred on the campaign trail. Boo-hoo!

I think Crimmins is probably right - it’s just hard to remember sometimes, because the dead-enders are the ones doing all the shouting.  But being loud doesn’t make them representative.  And hopefully not influential either.

(h/t bdr)

Add comment June 9th, 2008 at 11:05pm Posted by Eli

Post-Primary Vocab

Two words to keep in mind:

Rival, n.

1. One who attempts to equal or surpass another, or who pursues the same object as another; a competitor.
2. One that equals or almost equals another in a particular respect.
3. Obsolete A companion or an associate in a particular duty.

Enemy, n.

1. One who feels hatred toward, intends injury to, or opposes the interests of another; a foe.
2. 1. A hostile power or force, such as a nation.
   2. A member or unit of such a force.
3. A group of foes or hostile forces.
4. Something destructive or injurious in its effects: “Art hath an enemy called Ignorance” (Ben Jonson).

Please try to remember the difference.

2 comments June 9th, 2008 at 07:36pm Posted by Eli

Finally!

MSNBC calls the nomination for Obama.

Can we all focus on taking down John McCain now?  Please?

Add comment June 3rd, 2008 at 09:48pm Posted by Eli

Yeahbut.

This is great news for the congressional races, but I don’t think it’s quite the slamdunk Darryl thinks for the presidential:

Every month, Rasmussen Reports releases a new partisan trends report based on monthly interviews of a huge number of people:

…the Democrats now have the largest partisan advantage over the Republicans since Rasmussen Reports began tracking this data on a monthly basis nearly six years ago.

During the month of April, 41.4% of Americans considered themselves to be Democrats. Just 31.4% said they were Republicans and 27.2% were not affiliated with either major party.

April was the third straight month that the number of Democrats topped 41%. Prior to February of this year, neither party had ever reached the 39% level of support.
[…]

The partisan gap now shows the Democrats with a 10.0 percentage point advantage over the Republicans. That’s the largest advantage ever recorded by either party. In fact, before these past three months, the previous high was a 6.9 point percentage point edge for the Democrats in December 2006.

(…)

Republicans reached their peak numbers of 37.3% in September of 2004, and have been on a slow decline since.

Until about six months ago, the Democrats were holding steady at about 37% Democratic voter identity. The rise since December has been nothing short of stunning. Democrats had 36.3% identity in December and shot up to 41.5% in February—just about the time that the race started heating up.

(…)

A cautious statement would be that any damage done by the primary contest is minor at worst, as the damage has been more than offset by the Republican collapse, resulting in a net gain for Democrats.

An alternative explanation is that the primary-from-hell really has been a good thing for Democrats.

The thing is, will all those Democrats vote for Obama?  How many of them are pissed-off Clinton supporters who are more angry at Obama than afraid of McCain?  I think the Democrats should clean up in the downticket races - unless the Hillary supporters are so pissed off that they stay home altogether - but until I see Hillary enthusiastically campaigning for Obama (as she has said she will), I’m going to be nervous.  And maybe even after that, if her supporters don’t come with her.

1 comment June 2nd, 2008 at 10:41pm Posted by Eli

Take That, Propaganda!

Woohoo!  House passes amendment to investigate the DoD’s use of generals to spout administration talking points on teevee in the guise of “analysis”:

Tonight, the House passed an amendment introduced by Reps. Hodes, DeFazio, and DeLauro to the Defense Authorization Act for FY2009 requiring that “not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense and the Comptroller General of the United States shall each conduct a study of, and submit to the Congress a report on, the extent to which the Department of Defense has violated the prohibition on propaganda” and defines propaganda as “any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of the people of the United States in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”

On passage of the amendment, Speaker Pelosi said:

In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” The Pentagon media influence program reported by the New York Times struck at the heart of this principle – not only denying citizens the knowledge they deserve but also using the media to manipulate public opinion, and as a consequence, damaging our democracy.

The President and members of his Administration led the country to war on the basis of unproven assertions, later confirmed to be false, and have continued to misrepresent the truth on the ground. The Hodes-DeFazio-DeLauro Amendment which prohibits the Department of Defense from using funds for propaganda purposes and initiates a GAO and IG investigative report into past use of propaganda, is a vital step toward restoring the public’s faith in information stemming from the Pentagon.

