As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Monday, September 08, 2008
Ugh
Can everybody in the Democratic leadership in the Congress be required to take a political science class?
Congressional Democrats have scrapped plans for another vote on expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, thus sparing Republicans from a politically difficult vote just weeks before elections this fall.
Before the summer recess, Democrats had vowed repeatedly to force another vote on the popular program. But Democrats say they have shifted course, after concluding that President Bush would not sign their legislation and that they could not override his likely veto.
Mr. Bush vetoed two earlier versions of the legislation, which he denounced as a dangerous step toward “government-run health care for every American,” and the House sustained those vetoes [...]
Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said: “We are not going to change any votes on the children’s health insurance bill. We still don’t have enough to override a veto. Those who opposed this bill can face the voters and explain why they believe 10 million kids should not get health coverage.”
Yeah, no kidding, Rahm, and it'll be easier for Democratic challengers to draw this contrast if YOU PUT THE BILL UP FOR A VOTE AGAIN and showed yet again the callousness of the Republican caucus.
There were 2 SCHIP votes over a year ago. In news cycle time that might as well have been during the Eisenhower Administration. Everyone knows that SCHIP wouldn't pass - the point is to make the Republicans vote on it. It's part of the perks of being in the majority, forcing the opposition to make inconvenient votes in an election year. You might want to look up the vote for military force in Iraq (2002), the Homeland Security bill (2002), the Military Commissions Act (2006), and on and on...
Because there's no way the bill would pass, it's a free vote. You could tie the revenues to removing tax breaks for the oil companies and make the vote a two-fer. "Congressman X would rather give oil executives a new yacht than help sick children!" But alas, the leadership sees no reason why that would be a useful vote.
Thanks for making life harder for the dozens of challengers trying to unseat the bozos on the other side. Really nice work. Be sure to pass an offshore drilling bill while you're at it, because we should definitely play on Republican turf with our votes in an election year when we hold the majority. Great strategery.
I don't but all of this "I'm-a gonna leave the party and vote for McCain if my candidate loses" stuff. It's something people say in the heat of battle but rarely is there actually follow-through. I don't remember a ton of reporting about George Bush's nasty primary campaign causing McCain voters to switch to Gore, which was picked up in some post-primary polls, so this is also a media creation, something to pontificate about. And for her part Hillary Clinton is not interested in doing that kind of damage to the country. After the primary it'll be both the nominee and the loser's job to unify the party against the Republicans, and I have little doubt that they'll be able to do it.
Clinton was asked by a questioner in the audience here what she would tell frustrated Democrats who might consider voting for McCain in the general election out of spite.
“Please think through this decision,” Clinton said, laughing and emphasizing the word “please.”
“It is not a wise decision for yourself or your country.”
The crowd applauded loudly.
At the rank-and-file supporter level, I think the damage will eventually be minimal. At the fat-cat big-money boy and girl level, I think they will consider an Obama nomination something of a betrayal. The Clinton campaign did not disavow their big-money donor "shakedown" letter to Nancy Pelosi because they really do think they own the party, as some rich people tend to think about a lot of things they try to purchase. These are people who enjoyed the DLC types in the party helping them out with their businesses and their taxes, and they remain loyal to even the Lieberman fringes because they've paid for those types of politicians for years.
Chris Bowers had the sharpest post I've seen on the primary in quite some time. While it's not perfect (I think a lot of the unelected superdelegates are merely activists, using my experience in California as a guide), I think he's hit on something.
The 2008 nomination campaign has generated quite a bit of talk about internal divides in the Democratic Party: young vs. old, wealthy vs. working class, African-America vs. Latino, male vs. female, etc. However, for my money, the most interesting divide by far remains the full-blown activist class war that the nomination has revealed. A changing of guard is taking place in the Democratic Party, and it might not be long before the entire Democratic Party leadership is transformed.
Consider the current delegate counts from primaries, and from superdelegates who currently hold public office:
Primary delegate totals: Obama 1,081.5--1,063.5 Clinton Supers who hold public office: Obama 99--96 Clinton
Tight as a glove. The "public" portion of the Democratic nomination campaign shows Obama only narrowly ahead of Clinton, and the campaign in a virtual tie. However, now look at the delegate totals for caucuses and for supers who do not currently hold public office:
Supers who do not hold public office: Clinton 150--110 Obama (58%-42%) Caucus delegate totals: Obama 334--190 Clinton (64%-36%)
While publicly elected officials and primary voters are virtually split between the two candidates, the Democratic Party leadership heavily favors Clinton and the highly engaged activists who keep the party's electoral engine running heavily favor Obama. This divide between the party leadership and the rising, activist base points strongly toward an ongoing battle in the party that online we have deemed "the silent revolution." While the other demographic divides listed above have longstanding cultural legacies that go well beyond a single election or political party, it is truly shocking to see such a huge gap between a party's leadership and that party's most dedicated activists. At least in theory, these are two groups of people who should be on the same page.
They're not because for too long, the Democratic Party's leadership was defined by past victories from the Clinton years. And that leadership is simply wrong for the historical moment. The Obama ground campaign, like the Dean campaign before it, is going to bring in a whole new class of leaders and activists who will be able to outwork and outmaneuver an ossified leadership class. The fat cats with the $10,000 checks for the DCCC are irrelevant in this environment. Obama raised $175 million or something and barely touched them. A more informed, more engaged political culture is going to demand transparency and put an end to unelected elites controlling the party. It's not going to happen overnight, but like Bowers said, this disconnect is both striking and untenable.
It's pretty gratifying to be on the right side of this for a change. Tomorrow I'll be driving up to San Jose for the California Democratic Party convention to witness the silent revolution in action. I ran for and snagged a spot in the DSCC in 2007, and I see a concerted strategy by the progressive grassroots to make more inroads into the party leadership. This includes running progressives in seats where they will be able to appoint party officials, which accounts for about a third of all delegates. This is nuts and bolts kind of stuff and the progressive grassroots is really thinking this through.
Despite the pie fight primary, I'm optimistic about being a Democrat. I think the dinosaurs' time has passed. A new era is dawning.
Nice Party You've Got Here, Be A Shame If Something Happened To It
I'm not sure what the Clinton campaign seeks to gain by sending an extortion letter to Nancy Pelosi and the DCCC.
As Democrats, we have been heartened by the overwhelming response that our fellow Democrats have shown for our party's candidates during this primary season. Each caucus and each primary has seen a record turnout of voters. But this dynamic primary season is not at an end. Several states and millions of Democratic voters have not yet had a chance to cast their votes.
We respect those voters and believe that they, like the voters in the states that have already participated, have a right to be heard. None of us should make declarative statements that diminish the importance of their voices and their votes. We are writing to say we believe your remarks on ABC News This Week on March 16th did just that.
During your appearance, you suggested super-delegates have an obligation to support the candidate who leads in the pledged delegate count as of June 3rd , whether that lead be by 500 delegates or 2. This is an untenable position that runs counter to the party's intent in establishing super-delegates in 1984 as well as your own comments recorded in The Hill ten days earlier:
"I believe super-delegates have to use their own judgment and there will be many equities that they have to weigh when they make the decision. Their own belief and who they think will be the best president, who they think can win, how their own region voted, and their own responsibility.'"
