Multi Medium

…And Don’t You Forget It.

I’m sensitive like Iggy.

Why doesn’t anyone believe me?

Men are stereotyped as immature, insensitive and noncommittal, but deep down inside most guys are blubbering romantics dreaming of finding a soul mate, an online survey reveals.

The AskMen.com “Great Male Survey” shatters the myth some women have of the knuckle-dragging opposite sex, said James Bassil, the Web site’s editor-in-chief.

“These survey results will be pleasantly surprising to many women, most of whom have a completely different perspective of what the average man thinks and feels,” Bassil said.

More than 70,000 men took the 150-question survey probing the psyche of the modern male. Among the he-man debunking results are:

- More than 75% believe they have a soul mate.

- At least 64% make an effort to be romantic regularly.

- Up to 77% look for girlfriends with “wife potential.”

- A whopping 94% say “real men” cry, and 75% admit to shedding tears over a woman.

- And 92% say they wouldn’t mind being in a relationship with a woman who earned more money.

So there!  Now can we get a little more respect, please?  That insensitive caveman stuff really hurts my feelings.

Add comment July 24th, 2008 at 07:09am Posted by Eli

My Pipple!

They make me so proud:

Among the most high-profile Jews in Congress, Lieberman is viewed far more unfavorably than the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a new poll. Only 37 percent of Jews view the Connecticut Independent in a favorable light compared to 48 percent who have a negative perception. As for Obama, 60 percent of Jews view him favorably while 34 percent view him unfavorably.

The findings were released as part of a recent survey of American Jews by the new progressive pro-Israel group J Street. They seem to upturn some of this year’s conventional political wisdom.

Obama, who is set to travel to Israel this week, is often described in the press as facing significant obstacles to winning Jewish support, in part because of false claims that he is a Muslim. Lieberman, meanwhile, is regularly quoted disparaging Obama’s credentials on topics considered dear to the Jewish voter’s heart: toughness on Iran and support for the Jewish state. Asked recently whether he should be questioning Obama’s commitment to Israel, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee responded, “why wouldn’t I do that?”

Lieberman does score better among the 900 Jewish voters polled than other major political and religious figures. President Bush is viewed unfavorably by 74 percent of Jews, compared to 22 percent who see him in a positive light. McCain, meanwhile, is viewed favorably by just 34 percent of Jews, while 57 said they had a negative perception….

(…)

…As Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent noted in a review of the J Street poll, Jews are “liberal as hell.”

“Seventy-four percent of us view Bush unfavorably and 83 percent of us disapprove of his job performance,” Ackerman wrote. “While 76 percent of the country as a whole says the U.S. is on the wrong track, an astonishing 90 percent of American Jews say the same. Only 21 percent of us approve of the Iraq war and only 29 percent think Bush is good for Israel, and those are clearly the shmucks that kissed ass in Hebrew school and snitched when the rest of us used the synagogue phone booth and cloakroom to make out.”

Now I’m all verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. Here’s a topic: Joe Lieberman is neither moderate nor a Democrat. Discuss.

Joe Lieberman does not speak for me.

Add comment July 22nd, 2008 at 11:33am Posted by Eli

Obama Cleaning Up In The All-Important Novelty Cola Demographic

Fortunately for Obama, it appears that novelty cola drinkers don’t care about FISA either.

They really turn out in droves, too.

Add comment June 20th, 2008 at 07:01am Posted by Eli

Raise Your Hand If You’re Surprised…

…That Americans find it easier to relate to Michelle Obama than to a beauty queen beer heiress known for stealing drugs and recipes.

Yeah, I know - shocking, isn’t it?  I think all the bad blood the Republicans stirred up against Theresa Heinz Kerry is boomeranging back on them.

1 comment June 19th, 2008 at 11:21am Posted by Eli

This Just In: Women Not Stupid

Well, it doesn’t sound like McCain’s attempts to woo disgruntled Hillary supporters are really going all that well.  I can’t imagine why not.

TEN years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.

In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.

How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.

How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.

Oops.  I guess most women can tell when they’re being played.

The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer her to Mr. Obama in the primaries.

This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats.

(…)

That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.

The conservative hostility toward McCain heralded by the early attacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and James Dobson is proliferating. Bay Buchanan, the party activist who endorsed Mitt Romney, wrote this month that Mr. McCain is “incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls” and “has a personality that is best kept under wraps.” When Mr. McCain ditched the preachers John Hagee and Rod Parsley after learning that their endorsements antagonized Catholics, Muslims and Jews, he ended up getting a whole new flock of evangelical Christians furious at him too.

The revolt is not limited to the usual cranky right-wing suspects. The antiwar acolytes of Ron Paul are planning a large rally for convention week in Minneapolis. The conservative legal scholar Douglas Kmiec has endorsed Mr. Obama, as have both the economic adviser to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Lawrence Hunter, and the neocon historian Francis Fukuyama. Rupert Murdoch is publicly flirting with the Democrat as well. Even Dick Cheney emerged from his bunker this month to gratuitously dismiss Mr. McCain’s gas-tax holiday proposal as “a false notion” before the National Press Club.

