Category Archives: Politics

Bucking the machine

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For those of you who haven’t been following the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District (a solid GOP district whose previous officeholder was appointed Secretary of the Army), it’s gotten quite interesting. The Democratic Party’s first choice begged off—the district, which covers eleven rural counties in the northernmost part of the state, has been in GOP hands since the Civil War, and he appears to have figured a ritual loss wouldn’t do much for him—but they managed to find a solid candidate, a local lawyer named Bill Owens. The New York Republican Party, though, might have been worried that the Democrats wouldn’t be able to find somebody, since they basically nominated a Democrat of their own for the seat: they hand-picked a candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who’s not just to the left of the House Republican caucus, she’s to the left of half the Democratic caucus. Michelle Malkin described her as “an ACORN-friendly, union-pandering, tax-and-spend radical Republican, ” and if anything, she actually understated the case.

Apparently, Scozzafava was handed the nomination by the party machine as an act of favoritism because of her connections with county GOP chairmen in the state—the machine picked one of its own, and hang principles. The amazing thing is that the national party machine fell into line behind them; though 90% of House Republicans refused to support Scozzafava, the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee sent donations in the six-figure range to keep her campaign afloat, and Newt Gingrich endorsed her. All this despite the fact that there is a true conservative in the race: Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, who according to reports has now passed Scozzafava in the polls and is setting his sights on Owens.

This evening, Sarah Palin joined the battle, endorsing Hoffman for Congress. She said this summer that she would work for the election of conservative candidates regardless of party, and now she’s backed up those words by standing against her own party to support a candidate she can believe in:

The people of the 23rd Congressional District of New York are ready to shake things up, and Doug Hoffman is coming on strong as Election Day approaches! He needs our help now.

The votes of every member of Congress affect every American, so it’s important for all of us to pay attention to this important Congressional campaign in upstate New York. I am very pleased to announce my support for Doug Hoffman in his fight to be the next Representative from New York’s 23rd Congressional district. It’s my honor to endorse Doug and to do what I can to help him win, including having my political action committee, SarahPAC, donate to his campaign the maximum contribution allowed by law.

Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a “time for choosing.”

The federal government borrows, spends, and prints too much money, while our national debt hits a record high. Government is growing while the private sector is shrinking, and unemployment is on the rise. Doug Hoffman is committed to ending the reckless spending in Washington, D.C. and the massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government. He is also fully committed to supporting our men and women in uniform as they seek to honorably complete their missions overseas.

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of “blurring the lines” between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party’s ticket.

Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.

You can help Doug by visiting his official website below and joining me in supporting his campaign:
http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/donate3.html.

Good on you, Governor.

Obama media strategy: control the message

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This is an absolutely fascinating presentation by Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director, on the media strategy of the Obama campaign—and by extension, the Obama administration. Her analysis is, I think, critically important for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between politics and the media in the current environment, and the approaches that politicians who want to be successful will need to adopt going forward.

From what I’ve seen, most of the blogospheric reaction has followed the tone of this WorldNet Daily piece:

President Obama’s presidential campaign focused on “making” the news media cover certain issues while rarely communicating anything to the press unless it was “controlled,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn disclosed to the Dominican government at a videotaped conference.”Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.

Though that presentation is not inaccurate, it’s designed to support the title of the piece:

White House boasts: We ‘control’ news media

and that title is inaccurate, in two ways. In the first place, Dunn nowhere claims to control the media; what she’s actually talking about is manipulating the media to control the message, to set things up in such a way that the story they have to report is the story you want them to report, so that your message gets out the way that you want it to get out. It’s not about controlling the media but using them for your purposes. (This was, of course, made a lot easier for them by the generally lap-doggish attitude of the major media toward Barack Obama.) And in the second place—and this is more important than it sounds—Dunn wasn’t boasting. She was simply reporting: “This is what we did, this is why we did it, and this is why it produced the result we wanted.”