Rep. Hodes:

The American people were spun by Bush Administration “message multipliers.” They were fed Administration talking points, believing they were getting independent military analysis. Days after, the Pentagon suspended the program. The news outlets have been remarkably silent. The Department of Defense Inspector General has begun an internal review of the program but given the possibility as well as decision makers in this Congress were misled about the war in Iraq, I believe it is absolutely critical that a public investigation happen that is transparent to this body as well as to the American people. Congress cannot allow an Administration to manipulate the public on false propaganda on matters of war and national security.

Awesome. Be even better if the media were to report on it. I couldn’t find a story about this vote in either NYT or WaPo, so who knows if they’ll bother to write about the investigation’s results either.

2 comments May 23rd, 2008 at 07:30am Posted by Eli

Hillarywankery

Yeah, I know she has to make her case, but this is just bogus:

Adding a new mathematical twist to her case for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Monday that she had not only won more popular votes than Senator Barack Obama, she had won states totaling far more electoral votes.

“The states that I’ve won total 300 electoral votes,” she told about 300 people in a high school gymnasium in Maysville, the birthplace of the actor George Clooney. “The question is who can win 270 electoral votes? My opponent has won states totaling 217 electoral votes.”

So, in other words, it is apparently impossible for a candidate to win a state in the general election if they did not carry it in the primaries.  Fascinating.

But wait, it gets better:

The Clinton campaign, in an email message from spokesman Phil Singer, offered as evidence for their electoral college argument a memo from Karl Rove obtained by ABC News, which provides an estimate of electoral votes based on public opinion polls.

Mrs. Clinton cited the memo in an appearance in Prestonsburg, Ky., saying, “I believe I am the stronger candidate and just today I found some curious support for that position when one of the TV networks released an analysis by, of all people, Karl Rove, saying I was the stronger candidate. And there it is.”

She’s using Karl Rove as backup now, because he’s such a fair and reliable source whose math is never wrong.  Awesome.

2 comments May 19th, 2008 at 09:43pm Posted by Eli

Is More But Not Better Worse?

Carl Hulse points out an intriguing (and frustrating) Dem dilemma:

While much of the Congressional political focus has been on the declining fortunes and numbers of House Republicans, House Democrats have their own problem: They are winning too many elections.

By prevailing in conservative districts where they ordinarily would not have a chance, Democrats are widening the ideological divide in their own ranks and complicating their ability to find internal consensus. It is a nice problem to have, but it is one that can bedevil party leaders. As their numbers expand, they have to juggle the competing interests of Travis Childers, the newly elected pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-tax representative from northern Mississippi and someone like, say, Nancy Pelosi, a pro-gun control, liberal abortion-rights advocate from San Francisco who sees government as a solution.

(…)

[T]he strain of balancing the political imperatives of a right-of-center to pretty far left-of-center caucus has already strained the Democratic majority in the House. In the most recent example, the party’s intricate scheme for passing a war spending bill collapsed Thursday when most Republicans sat out the war money vote and most Democrats, who oppose spending more money on combat in Iraq, voted against it.

That left the Democratic majority without the votes to pass a spending bill that, in the leadership’s calculation, is essential to protecting the party’s image on national security as well as members from conservative districts who cannot afford to be seen as failing to support troops in the field. Most of those lawmakers, including many freshmen, backed the war funds.

(…)

Democrats elected themselves into this situation. In picking up 30 seats in 2006, Democrats walked away with some in Republican territory, with the result that many of the newcomers are representing districts where the voters are not completely in sync with the Democratic agenda.

As Howie Klein points out, this is not an entirely accurate representation of the Congressional dynamic:

The Democratic freshmen– of all ideological stripes– voted in greater proportions against the war than the Democratic caucus as a whole did.

However, there are a whole bunch of reliably unreliable freshmen Democrats, including the two special election winners now in office, who voted in favor of the war funding, and who will probably vote with the Republicans most of the time.