Super-delegates, like all delegates, have an obligation to make an informed, individual decision about whom to support and who would be the party's strongest nominee. Both campaigns agree that at the end of the primary contests neither will have enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination. In that situation, super-delegates must look to not one criterion but to the full panoply of factors that will help them assess who will be the party's strongest nominee in the general election.
We have been strong supporters of the DCCC. We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August. We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters.
That's just sad. The big-money boys did this to Howard Dean too, when his 50-state strategy didn't meet with their satisfaction. And he went ahead and implemented it and put us far ahead of Republicans on the ground all over the country. GOP incumbents are dropping like flies because they see the reality of going up against serious political muscle in an election with some headwinds. We have a decent pickup shot in Alabama, for crying out loud. And those Republican incumbents don't want to pay the bills for their own campaign committees because they see it as wasted money. (What's nutty is that even Joe Lieberman gave $100K to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in December - he knows where his bread is buttered - that's money designed to bribe the leadership into keeping him in the party).
Dean defied these big-money morons and beat them all. So they can threaten and intimidate Nancy Pelosi and the D-Trip all they want, and say they're going to take their wallets and go home. They don't own the party anymore and it must be killing them.
The idea that Pelosi should say "How high" when these fat cats tell her to jump, and that she should claim that ALL delegates, not just superdelegates, should exercise independent judgment no matter what the will of the people expressed, is just nuts.
(By the way, those Gallup numbers are in the heat of a primary campaign, and can reasonably be seen as the highest possible point for them. Also, the numbers are FACTORED INTO current head-to-head matchups against McCain. In other words, McCain is getting as many crossover Democrat voters as he can possibly hope to get in November, and he's still generally tied with Obama and Clinton. Meaning that he's doomed.)
Piece Of Crap Stimulus Package Coming Down The Pike
In the wake of the fact that GDP growth flatlined in Q4, and the homeownership rate has fallen down to 2001 rates, you would think that the Senate would be able to bring forward a more robust stimulus package that would actually, you know, help the people who need help, and get money into the hands of those who would actually spend it quickly. That's where you'd be wrong:
Backed solidly by the Bush administration, Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a $157 billion economic stimulus package championed by Senate Democrats, who said they would have no choice but to quickly adopt a cheaper, more streamlined plan approved earlier this week by the House.
In waving a surrender flag, Democratic Senate leaders said they still hoped to secure changes to the House plan when they vote on it next week and that they remained on track to get the portfolio of tax rebates and business tax breaks, aimed at jolting the economy, to President Bush for his signature by Feb. 15.
The Democrats also said that the efforts over the last two days to shape the stimulus package to reflect their economic priorities had allowed them to lay out an agenda that they would pursue in the months ahead, and use to bolster the case for electing a Democrat as president and widening their majorities in Congress.
The Democratic Party: from "Why We Fight" to "Why Fight" in just 60 years.
Also, note the emphasis on how they'll look to use their own failures as proof that they need bigger majorities in the next Congress. It'd be a lot easier to make that case if you actually bothered to lead now. There are a host of issues out there, from the FISA debate and holding the line on retroactive immunity to this stimulus package, and making it more of a targeted injection of cash into the economy through extending unemployment and food stamps rather than just giving cash away.
But I think you can read a lot about how the average Washington Democrat thinks in this upcoming expose by Lincoln Chafee.
The book, titled Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President, is due in bookstores April 1. It is being published by St. Martin’s Press. The Journal obtained a copy last week, and Chafee agreed to talk about it in his office at Brown University’s Watson Institute, where the former senator is a visiting scholar.
The book excoriates Mr. Bush and his GOP allies who repeatedly fanned such wedge issues as changing the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, abortion and flag-burning. But he saves some of his harshest words for Democrats who paved the way for Mr. Bush to use the U.S. military to invade Iraq. That includes New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, whom Chafee says put her presidential ambitions above standing up to Mr. Bush and the rush to war in Iraq.
“I find it surprising now, in 2008, how many Democrats are running for president after shirking their constitutional duty to check and balance this president,” writes Chafee. “Being wrong about sending Americans to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed, is not like making a punctuation mistake in a highway bill.
“They argue that the president duped them into war, but getting duped does not exactly recommend their leadership. Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”
Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against prosecuting the war. “The top Democrats were at their weakest when trying to show how tough they were,” writes Chafee. “They were afraid that Republicans would label them soft in the post-September 11 world, and when they acted in political self-interest, they helped the president send thousands of Americans and uncounted innocent Iraqis to their doom.
“Instead of talking tough or meekly raising one’s hand to support the tough talk, it is far more muscular, I think, to find out what is really happening in the world and have a debate about what we really need to accomplish,” writes Chafee. “That is the hard work of governing, but it was swept aside once the fear, the war rhetoric and the political conniving took over.”
Chafee writes of his surprise at “how quickly key Democrats crumbled.” Democratic senators, Chafee writes, “went down to the meetings at the White House and the Pentagon and came back to the chamber ready to salute. With wrinkled brows they gravely intoned that Saddam Hussein must be stopped. Stopped from what? They had no conviction or evidence of their own. They were just parroting the administration’s nonsense. They knew it could go terribly wrong; they also knew it could go terribly right. Which did they fear more?”
Unlike members of his own party, Democratic senators were not getting the influence, home-state goodies, White House invites and Congressional pork that goes with being in the majority. The Democrats had learned not to trust Mr. Bush before the Twin Towers and the Pentagon burst into flame on Sept. 11.
A bewildered Chafee, seeking an explanation, turned to an unnamed Democratic senator who opposed the war but was well-respected by his party’s leaders. This senator tells Chafee “in confidence” what concerned the Democrats. “They are afraid the war will be over as fast as Gulf One. Few will die, the oil will flow and gasoline will cost 90 cents a gallon.”
They weren't worried about the costs of war, but the "costs of success." It's truly unbelievable to watch how these guys think.
UPDATE: There's talk that Harry Reid is holding up the stimulus bill for a week or so, until after Super Tuesday. A brief glimmer of hope. Max Baucus appears to be talking tough on this, particularly in reference to allowing seniors to gather the benefits of these rebates. Looks like a political strategy more than anything, however. But at least it's playing tough and forcing votes.
The lightning speed of the Mukasey confirmation on the floor of the Senate is puzzling everybody, particularly the Presidential candidates, all of whom were caught flat-footed. Greg Sargent did some digging, and finds out this:
According to sources inside and outside the Democratic leadership, Harry Reid allowed a vote on Mukasey because in exchange the Republican leadership agreed to allow a vote on the big Defense Appropriations Bill, which contains $459 billion in military spending but doesn't fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reid had wanted to get this bill passed before the end of this week, and in fact, the defense bill did come up for a vote late last night and was passed after the Mukasey vote.
One key reason Dem leaders wanted this defense approps bill passed, sources tell me, is that they wanted to be able to argue that they had sent a bill to the President funding the military, if not the war itself. The idea was that doing this would allow them to protect themselves in the days ahead when the battle over Iraq funding heats up and Republicans inevitably charge that Dems are refusing to fund the troops.