What Dunn is essentially talking about here is the ways in which the development of the Internet has weakened and is eliminating the long-held power of the legacy media to filter reality, to decide what the culture in general will be broadly aware of—and the ways in which, in consequence, politicians can use that development to control their message. Indeed, she’s laying out a blueprint for doing so, and explaining why it was essential to her campaign’s success.

The fact that the Obama campaign understood this intuitively, and thus was able to use that intuitive understanding to do just that to an unprecedented degree, while the McCain campaign was completely clueless is one of the reasons Barack Obama is now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fact that Sarah Palin understands this, and in consequence has turned her Facebook page into a potent political weapon, is one of the reasons she is in my judgment the most important and effective political force in the Republican Party at this moment despite the best efforts of the legacy media to filter her right into impotence and irrelevance. Anyone who wants to compete with them in the future on anything approaching a level playing field is going to need to be smart enough and tuned-in enough to do likewise.

That is the real meaning and significance of Dunn’s presentation; rather than mistaking it for hubris on the part of the Obama administration and using it as one more cudgel with which to beat on the President, the Right needs to recognize her analysis of the political-media landscape as correct and her prescription as essential, and learn to go and do likewise. And the media had best do the same, and figure out how to adapt and respond, lest their current posture of lap-doggish servitude be institutionalized and rendered permanent.

HT: Janet McGregor Dunn

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Short-term stimulus

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There have been a lot of claims made about jobs “saved or created” by the so-called “stimulus” (and how you measure a job “saved” when you don’t know the might-have-beens, I have no idea); but has it occurred to you to wonder how long those jobs have lasted? Apparently, not very long in some cases:

How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program’s first three months.

But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state’s accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime. . . .

At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can’t be verified.

When even the AP is noticing that Democratic politicians are playing games with the numbers, you know it’s hard to ignore. (Though it’s worth noting that the AP appears to be trying to hide the story, judging by the fact that this link is down.) It should of course be pointed out that Oregon’s behavior here is uniquely egregious:

Oregon’s accounting practices would not be allowed as part of the $787 billion federal stimulus. While the White House has made the unverifiable promise that 3.5 million jobs will be saved or created by the end of next year, when accountants actually begin taking head counts this fall, there are rules intended to guard against exactly what Oregon is doing.

The White House requires states to report numbers in terms of full-time, yearlong jobs. That means a part-time mechanic counts as half a job. A full-time construction worker who has a three-month paving contract counts as one-fourth of a job.

That said, the response from the state to that criticism is telling:

Oregon’s House speaker, Dave Hunt, called that measurement unfair, though nearly every other state that has passed a stimulus package already uses or plans to use it.

“This stimulus plan was intentionally designed for short-term projects to pump needed jobs and income into families, businesses and communities struggling to get by,” Hunt said in a statement. “No one ever said these would be full-time jobs for months at a time.”

But wasn’t that the implication? After all, when the President talked about “3.5 million jobs saved or created,” he didn’t add the caveat “but only for a little while”; an extra week’s worth of work is not nothing, to be sure—I’ve been a temp, I know the drill—but if that’s the best the government can do, your job hasn’t been saved, your job loss has just been delayed a bit. And when most people talk about “job creation,” temp work is most certainly not what they have in mind.

The truth is, this story from Oregon highlights how fuzzy and dubious these job claims are even when the politicians aren’t playing games with them. As the Reason Foundation’s Anthony Randazzo points out,

The problem remains that there is still no good way of counting exactly the number of jobs that wouldn’t have been lost because of the savings, and there is no way the government is going to track the number of jobs that have been lost because of stimulus spending (such as lost jobs in traditional energy because of green spending).

Put another way, all such claims depend on a knowledge of the might-have-beens—if we hadn’t done this, what other things might we have done instead, and what results would they have produced? And what would have happened if we hadn’t done anything at all?—and that’s knowledge we don’t actually have in any reliable way in most cases, and particularly when you’re talking something as complex and interconnected as the national economy.