In addition to being a tactical problem - how to hold the Democratic caucus together and pass legislation when a giant chunk of it votes with the Republicans - this is also an optical problem.  The more Democrats there are in Congress, the more results Americans will expect to see.  If progressive initiatives are consistently sabotaged by the Blue Dog caucus, and Republican business as usual continues, voter frustration with the Democrats will increase and support for the Democrats will collapse.

Indeed, I believe that Democratic gains in this November’s elections will be far more due to disgust with Republicans and failed Bush policies than any kind of esteem for the Democrats.  If the Bush Dogs are able to hold the party hostage, the Naderite meme that there’s no difference between the parties will take hold once again, and 2010 and 2012 will be disasters.

I think the bottom line is that however many seats Democrats pick up, they need to have a core voting majority of progressives, or at least of non-Bush Dogs.  I’m not sure that that’s going to happen this cycle, or next.  But if we can run strong progressive challengers to some of the worse Bush Dogs, and/or the ones in safely Democratic seats, then maybe we can funnel some of that voter discontent to our advantage.

(h/t Stoller)

2 comments May 19th, 2008 at 07:22am Posted by Eli

Welcome To The 2008 Campaign Metanarrative

I think the #1 story - and deciding factor - of the 2008 campaign is going to be the efforts of McCain and downticket Republican candidates to distance themselves from the unpopular awfulness of the Bush/Cheney administration and position themselves as Reasonable Pragmatic Moderates.

Dick Morris thinks it’s doable, at least for Straight-Talking Maverick McCain:

McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he’s not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive?

I wasn’t aware that one did.

…McCain can win by running to the center.

His base will be there for him; indeed, it will turn out in massive numbers. Wright has become the honorary chairman of McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts. It would be nice to think that race isn’t a factor in American politics anymore, but it is. The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.

So McCain doesn’t have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.

(…)

Earlier in the race, Iraq might have been a deal-breaker. But a kinder, gentler war has emerged. U.S. combat deaths are way down, and the de facto U.S. alliance with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province against al-Qaeda in Iraq seems to have dramatically improved the security situation. Still, most Americans don’t like the war, and McCain must deal with their opposition if he wants to win.

(…)

….Unlikely as it sounds, the soon-to-be former president needs to get out of the White House, reenter the political arena (much as it will pain him) and go around the country telling us two things: First, we are winning in Iraq; second, the economy is not as bad as most people think….

Right, because Dubya hasn’t been doing that at all for the past four years.

Bush can help McCain, but that doesn’t mean that McCain should support Bush. As Bush makes the case for himself, McCain must put distance between them. A lot of distance. Once, McCain ran against Bush. But since then, he has basked in the glow of Bush’s warm welcome back to the mainstream of the party. Now McCain needs to free himself of Bush’s spell, go out again into the cold and show the country the difference between his agenda and Bush’s.

Meanwhile, McCain should highlight his credentials as a reformer and a maverick to attract Democrats and independents who worry about Obama. Forget about the base. It will be there. Obama’s liberalism, his pro-tax agenda and his proposed weakening of the USA Patriot Act — as well as fears that he would appoint to office people such as Rev. Wright and William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground — will all assure the full mobilization of the right. Immigration reform and McCain’s other acts of apostasy will be forgiven for the sake of beating Obama. So McCain needs to go after the swing voters:

[Laundry list of things that McCain will mostly never do, but might conceivably pretend to have intentions of doing]

(…)

Meanwhile, the right wing will carry the attack against Obama. McCain is not a mudslinging politician by nature, but he doesn’t need to be. The collected quotes of Rev. Wright will be a bestseller this summer. Obama once had to prove to us that he was not a Muslim; now he must convince us that he never really went to church much….

Wow, Dick really has put all his eggs into the racism/Reverend Wright basket, hasn’t he?  And he obviously wants us to believe that McCain really is as honorable and independent as he pretends to be.

Frank Rich doesn’t think it’ll work:

The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.

Republicans finally recognized the gravity of their situation three days after Jenna Bush took her vows in Crawford. As Hillary Clinton romped in West Virginia, voters in Mississippi elected a Democrat [by eight points] in a Congressional district that went for Bush-Cheney by 25 percentage points just four years ago. It’s the third “safe” Republican House seat to fall in a special election since March.