These are not anomalies. Last week The Hill reported that at least 14 Republican members of Congress have refused to endorse or publicly support Mr. McCain. Congressional Quarterly found that of the 62,800 donors who maxed out to Mr. Bush’s campaign in 2004, only about 5,000 (some 8 percent) have contributed to his putative successor.

(…)

The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and that young people don’t turn up to vote.

The October Surprise is going to have to be pretty damn spectacular…

Add comment June 16th, 2008 at 07:04am Posted by Eli

Good News, Could Be Better

So much for Maverick:

According to the Pew Research Center, when asked to describe their views of McCain in a word, the term “maverick” didn’t even come up. Nor did “reformer” or “independent.” Ruh-roh. It looks like the embrace of Bush, 100 years in Iraq and his newfound affection for Bushenomics have all done serious damage to McCain’s perceived maverickness:

John McCain once had the most powerful brand in American politics.

He was often called the country’s most popular politician and widely admired for his independent streak. It wasn’t too many years ago that “maverick” was the cliche of choice in describing him.

But that term didn’t even make the list this year when voters were asked by the Pew Research Center to sum up McCain in a single word. “Old” got the most mentions, followed by “honest,” “experienced,” “patriot,” “conservative” and a dozen more. The words “independent,” “change” or “reformer” weren’t among them.

Voters have notoriously short memories, but it could be argued that McCain cheapened his own brand.

He embraced President Bush and attempted to become, like Bush, the choice of the Republican establishment. In the process, he helped obliterate recollections of his first run for president, when he became the first Republican in a long time with strong crossover appeal to independents and Democrats.

Losing his reputation for independence could prove particularly costly this year.

It turns out that there may be a cost for flip-flopping on tax cuts for the top 1% and wanting to “bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Who would have thunk it?

(…)

John McCain may just have lost his greatest asset.

This is great news.  McCain’s image as an independent agent of change is completely gone.  No-one sees him as a maverick any more.  Unfortunately, it sounds like lots of Americans still view him as honest, experienced, and patriotic.

Okay, I’ll give him a pass on patriotic, even if he does vote for torture and against habeas corpus, but honest and experienced?  No way.  I suppose he could be considered experienced in the purely literal sense, but if his experience doesn’t translate into wisdom, knowledge, or competence, what good is it?  And honest?  Pfft.  He lies every time he claims that he’s not an extension of Dubya, which is a lot.

2 comments June 15th, 2008 at 09:09pm 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

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

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

All The Iraqis Tell Me So, But What Do All The Iraqis Know?

It’s the Battle Of The Unscientific Polls!

On CNN’s American Morning earlier today, Kyra Phillips reported that during a recent trip to Baghdad “dozens of Iraqi soldiers and dozens of students at Baghdad university” told her that they “don’t want to see a Republican president.” “Out of every single one that I talked to, one person said they supported John McCain,” said Phillips.

Asked to respond, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who is an ardent supporter of McCain, dismissed what the Iraqis told Phillips as an “unscientific poll.” He claimed that on all the visits he’s made to Iraq, “the Iraqi people on the street, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi government that I’ve talked to, don’t want us to just pick up and leave.”

Lieberman then noted that the Iraqis don’t want the U.S. “to stay there forever,” which he claimed was consistent with McCain’s position on Iraq.

The Iraqi people on the street, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi government that I’ve talked to, don’t want us to just pick up and leave, which is what Sen. Obama, Sen. Clinton have been advocating. They want us, obviously, not to stay there forever. Sen. McCain wants the war to stop and to have us pull back into bases and be on a path, a reasonable path of withdrawal.

As Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) told ThinkProgress last year, congressional trips like Lieberman’s are shrouded in a “Green Zone fog” that makes it hard to get a real sense of the reality on the ground. But, as Phillips noted during her March report from Baghdad, she didn’t have a public affairs official present when she interviewed the soldiers and students, which she says allowed for an “uncensored” and “candid” two-hour discussion.

Additionally, in making the claim that like the Iraqis, McCain doesn’t want us “to stay there forever,” Lieberman completely ignores the fact that McCain has said it is “fine” with him for the U.S. to stay in Iraq for 100 years, which would essentially be forever. Also, while the Iraqi people have rejected permanent U.S. bases in the country, McCain has said they may be “necessary.”

Lieberman isn’t even on the same planet as reality.  Hell, even Ellen Tauscher says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Add comment May 12th, 2008 at 10:16pm 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 Bush Surge

What momentum! He’s unstoppable!!!

(h/t Peterr)

Add comment April 29th, 2008 at 06:52pm Posted by Eli

Bush Continues To Break New Ground In Worst-Ever Presidenting

Dubya reaches another milestone!

