. . . Dr. André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. Dr. Lalonde’s reaction to Sarah Palin’s emergence as a role model for mothers of Down Syndrome and other special-needs children:“The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada.”In other words, he’s worried that that Gov. Palin’s example might “inadvertently influence” women to keep their Down Syndrome babies instead of aborting them, as he obviously feels they ought to do. (Though Dr. Lalonde tried to deny it, “Members of Canada’s Down syndrome community say that many of the country’s medical professionals only give messages of fear to parents who learn their baby will be born with the genetic condition.”) That rather takes the pro-choice mask off the pro-abortion lobby, doesn’t it?And no, before anyone reacts, I’m not saying that everyone who supports legal abortion wants to promote abortion; but a lot of those in the business, either as practitioners or as advocates, absolutely do, and hang anything that gets in the way—even basic public-health concerns.*For those unfamilar with David Zirnhelt, he’s a Canadian politician and former New Democratic Party cabinet minister in British Columbia who was known for his quick temper and uninhibited tongue; Minister Zirnhelt is probably best remembered for telling a group of reporters, “Remember, government can do anything.”HT: The AnchoressUpdate: Andrew Malcolm commented on this as well in his “Top of the Ticket” blog on the Los Angeles Times website; somewhat suspiciously, that post appears to be missing. Hugh Hewitt has a PDF copy of it available here.
Category Archives: Politics
Voices of the surge
While the opinions expressed in these ads are not universally held (I’ve spent enough of my life around the US military to know that it’s no more monolithic than any other organization), I’ve heard enough from folks to be confident that they’re generally representative. Incidentally, the soldier in the second video is a family friend of a member of my extended family.
While I’m thinking of it
can we knock off the whole “gaffe hunting” thing? Barack Obama uses the words “my Muslim faith,” and some folks jump on it and claim he’s admitted that he’s really a Muslim. If you read the transcript or watch the video, it’s clear he didn’t do any such thing (though George Stephanopoulos didn’t help him any); rather, this was simply “a reference to those falsely imputing Islam to him,” if a clumsily-phrased one. And yet there are some trying to turn it into a gaffe, because that appears to be what we do in American politics these days: look for something we can misinterpret, and then pounce.Similarly, when Sarah Palin calls Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “too big and too expensive to the taxpayers,” the cry goes up from the Left: “A gaffe! A gaffe!” Again, it wasn’t. Granted the technical truth of the statement that these institutions “aren’t taxpayer funded but operate as private companies,” Gov. Palin was just responding to the same concern Sen. Obama had raised, that they “should either should either operate as public entities without profit, or as private companies that won’t be rescued if they fall into trouble.” As it is, as entities created and sponsored by the federal government, they’ve effectively been private companies backstopped by national taxpayers, free to do whatever was profitable in the short term in the assurance that they’d be bailed out if it all went sour. As is indeed happening, which is why the McCain/Palin ticket has them firmly fixed in the crosshairs as “too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.”Finally, the one most annoying to me, the whole kerfuffle over “lipstick on a pig.” I’m all for defending Gov. Palin from people going after her children, or phony attacks on her record, but honestly, this is just ridiculous. Sen. Obama used a standard Americanism, one which Sen. McCain has used before, as many, many Americans have; granted, he delivered it awkwardly, and the audience does seem to have taken it as a shot at Gov. Palin, but still, it’s just a standard bit of American lingo. Conservatives howl when liberals do this to us—why on earth dignify this tactic by using it ourselves? If some who see the video take it that way and get mad at Sen. Obama, then so be it, but I agree with Roger Kimball: “Palin Rule #1: No whining! (Give the pig thing a rest)” Let Gov. Palin come up with a wisecrack for her next couple stump speeches, and let it go. (Sen. Obama would be well advised to drop it as well, before he makes things worse.)Now, some have pointed out that if he didn’t intend the “lipstick on a pig” line as a shot at Gov. Palin, Sen. Obama was unwise to use it, and I think that’s true; that, plus the “Muslim faith” line, are definite signs that the golden tongue has gone a bit clumsy just at the moment. As someone pointed out to Hugh Hewitt in an e-mail, “he hasn’t had a ‘good communicator’ day since his acceptance speech,” which is deadly for a campaign that has depended on his ability to communicate—when you combine Sen. Obama’s recent infelicities with the walking gaffe track that is Joe Biden, you get a very bad day or two indeed; but while that may well be cause for some thoughtful analysis as to why his campaign is missing its mark, I don’t think it justifies attack ads and charges of sexism. Not even close.