HT: David Riddle

On agenda-driven orthodoxy and the need for humility

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In addition to my snark in the previous post, I do have a serious comment on the BBC’s admission that the Earth has been cooler since 1998—or perhaps I should say, sparked by that article. The remarkable thing about that article is that it’s a deviation from the liberal political orthodoxy on global warming (and it is a political orthodoxy, for all that it claims scientific status), which is not the sort of thing one expects from the BBC. Of course, it was a deviation driven by the facts; the author of the article did his best to uphold the global-warming storyline anyway, but facts are hard things to get around.

Which brings up the problem I have with the global-warming orthodoxy: it’s an orthodoxy based on an agenda. The agenda itself is not necessarily bad; in fact, I agree with its declared goals, though I disagree with the socialist/big-government approach to reaching them. From both a theological and a public-health perspective, as well as with an eye to future unexpected consequences, it’s obviously important that we continue to reduce pollution; I just think that encouraging innovation rather than regulating it is likely to be more productive in doing so.

The problem is, rather, that what we have here is an agenda in search of a crisis, because whipping up a crisis and motivating people by fear is considered to be the quickest and most effective way to drive action, particularly when that action involves expanding government control over the economy and people’s lives. The agenda comes first, and it looks for a plausible threat to which to attach itself, so as to be able to tell people that they must enact the agenda or Bad Things will happen. This is what we might call the Houghton Strategy, after Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”

Now, the problem with that is that even when it finds success at first, that approach will ultimately collapse. Eventually, as even a global-warming believer like Gregg Easterbrook recently noted, the facts refuse to cooperate, and the truth becomes inconvenient for the agenda. That’s when you get people rooting for disaster, because they’d rather be proved miserably right than happily wrong; getting their own way is the most important thing to them, and they react accordingly.

That’s when orthodoxy gets ugly, and when it fails. I am, obviously, not opposed to all orthodoxies as such; I believe there’s such a thing as truth, and that fact provides at least a philosophical and theoretical justification for orthodoxy (and, in my view, a good bit more than that). Humble orthodoxy that arises out of the search for truth and that recognizes that it is at best an imperfect grasp on that truth is, I firmly believe, a good thing; it’s also a flexible thing, able to discern what is truly essential and what isn’t. Orthodoxy that arises out of an agenda, however—that exists in service not to the truth and the desire for understanding, but to the desire to do certain things—is of necessity dogmatic and inflexible; it also tends to end up being shrill, because it’s forced to defend itself and advance its cause through denunciations and alarmist statements. By its very nature, it’s committed not to understanding what is true, but to winning the argument—and when winning is everything, it very quickly becomes the only thing, and all other concerns (such as truth and fairness) fall by the wayside, leaving behind only a naked power grab.

This applies to orthodoxies of all types—political, religious, cultural, scientific, legal, you name it. You can meet this in the church (whether the local congregation or the international denomination), in politics at every level, in business, and indeed in most spheres of human life. You can find it among the cynical and power-hungry, and in the hearts of the most selfless and altruistic. It is a universal danger for all of us who are strongly committed to any belief or set of beliefs: are we truly seeking to under-stand the truth, to pursue it and stand under it and allow it to shape us, or are we concerned with winning the argument, with being acknowledged to be right, whether in fact we are or not?

The demon parade

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I just put up a post arguing that hero worship really isn’t a normal part of politics in this country, and that started me thinking: what is “just part of politics” in this country anymore is the opposite of hero worship—what we might call villain demonization. I think the first place we really see that in recent American politics was in Edward Kennedy’s decision to throw out truth and civility in order to destroy the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court; that was succeeded by the attempt to do the same to Clarence Thomas, which failed when Anita Hill didn’t hold up as a credible witness. When Bill Clinton won the White House, those two things, combined with the memory of the Iran-Contra investigation, had the Right out for blood, and what Hillary Clinton would dub the “politics of personal destruction” were on in earnest. I do believe the impeachment of President Clinton was justified—perjury is a major felony; it is to the justice system what counterfeiting is to the banking system—but I don’t believe the investigation that produced the circumstances under which the President (stupidly) perjured himself was justified by that point, if indeed there had ever been sufficient justification for it. (Those aren’t weasel words—I simply don’t know the facts of the matter well enough to say one way or the other.)