At 39 months in the doghouse, George W. Bush has surpassed Harry Truman’s record as the postwar president to linger longest without majority public approval.

Bush hasn’t received majority approval for his work in office in ABC News/Washington Post polls since Jan. 16, 2005 — three years and three months ago. The previous record was Truman’s during his last 38 months in office.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Dubya does not turn it around in office.  So by my calculations, his losing streak will end up at roughly, oh, HIS ENTIRE SECOND TERM.

Buyer’s remorse: We’re soaking in it.

(h/t Blue Texan and The All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin)

2 comments April 15th, 2008 at 09:23pm Posted by Eli

Another Republican Who Speaks For Me

First Lincoln Chafee, now Mickey Edwards:

I do not blame Dick Cheney for George W. Bush’s transgressions; the president needs no prompting to wrap himself in the cloak of a modern-day king. Nor do I believe that the vice president so enthusiastically supports the Iraq war out of a loyalty to the oil industry that his former employer serves. By all accounts, Cheney’s belief in “the military option” and the principle of president-as-decider predates his affiliation with Halliburton.

What, then, is the straw that causes me to finally consign a man I served with in the House Republican leadership to the category of “those about whom we should be greatly concerned”?

It is Cheney’s all-too-revealing conversation this week with ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz. On Wednesday, reminded of the public’s disapproval of the war in Iraq, now five years old, the vice president shrugged off that fact (and thus, the people themselves) with a one-word answer: “So?”

“So,” Mr. Vice President?

Policy, Cheney went on to say, should not be tailored to fit fluctuations in the public attitudes. If there is one thing public attitudes have not been doing, however, it is fluctuating: Resistance to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy has been widespread, entrenched and consistent. Whether public opinion is right or wrong, it is not to be cavalierly dismissed.

(…) The decision to go to war… — to send young Americans off to battle, knowing that some will die — is the single most difficult choice any public official can be called upon to make. That is precisely why the nation’s Founders, aware of the deadly wars of Europe, deliberately withheld from the executive branch the power to engage in war unless such action was expressly approved by the people themselves, through their representatives in Congress.

Cheney told Raddatz that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America’s constitutional system.

In Europe, before America’s founding, there were rulers and their subjects. The Founders decided that in the United States there would be not subjects but citizens. Rulers tell their subjects what to do, but citizens tell their government what to do.

If Dick Cheney believes, as he obviously does, that the war in Iraq is vital to American interests, it is his job, and that of President Bush, to make the case with sufficient proof to win the necessary public support.

That is the difference between a strong president (one who leads) and a strong presidency (one in which ultimate power resides in the hands of a single person). Bush is officially America’s “head of state,” but he is not the head of government; he is the head of one branch of our government, and it’s not the branch that decides on war and peace.

When the vice president dismisses public opposition to war with a simple “So?” he violates the single most important element in the American system of government: Here, the people rule.

Amen to that. Bush and Cheney have completely forgotten - or completely dismissed - the Constitution’s fundamental premise, which is that the president is not the king or the boss of all Americans, but rather the other way ’round. And look at how well that’s worked out for us.

(h/t dakine)

3 comments March 22nd, 2008 at 04:05pm Posted by Eli

Americans Tell Cheney To Go Cheney Himself

Well, this is not exactly a surprise:

In contrast to Vice President Dick Cheney’s dismissive attitude toward Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, a recent World Public Opinion poll found that 81 percent of Americans believe that “when making ‘an important decision,’ government leaders ’should pay attention to public opinion polls because this will help them get a sense of the public’s views.’” Moreover, in a sharp rebuke to White House press secretary Dana Perino’s recent claim that Americans only “have input every four years” regarding policy matters, the poll also found that “94 percent say that government leaders should pay attention to the views of the public between elections.”

Dick Cheney’s response: “So?”

Add comment March 22nd, 2008 at 03:12pm Posted by Eli

Poll Of The Week

Rick Astley would never…

Brilliant.

(From c’est chic)

Add comment March 8th, 2008 at 10:21pm Posted by Eli

If You Could Bring Back One President…

Gallup asked an interesting question for President’s Day:

Suppose you could bring back any of the U.S. presidents, living or dead, to be the next president of the United States. Who would you most want to be the next president?

Me personally, I think FDR would be perfect for the situation in which we find ourselves - he inherited a United States in the direst possible straits, and he fixed it. He actually won his (just and necessary) war, and used it to grow the economy instead of destroying it. He also created much of the social safety net that the Republicans have done so much to erode. And perhaps most importantly of all, he was fearless and tough, and refused to be intimidated by his enemies.