Joe Biden crosses Barack Obama’s line
“I hope I am as clear as I can be. So in case I am not, let me repeat, we don’t go after people’s families, we don’t get them involved in the politics, it is not appropriate and it is not relevant. Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought it was somebody in the campaign that was involved in something like that they would be fired.”—Barack Obama, 9/1/08“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there’s joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?”—Joe Biden, 9/9/08OK, at the time that Sen. Obama made his statement, I wrote, “Based on the way Sen. Obama has run his campaign so far, there’s no plausible reason to doubt his statement.” Let’s see if I can still say that in a day or two. Sen. Biden’s comment is clearly directed toward Sarah Palin, with her son Trig who has Down Syndrome, and is clearly intended to score a partisan political point; that would be in violation of Sen. Obama’s edict that “we don’t go after people’s families, we don’t get them involved in the politics, it is not appropriate and it is not relevant.” Clearly, Sen. Biden disagrees, and I think we can safely call him “somebody in the campaign.” Now, he’s not just an ordinary Joe in the campaign, and I’m not sure Sen. Obama actually can fire him—sure, he picked the guy, but the convention nominated him, and I really don’t know what the rules would be on booting him off the ticket now, or even if there are any; but still, if Sen. Obama is to be true to the principles he articulated, some sort of discipline should be in order, and a sincere public apology (i.e., not “I’m sorry if anyone was offended, because I wasn’t being offensive”) should be shortly forthcoming from Sen. Biden. I look forward to hearing it.HT: Jennifer Rubin
When ideology trumps thought
You may have seen Joe Biden’s statement today that the election of Sarah Palin as VP would be “obviously a backward step for women.” Beldar posted a response to Sen. Biden that is positively devastating:
It’s possible to become so thoroughly saturated with partisan politics that it turns one into a complete moron. Every question, every issue, must be answered in a fashion deemed “correct” and “acceptable” according to the entire spectrum of one’s party’s positions. When carried to extremes, this becomes so ridiculous that it’s actually quite funny, sort of like watching a drunk search for his missing keys only below the lamppost because that’s where the light’s better.I believe in equal opportunity regardless of race. Anyone who shares that belief can take satisfaction from the fact that a major party’s presidential nominee is black. Although I will campaign and vote against him, if he should be elected, I will nevertheless readily acknowledge that to be a historic symbolic event, and one that should provide further satisfaction to all who believe in equal opportunity regardless of race.Someone who denies the corollary of that historic symbolism for Gov. Palin’s potential achievement is not really a believer in equal opportunity regardless of sex. If accomplishment only “counts” when the accomplisher is a “right-thinking” (meaning here, “left-thinking”) woman, that’s just another variety of sexism—a particularly ugly one, because its premise is that a woman’s own decision about her beliefs on the entire remaining range of issues counts for less than a man’s.I say, then, with confidence, and as a committed believer in equal opportunity regardless of sex, and one who absolutely believes his two daughters ought to have the same opportunities as his two sons: If Joe Biden is elected to the vice presidency, that would obviously be a backward step for women.
I agree completely.
British Palin envy
It’s been interesting to see the reactions to Sarah Palin from England. Those on the Left over there don’t like her any more than the Left over here does, of course, but since she’s less of a direct threat to them, there’s definitely less of the hysteria that has driven efforts to club her to death like a baby seal. That’s provided more room for intelligent commentary—and also, interestingly, for voices asking, “WHY, why, why can’t WE have a Sarah Palin?” In Fergus Shanahan’s case, his lament seems primarily the result of a British political scene “as grey and dull as the leaden September skies. It’s dire”; but others are expressing the same wish for more substantive reasons. The title of Melanie Phillips’ column in the Daily Mail says it all, I think: “Contempt, apathy and lies—why Britain is crying out for our own ‘pitbull with lipstick.'”
