Monday, February 18 – Presidents Day, with the banks and post office closed, and luckily no trading on Wall Street, so there will be nothing new on the ongoing meltdown of the world’s financial systems. Hollywood wrapped in light fog before dawn and then the dull thump as the Los Angeles Times drops outside the door – time to start a new day. The fancy coffee machine will do its thing – the roar as it grinds the beans and then burbles away (a nice gift one birthday ago), so check the emails and make the corrections to the previous column, all the typos that the high-powered Wall Street attorney and Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, found, and repost the damned thing. Then grab the Times, pour a mug of hot black coffee and dive into the morning paper, to see what’s up.
What with cable news and the internet this may not be the best way to see what’s up, but the newsprint in comforting in an old-fashioned way and you find yourself reading things you’d not find elsewhere – and there are the comics, and a friend is a copy editor at the Times and it’s fun to see what headlines she came up with for this and that in the Calendar section. You have your fixed point-size and only so much column space, so that’s a challenge. She’s good. So after that and the daily book review and news of the state – California is in awful financial trouble and the current movie star governor, Arnold, lost at sea, has been forced to cut services and add debt because he won’t attempt to raise revenue in any way as, as a Republican, he knows that drives business away – it’s on to the last section that must always wait until the fine Columbian coffee kicks in. So it’s the opinion page.
What’s this? This cannot be so. The blunt and vaguely thuggish Fox News legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, is saying that Bush and the Republican Party are dead wrong on surveillance. But Bill O’Reilly loves this grumpy ex-judge – you see that all the time on television. This cannot be. Will Murdoch now fire Napolitano? This is just odd:
Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all “persons” and all “people” implicated by government behavior. So the government should be required, as it was until FISA, to obtain a 4th Amendment warrant to conduct surveillance of anyone, American or not, in the US or not.
If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?
Damn, he sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal. Next he’ll be saying that Justice Scalia is wrong and that torturing people we hope might know something to get them to blurt out what we hope they might say is perhaps a bad idea. The world gets stranger by the moment.
But then the newspaper is not really up-to-the-moment. You need to run through your bookmarks on the web to get a sense of what the real buzz is, as if that matters. There things got even stranger. The three remaining candidates with a chance to be our next leader, and thus the most powerful man (or woman) in the world, as everyone agrees, are suddenly on the attack. Everything turned negative. Is that any way to celebrate Presidents Day?
It must be a new tradition. There was Mike Allen at The Politico: Clinton aide accuses Obama of plagiarism – “Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, today accused Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of committing ‘plagiarism’ in a speech in Milwaukee on Saturday night.”
What, will Obama now be gone? Will this sink him like Joe Biden, the candidate who years ago lifted whole passages from that Brit, Neal Kinnock, and dropped them in his speeches and then, caught, just gave up? Is this the end?
Wolfson said this – “Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he’s breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn’t his own.”
Strong stuff, and Jeff Zeleny at the New York Times picks it up: An Obama Refrain Bears Echoes of a Governor’s Speeches – “Senator Barack Obama adapted one of his signature arguments - that his oratory amounts to more than inspiring words - from speeches given by Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts during his 2006 campaign.”
The AP picks it up with an item bylined Niles, Ohio (an odd little town): Obama Says Borrowed Lines Not a Big Deal – “Senator Barack Obama said Monday that he doesn’t think it’s a big deal that he borrowed lines from his friend Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, although he probably should have given him credit.”
Okay – they’re buddies. They think alike and use each other’s lines, and Patrick himself sees no problem – great minds think alike and all that. And a quick glance at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News – more coffee being quite necessary – shows that everyone is showing clips of Hillary Clinton using Obama’s exact words as if they’re her own, over and over. Something is up.
Okay, back to the net – set the coffee down, light a pipe and see what up with that. There’s Jennifer Parker at Political Punch with this – “In a conference call just now the Clinton campaign would not guarantee that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, has never used someone else’s rhetoric without crediting them.”
And there’s more:
In fact, Wolfson seemed to say it wouldn’t be as big a deal if it were discovered that Clinton had “lifted” such language.
“Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric,” Wolfson said.
Damn – what’s up with that? Yes, on the next coffee run there’s Hillary on television in Wisconsin holding up her new pamphlet that contains all her economic ideas, urging voters to read the thing. That’s an interesting tactic – sort of an I-don’t talk-so-good admission, but one that tells people her staff can put together position papers that will have you glued to your seat, enraptured. Actually it’s more bone-headed than interesting. It’s just a wild guess, but that pamphlet is something that may not really grab people. Who reads anything these days? (Hey! Are you still out there?)
And the thrust of the thing is her saying Obama talks good policy but you must realize that she said it all first, really – and here it all is in exquisite detail that proves she’s on top of things, if you sit your ass down and read it all.
This may not be a wise tactic. David Kurtz puts it this way:
Sure he gives better speeches than I do, the Hillary line goes, but the words aren’t even his own. He may talk a good game about public financing, she asserts, but when push comes to shove his position is the same as mine.