"This lets us argue, `Hey, we just sent $450 billion to the military," one leadership source tells me.
I want to pull my hair out.
For the last time, it DOESN'T MATTER what you can argue, Republicans are going to call you anti-American troop-haters, and the general public ISN'T GOING TO CARE. This has been proven for about three years going. Getting to make a symbolic argument is useless. The public isn't going to give a shit until you stop the war; that's all they want. And the Republicans aren't going to give a shit, period. No matter how many times you sit on command, they're not going to pat you on the head.
And in the process, you just allowed a guy who won't say waterboarding is torture to be the top law enforcement official in the country.
It's distressing that this Presidential election could turn on the nativist, fearmongering issue of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, around which there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. I'm one of the many in California who has been in an accident with someone who didn't have insurance (I didn't check papers so I don't know if he was "illegal"). The impact on premiums and basic public safety is severe. The guy smashed me into the sidewalk and about 10 inches away from a light pole. If granting licenses means we can track those who can drive and keep those who can't off the road, then there are social benefits to that.
Senator Clinton initially gave a good answer to this, but when challenged by Chris Dodd, who gave one of those positions that sounds noble but actually is more driven by fear and nativism, she suddenly got an image of a Rudy Giuliani press release shouting "HILLARY HEARTS ILLEGALS" in her head or something, and decided she couldn't endorse the plan fully. So after a couple minutes of saying it was a good idea and defending it, she couldn't endorse it.
Forgive me if I see that as a microcosm of what would happen in a Clinton presidency. She takes a strong position on the issue, then reads the focus groups, or just imagines them, and instead of doing the hard work of educating the public, she stops short and hedges because of perceived political costs. That describes her husband's presidency in many ways, and while it was a hell of a lot better than 8 years of George W. Bush, it's inappropriate for the unique moment we face today. I'd rather go with someone who thinks like this.
Edwards was absolutely right to point out Clinton's answer on the driver's license issue. She spoke on both sides of it in two minutes flat. It's one thing to make an accusation that Clinton uses doubletalk, it's quite another to have it come up in the middle of the debate. Clinton displayed for the viewers exactly what the rest of the field, particularly Edwards and Obama, was saying about her the whole night. That was powerful. And it ought to be the takeaway from this debate.
I thought Clinton was under duress the whole night, but she largely fought it off. She defended her position on Iran - I don't agree with it, but she defended it - and gave some good answers in the middle of the debate. But by ending up on every side of the driver's license issue, she proved Edwards and Obama's point. She came off like a slick politician. And she recalled the worst of the Clinton years instead of the best, as she has been doing throughout the campaign.
It has the chance to be a pivotal moment if the press can get over giggling about how Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO, ignoring the three times he called for impeachment, of course.
Edwards ... challenged her assertion that she was putting pressure on the administration when she voted for Kyl-Lieberman. "So the way do that was to vote Yes on a resolution that looks like it was written literally by the neocons?" Edwards said in disbelief.
Her answer on Kyl-Lieberman is incoherent, but at least it was an answer. The driver's license thing was a total implosion.
Here's something to make your eyes bleed next time you think about our great victory in 2006. One of those winners was Dianne Feinstein (D-Establishment). And here's what she had to say about the President after sharing a plane with him to California to survey wildfire damage, apparently a reward for shepherding through the confirmation of Leslie Southwick to the federal bench.
With a 7:40 a.m. Thursday departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Feinstein found herself seated in the rear of the plane with a handful of Southern California congressional representatives. After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and French toast, Bush popped back for what the senator described as a frank two-hour conversation, mostly about foreign policy [...]
“I found the discussion extraordinarily positive,” Feinstein said. “I came away with a very different view about him.” [...]
As for the president’s performance on the ground?
“It was a wonderful thing to see, to be candid,” Feinstein said. “I saw a warm, caring human being.”
As the link above shows, during the 2006 election Feinstein was talking about removing all US forces from Iraq and serious Constitutional crises. But when allowing a far-right loon to serve on the federal bench gets you all the Presidential mints and fluffy pillows you want, why bother being anything but gracious? After all, everyone in Washington is so nice and personable!
This week, we learned that the Democratic leadership considers their strongest base of supporters nothing more than pests.
Though opposed to the war herself, Pelosi has for months been a target of an antiwar movement that believes she hasn't done enough. Cindy Sheehan has announced a symbolic challenge to Pelosi in California's 8th Congressional District. And the speaker is seething.
"We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow," Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their "passion," Pelosi called it "a waste of time" for them to target Democrats. "They are advocates," she said. "We are leaders."
In other words, don't question your leaders.
The leaders also ran to the New York Times to plead their case, which they happily lapped up as it plays into a narrative of Dems divided that the other side has been pushing since approximately 1856. They call Pelosi's style "responsible leadership." There's nothing responsible with giving the President a blank check for war and carte blanche to spy on Americans.
I've actually been more forgiving than most bloggers about what the Congress has done, there's actually an impressive list of accomplishments on lobbying reform, education, the minimum wage, and instituting the 9/11 Commission recommendations. But the tone, the whole "shut up and respect your elders" as a means to silence citizens who the Congress is supposed to be working for, is beyond the pale. And then there's this.
District 4 spans Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. U.S. Rep. Albert Wynn (D-Dist. 4) is running for his ninth term in the Feb. 12 primary and is also facing off against Fort Washington attorney Donna Edwards, who lost to Wynn by just three points last year [...]
Meanwhile, Wynn campaign manager Lori Sherwood said Wynn raised about $160,000 in the last quarter, and has $400,000 still on hand.
She said the campaign plans to bank over $1 million, and that a fundraiser scheduled next month in Montgomery County with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should help them rake in the dough. Sherwood said the details of that event are still being worked out.
Al Wynn has sold out this party over and over again, and in the last primary against Donna Edwards, his thugs beat up her supporters at a debate. Yet he's an incumbent, so powerful forces will stick together, I guess. Edwards is a true progressive that would actually help her further her goals. But as I said, incumbents stick together.
The establishment refuses to stay out of these primary battles which are good for democracy. Well, fine. We'll just outraise Nancy's little fundraiser and make the whole thing backfire. At some point this will turn around. But it's a long fight.
It really is a throwback kind of autumn: OJ's in the news, the Phillies are in the playoffs, and the no nukes movement is back.
Make no mistake: we must always be prepared to use force to protect America. But the best way to keep America safe is not to threaten terrorists with nuclear weapons – it’s to keep nuclear weapons and nuclear materials away from terrorists. That’s why I’ve worked with Republican Senator Dick Lugar to pass a law accelerating our pursuit of loose nuclear materials. And that’s why I’ll lead a global effort to secure all loose nuclear materials during my first term in office.
But we need to do much more. We need to change our nuclear policy and our posture, which is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union – a country that doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan and North Korea have joined the club of nuclear-armed nations, and Iran is knocking on the door. More nuclear weapons and more nuclear-armed nations mean more danger to us all.
Here’s what I’ll say as President: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.