There are millions who long for a conservative defence of Britain and its values by a leader they respect and admire. Sarah Palin may well turn out to be Middle America’s revenge on its elites. Middle Britain is watching—and hoping that it will now be hunting season against the moose of the British Left, too.
Perhaps the best British piece on Gov. Palin was James Bennett’s article in the Telegraph pointing out how different her small-town background is in Alaskan politics than it would be most places:
Having worked with Alaskans, I know something of the challenge she has faced, and why—contrary to what Democrats think—it could make her a powerful figure in the White House.The first myth to slay is that she is a political neophyte who has come from nowhere. In fact, she and her husband have, for decades, run a company in the highly politicised commercial fishing industry, where holding on to a licence requires considerable nous and networking skills.Her rise from parent-teacher association to city council gave her a natural political base in her home town of Wasilla. Going on to become mayor was a natural progression. Wasilla’s population of 9,000 would be a small town in Britain, and even in most American states. But Wasilla is the fifth-largest city in Alaska, which meant that Palin was an important player in state politics.Her husband’s status in the Yup’ik Eskimo tribe, of which he is a full, or “enrolled” member, connected her to another influential faction: the large and wealthy (because of their right to oil revenues) native tribes.
In other words, Sarah Palin was actually already well involved in statewide politics in Alaska even before she ran for lieutenant governor in 2002. As such,
Far from being a reprise of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Palin was a clear-eyed politician who, from the day she took office, knew exactly what she had to do and whose toes she would step on to do it. The surprise is not that she has been in office for such a short time but that she has succeeded in each of her objectives. She has exposed corruption; given the state a bigger share in Alaska’s energy wealth; and negotiated a deal involving big corporate players, the US and Canadian governments, Canadian provincial governments, and native tribes—the result of which was a £13 billion deal to launch the pipeline and increase the amount of domestic energy available to consumers. This deal makes the charge of having “no international experience” particularly absurd.In short, far from being a small-town mayor concerned with little more than traffic signs, she has been a major player in state politics for a decade, one who formulated an ambitious agenda and deftly implemented it against great odds.
Bennett also raises a very interesting point about the reaction of Gov. Palin’s enemies in Alaska to her nomination (one which makes a great deal of sense out of some of the stories we’ve seen):
Her sudden elevation to the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket shocked no one more than her enemies in Alaska, who have broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of Palin in Washington, guiding the Justice Department’s anti-corruption teams through the labyrinths of Alaska’s old-boy network.It is no surprise that many of the charges laid against her have come from Alaska, as her enemies become more and more desperate to bring her down. John McCain was familiar with this track record and it is no doubt the principal reason that he chose her.
Who would ever have thought that Alaskan politics would become a subject for international analysis?Surely not Ted Stevens.
Community organizing and the vision of Barack Obama
Byron York has a good article up on the National Review website on Barack Obama’s time as a community organizer, his accomplishments, and the way in which that shaped his political vision and approach. (See also Stephen Malanga in City Journal for an account of his transition to politics.)
Snapshot of the presidential race
As of this evening, in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, John McCain has a 2.9 point lead over Barack Obama. That’s within the margin of error, of course, but still, it’s a pretty good bounce.