From there, we got the disputed 2000 election and the outrage of a Left that had never seriously considered the possibility it might lose, and thus refused to accept that it had (a refusal which did, at least, produce the single most brilliant political bumper sticker I’ve ever seen: “Re-Defeat Bush”); this would, over time, build to a crescendo of political filth such as I don’t think the US has seen since the 1860s, with shots like “BusHitler” and “Chimpy McHitler” aimed at the President, and considerably worse insults directed at VP Cheney. We saw the Left advance from the level of abuse directed at the Clintons to language actively designed to debase and dehumanize President Bush and his administration—with the worst of it (aside from that dumped on the President and VP) unloaded on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for whom the good old Southern plantation racism was dragged out, used for the exact same purpose against her as it had been back in the day. She might well have said, as entertainer Lloyd Marcus recently did, “Because they are libs and I am an uppity, off the liberal plantation, run-away black, all tactics to restore me to my owners are acceptable.” If she had, however, I doubt she would have gotten any consideration from the Left, only more ridicule.

One advantage to the election of Barack Obama to the big chair at 1600 Pennsylvania is that his status as the first person of African descent (though not of slave descent; that breakthrough hasn’t happened yet) to assume the Presidency has made the use of that sort of vitriol against him politically disadvantageous (for now, at least), and has thus walked back the level of nastiness in our political discourse. Unfortunately, the Left seems firmly intent on undoing that advantage by treating any sharp opposition to the President and his policies as if it were that bad, or worse. Thus, for instance, the howl over Joe Wilson’s inappropriate (though arguably true) outburst—you’d never realize, listening to the sanctimony oozing from the lips of Nancy Pelosi and others, that the Democratic congressional caucus as a whole had treated President Bush far worse, and on more than one occasion. Thus as well the debasement of the words “racism” and “racist” into mere political swear words for liberals to hurl at conservatives. Thus, ultimately, the deliberate effort to exacerbate the inflammation in the American body politic for political gain, rather than allowing it to subside somewhat and hoping to draw advantage from that.

This is not to say that there haven’t been inappropriate and outrageous things hurled at President Obama (though the most ubiquitous, the Obama-Joker poster, was created by a liberal Palestinian supporter of Dennis Kucinich); but it is to say that in their efforts to paint seemingly every criticism directed at him with that brush, Democratic leaders are guilty of both the rankest of rank hypocrisy and an appallingly cynical and short-sighted attempt at political manipulation. Honestly, while the Right needs to continue to work to marginalize and weed out the nasty folks, most folks on the Left really don’t have a leg to stand on to complain about the nastiness. If they want to publicly repent of calling George W. Bush “Chimpy McHitler,” Dick Cheney “Darth Vader,” Condoleezza Rice “Aunt Jemima,” and Michael Steele “Simple Sambo,” then I’ll welcome them complaining about a portrayal of Barack Obama as a witch doctor. Until then, what more are they saying than “It’s only racist when you do it”? They’d never tolerate that sort of special pleading from the Right; why should they be allowed to get away with it?

Hero worship?

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I posted below what I labeled three parts of a four-part response to Doug Hagler’s comments on my post “The self-esteem presidency.” Those parts were, respectively, a post noting mistakes Sarah Palin has made, one listing positive things about Barack Obama, and one listing positive things about the overly- and unfairly-vilified Dick Cheney. Being all of the same kind, detail posts, they quite properly went together. There is, however, a broader response that I think needs to be offered. Doug kicked the conversation off not just with a challenge, but with an assertion:

See, my theory is that hero-worship is just part of politics, and my guess is that it is just as operative with Palin supporters as it is with Obama supporters.