Yes, I think FDR is exactly what we need now. Does America agree? Er, not so much…

JFK? Really? I guess I can see the reasoning behind that, and of course the Republicans luuurrrve their Reagans, but I’m really surprised FDR didn’t get more respect here. I suppose I should just be heartened that outright evil people only got 25% of the total…

(h/t to The All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin)

Add comment February 19th, 2008 at 09:36pm Posted by Eli

Guess I Blew That One…

From my Iowa wrap-up yesterday:

I’ll be curious to see whether the media ever suggests that Huckabee’s economic populism played into his victory at all, or if it’s all faith ‘n’ folksiness. My guess is that the establishment narrative will be reluctant to acknowledge that there’s a deep hunger for economic fairness. I was hoping that Edwards would win to really drive this point home (not that anyone would notice), but he did place a solid second despite being massively outspent.

Well, it looks like some conservatives have taken note, if only because admitting the alternative is even worse. Bobo Brooks yesterday:

On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.

(…)

Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived….

(…)

A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

Of course, being the out-of-touch wanker that he is, Brooks frames Huckabee’s message as a concern for family cohesion rather than a desire for economic justice. But if he acknowledged that, then he probably wouldn’t be able to say this:

[Obama has] made John Edwards, with his angry cries that “corporate greed is killing your children’s future,” seem old-fashioned. Edwards’s political career is probably over.

So, yeah, economic populism is sooo over. Unless it’s coming from Republicans, in which case it’s The Next Big Thing. But I digress.

Fox News may have gotten the message too, and they’re not happy about it:

During a discussion today on the results of last night’s Iowa caucuses, Fox News’s Neil Cavuto ran a chyron asking: “Did populism win and America lose in Iowa?”

Niiice. Still, it’s better than admitting that the religious right has finally found a candidate of their very own instead of letting the GOP establishment dupe them into supporting some corporate neocon shill who knows how to speak Evangelese.

Yes, I know I suggested that Huck’s economic populism was a factor in his success, but based on the Iowa exit polls, I think I got it dead wrong. 60% of IA Republican caucus-goers described themselves as born-agains or evangelicals, and 46% of them voted for Huckabee (which works out to 27% of the Republican vote, out of his 34% overall total). 19% voted for Mitt, 11% for Fred, 10% each for Paul and McCain, and 2%(!) for Rudy.

That looks like pretty strong evangelical support to me. I’m surprised at just how much support Mitt got, but maybe his landmark “I’m just like you: I want to ban all the same stuff, and I agree that atheists have no place in the public discourse” speech worked, or maybe he just picked up the pro-corporate evangelical vote.

Add comment January 5th, 2008 at 02:51pm Posted by Eli

A Modest Proposal On How To Achieve Immigration Reform

It’s very simple, really. Latinos need to start telling pollsters that they love Republicans and intend to vote Republican, and in fact actually do so in states and districts that are not up for grabs (maybe not quite so much in blue states - best not to take chances)… In other words, make it appear that Latinos are now a core of reliably Republican voters.

Once that idea has been established, I guarantee that the GOP will swallow its inherent hatred of brown people, and move heaven and earth to fast-track the citizenship process to bring in all those new Republican voters. At which point Latinos can go back to voting against them and openly hating their guts. Hot damn, that would be a beautiful thing.

(Note: This strategy could potentially be used to stop the disenfranchisement of black voters as well.)

Add comment December 20th, 2007 at 11:22am Posted by Eli

Food For Thought

Chris Bowers has an intriguing post up at OpenLeft, suggesting that opposition to the war is based more on the flawed and shifting rationales for invasion, than on the actual body count itself:

I think that too many of our anti-war arguments center on the third grouping of anti-war arguments, which state that the cost of the war in terms of lives, money, our standing in the world, and state of our armed forces has not been worth it. This leads to the counter-argument from Republicans and liberal hawks that because violence in Iraq is decreasing, that means the war is now becoming worth it. However, this argument over whether or not the costs of the war are worth it’s accomplishments is simply not were most Americans are at. The vast majority of the Americans either think that the war simply isn’t justified no matter the costs, or they think it is an integral part of fighting terrorism, no matter the costs. As such, for most people on both sides, it isn’t about the costs of the war, but rather about the rationale for the war. Americans believe in the fundamental decency of our country, and as such we don’t want our country to be in a war that can’t be justified, even if we are winning that war.

Personally, I think that after the weapons of mass destruction arguments collapsed, after people realized that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and after people realized we were fighting an insurgency against Iraqis themselves, the majority of the country simply no longer saw the war as justifiable on moral and / or legal grounds. In contrast to our three favorite wars as a nation, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War Two, it becomes increasingly difficult to portray Americans as the good guys in that situation, Think about how, as a nation, in contrast to those three conflicts, there is comparatively little positive cultural remembrance of, say, the war of 1812, the Mexican-American war, the war with Spain, World War One, and the Vietnam war. I think one of the key reasons for that is because, in those five conflicts, it is much more difficult to portray our participation in those conflicts as morally justifiable. The majority of our population is not hellbent on Empire for its own sake. If we use our military, Americans need to believe that what we are doing is just.