(…)

The vice president’s visit was last Monday, the centerpiece of a get-out-the-vote rally in DeSoto County, a G.O.P. stronghold. “We’ll put our shoulders to the wheel for John McCain,” the vice president promised as he bestowed his benediction on Mr. Davis. Well, he got out the vote all right. In the election results the next day, the Childers total in DeSoto County increased 142 percent, while the Davis count went up only 47 percent.

(…)

The McCain campaign is hoping that… showy, if tardy, departures from Bush-Cheney doctrine will constitute a galaxy of Sister Souljah moments, each with headlines reading “McCain Breaks With Bush on…” and the usual knee-jerk press references to Mr. McCain as a “maverick.” Enough of these, you see, and those much-needed independent voters might be flimflammed into believing that the G.O.P. candidate bears no responsibility for the administration’s toxically unpopular policies.

(…)

But are independents suckers? They’d have to be to fall for the pitch that Mr. McCain is an apostate in his own party in 2008. He has been an outspoken Bush defender since helping him sell the Iraq war in 2002 and barnstorming for him in 2004. Despite Mr. McCain’s campaign claims to the contrary, he never publicly called for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. He is still one of the president’s most stalwart supporters in Congress, even signing on to the president’s wildly unpopular veto of an expansion of children’s health insurance.

(…)

Hard as it is for Mr. McCain to run from the Bush policies he supports, it will be far harder to escape from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. When Mr. McCain accepted Mr. Bush’s endorsement at the White House in March, he referred three times to the president’s “busy schedule,” as if wishing aloud that the lame-duck incumbent would have no time to appear at, say, get-out-the-vote rallies. Alas, Mr. Bush and company are not going gently into retirement.

Just look at Mr. Rove. Some Democrats are outraged that he is now employed as a pundit by Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal as well as Fox News. Instead of complaining, they should be thrilled that Mr. Rove keeps inviting Republican complacency by constantly locating silver linings in the party’s bad news. His ubiquitous TV presence as a thinly veiled McCain surrogate has the added virtue of wrapping the Republican ticket in a daily and suffocating Bush bearhug, since Mr. Rove is far more synonymous with his former boss than Mr. Obama is with his former pastor.

And what of the loyal base that Dick Morris doesn’t think the Republicans have to worry about?  Check out the comments on this NRCC blog post where Tom Cole hypes the rollout of a kinder, gentler Republican Party.  They uniformly bemoan the sellout big-government liberalism and vow to stop contributing and stay home on Election Day.

So this is the dilemma that McCain and the Republicans face: How do they thread the needle between pretending that they have absolutely nothing in common with Dubya, nope, never heard of him, and pissing off the die-hard conservative base that is completely unaccustomed to not being pandered to? Even with the corporate media’s unstinting assistance, I don’t think it can be done - not if American voters still have functioning memories.

I’m looking forward to watching the Republicans alienate both the independents and the base for a truly epic implosion.  And if Bob Barr really does end up running to siphon off the crazy base vote, McCain will have absolutely zero chance.

(h/t dakine, Mike Stark, & Julia)

2 comments May 18th, 2008 at 02:13pm Posted by Eli

Quotes Of The Day

Just some things that made me smile today.

Hans von Spakovsky:

Dear President Bush:

It is with great regret that I write to request that you withdraw my nomination to be a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.  My nomination has been pending for almost two and one half years in the Senate without any resolution.  This process has been extremely hard on my family, and quite frankly, we do not have the financial resources to continue to wait until this matter is resolved.  I also agree with my former colleague Robert Lenhard, who recently withdrew his nomination, that it was past time that the FEC was reconstituted - the agency that is tasked with policing our campaign finance system needs to be operational during a presidential election year.  Ths opposition to my nomination (however unfair) is preventing that from happening.

He actually makes a very commendable point at the end there (aside from the “however unfair” part), so it appears that he does feel some rudimentary sense of civic responsibility then again, his vision of what the FEC should be doing during a presidential election year is very different from ours.

In case you’ve forgotten why he’s a total bastard who should never have been allowed within 3000 miles of the FEC, check out the roundup at the end of this TPMMuck post.

John Conyers:

We’re closing in on Rove. Someone’s got to kick his ass.