I think the best that can be said of the first part of this statement, the general theory Doug propounded, is that to the extent that it’s true, it’s not meaningful. On the one hand, I don’t know that we can rule out all hero worship for any significant politician—heck, I can think of one or two people who could be accused of that with respect to John McCain, though not for anything he’s done in politics. (Come to think of it, though, that same qualifier could be applied to most of Barack Obama’s adoring fans.) On the other, however, and more significantly, large-scale hero worship for politicians is a very rare thing. Take John Kerry, for instance (I’m tempted to say, “Please!”): he certainly tried to create an heroic image for himself, but I don’t think even Democrats bought it on a visceral level. They staunchly supported him, but for ideological reasons—and for emotional reasons that had nothing to do with Sen. Kerry, on which more in a minute. Hero worship of Ol’ Long Face was simply not in evidence.

If you look at the major politicians out there, at recent presidents and presidential candidates, Sen. Kerry was in that respect the rule, not the exception. Granted, Sen. Kerry was at the uncharismatic end for a politician, and thus unusually unlikely to inspire adoration—but not even Bill Clinton, the most charismatic of a remarkably unappealing set of presidential contenders over the last quarter-century, never inspired anything remotely approaching true widespread hero worship, let alone anything one might think to call a cult of personality.

This past campaign was the exception. Under normal circumstances, Hillary Clinton would have run away with the Democratic nomination, because she came into the campaign generating far more passion than any non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidate of the preceding 45 years; in some cases, I think you could fairly call that hero worship, of a purely ideological sort. As it was, though, she got blown away by somebody who could also generate that ideological sort of hero worship, but who also had the charisma and political skills to create much more—and took full advantage of them, even amplifying them by using quasi-messianic language of himself in his speeches.

This, of course, created a hunger in the Republican base for a candidate of their own who could do the same—and when Sen. McCain found one to be his running mate, the base went through the roof. There were a couple things, however, which mitigated against the development of the same sort of personality cult around Gov. Palin that had developed around Sen. Obama. The first, of course, was the fact that the McCain campaign didn’t want any such thing to happen; indeed, once they realized just how big a tiger they’d gotten by the tail, their main concern the rest of the way appeared to be keeping Gov. Palin from upstaging Sen. McCain. I wouldn’t say the GOP candidate was actively trying to squash support for his running mate, but he and his staff were definitely working to prevent it from developing in ways that wouldn’t benefit him directly.

The second, on the evidence of her own writings and speeches since the campaign, appears to have been that Gov. Palin wasn’t interested in any such thing happening either. Not only did she not make any “elect me and everything will be wonderful” types of statements during the campaign, she hasn’t made any since, or indeed done anything close. She has not adopted a strategy of offering herself to the nation, and there seems to be no reason to think that will change. Nor has she tried to organize, or indeed offered any support to, the community of online communities that have developed around her; in fact, the only acknowledgements I can recall from her staff of sites like Conservatives4Palin and TeamSarah have been vaguely unflattering.

The upshot of all of this is that, while there are no doubt a lot of people out there who could be fairly accused of hero worship with regard to Gov. Palin, whose view of her is unreasonably positive, there’s none of the fawning over her that one gets over the President, even from her most prominent supporters. There are no clergy offering prayers to her, no celebrities making music videos offering prayers to her, no school districts teaching their students to sing worship songs about her, no “Palin Youth” to match the “Obama Youth”—none of that, nothing of the kind. And certainly there’s no other politician, now or in living memory, who’s ever gotten that sort of treatment. The Obama phenomenon (Obamanomenon?) is and remains sui generis—at least outside countries like North Korea that can compel it.