There's a slight hedge here (and rightly so) that Obama wouldn't disarm unilaterally, but a President with the courage and fortitude to stand up and call for an end to the spectre of nuclear weapons is one I'd like to see. It should be noted that Edwards called for this at some point as well.
What I liked even more about Obama's speech was this part:
As Ted Sorensen’s old boss President Kennedy once said – “the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war – and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears.” In the fall of 2002, those deaf ears were in Washington. They belonged to a President who didn’t tell the whole truth to the American people; who disdained diplomacy and bullied allies; and who squandered our unity and the support of the world after 9/11.
But it doesn’t end there. Because the American people weren’t just failed by a President – they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress – a coequal branch of government – that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let’s be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.
Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren’t really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debating in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That’s the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it? [...]
We thought we learned this lesson. After Vietnam, Congress swore it would never again be duped into war, and even wrote a new law -- the War Powers Act -- to ensure it would not repeat its mistakes. But no law can force a Congress to stand up to the President. No law can make Senators read the intelligence that showed the President was overstating the case for war. No law can give Congress a backbone if it refuses to stand up as the co-equal branch the Constitution made it.
That's a direct attack on the Democratic establishment who helped sell and authorize this failed war. Obama gets some credit for standing up against the war when it was unpopular, but he hasn't exactly led a movement while in the Senate to end our involvement in Iraq. His moves have been cool and measured. However, this is a very bold stance, and it does sharpen the differences between a Clinton dynasty and a new direction in an Obama Administration.
"In a world with terrorists trying to acquire nuclear technology and with Iran and Syria threatening their neighbors, it is difficult to comprehend that a major presidential candidate wants to eliminate our nuclear arsenal. This is yet another example of Senator Obama playing to the fringe elements of his party and failing to understand the threat America faces," says (RNC) spokesman Danny Diaz.
The plan Obama has signed on to was drafted by those fringe extremists George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn.
Nonproliferation would be a great legacy of a Presidential term in office. It certainly would be better than endless caution.
Here's something that'll make you puke - Cokie Roberts this morning described Hillary Clinton's visit to all five Sunday morning chat shows as "the full Ginsburg." It's so named after Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, who I guess was the first to initiate this practice. The takeaway for me was that this is a tactic solely designed to represent yourself to the establishment. The Clinton campaign openly talked about it as a way to show herself as the front-runner (as if voters in Iowa and New Hampshire pick who gets on the talk shows). And sure enough, Hillary Clinton said a lot of establishment things, unlike that deeply unserious rhetoric that the war is a disaster and must end now.
The leading Democratic contender for the presidency was asked whether she'd pull out all troops from Iraq in her first term.
She declined.
"You know, I'm not going to get into hypotheticals and make pledges, because I don't know what I'm going to inherit," Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) told ABC's George Stephanopoulos, according to the New York Times. "I don't know and neither do any of us know what will be the situation in the region. How much more aggressive will Iran have become? What will be happening in the Middle East?
Anyone so cautious as to not aver that troops will leave Iraq FIVE YEARS from now, at which point they will have been there NINE YEARS, isn't worth an ounce of support. Clinton is blurring her strategy on Iraq by saying she will end the war, but leaves herself this kind of ut by saying she won't answer any questions about troop reductions, which is kind of a pre-req to ending the war. In actuality, her plan, or at least the plans of her closest advisers, call for keeping as many as 60,000 troops in Iraq long into the future, which is actually the worst option, because less troops to try and manage a problem that more troops couldn't handle would be nothing more than targets. It's time to either go big or go home, and since going big would essentially presage a permanent occupation, and occupations almost never work, it's time to go home. But that's not a serious enough sentiment, because it would mean that these Village elders who enthusiastically backed the Iraq war were wrong in the first place. So we have to strike the bipartisan compromise of pretending to leave and instead keeping the imperial project going permanently.
This is right in the wheelhouse of Hillary Clinton. This is why George Bush trusts her to do his bidding in Iraq once he leaves office.
Karl Rove may not think much of Hillary Rodham Clinton's chances of winning the White House, but it sounds like President Bush is less sanguine. At an off-the-record lunch a week ago, Bush expressed admiration for her tenacity in the campaign. And he left some in the room with the impression that he thinks she will win the election and has been thinking about how to turn over the country to her.
The topic came up when Bush invited a group of morning and evening news anchors and Sunday show hosts to join him in the executive mansion's family dining room a few hours before he delivered his nationally televised address on Iraq last week. Bush made no explicit election predictions, according to some in the room, but clearly thought Clinton would win the Democratic nomination and talked in a way that seemed to suggest he expects her to succeed him - and will continue his Iraq policy if she does.
As Bush was describing his thinking about Iraq and the future, he indicated he wants to use his final 16 months to stabilize Iraq enough and redefine the U.S. mission there so that the next president, even a Democrat, would feel politically able to keep a smaller but long-term presence in the country. The broadcasters were not allowed to directly quote the president, but they were allowed to allude to his thinking and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News later cited the analogy of Dwight D. Eisenhower essentially adopting President Harry S. Truman's foreign policy despite the Republican general's 1952 campaign statements.
"He had kind of a striking analogy," Stephanopoulos said of Bush on air a few hours after the lunch. "He believes that whoever replaces him, like General Eisenhower when he replaced Harry Truman, may criticize the president's policy during the campaign, but will likely continue much of it in office."
This is also what informs Clinton's completely hawkish position on Israel, with its claim that Israel must have an undivided Jerusalem, which not even the BUSH SOLUTION includes. What's so interesting is how she's become an establishment figure despite being hated by the establishment. They saw the Clintons as interlopers and thoroughly unsuited to their social circles (and that's what this is about). Yet she shares the same centrist, mustn't upset the children establishment mindset. And yes, she condemned the MoveOn ad and had no problem doing so.
By contrast, Bill Richardson, who understands that a longshot campaign needs to heighten differences, is pushing a swift and urgent removal of all troops from Iraq, combat and noncombat.
I especially like what Stoller has to say about Richardson having the courage of his convictions to know that he's accomplished a lot on the foreign policy stage and he can trust his own judgment. Everyone else is looking to some time in 2010 when what might happen in Iraq could lead to some drop in imaginary poll numbers. It's the worst kind of leadership, worrying about something that might happen two years from now instead of laying out the conditions that would take that possibility off the table. I am not a Richardson supporter but this is an important debate for America, and the Democratic Party, to have. And it won't be had with Hillary Clinton as long as she is off doing the full Ginsberg and air-kissing the DC establishment.
(I do think the ad is unfair to Edwards, who is much closer to Richardson's position than anyone else on the Democratic side. But it is up to him to say that forcefully.)
There are a few encouraging signs on the Iraq front. Harry Reid has called the end of the surge bait-and-switch unacceptable, Nancy Pelosi judged it as a path to 10 more years of war, the Democratic National Committee is saying time's up, and even Levin and Reed, authors of the toothless Levin-Reed Amendment, are calling bullshit on the President's so-called plan, which is hope and nothing more.
But what will they DO about it? That's the key question. And two of our Presidentials are aware of where this is leading: a lot of talk without action.