It isn’t just about the violence, or the other costs of the war. The reason Americans are done with Iraq if because they no longer believe the war is justified or justifiable. It is important for progressives and Democrats to remember that.

It’s all about self-image. We need to see ourselves as either just or tough, or both. Personally, I believe the invasion of Iraq shows us to be neither.

Also: Chris Bowers sure does write some bigass paragraphs.

Add comment December 11th, 2007 at 08:54pm Posted by Eli

I Wouldn’t Worry About It…

…It’s not like Gallup knows anything about polling.

Yesterday two polling firms — Zogby and Gallup — released surveys of the presidential race that offered strikingly different conclusions. The Zogby poll found that Hillary is trailing five leading GOP candidates in general election matchups. The Gallup Poll, by contrast, found that Hillary, and to a lesser degree Obama, has a slight to sizable lead over the top GOP contenders.

A couple of other things that distinguish these two polls: The Zogby one is an online poll, a notoriously unreliable method, while the Gallup one is a telephone poll. And, as Charles Franklin of Pollster.com observed yesterday, the Zogby poll is completely out of sync with multiple other national polls finding Hillary with a lead over the GOP candidates. The Zogby poll actually found that Mike Huckabee is leading Hillary in a national matchup. The Gallup findings were in line with most other surveys.

I don’t need to tell you which poll got all the media attention. Do I?

The Zogby survey was covered repeatedly on CNN, earned coverage from MSNBC, Fox News, and Reuters and was covered by multiple other smaller outlets.

By contrast, I can’t find a single example of any reporter or commentator on the major networks or news outlets referring to the Gallup poll at all, with the lone exception of UPI. While the Zogby poll was mentioned by multiple reporters and pundits, the only mentions the Gallup poll got on TV were from Hillary advisers who had to bring it up themselves on the air in order to inject it into the conversation.

(…)

Worse, the Zogby poll was covered with few mentions either of its dubious methodology or of the degree to which its findings don’t jibe with other surveys. Bottom line: The Zogby poll was considered big news because many in the political press are heavily invested in the Hillary-is-unelectable narrative for all kinds of reasons that have little to do with a desire to, you know, practice journalism.

As much as I dislike Hillary and don’t want her as the nominee, this is still inexcusably shoddy reportage. If the corporate media wants to take Hillary down, they can do it by reporting on her policies, like her refusal to withdraw all our troops from Iraq, or her vote in favor of Kyl-Lieberman, or her leadership position in the DLC.

Add comment November 27th, 2007 at 09:39pm Posted by Eli

Morons! I’ve Got Morons On My Team!

What Jane/Russ/Cujo said:

Russ Feingold proves he’s maybe the only one in the Senate who can read a fucking poll:

One question that I keep getting asked by reporters is why Democrats aren’t reaching out to moderate Republicans to come up with some sort of consensus legislation. I also see stories criticizing the Democratic leadership for failing to bring in Republican moderates to pass legislation. My response is simple - what good is getting 60 or 67 votes to pass a nonbinding Sense of the Senate resolution on Iraq that doesn’t bring the troops home? When I hold my town hall meetings in Wisconsin, nobody is asking me to push for an empty compromise. They ask me how we can finally end this war. This summer we heard a growing chorus of Republicans call for change in Iraq but their words have proven to be empty. If members are serious about changing course in Iraq, Feingold-Reid is the surest way to do it.

There are a handful of Senators who understand this, it would seem. Most of us can name them: Kerry, Dodd, Kennedy, etc. I don’t know what smelly orifice the remaining Democratic Senators have their heads inserted into, but they’d better pull them out and smell the coffee, or damn few people will be showing up next election day.

I’ve been saying since well before I had this blog that the only strategy that makes sense is for the Democrats to resist this war any way they can. Passing the sort of useless resolutions that “moderate” Republicans will agree to isn’t resisting. They need to make the Republicans say no to ending the war, and they need to make Americans aware that they’re doing it. The more they do that, the worse it will be for the Republicans. Eventually, even the Republicans will get the message. Unfortunately, right now most Democrats are as clueless as their colleagues across the aisle.

As I said in the comments to Cujo’s post, when 70% of the public hates the war and wants it over, the only sane thing to do is brand your side as the “adamantly opposed to the war and will do everything we can to stop it” party, and the other side as the “love the war and will do everything they can to perpetuate it” party.

When Democrats blur the lines by perpetuating the war, or by allowing “moderate” Republicans to make meaningless antiwar gestures, they dilute their biggest advantage, and sabotage their prospects for the 2008 elections.

But this weird unilateral disarmament isn’t limited to the Democrat-Republican dynamic:

“Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term, more than five years from now, there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq?” — Tim Russert

Barack Obama: “I don’t want to make promises not knowing what the situation is gonna be three or four years out.”

Hillary Clinton: “I agree with Barack.”

John Edwards: “I cannot make that commitment.”