Now, I can understand Doug’s desire to argue otherwise, since I know the personality cult of the Obamessiah doesn’t make him any happier than it does me; I can understand why he would want to be able to argue that this is just par for the course in politics, not something of which the Left has become uniquely guilty. In the end, though, the facts just won’t sustain that argument; this is in fact something unique to the Left in American politics. I continue to believe that there’s good reason for that, that this is no accident but rather is the result of the secular Left’s search for a secular messiah to replace the one it has decisively rejected. For all the temptation to political idolatry on the Right (something I’ve certainly written about often enough), that particular temptation doesn’t exist there, as religious conservatives already have a Messiah and non-religious conservatives tend to be quite consciously anti-messianic. Here’s hoping that doesn’t change.

My own personal bailout

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Despite the fact that I’m only 35, I’m an old folkie at heart; I suppose that’s what comes of growing up with a father who started at Stanford in the first heat of the Kingston Trio’s success. I remember, for instance, a 1983 folk music reunion concert that we taped while we were living down in Texas—I remember it quite well, in fact, having rewatched it more times than I can count. One of my favorite songs from that concert, one by Tom Paxton, has been coming back to me as once again eerily appropriate:

I Am Changing My Name to Chrysler

Oh, the price of gold is rising out of sight,
And the dollar is in sorry shape tonight;
What the dollar used to get us
Now won’t get a head of lettuce—
No, the economic forecast isn’t bright.
But amidst the clouds a spot is shining grey;
I begin to glimpse a new and better way.
And I’ve demised a plan of action,
Worked it down to the last fraction,
And I’m going into action here today.

Chorus:
I am changing my name to Chrysler;
I am going down to Washington D.C.
I will tell some power broker
What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me.
I am changing my name to Chrysler;
I am headed for that great receiving line.
So when they hand a million grand out,
I’ll be standing with my hand out,
Yes sir—I’ll get mine.

When my creditors come screaming for their dough,
I’ll be proud to tell them all where they can go.
They won’t need to scream and holler—
They’ll be paid to the last dollar
Where the endless streams of money seem to flow.
I’ll be glad to tell them all what they can do;
It’s a matter of a simple form or two.
It’s not just renumeration—it’s a liberal education;
Aren’t you kind of glad that I’m in debt to you?

Chorus

Since the first amphibian crawled out of the slime,
We’ve been struggling in an unrelenting climb;
We were hardly up and walking before money started talking,
And it said that failure is an awful crime.
It’s been that way a millenium or two,
But now it seems there is a different point of view.
If you’re a corporate Titanic and your failure is gigantic,
Down in Congress there’s a safety net for you.

Chorus

Words and music: Tom Paxton
©1980 Accabonac Music (ASCAP)

10 positive things about Dick Cheney

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This is the third part of my response to Doug Hagler, who also issued this challenge:

I am constitutionally unable to come up with 10 positives about Cheney—and I challenge anyone who is not a sociopath to do so.

That’s unjust, so I had to take it up.

  1. He’s a loving, devoted husband.
  2. He’s a loving, devoted father. See my comment on Barack Obama.
  3. He’s absolutely dedicated to serving his country. You might disagree with how he thought best to do that, but this is still a profoundly important and positive statement which cannot be made about all too many of our politicians.
  4. He took his oath of office seriously. He didn’t do his job for the fun of it, he did what he thought was right and necessary to protect and defend the lives of people in this country.
  5. He’s candid about his beliefs and positions; he doesn’t pretend to believe what people want to hear, he just tells them what he thinks, whether they want to hear it or not. That sort of candor is all too rare on our political scene, because it’s not the easiest way to get elected.
  6. He never tried to win a political argument by obfuscating his positions. Actually, as a politician, Cheney has a strong resemblance to a bulldozer; that’s why he ended up so unpopular. A little tact probably wouldn’t have hurt.
  7. He’s consistent in his beliefs and positions; he doesn’t compromise for political gain. Politicians who actually have principles rather than just poll-testers are important for the health of the nation.
  8. He’s willing to be unpopular to do what he believes is right. The name for that is “moral courage”; it’s an unfortunately rare quality.
  9. Indeed, he’s been willing to endure abuse, slander, and unjust calumny to do what he believes is right. That’s a rare degree of courage in American political history, or indeed in history more generally. He’s not Darth Vader, nor is he a sociopath (and waterboarding isn’t torture, nor did anybody ever call it so before that became a political weapon of expediency against a Republican administration), but he’s had to endure all that for the sake of keeping Americans from being butchered by their enemies. The irony here is that those who use debasing, dehumanizing language (such as “monster”) to describe him are guilty rhetorically of exactly the same thing of which they accuse him; the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
  10. He defends his people, rather than scapegoating to protect himself. Had he been willing to play the blame game (like, for instance, our current president), he probably could have ended office a fair bit more popular than he did; but he has refused to do that, which is admirable.