"Some, like Senator Obama, have said we should only 'begin' to end this war now. Senator Obama would withdraw only 1-2 combat brigades a month between now and the end of next year, which for the next several months could essentially mimic the president's own plans to withdraw 30,000 troops by next summer...
"Enough is enough. We don't need to 'begin' to end the war now. What we need to do now is actually end the war. This is about right and wrong. Our young men and women are dying every day for a failed policy. Every member of Congress who believes this war must end, from Senators Obama and Clinton to Senator Warner, has a moral responsibility to use every tool available to them, including a filibuster, to force the president to change course. Congress must stand firm and say: No timetable, no funding. No excuses."
"I was disappointed that Senator Obama's thoughts on Iraq today didn't include a firm, enforceable deadline for redeployment, and dismayed that neither he nor Senator Clinton will give an unequivocal answer on whether they would support a measure if it didn't have such an enforceable deadline.
"It is clear to me - especially after yesterday's testimony - that half-measures aren't going to stop this President or end our involvement in this civil war. I thought it was clear to Senators Obama and Clinton as well after they finally came around to supporting the Feingold-Reid measure and voting against a blank-check supplemental spending bill this spring. If 'enough was enough' then, why isn't it after the bloodiest summer of the war?
"Senator Obama has a gift for soaring rhetoric, but, on this critical issue, we need to know the substance of his position with specificity. Without tying a date certain to funding how does he plan to enforce his call for an immediate redeployment?
Hope is not a plan on either side of this debate. Obama's people and Hillary's people send out staffers to write white papers all they want, but until they respond with legitimate action to end the war instead of hopping up and down like Daffy Duck when they get played on the supplemental again, it's useless. We all know that no legislation need be passed to end this war. Jack Cafferty explained it very simply on The Situation Room today. Without a bill for more funding, either the troops come home or the President commits an impeachable offense by stealing money to hold the troops hostage in Iraq. He explained it very simply. The Speaker of the House can hold up any legislation in the House by herself, and 40 Senators can do the same in the Senate. I truly believe that the Democrats think the American people are so ignorant, and that they have so little faith in their own communication skills, that they couldn't make the same claim.
Pass a supplemental bill with a withdrawal deadline. Let the GOP filibuster. If it comes to the point where the troops are being harmed from lack of funding, pass one-month supplementals -- keep forcing Republicans in vote after vote to stand with Bush and his hated war.
If the bigger supplemental, the one with teeth, passes, let Bush veto it. Send it back to him, again and again. All the while, keep the one-month supplementals going to ensure our troops have everything they need.
Tell the American people -- we will support the troops by bringing them home safe and sound to their families, and we will fund them appropriately every step of the way. Ignore what Joe Klein and David Broder say. They don't speak for, or to, the American masses.
THIS is what the American people want. They don't want another blank check to Bush for $200 billion more. They want binding legislation to end this thing. The polls are clear. It's morally justified.
Actually all you have to do is not support any plan. But this one is best matched with political reality.
The political blogosphere grew up watching a series of extreme far-right assaults on democracy, from the Clinton impeachment to the stolen election of 2000 to the hijacking of the tragedy of 9/11 into an unnecessary war of choice. We watched as our elected representatives in Washington did literally nothing to stop these predations, and indeed led the Party on a slow road to marginalization and defeat. This is the line in the sand. They have one last chance to restore the trust of the American people. We do not need an elite establishment that is too cozy with incrementalism and will avoid noth the big changes we need and the fortitude to stop the Republicans. If the Democratic leadershipe in DC will not stand up for the will of the American people we will stand up for it by running primary challenges and overtaking these seats. 2008 is going to be a bad year for incumbents, particularly if the gridlock on Iraq continues. Democrats were given a mandate and they shouldn't be afraid of what pundits will think by acting on it.
The House of Representatives, having seen multiple negative assessments of the success of the escalation, polls showing support for withdrawal in the 60-70% range, etc., etc., is going to pretty much give up on any attempt to get our troops home.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) came out on Wednesday in favor of holding a vote on a bipartisan Iraqi withdrawal bill. Meanwhile, the party’s left wing renewed calls for a pullout and announced a new campaign to block funds for arming and training the Iraq Security Forces.
The bipartisan legislation, authored by Reps. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) and John Tanner (D-Tenn.), would order Bush to draft plans to withdraw from Iraq but not require them to be implemented. Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.) and two other Republicans have signed on as cosponsors.
“I would like to see us move forward on that,” Hoyer said. “The president ought to come up with a plan for withdrawal.”
You're the Majority Leader of the House and you don't think the Pentagon has withdrawal plans? Who cares if there's a plan when there's no need for it to be implemented? So you can feel good on the way to your cocktail parties?
Kos, a new convert to the cut the funding plan as the only way to end the war, is righteously angry:
Here's the bottom line -- the voters elected a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate in 2006 to get the f' out of Iraq. Democrats don't need to compromise with Republicans. If there's no money, there's no way to continue the war. And with Democrats in total control of the House, and with the ability to filibuster any funding bill in the Senate, our side can hole up any bill that doesn't do what WE want to do.
Republicans have to compromise with us. We have the electoral mandate, not the unpopular Republicans and certainly not Mr. 25%. And the compromise is 1) we give you the money, and 2) you give us the timetable. We can even compromise on #2, working together to figure out just how long troops ought to remain (from, say, six months to just before Bush leaves office), depending on what military leaders on the ground say would be the safest, most efficient way to get them out.
But telling Bush he doesn't have to do shit for his $200 billion other than come up with a "plan" isn't a "compromise", it's capitulation. And, by giving Republicans a free vote on a paper tiger bill, they even get to go home and campaign on their efforts to "end the war".
And our leaders aren't doing a damn thing about it. Chris Dodd is trying.
The New York Times reported earlier today that Democrats are considering whether to offer a "compromise" amendment on Iraq to the upcoming Defense Department Authorization bill.
This "compromise," the Levin-Reed amendment, would reportedly establish a non-binding "goal" -- as opposed to a firm deadline -- for withdrawing our combat troops from Iraq.
The net result would be another blank check for President Bush.
Senator Dodd said it best earlier today, "I cannot and will not support any measure that does not have a firm and enforceable deadline to complete the redeployment of combat troops from Iraq. Rather than picking up votes, by removing the deadline to get our troops out of Iraq you have lost this Democrat's vote."
This is a depressing day because the Democrats are squandering their mandate, and there is precious little leadership on this side of the aisle apart from Sen. Dodd and former Sen. Edwards. They'll scream about not having the votes when they don't need more than 40 votes in the Senate to block any funding bill. But they don't have the cajones to lead, still afraid of what the President might say about them like a bunch of 9 year-olds. Meanwhile, the President has to withdraw 30,000 troops next year and now he'll get credit for bringing our boys home when it was inevitable anyway. Meanwhile more die every month.