Tom Davis, by way of Peggy Noonan:

The party, Mr. Davis told me, is “an airplane flying right into a mountain.” Analyses of its predicament reflect an “investment in the Bush presidency,” but ‘the public has just moved so far past that.” “Our leaders go up to the second floor of the White House and they get a case of White House-itis.” Mr. Bush has left the party at a disadvantage in terms of communications: “He can’t articulate. The only asset we have now is the big microphone, and he swallowed it.”

Jay Leno:

Huge political fireworks today after President Bush went to Israel and he talked about American politicians who might want to talk with Hamas or other leaders. Politicians who would sit down and appease terrorists. He said he would not do it. He would not put up with it. He would never talk to terrorists. And then he flew to Saudi Arabia to spend a couple of days with the Saudi royal family.

Jon Stewart (while showing footage of Dubya biking, fishing, and dancing):

You know what?  Pictures matter.  Image is everything.  And when you ask military families to sacrifice so much — through stop-loss, or multiple tours without proper stateside rest, or refusing to fund a proper GI Bill, the least you can do is not force them to see you dicking around like you don’t have a care in the world.

Awesome.

(h/t All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin)

Add comment May 16th, 2008 at 08:23pm Posted by Eli

W00t!!!

This is awesome:

Short, simple, to the point from the AP: “Democrat Travis Childers wins special election for Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District.”

(…)

1. I don’t want to go so far as to say that this is the end of the Republican Party, because it’s not. But this is as bad news as the GOP could possibly get at this point. They lost a district that leans 6 points more Republican than the nation as a whole in Illinois in March. They lost a district that leans 7 points more Republican than the nation as a whole earlier this month in Louisiana. Now they lost a district that leans 10 points more Republican than the nation as a whole in Mississippi. If they can’t win in Mississippi’s first congressional district, where can they win?
2. The Republicans tried to make this election about two people: Barack Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And despite running this type of campaign, they lost. While it is true that Childers distanced himself from his party (and implicitly from Obama), the fact is that the Obama/Wright smears simply DID NOT WORK. The Republicans are going to have to get a new game plan, and the establishment media are going to have to get a new meme. Sorry folks.

This is very, very bad for can only be good for Republicans.

50-State Strategy, bitches!!!

Add comment May 13th, 2008 at 11:11pm Posted by Eli

Rahm Wants Hill To Chill

Sounds like the Democratic establishment is starting to get a wee bit antsy about Hillary continuing to bash Obama, especially now that it’s obvious to everyone but her that she’s lost the primary:

“What Hillary does in the next month is important,” Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a one-time senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton, warned last week in Manhattan.

(…)

[T]he man known affectionately by his colleagues as “Rahmbo” for his electoral prowess is clearly worried about an unbound Clinton, who so far has shown little desire to turn down the volume on Obama.

“If she spends her time contrasting with Sen. McCain, drawing distinctions that help the Democratic Party, that’s productive,” he said. “If it’s done in another way, that’s not productive.”

Translation: Clinton can help bring the party together, or she can drive deeper the wedge that is dividing the Clinton and Obama camps.

It’s not just about votes. It’s about money.

The Democrats have run laps around Republicans in the money race. At the end of March, Obama had $51 million in cash on hand, compared with $11.6 million for McCain.

But while McCain has been saving his pennies, Obama has continued to pour money into costly primary contests.

At the same time, the Republican National Committee has raked in the dough - it reported $31 million in cash on hand at the end of March. And last week, the committee raised $7million in its best night ever, thanks to a joint account established with McCain.

By contrast, the Democratic National Committee reported only $5 million in cash on hand in March, and it has no joint fund-raising account because Obama and Clinton are still focused on beating each other.

The situation is serious enough that Clinton has summoned her top fund-raisers to a meeting at her Washington home on Wednesday to talk about the road ahead.

At least one invitee says he hopes to serve up a heaping portion of reality.

Richard Schiffrin, a national finance co-chairman for Clinton, told the Los Angeles Times last week that he plans to tell her, “Let’s look at the situation as it exists and think about whether there’s a credible path to the nomination, and if there isn’t, what’s Plan B?”

