Take eight days off and all sorts of things happen. The visitor wanted to see Hollywood and the beaches and all that, so what was happening with the process by which we will, somehow or other, choose the next president, now the most powerful office in the world, was just minor background noise – a snippet here, a headline in the unread newspaper, something said on television blowing by on the news as you click through, just before you snap it off heading out the door. Maybe that’s how most people deal with the whole business and it’s no big deal. But things were happening.
Did that Huckabee fellow really say that since the Bible is inerrant and the constitution a product of men, not God, we should use the one and not the other, or at least fix the constitution to align it with the Bible? No, he couldn’t have said that. But it seems he did, and he wants the southern states to proudly fly the Confederate battle flag, no matter what black folks think. That seems needlessly boorish, at best, but it is an issue. Wasn’t the Confederacy a rebellion against the duly constituted government, an insurrection? Ah well, he is who he is, and he has his committed followers. Willard “Mitt” Romney seems to have been doing the usual pandering, but that wasn’t news – but his version of the “who let the dogs out” thing was beyond surreal. He’s conspicuously not black and about three years late with that bit. Mormon advisors – not hip, never were, never will be. These folks gave us Donny and Marie Osmond. McCain now seems quite human and authentic – he knows he’s not black – even if his party sees him as a heretic on all sorts of issues, not the least of which being his opposition to torture as official policy, and the left sees him as a man in love with war as the answer to all international issues and wrong on all social issues. Then, as everyone suddenly realizes we’re heading into a recession if not a depression, the man flat-out says he doesn’t know much of anything about economics. Well, straight-talk is his thing, so that’s both refreshing and alarming. With Sleepy Fred dropping out, the competent actor from Law and Order not that much into running, and Ron Paul just a curiosity, that leaves Rudy Giuliani. Andrew Sullivan sums him up:
You can make a broad case for his candidacy…. But you cannot get around the fact that he is a vicious, vindictive, power-abusing, sorry little tyrant of a human being. Do not the endless stories of his using the might of his office to punish and persecute the weak and vulnerable and personal enemies tell you something about his character? And doesn’t that matter in a president?
Well, that’s why some people seek the office, or any office. Power is its own reward, and obviously intoxicating. Of course “toxic” is part of that word. But anyone can relate to that.
On the Democratic side, the problem is the YouTube sensation:
While cable news shows gorge on campaign sparring, Obama’s uplifting speech is absolutely dominating YouTube. The 34-minute address from Ebenezer Baptist Church is currently the fourth most viewed video in the world on YouTube, trailing two Britney Spears clips. Not only is that unusual traffic for a long political address – people also like it. On Tuesday, viewers voted it the second most “favorited” video in the world. It also drew the second highest number of incoming links, a key indicator of web interest that drives Google page rankings.
Then there was this Byron York anecdote from South Carolina:
I went to Barack Obama’s rally here, on Sunday night, with a Republican friend who had never seen the Illinois senator in action before. Watching the crowd of more than 3,000 fill up the convention center, watching the people send up waves of energy to Obama, and watching him play off that energy in a speech that was one of the best political performances anyone has seen this year, my Republican friend said, simply, “Oh, shit.” He recalled the scene from Jaws, in which the small seaside town’s sheriff realizes how big the shark he’s tracking truly is, and says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
The Republicans see what’s happening. The Democrats don’t. Hillary Clinton is riding high.
And endorsements like this for Obama don’t help with the problem:
Hillary Clinton has been a policy wonk most of her life, a trait she has carried into the US Senate. As her debate performances have shown, she has intelligence and a deep understanding of many issues. Her efforts in New York focused first on learning her adopted state’s issues in detail, and pursuing legislation that would not necessarily grab headlines.
But we also have a good idea what a Clinton presidency would look like. The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare. That is not all Bill and Hillary’s fault - but it exists, whomever you blame, and cannot be ignored. Hillary Clinton doesn’t pretend that it won’t happen; she simply vows to persevere, in the hope that her side can win. Indeed, the Clintons’ joint career in public life seems oriented toward securing victory and personal vindication.
Do we want to go along for that ride? Many do, but there is the alternative:
Sen. Obama’s campaign is an argument for a more unifying style of leadership. In a time of great partisanship, he is careful to talk about winning over independents and even Republicans. He is harsh on the failures of the current administration - and most of that critique well-deserved. But he doesn’t use his considerable rhetorical gifts to demonize Republicans. He’s not neglecting his core values; he defends his progressive vision with vigorous integrity. But for him, American unity - transcending party - is a core value in itself.