Chris Dodd: “I will get that done.”

All three top-tier Democratic candidates refuse to commit to ending the war. Only the second and third-tier candidates like Dodd (my favorite candidate if Algore doesn’t jump in), Richardson, Gravel, and Kucinich are willing to make strong statements about ending the war or bringing all our troops home.

If Obama or Edwards started highlighting Hillary’s intention to keep troops in Iraq, and her apparent willingness to facilitate war with Iran, while promoting their own intentions to get us all the way out as completely as possible, I think her inevitability would be destroyed. Especially when you consider that Democratic primary voters are even more rabidly antiwar than the 70% of the public at large.

And yet they don’t. Why not? What could they possibly have to lose?

2 comments October 4th, 2007 at 07:43pm Posted by Eli

It’s A Trap!

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but I always have mixed feelings when I read stories like this:

New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party’s identity — what strategists call its “brand.” The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs, which could alter U.S. politics in the 2008 elections and beyond.

Some business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share. In manufacturing sectors such as the auto industry, some Republicans want direct government help with soaring health-care costs, which Republicans in Washington have been reluctant to provide. And some business people want more government action on global warming, arguing that a bolder plan is not only inevitable, but could spur new industries.

Already, economic conservatives who favor balanced federal budgets have become a much smaller part of the party’s base. That’s partly because other groups, especially social conservatives, have grown more dominant. But it’s also the result of defections by other fiscal conservatives angered by the growth of government spending during the six years that Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress.

(…)

[P]olling data confirm business support for Republicans is eroding. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in September, 37% of professionals and managers identify themselves as Republican or leaning Republican, down from 44% three years ago.

Richard Clinch, a 69-year-old New York native, illustrates the party’s plight. The retired Westinghouse manager and mechanical engineer says he has been “a lifelong Republican.” As a young fiscal conservative, he was attracted by the party’s reputation for frugal and competent governance, he says. The Democratic Party left him cold, he says, because of its social spending and ties to the unions that exasperated him at work. As a retiree in Annapolis, Md., he became a local Republican officer.

Yet next year, for the first time since he began voting in 1960, Mr. Clinch won’t support the Republican presidential nominee, he says. He only “very reluctantly” voted for Mr. Bush’s re-election in 2004. “Like many Republicans, I am frustrated,” he says. “We’ve lost control of spending,” and the administration’s execution of the Iraq war has been “incompetent.” Mr. Clinch says he is liberal about rights for women and gays, and vexed that “we [Republicans] get sidetracked on these issues like gay marriage.”

On the one hand, I always like to hear about Republicans seeing the light and realizing that the GOP has no plan for actual governance. On the other hand, I think stories like this prop up the DLC, allowing them to entice Democrats with visions of low-hanging fiscal conservative fruit just ripe for the plucking… for a sufficiently pro-corporate candidate. In truth, I’m not convinced that there are that many such votes up for grabs; I’m guessing a lot of them will return the GOP at election time (”It’s okay; it’s not Dubya!”) or simply not vote at all.

Any candidate weighing a pro-corporate (or pro-war, or pro-”moral values”) centrist approach should always ask themselves whether they’ll pick up enough moderate/independent/ex-Republican votes to offset the progressive base votes they’ll lose. They should also ask themselves which kinds of voter typically turn out more.

I’m not asking Democrats to be rabidly, implacably anti-business, but they need to at least strike a balance between business and labor, business and consumer, business and stockholders. Right now it’s all business.

(h/t Bonddad)

6 comments October 2nd, 2007 at 11:26pm Posted by Eli

Just Makes You Proud To Be An American…

This is really, really depressing:

In the largest and most comprehensive project of its kind to date, 13 young male applicants, presenting the same qualifications and experience, split into teams and went on nearly 3,500 entry-level job interviews with private companies in supposedly left-leaning, “progressive”, multicultural New York City, jobs ranging from restaurants to manufacturing to financial services. After recording which applicants were invited back for interviews or were offered jobs, two sociology professors looked at the hiring practices of 1,500 prospective private employers, focusing specifically on discrimination against young male minorities and ex-offenders.

(…)

Some of the study’s findings are depressingly familiar. For instance, young white high school graduates were twice as likely to receive positive responses from New York employers as equally qualified black job seekers. It also reaffirmed not only that former prisoners are at a distinct disadvantage in the job market, but also that, again, black ex-prisoners are in a much worse position: positive responses from employers towards white applicants with a criminal record dipped 35 percent, while for black applicants similarly situated it plummeted 57 percent.

However, the study revealed that our society’s racism extends even deeper: black applicants with no criminal record were no more likely to get a job than white applicants with criminal records just released from prison! In other words, while whites with criminal records received low rates of positive responses, such response rates were equally low for blacks without a criminal background. Further exposing the overt racism at play was the study’s finding that minority employers were more accepting of minority applicants and job applicants with prison records.