Politics, politicians, and the real story

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Michael Wolff has a most interesting piece up today on Newser:

Barack Obama is an uplifting but, so far, ultimately boring story.

The greatest political saga, the one that has it all, that gets to the real heart of American politics, is the John Edwards story. . . .

The problem here, let me argue, is not John Edwards, but our inability to see politicians for who they are.

We reduce these guys to stick figures, either to boring, righteous leading citizens, or incorrigible grotesques. We’re not interested in the former, and not allowed to be interested, except as witnesses to a train wreck, in the latter. Hence, we can never really understand the nature of politics, because we’re not allowed to know the people who have, for strange and heroic and horrifying and, no doubt, emotionally unsound reasons, committed their lives to this business.

The John Edwards story, as it helplessly and haplessly unfolds and keeps unfolding, is a remarkable window, which we ought to look into with the greatest curiosity and awe. Edwards isn’t, I doubt, much of an aberration. He is the American politician. The only difference is that circumstances now find him beyond spin, truer, and more naked than perhaps any American politician has ever been.

I’ll have to think about that; I think Wolff is on to something there. In the meantime, go read the whole post.

On the liberal use of racism

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Lloyd Marcus writes,

I am so sick of the Left being allowed to make the rules. Imagine the absurdity of a competition in which one side is allowed to set the rules against their opponent. The Left tells us what is racist. The Left tells us what we can and cannot say. The Left published a cartoon depicting former black Secretary of State Condolezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; another depicted Rice as a huge-lipped parrot for her Massa Bush. Neither were considered racist by their creators or publishers, or even widely condemned on the Left.

In opposition to black Republican Michael Steele’s campaign to run for U.S. Senate, a liberal blogger published a doctored photo of Steele in black face and big red lips made to look like a minstrel. The caption read, “Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house”. Not one Democrat denounced these racist portrayals of black conservatives.

And yet, a sign seen at a tea party depicting Obama as a witch doctor is considered by the Left to be beyond the pale and obviously racist. Why is the Left, given their track record of bias, granted final authority to determine the intent of the sign? Why do we conservatives so quickly and easily allow ourselves to be put on the defensive?

The rules set by the Left are extremely clear. Racist images of black conservatives and negative images of Bush are fair game. Even a play about murdering President Bush was called “harmless art”. Meanwhile, all unflattering images of Obama are racist, and constitute dangerous, potentially violent hate speech.

Now, before you dismiss Marcus’ critique as sour grapes, consider this:

I am a black conservative singer, songwriter, entertainer and columnist. Liberals have posted comments all over YouTube and C-SPAN freely using and calling me the “N” word. Because they are libs and I am an uppity, off the liberal plantation, run-away black, all tactics to restore me to my owners are acceptable.

The truth is, in the current political environment, “racist” actually has no concrete, objective meaning. As all derogatory terms eventually are, it has been debased from a meaningful descriptive term to a mere swear word, one which only has one true significance: to denigrate anyone who opposes liberal dogma. “Racist” is to a liberal fundamentalist what “heathen” is to an old-style Christian fundamentalist, and nothing more; it means only the Other, the hated Them, They Who Must Be Condemned.