Much depends, of course, on whether the bounce is transitory or hangs around for a while, but there are reasons to think it might stick. One is that the huge edge in voter identification that Democrats enjoyed—it was 6% in November 2006 and had climbed over 10% this past May—has been steadily eroding; by last month it was down to 5.7%. Now, according to the Gallup/USA Today poll, that edge has dropped to just 1%, which is less even than the Democratic Party had in 2004. Another is that according to the Rasmussen tracking poll a higher percentage of McCain voters than Obama voters are certain about their vote (41%-38%); not only is Sen. Obama behind in the polls, more of those who say they plan to vote for him are open to changing their mind. It’s also worth noting that the ABC poll reports a 20-point swing in Sen. McCain’s favor among white women; Gallup finds a smaller shift among all women, but a huge shift in support among independents (now 52%-37% in his favor). As well, after all the talk about Sen. Obama reaching beyond the Democratic base, pursuing a 50-state strategy and drawing votes from Republican evangelicals, the focus is back on swing states and he’s doing no better with evangelicals than Kerry did.That said, if you take RCP’s electoral map with every state projected one way or the other, they do still give Obama/Biden the win in electoral votes, 273-265:
That’s somewhat misleading, however, because most of the state poll numbers they’re using are pretty old. Thus, for instance, New Hampshire:
As you can see, their average gives Sen. Obama a paper-thin lead—but the newest poll there was finished on the 18th of August, and the others are one and three and a half months older. Given that Sen. McCain has gained a fair bit on Sen. Obama in that time, it would seem likely that New Hampshire is now leaning the other way; and if you flip them and leave everyone else the same, you get a 269-269 tie.Other interesting cases to consider include Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado:
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Sen. Obama’s decent lead in the poll average is based largely on old polls; in the one up-to-date poll in each state, his lead is razor-thin—one point in Michigan, two points in Pennsylvania; when the other polls catch up, they will likely show the effects of the McCain bounce. At this point, while you’d have to say both are leaning toward him, the tilt would seem to be very slight; both states are very much in play. As for Colorado, there we see no such pattern, but there is a poll not included in this average, commissioned by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which shows Sen. McCain up by two. Given that Rasmussen in Colorado shows no signs of a bounce for the McCain campaign, there doesn’t seem reason to expect the other polls to move significantly in his direction, leaving Colorado also leaning slightly against him.Others might ask, what about states that could flip the other way? What about Ohio? Well, take a look:
At this point, the numbers on Ohio don’t look promising for the Obama campaign; yes, the average is quite close, but the only recent poll, Rasmussen, gives Sen. McCain a seven-point lead, whereas even after the Democratic convention, Sen. Obama was only up two. Virginia‘s more interesting, though:
There, we have two polls which are up to date, and both show a two-point lead for Sen. McCain. He ought to be able to carry the state, but he’s not going to be able to take it for granted—it appears that the Old Dominion could readily go either way.So what does this all mean? Well, on my read, the truest picture of the race is this:
Looking at that, I tend to think there’s more opportunity for the GOP to pull states out of the Democratic column than vice versa; the momentum is going their way, and Sarah Palin looks like someone who will have particular effectiveness appealing to blue-collar Democrats in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Sen. Obama doesn’t have a similar advantage to help him go after states like Ohio, Virginia, Missouri and Florida.That, of course, is as of now; we need only look back at the serpentine course this presidential election has already taken to be reminded how quickly—and strangely—things can change. Certainly there’s no room for overconfidence on the part of the GOP; they’re in a dogfight, and at best have an even shot at coming out on top. But when you consider that most pundits expected them to be all but writing the concession speech at this point of the campaign, an even shot looks pretty good.