Well, that’s just great. A black person applying for a job with a white employer is on the same footing as a white ex-con. Wonderful.

My simplistic interpretation of this is that there is an implicit assumption that criminality is the default condition for black people, but an aberrant condition for white people. So the straight-arrow black applicant with no record simply hasn’t slipped up yet, while the white ex-con has obviously learned his lesson and paid his debt to society.

See also: “Looting” vs. “Finding” in the reporting of the Katrina aftermath.

1 comment September 25th, 2007 at 08:19pm Posted by Eli

Our Next President.

Well, it worked for them the last time.

Add comment September 24th, 2007 at 11:18am Posted by Eli

Voter’s Remorse

The Great Orange Satan decided to use some of the generous stipend he receives from Liberal Mastermind George Soros to commission a poll of CT voters to see if they would vote for Joe Lieberman again if they were granted a second chance. Let’s see how that turned out…

For whom did you vote for in the 2006 race for U.S. Senate, Ned Lamont, the Democrat, Alan Schlesinger, the Republican, or Joe Lieberman, an Independent?

        Lieberman  Lamont  Schlesinger
All         49       42        9
Dem         34       62        4
Rep         67       10       23
Ind         53       41        6

If you could vote again for U.S. Senate, would you vote for Ned Lamont, the Democrat, Alan Schlesinger, the Republican, or Joe Lieberman, an Independent?

        Lieberman  Lamont  Schlesinger
All         40       48       10
Dem         25       72        3
Rep         69        7       24
Ind         38       49        9

Gee, you’d think Joe’s Reasonable Centrist Moderateness would only attract Independent voters, not drive them away in droves. Why, for something like that to happen, it would almost have to mean that all those Bipartisan Rawks!/Give-The-Republicans-Everything-They-Want-Because-It’s-The-Civil-
Thing-To-Do concern trolls like Broder are Wrong About Everything, and that can’t be possible, can it?

I also like the fact that CT Republicans actually like Joe a little bit more now, and that his current Democratic numbers bear a striking resemblance to Dubya’s approval rating. I guess there are always some brain-dead Kool-Aid drinkers in every tribe.

Add comment September 13th, 2007 at 05:42pm Posted by Eli

Cause And Effect

This…

[Katrina is] the signal conservative failure, the sine qua non of all we warn about here at the blog. In fact, we could write about nothing else, and teach our lesson just as well: that conservatives can’t govern, because of their contempt for government.

It also allowed us to gauge our conservative fellow Americans’ moral level.

(…)

Conservatives, of course, claim to be patriotic. They claim to be the most patriotic souls of all. Sometimes - say it ain’t so! - they’ve been known to say other kinds of Americans are not patriotic, because they don’t believe the right things about preventive war, theology, and uncritical worship of the President (if the President is a Republican).

But patriotism has a simple definition: love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it.

This is, of course, something progressives have no problem doing. Because it means, simply, that all Americans are every other American’s concern. It means always acknowledging a national community, one to which we owe a constant obligation, parallel to our more local networks. It means that there is a certain level below which no American should be allowed to fall: in rights, in services, in solicitude from Washington. That no one who lives under that flag can ever be left behind. Even if they have the misfortune to live in a city that was hurt more by a hurricane than your city; and even if one city proves tragically less prepared to cope with a hurricane than another. That being an American means: step up. Our nation will sacrifice for you. That is what patriotism means.

Conservatives, on the other hand, were glad to let a certain group of Americans flounder and rot - to gloat that certain supposed local failings trumped national obligation, and use “clever” graphics and just-so stories to shirk that obligation.

It proves they aren’t patriots at all.

Leads to this…

The era of conservative values — a tight-fisted approach toward government aid to the poor, traditional positions on social issues and a belief in a muscular foreign policy — that emerged in the 1990s is coming to a close.

Disenchanted by the failures of the Bush administration, the public is moving away from its policies, values and ideology. This shift is an echo of the late 1960s, when weariness with the Vietnam War and discord at home resulted in a backlash against Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, and the late 1970s, when growing discontent over the stumbling performance of Jimmy Carter’s administration opened the door to the Reagan revolution.

(…)

[If] Rove hoped for a permanent majority, his hopes may have been dashed. Today, half the public — 50 percent — lines up with the Democratic Party, compared with 35 percent who align with the GOP. Even more striking is the public’s disenchantment with military muscle, a traditional GOP bailiwick. Today 49 percent think that military strength is the best way to ensure peace, the lowest level recorded for this question in the two decades that Pew has been conducting political values studies.

Here’s something Democrats can really take heart from: Public support for more government aid to the poor and needy is back. The percentage of those who say that “it is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves” has gone up 12 points since 1994, the pivotal year when Republicans took control of Congress with their promises of a “Contract With America.” Support for more government involvement in dealing with social problems is on the upswing overall.