This puts the Presidential election in severe jeopardy. I don't get the sense that our frontrunners are ready or willing to lead. (Edwards and Dodd excepted)
I always thought that this clique of Foreign Policy Scholars, who pay no attention to facts or dissenting opinions, was a new phenomenon... until I saw this (h/t Attaturk):
This is from a film called War Made Easy, from the makers of Hijacking Catastrophe, another excellent film. The featured speaker is Wayne Morse, Senator from the great state of Oregon, and much of it is from a Face the Nation episode circa 1964. Morse was one of only two Senators, both Democrats, to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And in so doing, he went up against a political and foreign policy establishment that is eerily similar to where we are today. The Face the Nation exchange is absolutely fascinating, with Morse challenging the entire notion that a President has unique and untrammeled authority in matters of foreign policy. The journalist who questions him considers this a highly unserious answer, and makes no attempt to hide his disdain. For those who can't see the YouTube, here's a transcript:
Questioner: Senator, the Constitution gives to the President of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy-
Morse: Couldn't be more wrong! You couldn't have made a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy, that foreign policy belongs to the President of the United States, that's nonsense-
Questioner: To whom does it belong, then, Senator?
Morse: It belongs to the American people, and our Constitutional fathers made it very, very, clear.
Questioner: Where does the President fit into this in the repsonsibility scale.
Morse: What I am saying is under our Constitution all our President is, is the administrator of the people's foreign policy. Those are his prerogatives, and I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy-
Questioner: You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.
Morse: Why do you say that? Why, you're a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of statement. I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them.
Questioner: It isn't a lack of faith, Senator-
Morse: And my charge against my government is we're not giving the American people the facts.
This was well over 40 years ago, when we had a President using a trumped-up event to take the country to war, and Sen. Wayne Morse was a lonely soul challenging his government to tell the truth, to trust the American people, to live up to the ideals of democracy. For this he was dismissed as extremely silly. The next time he was up for election, he lost - to Bob Packwood. He would never return to the US Senate.
This idea that the people have a say in the workings of their government clearly irritated the journalist, presumably a Washington journalist, doing the questioning. His belief in the oligarchy of self-appointed elites represents an insidious trait in American political culture that we see to this day. It is not of much interest to the Beltway that this President is arrogating extreme amounts of executive power unto himself, because they see the self-aggrandizement of power as a noble goal. They believe that government is run best by themselves and them alone; that the foreign policy "consensus" is one made in the cocktail parties and right-leaning think tanks of the capital rahter than in the country at large. And this is nothing new, as we have seen.
This is the truly dangerous outcome of vesting power in the hands of people who do nothing but talk to each other and overlook each others biases. It's been a problem in this country almost since the beginning of the Republic. The Internet and blogs afford an opportunity for other voices to connect and mass against this deeply wrongheaded, groupthought, expansionist view of the world. But it won't be easy. Just look what happened to Sen. Morse.
I just participated in a discussion with thereisnospoon and hekebolos from Daily Kos about the terms "moderate" and "centrist" and how they played out in yesterday's debate on Meet the Press between Markos Moulitsas and Harold Ford (there's a good writeup of that here). You can listen to the discussion via podcast over at Political Nexus.
I thought Markos did a great job against a fairly stacked deck. David Gregory (sitting in for Tim Russert) framed the debate as an ideological battle between liberals as represented by the blogosphere and centrists as represented by Ford. It was an imprecise way of describing it. Markos himself is pretty moderate, and the opinion on the blogosphere ranges over a whole series of policy stances. There are plenty of "moderate" Democrats, as defined by an ideological stance on policy positions that is in the middle of the extremes on the left and the right, that have earned the support of the blogosphere. "Centrist" is actually a code word that means the type of person determined to preserve the status quo and suck up to the Beltway establishment elites, the Broders and Ignatiuses and Slaughters and Quinns of the world. This "centrism" is more about blurring the lines between the parties completely and arguing for "bipartisan solutions," which really means "shut up all dissent and do what we, your sensible elite overlords, tell you to do." Adversarial democracy demands vigorous debate in public so that a well-informed citizenry can make choices between a range of alternatives. "Centrists" do not want the people to have those choices, and would rather make the choices for them. The debate between the DLC and the blogosphere for the soul of the Democratic Party is not one about liberal versus moderate; it's about inside versus outside, about a few oligarchs versus a panoply of voices.
I also think that this insistence by the elites who rule our discourse for "sensible bipartisan solutions" ends up narrowing the bands of opinion, at least on the left. The belief from these elites is that we live in a fundamentally conservative country where "real Americans" can only be found in the center of the nation, literally and figuratively, and that voices on the far left represent some sort of fringe element instead of the mainstream of America on many issues (health care, getting out of Iraq, etc.). The nutjobs on the right can literally advocate anything and it isn't met with as much fervor, because they are typically arguing for an entrenchment of the status quo. Where anyone argues for REAL change, the elites see them as unserious and silly and unfit for public discourse (see Kucinich, Dennis).
It was a pretty good discussion, go have a listen at Political Nexus.
UPDATE: Thereisnospoon has further thoughts on this here. And yes, Harold Ford did make a real cheap shot calling Daily Kos an anti-Semitic site, then turned around and said he would appear at the NextGen Yearly Kos Convention. Harold Ford: pro anti-Semitic sites! (and to be clear, Daily Kos is most certainly NOT that.)
So I guess Bill Richardson really messed up at last night's Human Rights Campaign/LOGO debate on LGBT issues. He said homosexuality was a choice and really didn't do a good job of damage control. But I want to highlight Hillary Clinton's answer on the subject of gay rights, because I think it's not only damaging, but illustrative of how she'd run her Presidency (at peril to the progressive movement):
I have to say that Hillary Clinton probably didn't win over any new fans tonight; those who support her probably remain in her court. While at ease, at times she was condescending and impersonal, communicating a message that the LGBT community needs to be patient.
"If I were sitting where you're sitting, with all you have gone through in the last 14 years, I'm sure I would feel exactly the same way because, you know, not only did you bravely come out, but you've had health challenges and so much else. And so time can't go by slowly. You want things to move as quickly as possible, which I, you know, understand and wish could happen as well."
Clinton still has this defensive position which tells gays and lesbians to wait their turn until the country catches up, instead of forcing the kind of change needed for the country to catch up. If we waited for civil rights there would still be whites-only drinking fountains in Alabama. It's absurd to continue to look at today instead of planning the future. Hillary Clinton is simply not a leader. She's a finger-in-the-wind establishment politician who will be very competent, but will only push change as far as she believes the most cautious and conservative Democrat is willing to go.
That's not what we need. Because you can bet that the Republicans will push and push and push without giving a damn about public opinion. They'll loudly suggest that the public is with them. And unless we on the other side offer a competing narrative, nothing meaningful will get done.
I agree that Republicans are a trashed brand and that the country is moving further and further away from them. But this is only an opportunity, not a fait accompli, for Democrats. And Democrats that don't stand up and offer principled resistance to the status quo will eventually lead us right back where we were in 2002.
Things are looking extremely bleak for the GOP pirates, and it's fun watching the rats jump off the ship. Now all we have to do is stand for what we believe in and do the difficult work of holding ourselves accountable, standing in the way of Mr. 23% for the remainder of his term, and passing legislation that will benefit the American People for a change, rather than GOP monied interests.
The more I read from Hillary Clinton, the more I see her as the poster child for the 90s-era cautious competence that will simply keep us running on a treadmill rather than changing the paradigm.