What is Plan B, indeed.  Plan B should be to very publicly and sincerely endorse Obama as the nominee, and to campaign for him and against McCain without reservation.  Anything less will signal to her followers that Obama is as unworthy and unelectable as she’s been saying throughout the primaries, and to everyone else that she’s hoping for a disastrous one-term McCain presidency so she can run again in 2012.

I’m hoping Hillary will do the right thing, and stand by what she said at the ABC debate:

…[O]nce [the nomination] is resolved, I think it is absolutely imperative that our entire party close ranks. That we become unified. I will do everything to make sure that the people who supported me support our nominee. I will go anywhere in the country to make the case.

And I know that Barack feels the same way because both of us have spent 15 months traveling our country. I have seen the damage of the Bush years. I’ve seen the extraordinary pain that people have suffered from because of the failed policies. You know, those who have held my hands who’ve lost sons or daughters in Iraq. And those who have lost sons or daughters because they didn’t have health insurance.

And so, regardless of the differences there may be between us, and there are differences, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and Senator McCain. So, we will certainly do whatever is necessary to make sure that a Democrat is in the White House next January.

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Add comment May 12th, 2008 at 11:25am Posted by Eli

This Is Not Your Father’s Presidential Election

Frank Rich has an interesting perspective on this year’s election, and why it looks promising for Obama:

This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence….

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.

And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.

Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.

For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.

Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.

(…)

[T]his isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.

This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.

…[E]ven if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.

Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.

Rich is more optimistic than I am about the diminished impact of smear campaigns - I think they will always be effective unless countered decisively and authoritatively (indeed, Kerry’s passive reaction to the Swift Boaters might have been more damaging than the smears themselves).

But overall, I think he’s onto something important: America hates Bush like they’ve never hated any president before.  Nixon might have come close, but he was already two years out of office by Election Day.  Dubya will still be there, and he’ll still be trying to throw his weight around to prove how relevant he is.  If Obama can effectively tie McCain to Dubya and his most unpopular policies, he should win in a landslide.

The good news is that McCain has given Obama plenty of ammunition; the bad news is that the corporate media will be doing all they can to debunk and “fact-check” him at every turn.  My hope is that the media overplay their hand and end up discrediting themselves instead of Obama - because without the media, the Republicans have nothing.

Add comment May 11th, 2008 at 11:58am Posted by Eli

The #1 Reason We Need A Democratic President

Judiciary, Judiciary, Judiciary.

Al Kamen provides some perspective on just how imbalanced the courts are right now, and how much worse SCOTUS could be four years from now if McCain becomes president:

The next president will find the federal bench solidly controlled by the GOP, with about 100 Republicans in appeals court seats, compared with approximately 66 Democrats. Republicans have a 56 percent majority at the trial court level.

At least for the first couple of years, [the next president] would probably find the number of Republican retirees far outnumbering Democrats. Forty-six of the 53 longest-serving appeals judges are GOP appointees. [A Democratic president] would have a golden opportunity to replace them with liberal court-abusers. McCain, at least for a chunk of his first term, would only be treading water.

(…)

But there would be a huge silver lining for President McCain. He might have the chance to solidify GOP control of the big prize, the Supreme Court, for many years to come. The senior liberal, Justice John Paul Stevens, just turned 88, although he’s still golfing and, we hear, maybe playing a little tennis.

A second liberal opening might come from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is 75. McCain also might be able to replace conservative justices Antonin Scalia, 72, and Anthony Kennedy, 71, with younger Republicans. If everything worked out, McCain could create a court with a seven-member conservative majority whose oldest member would be Clarence Thomas, who turns 60 next month.

Every Democrat and progressive should be scared to death by this possibility.  Even if McCain were held to a single term, followed by the Democrats hammerlocking the White House and the Congress for the next 30 years, they could still be overruled at every turn by an unabashedly right-wing Supreme Court, with absolutely no recourse. Roe v. Wade: gone.  Affirmative action: gone.  Employee protections against discrimination, abuse, injury and death: gone.

Any questions on campaign finance, voting rights, or electronic voting machines would be decided in favor of the GOP.  But torture would be okay, just so long as the victims haven’t been convicted of anything.