That would make Hillary Clinton a lot like Rudy – you’re real clear on the it’s-payback-time motivation involved, and that may fill you with glee – and Obama is more like Reagan, the man who didn’t slam unhappy Democrats but won them over, convincing them someone was listening to them, even if nothing offered was really in their interest. The problem is Obama understands this, and then was foolish enough to explain it – Reagan transformed things, and Nixon and Bill Clinton did not. Slam! He was trying to explain that people who change things don’t scorn the folks on the other side – they work with them, they listen, the offer ideas. He thought that might be something the Democrats ought to try.
Bad move. As Walter Shapiro explains, the knives come out in South Carolina - on Martin Luther King Day, the Democrats had that nasty debate where Clinton and Obama tore into each other. Clinton and Obama and Edwards on stage, agreeing on almost every issue, but the first two getting personal and Edwards coming off as the only adult present:
For those who crave the blood sport aspects of politics, it was a night to remember. Clinton demonstrated that she has the ability to pile one attack on top of another without pausing for breath. (Obama’s purported sins ranged from having uttered a few complimentary sentences about Ronald Reagan last week to harboring a few small inconsistencies in his record of staunch opposition to the Iraq war.)
Finally, like a soda jerk adding the cherry atop an ice cream sundae, Clinton referred to the time when Obama was “practicing law and representing your contributor [Antoin] Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.” Rezko - who is certain to become a familiar figure in Republican attack ads if Obama is the Democratic nominee - raised more than $150,000 for Obama’s political campaigns (some of the money was later donated to charity) and aided the Obamas in a 2005 real-estate transaction. Rezko was indicted in 2006 by the federal government on totally unrelated corruption charges and goes to trial next month.
But Obama demonstrated that (unlike turn-the-other-cheek insurgents like Bill Bradley in 2000) he could fight back. Referring to his years as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama said to Clinton, “While I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart.” Also in a telling reference to the tag-team attacks from Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama snapped, “Well, I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”
That raises the obvious issues:
Did Democrats cringe after hearing about Clinton’s service on the Wal-Mart board because the company pays paltry wages and offers skimpy benefits? Or did they react positively because they associate Wal-Mart with low prices? Did anyone other than political pros and the campaign press corps get the reference to Rezko? Obama, for instance, may be more vulnerable over the more than 100 times that he voted “present” in the Illinois state Senate, since that parliamentary gambit is difficult to explain to uninitiated voters.
Yep, he’s been hit with that – but you vote “present” when you’re still working with the other legislators and you want more time to work out a final version of this bill or that. That works just fine, but you can use those “present” votes as a club to beat up on the other guy as no one but a real dork knows the details of parliamentary procedure. And Bill Clinton has those other clubs – Bill was always opposed to the Iraq war (no evidence) and Obama only says he was, when he clearly wasn’t (massive documentation shows Obama was right). Bill says Obama was for the war and Obama saying he wasn’t is a fairytale – “Give me a break!” Who are you going to believe – charismatic Bill or the uppity young black man? It’s a bit nasty. Has Bill Clinton ever lied about anything?
Anyone can see what is going on here. Obama said Bill was a good president, but didn’t really change anything. Bill doesn’t much like that. And his wife is saying Obama seems frustrated and wants to pick a fight now. The lady may protest too much and all that. It’s called projection. Jake Tapper here looks at the question of whether the Clintons have been deliberately misquoting and misrepresenting the young Illinois senator, saying the upstart likes everything Reagan stood for and he said that only Republicans have any ideas. That’s not what he said at all, but you use whatever lever you can grab. Perhaps Obama should not have mused about process theory. Being that thoughtful can get you beat up real good.
To some the Clinton camp looks desperate, with Bill doing his best to get back in office one way or another, and to others this is all good – now we have a Democrat, or a team actually, that knows how to fight dirty and destroy all opposition, and it’s about time. Where you come down depends on how angry you are.
But, according to Mark Kleiman, the public policy expert at UCLA, the Clinton spin on the upcoming South Carolina primary, where Obama is far ahead and Hillary has left the state, is obvious – “He only won it because of black votes, so it doesn’t really count.”
He says that Daniel Schorr’s commentary on NPR is hard to decipher, “but if it means anything it means that Obama’s decision to speak about civil rights from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Martin Luther King’s birthday was somehow in conflict with Obama’s claim to be the ‘unity’ candidate.” He went over it and shows that Obama’s sermon was about much more than “civil rights” but that’s a separate question – “Schorr’s point seems to be that Obama sounded awfully … well, black.”
And he doesn’t think much of Cokie Roberts’ item as she “seems to think that if a white candidate gets white votes, that’s natural, and if a white candidate gets black votes, that’s wonderful, but if a black candidate gets black votes then he’s no longer a ‘unity’ candidate and becomes ineligible to get white votes. Or something.”
Sullivan puts it this way:
Thinking over last night again, I realized that, for the first time in memory, I actually liked parts of Hillary Clinton’s performance. I liked her unplugged comfort with her own vile hackery. I like her when she’s transparently shameless. I like watching a woman politician tearing into a guy like a Rottweiler with issues. It’s the feminist in me.