(I'm particularly shocked that my state Senator Sheila Kuehl, one of the more prominent gay politicians in America, has endorsed Hillary and given creedence to this "art of the possible" mentality that will put us in stasis for eight years. Yes, politics is the art of the possible, but somehow this worldview suggests that you give up your side of the argument before the battle is even joined. This is why we get crap like the FISA bill passed. The negotiating skills of the establishment Democrats are terrible.)
UPDATE: This quote from Markos is what I'm driving at, although I'm not sure he totally believes it:
"We're proud Democrats, confident and secure in the belief that we're on the right side of history and Americans will side with us if we can only get our message out. The DLC thinks this is a conservative country and we can only win if we blur distinctions with the GOP."
Welcome to Hillaryland.
UPDATE II: I'm completely aware, and ashamed, that the position of all the major Democratic candidates on the issue of gay marriage is anti-gay marriage but pro-civil unions, and that their position is for nakedly political reasons. But I see this pattern for Clinton across a number of political issues, while other top candidates have shown a willingness to buck conventional wisdom in far more direct ways.
If you don't agree with Barack Obama that, when faced with the resurgence of Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in northwest Pakistan, we should not defer to Pervez Musharraf if he demurred with a go-ahead for air strike against actionable terrorist targets, then you don't believe in the current policy of this country, as Joe Biden rightly suggested last night. This notion that Obama said he was going to invade Pakistan is nonsense. I can see, when the issue moved for no good reason into the area of nuclear weapons, why people would get pissed off.
Twenty years ago, everybody in this country (give or take a baker’s million blazing nutjobs) understood that the use of nuclear weapons was a cataclysmic, final act of madness, a step towards global suicide to be avoided at (almost) any cost. Now, absent an enemy with any real ability to do us harm, the idea that nuclear weapons should be available to use on caves full of crazy idiots armed with weapons that were the height of military sophistication approximately seventy years ago, this idea is the conventional wisdom? Of the Democratic Party? The party that ostensibly wants to end the war in Iraq? Where have you gone, Robert McNamara / A nation turns its loony eyes to you, doot doot doo.
Indeed. And it should be mentioned that nukes were thrown into the discussion by reporters, and it certainly wasn't the impetus of Obama. It should also be mentioned that nobody in the Congress on the Democratic side has done more to stop nuclear proliferation than Barack Obama. I understand that some in Pakistan are protesting the notion of military action whatsoever, and are claiming that Obama's comments weaken the war on terror. And even Republicans are calling his statements "dangerous" (these are the guys that all agreed on tactical nuclear strikes against Iran).
I'm sorry, but I don't agree. Pakistan is not a reliable ally so long as they're allowing safe havens in their own country. I believe these safe havens threaten the sovereignty Pakistan itself, as we've seen from the series of attacks over the past month. Obama spoke softly and carried a big stick, and preferred to do it in public rather than behind closed doors as Hillary Clinton would prefer ("there are some things you just don't say"). Samantha Power, who I repsect greatly, wrote a long note to this effect, framing the Pakistan situation as one in which Obama challenged the stale conventional wisdom that has brought us to the foreign policy disaster we now face. Obama didn't create this mess; he didn't support Musharraf's peace treaty with the Taliban; he didn't look the other way as wealthy Saudis funded terror (and he certainly didn't offer them billions of dollars in weapons for their trouble). He simply is trying to deal with solutions to the problems as they exist, and in DC this is considered something too brash and fresh for words.
Over the last few weeks, Barack Obama has once again taken positions that challenge Washington’s conventional wisdom on foreign policy. And once again, pundits and politicians have leveled charges that are now bankrupt of credibility and devoid of the new ideas that the American people desperately want.
On each point in the last few weeks, Barack Obama has called for a break from a broken way of doing things. On each point, he has brought fresh strategic thinking and common sense that break with the very conventional wisdom that has led us into Iraq [...]
Terrorist Sanctuaries: For years, we have given President Musharraf hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, while deferring to his cautious judgment on how to take out high-level al Qaeda targets – including, most likely, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Here is the result:
* Bin Laden and Zawahiri – two men with direct responsibility for 9/11– remain at large. * Al Qaeda has trained and deployed hundreds of fighters worldwide from its sanctuary in northwest Pakistan. * Afghanistan is far less secure because the Taliban can strike across the border, and then return to safety in Pakistan.
By any measure, this strategy has not worked. Conventional wisdom would have us defer to Musharraf in perpetuity. Barack Obama wants to turn the page. If Musharraf is willing to go after the terrorists and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a base of operations, Obama would give him all of the support he needs. But Obama made clear that as President, if he had actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan – and the Pakistanis continued to refuse to act against terrorists known to be behind attacks on American civilians – then he will use highly targeted force to do so. Barack Obama’s judgment is right; the conventional wisdom is wrong. We need a new era that moves beyond the conventional wisdom that has brought us over-reliance on an unreliable dictator in Pakistan and an occupation of Iraq. Nuclear Attacks on Terrorist Targets: For years, Washington’s conventional wisdom has held that candidates for President are judged not by their wisdom, but rather by their adherence to hackneyed rhetoric that make little sense beyond the Beltway. When asked whether he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Barack Obama gave the sensible answer that nuclear force was not necessary, and would kill too many civilians. Conventional wisdom held this up as a sign of inexperience. But if experience leads you to make gratuitous threats about nuclear use – inflaming fears at home and abroad, and signaling nuclear powers and nuclear aspirants that using nuclear weapons is acceptable behavior, it is experience that should not be relied upon.
Barack Obama’s judgment is right. Conventional wisdom is wrong. It is wrong to propose that we would drop nuclear bombs on terrorist training camps in Pakistan, potentially killing tens of thousands of people and sending America’s prestige in the world to a level that not even George Bush could take it. We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes.
I think we're starting to see a realignment in the Democratic Presidential primary with a Washington insider/Washington outsider split. I admire and respect Chris Dodd, but he and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are clearly on one side of this, wedded to conventional thinking, while Barack Obama and John Edwards are on the other. Richardson is outside of this debate and under the radar, Kucinich is to the ideological left, and Gravel is on his porch and wants you off his property.
Biden was clearly the defender of Washington convention wisdom, the David Broder candidate, at last night's AFL-CIO debate. He took shots at Obama and Edwards at various points for their lack of experience. This exchange was typical:
Throughout the 90-minute debate, each sought to show superior labor credentials, producing one memorable scrape between Edwards and Biden.
"It is fine to come up on this stage and give a nice talk," said Edwards, who is competing hard for union endorsements. "The question is: Who's been with you in the crunch? In the last two years, 200 times, I have walked picket lines. I have helped organize thousands of workers, with 23 national unions."
Minutes later, Biden issued a withering putdown, saying he has walked with and fought on behalf of labor for more than three decades, often in difficult circumstances. "That's the measure of whether we'll be with you when it's tough," he said. "Not when you're running for president in the last two years, marching on 20 or 30 or 50 picket lines."