And that’s just what IWANAL (I Who Am Not A Lawyer) can think of off the top of my head.  I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface of what kind of havoc an all-wingnut Supreme Court could wreak.

But if, God forbid, John McCain does become president, I have two specific requests to make of Senate Democrats that might hopefully reduce the damage a little bit:

1) Please remember that judgeships are lifetime appointments, so don’t worry about comity or deference to presidential prerogative.  If you screw up, we all have to live with it for the next 30 or 40 years.  (I feel obliged to point out that life expectancy is quite a bit longer now than it was when the Constitution was written…)

2) Place more weight on the nominee’s judicial history and less weight on their evasive-at-best-dishonest-at-worst responses to your questions.  If they’ve been a right-wing judge all their life, that’s not going to change when they get a promotion.

Yeah, we’d still have a conservative judiciary, but at least some of those judges would choose the law over ideology every once in a while.

(h/t Peterr & dakine)

1 comment May 9th, 2008 at 08:28pm Posted by Eli

Blue Dogs Share Republican Vision Of “Fiscal Responsibility”

God, I hate these people:

A small group of fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats is threatening to block the emergency war spending bill over a program for veterans’ benefits not offset with tax hikes or spending cuts.

Because of that problem, and the efforts by House Republicans to stall floor action with procedural motions, the vote on the carefully crafted supplemental measure could be delayed until Friday or next week.

“Some of us oppose creating a new entitlement program in an emergency spending bill, whether it’s butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers,” said Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition who serves on the House leadership team as a deputy whip.

The so-called GI Bill of Rights, authored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), would give veterans money for college and cost $720 million in its first two years. But critics say that could grow to billions in future years.

House Democratic leaders attached it to the supplemental spending bill figuring Bush wouldn’t dare veto veterans’ benefits. If he did, Republicans would pay a steep political cost.

But that calculation is now causing heartburn for Blue Dogs, the same members who have generally supported war funding. The fiscally conservative coalition is split. Some members are willing to block the bill because “pay-as-you-go” budgetary rules — offsetting new spending with spending cuts or increased taxes — have been ignored one too many times….

Got that?  They’re perfectly fine with spending $200 billion to continue the disastrous Iraqupation, but a few billion more to do right by the troops would be fiscally irresponsible.  What a bunch of loathsome tools.

(h/t Stoller)

Add comment May 9th, 2008 at 07:20am Posted by Eli

As We Gear Up For The General Election…

Just some more things to keep in mind.

Bill Scher:

After all the histrionic punditfying throughout the campaign, after all the trivial media distractions over surrogates who blurt out mean things, after all the phony guilt-by-association attacks, the public unity around a progressive vision remains: an economy that works for everyone, health care for all, a clean energy future, affordable education and the end of the Iraq occupation.

(…)

The Democratic primary race produced no division within the party over the big issues, and no rift with self-described moderate independent voters who want the same things. The unity over substance extends beyond party lines. That means the Democratic nominee, widely presumed to be Sen. Barack Obama at this point, does not need to overhaul his message and platform to appeal to swing voters in the general election.

The Republican primary race, on the other hand, was wracked with internal division, still not fully resolved, as the party grapples with how to deal with seven years of complete conservative failure in Washington. On the issues, the conservative base of the party is completely out of sync with swing voters….

(…)

The public is united on issues. The mandate for progressive change is being built. Conservative dead-enders are increasingly marginalized.  Pity the poor candidate that can’t deal with that reality.

Arizona Republic:

A Washington Post analysis notes McCain voted with the GOP this term 88.3 percent of the time, the same as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., whose conservative credentials are seldom questioned. McCain ranked ahead of 29 other Republicans, including Arizona’s Jon Kyl, who holds the No. 2 spot in party leadership.

Congressional Quarterly gave McCain a 90 percent score for “party unity” voting last year and said he supported the president’s position on legislation 95 percent of the time. During the Bush years, McCain’s poorest totals from CQ were 67 percent party-unity voting in 2001 and 77 percent support for the Bush agenda in 2005.

(…)

Over the past decade, McCain effectively sealed a Republican win on a variety of close votes 14 times.