Barack Obama’s Ayers challenge
When reports of Sen. Obama’s connection to Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn first surfaced, he tried to dismiss Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and Ayers’ misdeeds as ancient history. Skeptics pointed out that Ayers’ radical views aren’t past tense, but very much present tense, and saw Sen. Obama’s association with him, along with his close relationship with people like the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as evidence of his comfort with radical leftist views, and of a general “no enemies to the left” policy.And that was about as much as people thought about it, until recently. I’m not sure who first raised the question of why Sen. Obama, with a pretty thin résumé that’s particularly lacking in executive experience, was no longer taking credit for his time as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a foundation which Ayers helped found. Given that the foundation had a considerable amount of money (I’ve seen the figure $50 million bandied about, but I don’t have any hard data), this would seem to be experience well worth talking about. Given that, why was Sen. Obama keeping it so quiet?Stanley Kurtz decided to try to find out—and that’s when the fun began. When he asked to see the CAC’s internal files, held by the Daley Library at the University of Illinois-Chicago, he was initially told he would be allowed to do so, and then the library began stonewalling him, offering a shifting collection of reasons to justify their actions.When Kurtz subsequently went on WGN-AM in Chicago to talk about his efforts with radio host Milt Rosenburg (audio here), the Obama campaign exploded. Rosenburg’s producer, Zack Christenson, invited the campaign to send someone to appear on the show with Kurtz, but they refused; instead, they tried to defeat the story by brute force. The campaign sent out an e-mail urging supporters to complain to WGN, calling Kurtz a “smear-merchant” and a “slimy character assassin” “pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations” via “divisive, destructive ranting.” Quite a lot of opprobrium for a guy who was just trying to get at some documents—he hadn’t even said anything yet. The e-mail also implicitly accused WGN of preventing the Obama campaign from responding to Kurtz, when in fact it was their choice not to send someone on the show.Now, this suggests one of two things. One, it’s possible that the Obama campaign’s reaction was justified by something truly explosive in those files. Honestly, though, that seems unlikely to me; I suppose nothing is impossible, especially in Chicago politics, but short of the CAC funding Sen. Obama’s 2004 run for Senate, it’s hard to see where there’s room for a true scandal in there. The most that would seem likely would be evidence that Sen. Obama and Bill Ayers were in fact close friends and associates.If that’s the case, then the Obama campaign appears to be overreacting in truly startling fashion. For one thing, it already seems pretty clear that Bill Ayers wasn’t just “a guy who lives in [Sen. Obama’s] neighborhood”; as Kurtz notes in the article linked above, the information that is publicly available leaves little doubt that they worked together pretty closely, and on a friendly basis. But if all there is in the CAC records is confirmation that they worked together and that Sen. Obama was comfortable with Ayers’ efforts and positions—well, honestly, conservatives already suspect that, liberals don’t care, and I don’t see that being an issue that sways a lot of folks in the middle. They probably half-suspect it as well, but it was a few years ago, and there are really more important things to worry about. If that’s all it is, the Obama campaign shouldn’t have tried to fight Kurtz; they should have just let him have his access, dig up what he’s going to dig up, and report it, then weathered the dust-up and gone on, confident that by November it will all be old news. Fighting as they did, if it wasn’t absolutely necessary, only hurts their candidate by drawing attention to the story and making it look as if he has something to hide—or, worse, something to be afraid of. That suggests that Sen. Obama’s biggest challenge isn’t Bill Ayers: it’s his own campaign.Update: of course, that assumes that Ayers doesn’t keep stirring the pot with stuff like this . . .
Barack Obama’s foreign-policy judgment
Sen. Obama: Iran is not a serious threat.
His mistake here: failing to understand that the Soviet Union, though a greater conventional military threat than Iran, was also a more predictable threat, and one with which we could negotiate on the basis of shared Western assumptions. Trying to deal with Iran on that basis would be like trying to keep vipers off your property by building a split-rail fence—just because it kept the neighbor’s bull where he belongs doesn’t mean it’s going to stop a snake.Here’s the McCain campaign’s take on that:
And here’s part of the reason why:
This man is not by any means representative of all Muslims—indeed, I would be surprised to find that his understanding of the world is even all that common among Muslims in most places—but he is representative of the sort of attitudes the ayatollahs of Iran are trying to foster and foment among Muslims around the world. Islam as such is not the enemy, but Islamic governments and movements which consider us to be the enemy (such as the government of Iran and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hamas) most definitely are—and they’re enemies which cannot be dismissed as “not serious” simply because they don’t have large conventional forces. They have other ways of attacking us, they are perfectly capable of developing WMDs, and they are far, far harder to deter than the Soviet Union was because they don’t share a Western value system; telling them, “don’t do that or we’ll kill you” isn’t much of a threat if they’re convinced that doing that will please Allah and earn them a special place in paradise. As such, they’re perfectly capable of doing something perfectly crazy if we don’t take them very seriously as a threat.Sen. Obama doesn’t appear to understand this. Unfortunately, given that Joe Biden told the Israelis, “Iran is going to be nuclear—deal with it,” it appears his running mate doesn’t either. This doesn’t bode well if they win in November.