Right, it's not tough to stand with labor when the Bush Administration is pushing back against unions at an historic rate. Apparently organizing thousands of workers is the wrong thing to do. Biden's actually demeaning it. Somehow I don't think that's a winning answer. Nor is this ideological blind spot that says that only bipartisan solutions will pass. Seems like we've had a relentlessly unipartisan President accomplish a good bit of what he's wanted over that past 6 years. And it reveals a crucial disconnect between the Biden mindset and that of the country outside of DC.
If there is anything that has been apparent since the Democratic takeover of Congress, it’s that many and probably most of the current Republican members of Congress will NEVER work with Democrats for the good of the country. Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, the majority of Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that they don’t care about the good of the country. Grover Norquist is inadvertently one of the most honest of conservatives, and when he referred to bipartisanship as date rape, he wasn’t revealing just his own personal view, he was describing the mindset of much of the Republican Congressional caucus and it’s allies in think tanks, among campaign hacks and activists, and in a sizeable chunk of its electoral base.
It’s a realization many of us had come to long ago. It’s one of the reasons many of us ended up on progressive blogs, the knowledge that George W Bush, his allies in Congress and the people who push them in to power will use unscrupulous means to attain, maintain and exercise power. They know they have to conceal their unscrupulousness from the public. While the Republican party has veered farther and farther to the right, the American people haven’t really budged. In fact, on individual issues, the American public is more liberal today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and far more liberal than it was when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which provided the mandate to enact our major civil rights legislation and the most major extension of the social welfare state since the New Deal and World War II [...]
Senator Biden, please look around, and realize that the solutions to our nation’s woes, the answers to our challenges, aren’t bipartisan. The involvement of people looking for solutions and to meet our challenges could eventually be bipartisan, but current evidence suggest otherwise. No more than four House Republicans have voted for any of the most meaningful pieces of legislation dealing with Iraq. Only four Republicans have joined the Senate Democrats on Iraq. The Republican Study Group in the House engages in delaying tactics almost every day; to see one reason why the House—which has passed significant legislation—isn’t doing more, look at how many bullshit procedural votes the Republican offered last week. In the Senate, the Republicans continue to use the filibuster and cloture votes to bottle up almost everything the Democrats try to accomplish. The Republicans go along with just about everything Bush and Cheney shove down our nation’s throat.
And it's in this category where Hillary Clinton is lining up. Her starpower and a fond look back at her husband has propelled her far out in front of the field so far. But the true colors are starting to show. She's starting to take hits for having a top aide whose PR firm includes a union-busting shop. The Yearly Kos debate was memorable for her only through her stirring defense of those poor, downtrodden Washington lobbyists. And last night's debate offered more missteps.
I'm watching the AFL-CIO debate, and Clinton has made some more major mistakes that open her up to charges of being an elitist and out-of-touch insider. In the argument over Pakistan, Clinton just said that if you are running for President you "shouldn't say everything you think", and got booed.
Earlier, she had fleshed out her opinion on Iraq. While outlining her plan for the country, most of it was focused on withdrawal, but there was an important caveat.
But if it is a possibility that Al Qaeda would stay in Iraq I think we need to stay focused on trying to keep them on the run as we currently are doing in Anbar province.
Anbar is tactically meaningless, as Al Qaeda has left the region and gone elsewhere in Iraq due to tribal pressure. That Clinton is saying that Anbar province is an example of the success of the surge suggests a serious lapse in judgment. She has learned nothing. I have heard that O'Hanlon is an advisor of hers, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. She is making the liberal hawk argument for remaining in Iraq, or even, supporting the surge.
Clinton's been trying to blur the lines on all of these fronts, trying to get the Democrats on stage to unite behind her, but it's not likely to work; the rest of these guys want the job too. And the true measure of how she's feeling the heat is the fact that she's doling out the pork, offering temporary bailouts for homeowners facing foreclosure. It has a lot of merit, particularly the predatory lending penalties and eliminating early payment penalties, but that doesn't seem to me to be a long-term solution. It's a short-term fix to engender compassion for her and her campaign. Because there is some faltering going on right now.
I would think that the last thing Clinton wants is for Biden and Dodd to join with her on the experience train. Obama and Edwards run the risk of cancelling each other out if they don't differentiate themselves, but clearly this is a change election. Presidents historically don't have a lot of Washington experience. That's just not what the country likes. And it's because Washington experience breeds a kind of contempt for real people and real solutions, rather than bipartisan "serious" solutions. This moment at the AFL-CIO debate cannot be credibly answered by Washington insiderism.
QUESTION: After 34 years with LTV Steel I was forced to retire because of a disability. Two years later, LTV filed bankruptcy. I lost a third of my pension and my family lost their health care.
Every day of my life I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family and I can’t afford to pay for her health care. What’s wrong with America and what will you do to change it?
That is where the country is at right now, and I question whether Hillary Clinton will be able to make the sale that she's the one to change it.
On Saturday, a blogger asked Hillary Clinton about NAFTA, and she gave a wishy-washy "we'll have to study it" answer. Two days later, John Edwards attacks NAFTA in a speech about fair trade.
"The trade policies of President Bush have devastated towns and communities all across America. But let's be clear about something this isn't just his doing. For far too long, presidents from both parties have entered into trade agreements, agreements like NAFTA, promising that they would create millions of new jobs and enrich communities. Instead, too many of these agreements have cost us jobs and devastated many of our towns."
Edwards goes on to argue in his speech that NAFTA was "written by insiders in all three countries" -- a move that the Associated Press interprets as a direct critique of former President Clinton's leadership. While this may be an over-interpretation -- how can Edwards criticize NAFTA without criticizing Bill? -- he's obviously using Bill Clinton-style 1990s centrism as a foil, something which now puts him at odds with not one, but two, Clintons. It's an intriguing move, given Bill's popularity with the Dem primary electorate, but Camp Edwards appears to be banking on the fact that some primary voters will associate NAFTA with the D.C. Dem establishment that Edwards, and now to some extent Obama, is running against.
Edwards has now come full-circle, offering his critique of politics as usual explicitly in the terms of regular people vs. DC insiders. It's exactly the kind of insiderism on display in today's awful WaPo op-ed from DLC acolytes Harold Ford and Martin O'Malley that Edwards is attacking. He is expressly waging an inside vs. outside war. That's what the focus on lobbyist money is all about. And it's very resonant. The question is whether you can build a coalition with that critique, given that it will be blocked access at every turn.
The DC insiders, the ones high-fiving each other over capitulating to Bush on Iraq, hate him.
When I did my profile of the guy, Chuck Todd, who's got a pretty good sense for these sorts of things, marveled to me, "for some reason he's pissed off half of DC. I can't tell you why, I don't know. But half of the Democratic elite here in DC just hate John Edwards. It's amazing, some of it's irrational, and the Edwards people know it and see it as a badge of honor, somewhat. Maybe they feel like it's because he didn't play ball, maybe they feel like he forced himself onto the ticket, that he was too brazen in how he campaigned for that second slot. There's no one rational reason, but there's a not insignificant clique of elites in DC who are not Edwards fans, and who are borderline irrational about it. It's not unlike that sort of clique of Republicans and John McCain."
Maybe they hate him because change is bad for business...
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