In 1999, for example, McCain supported an amendment to a bill addressing crime by juveniles and gang members. The amendment, offered by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, toughened gun-crime penalties and provided for background checks at gun shows. Seven Republicans opposed the amendment and another skipped the vote, but McCain sided with 46 others in his party to pass it by a single vote.

On five issues, McCain ensured a tie, allowing Cheney to settle matters with his vote.

Troutfishing:

A new Financial Times op-ed, by Anatol Lieven and entitled Why we should fear a McCain presidency dovetails with what commentators across the politically spectrum, from the libertarian Matt Welch, who has a new book out on McCain, to the moderate right Ivo Daalder of Brookings, and over to Pat Buchanan, have been saying: McCain, as President would start new wars, bigger ones even.

This is uncomfortable to McCain supporters; the Senator’s ideas on foreign policy, which I’d characterize as a “maximally aggressive US interventionist approach”, will at best will lead to more war. As for the worst, well…

(…)

On April 2, 2006 Senator John McCain told Tim Russert, on “Meet The Press”, that a US war with Iran “could be Armageddon” and yet less a year later John McCain was aggressively courting Armageddon-booster Pastor John Hagee and also engaging in increasingly menacing behavior to the point of McCain’s “Boomb, bomb Iran” parody sung at a VFW hall. It is a jarring disconnect ; In April 2006 it seemed John McCain thought Armageddon a bad thing. In February 2007 McCain was courting a Christian pastor, leader of a large new pro-Armageddon political bloc. McCain’s 180 about face on Armageddon could be called schizoid and it’s not the only indication McCain’s psychologically unstable.

Beyond psychological instability, John McCain’s positions towards Russia, especially McCain’s support for placing anti-missile batteries in Eastern Europe, would dramatically increase risk of global thermonuclear war; such anti-missile batteries would dramatically reduce the time window, already shaved down to mere minutes, Russian commanders would have in which to decode whether to fire ICBM’s under their command in response to a perceived US attack.

So there you have it.  Democrats are unified on the issues and in touch with mainstream America, and John McCain is a reliable conservative with bloodthirsty dreams of war.  Take your pick.

1 comment May 7th, 2008 at 08:37pm Posted by Eli

For Those Of You Who Refuse To Vote For Obama (Or Hillary) In November

Just a little helpful reminder:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Tuesday he would appoint judges in the mold of conservatives John Roberts, Samuel Alito and former Chief Justice William Rehnquist if he were elected in November.

In an excerpt from a speech McCain was to give in Winston-Salem on Tuesday, the Arizona senator said he would “look for accomplished men and women with a proven record of excellence in the law, and a proven commitment to judicial restraint.”

“I will look for people in the cast of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and my friend the late William Rehnquist — jurists of the highest caliber who know their own minds, and know the law, and know the difference,” McCain said.

John Paul Stevens would be 92 at the end of President McCain’s first term, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg would be 79.  So if you like the idea of having wingnuts solidly in control of the Supreme Court for the next 20-30 years, then by all means, stay home or vote for McCain on Election Day.

Add comment May 6th, 2008 at 11:35am Posted by Eli

Democrats Not Just Like Republicans

Yeah, this sucks, but at least Ohio’s Democratic state government is doing the right thing and not the Right thing.

Risking impeachment, Ohio’s attorney general on Monday refused demands from the governor and other fellow Democrats that he resign over a sexual harassment scandal in his office and an affair with a subordinate.

Gov. Ted Strickland told reporters that Democrats will begin drafting an impeachment resolution against Attorney General Marc Dann right away. Republican House Speaker Jon Husted said Monday that his chamber — which takes the first step in any impeachment — was already reviewing the process.

Virtually every state-level Democratic officeholder urged Dann to resign in a letter late Sunday after Strickland tried twice during the day to persuade him to leave office.

A sexual harassment investigation uncovered an atmosphere in Dann’s office rife with inappropriate staff-subordinate relationships, heavy drinking and harassing and threatening behavior by a supervisor. On Friday, Dann admitted to an extramarital affair with a subordinate after the investigation threatened to reveal the relationship.

“I would hope the Attorney General will understand that his effectiveness as an attorney general has been so diminished that in my judgment he can no longer effectively serve in that office,” Strickland said Monday. The