Now, in one sense, this is a normal linguistic process; but it has been accelerated for the sake of political expediency, and that isn’t a good thing at all. In fact, this sort of tactic carries serious consequences for our society, which its practitioners should carefully consider. Cornell law professor William Jacobson put it well:

While the false accusation of racism is not a new tactic, it has been refined by Obama supporters into a toxic powder which is causing damage to the social fabric of the country by artificially injecting race into every political issue. . . .

Not surprisingly, the pace of racial accusations has picked up as opposition has grown. Just in the past few days the usual and not-so-usual suspects have been seeking to out-do each other in making accusations of racism including Eugene Robinson, Maureen Dowd, Jimmy Carter, Rep. Hank Johnson, Chris Matthews, a wide range of Democratic politicians, and of course, almost all of the mainstream media.

The effect of these accusations is poisonous. Race is the most sensitive and inflammatory subject in this country. By turning every issue, even a discussion of health care policy, into an argument about race, liberals have created a politically explosive mixture in which the harder they seek to suppress opposing voices, the harder those voices seek to be heard. . . .

We are seeing for the first time a strong push-back against the race card players. And that reaction is visceral, much like an allergic reaction, from people who have been stung before.

What’s more, as Mark Steyn points out, the real racism and sexism here isn’t what the Left is saying it is:

Nobody minds liberal commentators expressing the hope that Clarence Thomas “will die early from heart disease like many black men,” etc. Contemporary identity-group politics are prototype one-party states: If you’re a black Republican Secretary of State, you’re not really black. If you’re a female Republican vice-presidential nominee, you’re not really a woman. What’s racist and sexist here is the notion that, if you’re black or female, your politics is determined by your group membership.

There are, it seems to me, two main points to be drawn from this mess. The first is that whatever they might say, the Democratic leadership is worried about a conservative resurgence; to quote Steyn again,

What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek’s “Mad Man” cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have “civility” drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper’s scrotal “teabagging” slur and characterized as “racists” and “terrorists” what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?

They’re telling you who they really fear. Whom the media gods would destroy they first make into “mad men.” Liz Cheney should be due for the treatment any day now. . . .

The media would like the American Right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That’s the better guide to what they’re really worried about.

The second is that the Democratic leadership in D.C. cannot win the battle of ideas, or at least don’t think they can. Now, there’s an important distinction to be drawn here: that does not mean that their ideas are wrong; the most brilliant ideas and the most basic truths can still be made to sound utterly unconvincing in the mouths of defenders who don’t really know how to argue for them. I happen to believe their arguments are wrong, but their competence or lack thereof in presenting them is no proof of that either way. The point is, rather, that whether they ought to be able to win the argument or otherwise, the leaders of the Democratic Party cannot, and so they feel the need to try to win by rhetorical thuggery what they cannot win by rational appeal. Dr. Jacobson’s summary is apt:

The increasingly hysterical use of the the race card by liberal columnists, bloggers and politicians reflects the last gasps of people who, being unable to win an argument on the merits, seek to end the argument.

In the last analysis, all of this is a blot on Barack Obama. No, it isn’t reasonable to expect him to fulfill the post-racial promise of his campaign; the only thing that was unreasonable was him using that to help sell himself as a candidate. However, he is allowing this to happen, and he could stop it if he wanted; and Jules Crittenden is right, he needs to make it stop.

Obama can let a growing chorus of prominent Americans call his failure racism and his opponents racists, a development which is itself driving a deeper partisan wedge and heightening the rancor and bitterness. He can let it further demean our national dialogue and intimidate speech. He can let it be his excuse, a smear in the history books. Or he tell America and the world firmly that in this country, political dissent does not equal racism. He will then have shown himself to be a statesman, who is worthy of respect no matter whether you agree with his politics and policies or not.

It is time for President Obama to take the race card off the table.

Here’s hoping—for his sake, for the country’s sake—that he does. Soon.