When she went for Obama over his respect for conservative ideas, she knew it was a phony charge, but she clearly relished wielding it. Ditto the Rezko swipe. And her gob-smackingly brazen lecture about Obama not taking responsibility for his own words - this from Bill Clinton’s wife? And watching her, you could see she was loving it. There was this absolute unconcern for propriety - especially the unconscionably tacky interventions of her husband. There was a relish in small-bore partisan attacks. She is steeped in the old politics, and there’s something clarifying about watching her enjoy flinging the dirt that is now caked under her fingernails.
This was always there, of course. But for a few moments, the patina of bien-pensant benevolence fell off. We didn’t have to endure the trademarked Clinton sacrifice-myself-for-saving-the-world routine. We could appreciate her for the gutter politician she is, deep down, all the way down. The real Clinton is actually more palatable than the Mother Teresa act we have had to deal with in this campaign so far. This is the Clinton who yacks it up with Sidney Blumenthal in her spare time, the Clinton whose main concern with her husband’s sexual pathologies was the damage it might do to her career. I can handle that candidate, even respect her, even as I loathe her. But it won’t last, alas. That’s part of the game. She won’t allow us the pleasure of her own self-awareness for long.
His view:
Do I sound like I’m resigning myself to the inevitable? Nah. You’ve got to have hope. The logic for Obama and McCain still outstrips re-electing the Clinton Machine. She’d be terrible for the country and the world in many ways. And the terms on which she is winning this campaign - Bill’s terms - guarantee endless psychodrama and dysfunction in the Oval Office. But at least we now begin to see her and her classless, needy, lying lech of a husband for what they are.
Politicians. The kind who cannot remember any more how painful it was when they had their sense of shame removed.
Hey, it works. There’s Matthew Yglesias with this – “The very tendentiousness of some of her attacks on Barack Obama is sort of the point.” We love a winner who attacks and wins by any means – think of the New England Patriots, or the New York Yankees for decades. Josh Marshall thinks Clinton’s toughness helps her. It’s a narrative that sells. And Matthew Continetti gets the dynamic involved:
These days the former president’s “outbursts” serve a dual purpose: they lend the impression that Senator Clinton is the insurgent running against the media-supported Obama, while also creating the illusion that it is the former president, not his wife, who is actually the candidate for the Democratic nomination.
But shouldn’t we move on? Kevin Drum here says Americans simply don’t want to move on:
I lean toward the Hillary approach because I think the Obama approach only works when there’s already a real groundswell of support for significant change (as in the 30s, 60s, and 80s, for example) - and as much as I hate to say it, I just don’t see that at the moment.
Sullivan earlier had an answer:
If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do.
Now he says this:
My own view is that America’s crisis is a very deep one. The markets are reflecting the fact that seven years of Bush have added $32 trillion to future debt, and there is no one able to either raise revenues or slash entitlements to get us back to fiscal sanity. Iraq has shown that America’s imperial burden is becoming greater and greater even as her major rivals, China and Russia, get stronger and stronger. The threat of Jihadism is as salient today as it was in 2001. Climate change is a challenge the political system seems utterly unable to confront. The cultural, racial and religious divisions tearing America apart are as powerful as we allow them to be. Another election campaign that actually deepens this polarization will render it even harder to overcome.
I fear dark times ahead. Which is why I favor McCain and Obama. Both can rally their own supporters while appealing beyond them. We need that unifying potential - not because unity is always a good thing. But because sometimes it’s necessary. Like: now.
The Clinton calculation is that people don’t feel that way. But, as this email to Andrew Sullivan shows, there is a danger:
I am a lifelong Democrat and have been a strong Obama advocate - even donating money for the very first time in my life. (And I am over 50.) Still, all along, I thought, if Clinton gets the nomination, I’d vote for her over a Republican. Especially after the past decade of the Republican experience. However, after seeing Clinton in action in these past weeks and at last night’s debate (as well as Bill’s “contributions”), I will never vote for her. Never. If she gets the nomination, I will have to hope that McCain is nominated and give him a good look.
While I have considerable disagreement with him on a policy level, he is a man of integrity. (Mostly; but that’s another email.) Perhaps a McCain presidency balanced by a Democratic Congress will serve the country well. But no matter the Republican nominee, one thing is certain: I will not vote for Hillary. The person who once bemoaned the politics of personal destruction now applies them with stomach-turning zeal. Not to mention her well-crafted art of the politics of distortion. No, that’s not what I want for this country. We’ve had enough of destruction, distortion and manipulation. Obama is a breath of welcome fresh air. If the country does not see it, well, then I suppose we’ll “get what we deserve.” Again.
This is not going well. Who let the dogs out?