More Americans now subscribe to the sentiment that “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.” Seventy-three percent concur with that statement today, up from 65 percent five years ago. A nationwide Pew survey last month found that 48 percent of the public sees American society as divided between “haves” and “have nots,” with as many as a third describing themselves as “have nots.” Both measures are substantially higher than in the late 1990s.

I think more than anything else, their callous, mean-spirited response to Katrina was what exposed the GOP as un-American, with no regard for anyone outside their own inner circle.

Add comment August 20th, 2007 at 08:13pm Posted by Eli

Compassionate Conservatives?

The ONE Campaign offers up some very intriguing survey results:

*Nearly all Democrats (97%) and 70% of Republicans agree that America’s standing has suffered in recent years. In addition to a strong military, Democrats (91%) and Republicans (78%) agree that the United States also needs to improve diplomatic relations by doing more to help improve health, education and opportunities in the poorest countries around the world. Both Democrats (81%) and Republicans alike (70%) agree that reducing poverty, treating preventable diseases and improving education in poor countries around the world will help make the world safer and the United States more secure.

*Democrats and Republicans agree that America has a moral obligation as a compassionate nation to help the world’s poorest people through foreign assistance. More than nine in ten Democrats (93%) and 84% of Republicans agree that when millions of children around the world are dying from preventable diseases and hunger, we have a moral obligation to do what we can to help. Similarly, Democrats (90%) and Republicans (85%) agree that it is in keeping with the country’s values and our history of compassion to lead an effort to solve some of the most serious problems facing the world’s poorest people.

*When it comes to addressing these issues, Democrats (86%) and Republicans (67%) agree that it is important for Presidential candidates to discuss their plans for addressing global hunger and poverty issues in this campaign. Additionally, eight in ten Democrats (81%) and Republicans (80%) agree that the next president should keep the commitments made by President Bush to prevent and fight the spread of AIDS in Africa.

And here I thought it was all Republicans who hated poor people and foreign people, but apparently it’s just their political leadership. Maybe conservative Christians really have read the New Testament (Dobson, Perkins, et al. excepted, of course).

On the other hand, roughly 70% of Americans want us out of Iraq, and yet that somehow never gets translated into enough political will to get it done. I guess 70% of the voters isn’t enough to get you elected anymore.

Add comment August 9th, 2007 at 10:25pm Posted by Eli

Lipstick, Meet Pig.

This can only be good for Republicans:

With 18 months left in office, [Bush] is in the running for most unpopular president in the history of modern polling.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News survey shows that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s job performance, matching his all-time low. In polls conducted by The Post or Gallup going back to 1938, only once has a president exceeded that level of public animosity — and that was Richard M. Nixon, who hit 66 percent four days before he resigned.

The historic depth of Bush’s public standing has whipsawed his White House, sapped his clout, drained his advisers, encouraged his enemies and jeopardized his legacy. Around the White House, aides make gallows-humor jokes about how they can alienate their remaining supporters — at least those aides not heading for the door. Outside the White House, many former aides privately express anger and bitterness at their erstwhile colleagues, Bush and the fate of his presidency.

Bush has been so down for so long that some advisers maintain it no longer bothers them much. It can even, they say, be liberating. Seeking the best interpretation for the president’s predicament, they argue that Bush can do what he thinks is right without regard to political cost, pointing to decisions to send more U.S. troops to Iraq and to commute the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff.

Right. Like Dubya ignoring the will of the people is some kind of new development. But now it’s a VIRTUE!

1 comment July 25th, 2007 at 11:46am Posted by Eli

The Toddler-In-Chief

Okay, so, I have never been a real impeachment enthusiast. My feeling has always been that if the Democrats are going to go that route, they need to use investigations and hearings to build popular demand for impeachment, so that they are finally “forced” to oh-so-reluctantly give in to the will of the people.

However, the longer Bush goes unchecked, the more he acts like a toddler who has discovered that his parents won’t actually discipline him for anything. As the reality gradually dawns on him that there are no rules, he becomes bolder and bolder. At this point, the only way to rein him in is to send him to bed without any supper. Or, y’know, just kick him out of the house altogether.

Anyway, the fact is, I don’t think impeachment is nearly as much of a reach as the Democrats seem to think it is. F’rinstance, last March an ARG poll indicated that 42% of the American people were in favor of impeachment, including 47% of Independents. And that’s before the US Attorney scandal, and the Libby verdict and commutation. And four months before that, an Ipsos poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org found that 50% of Americans, and 56% of Independents, favored impeachment if Bush lied us into Iraq.

So that suggests to me that the idea of impeachment is not some far-left fantasy, but actually pretty darn close to mainstream - and 16-20 months later, it’s probably even mainstreamier. I’ll be interested in seeing what results the Brave New Films impeachment poll comes up with. If you’re likewise curious, you might want to kick in a few bucks to help them raise the commission fee for it.

3 comments July 3rd, 2007 at 10:43pm Posted by Eli