The attacks are intended to bring down Obama’s positives, to knock him off his pedestal. But it’s hard to see how they raise Hillary’s. Her argument, boiled down, is: “He’s no better than me.” (Or perhaps, less charitably, “He’s just as bad as me.”)
And what is one to make of Obama’s somewhat eloquent comeback to the original accusation? He steps above it all:
“It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems,” he said. “But what is also true if we cannot inspire the country to believe again, it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have.”
What it’s all about is this:
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” Mr. Obama said, to applause. “‘I have a dream’ - just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ -just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ - just words? Just speeches?”
His buddy Patrick used the same language during his 2006 governor’s race and the Republican running against him, Kerry Healey, criticized Patrick for “offering lofty rhetoric over specifics.” Someone should remind the Clinton folks Kerry Healey lost the election.
And then as the coffee runs out another thought pops up – it’s good to no longer be an English teacher. Plagiarism was always an issue, and now, with so much floating around on the net, students face awful temptations. This Presidents Day tempest may be a “teaching moment” but sorting it all out with the kids would be a pain. Perhaps one would have to politics is a special case of some sort – one where those rules are somewhat looser.
Still the Clinton campaign needs to do something to stop the Obama momentum. Here Paul Lukasiak tries another tactic – he argues that Clinton actually has the popular vote lead. Here, from one “Tom in Texas” is a cynical summary:
Apparently, if you only count votes up to Super Tuesday, discount every state that had a caucus, only go by the exit polling, and eliminate any voters who weren’t registered Democrats, then Hillary Clinton actually has the popular vote lead. In other news, based on exit polling and early voting from 2004 President Kerry will be running for reelection.
Lukasiak may or may not have said that - see his comment appended below - but the folks at the Daily Dish comment that the idea that caucus states don’t count is odd, particularly when the Clinton campaign is simultaneously arguing that Florida and Michigan voters were disenfranchised. They point out there’s just one just one problem with that - even if you count Michigan and Florida voters, Obama still has the popular vote.
As noted previously that Michigan thing is odd. Everyone agreed that Michigan wouldn’t count – they broke the rules and held their primary early. Everyone removed their names from the ballot, but the Clinton people sort of forgot to do that. Oops – she was the only candidate listed, and she won of course. And now, the argument goes, that should count. It seems her people are implying that if Obama and the other were so stupid as to play by the rules they should pay the price – politics is hardball and all that, and this proves how sharp and tough Hillary Clinton really is. You’re supposed to admire her for that.
Maybe some do, but that’s gamble. And one of her senior advisors, Harold Ickes has gone farther, arguing the primaries don’t matter that much, and although those Michigan delegates would help, it all comes down to just who is in the right place at the right time:
Ickes, who in August voted as a member of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Commission not to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida as a penalty for violating the scheduling rules, now says they should be seated. And he points out that even if Clinton loses the race for elected (”pledged”) delegates, she might still control the Credentials Committee and be able to get those delegations seated.
Politics is not about getting votes, it’s about who makes the rules. Is Ickes saying she’s like Bush and he’s like Rove – they know how things really work? The argument is then that Democrats should calm down and just get with the winner, and not sweat the details. That’s pretty much saying all this business about hope is bullshit – idealism and feeling good about things is for teenagers and fools. It’s a “get real” message. It could work. Its working depends on the ah-crap cynicism most people feel, or so they have gambled. The odds regarding that gamble are unclear. Obama is working the other side of the bet.
Of course the final argument is that Clinton can win and the black dude cannot. That would be convincing but for the latest poll – McCain Beats Clinton, Obama Beats McCain. That seems to happen a lot. Damn. But if she has the right people pulling the right levers of power in the party she’ll get the nomination, and McCain will be the next president. That may be good enough for her. Much of the Democratic Party will be furious, but then Obama can run again in 2016 – he’s young. That should comfort them. Of course it won’t.
On the other hand, McCain is in some odd trouble, and one can sympathize with hilzoy:
I have been idly following the fight between the McCain and Obama campaigns on the subject of accepting public financing for the general election, and thinking that at some point I’d probably have to write about it. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this: the laws are arcane and complicated, and going back and figuring out who had said what, exactly, about accepting public financing in the general election isn’t really my idea of fun. I mean, I may be wonky, but even I have limits.
Don’t we all? But at American Prospect one Mark Schmitt, who actually knows a lot about such things, helps out this beleaguered semi-wonk and does write about it – John McCain might have inadvertently opted into the system of public financing by accepting a loan that did not exclude any public money he got as collateral:
The reason accepting loans matters is that the campaign finance laws try to force a choice on candidates: either you take the public money and abide by the limitations that go with it, or you don’t. If you don’t actually accept the money from the government, but use the fact that you are eligible to receive that money to secure a loan from someone else, then you can essentially spend the money you’d get through public financing without accepting the limitations that go with it. The consensus seems to be that this would violate the letter of campaign finance laws; it seems to me indisputable that it would violate their spirit.
Got that? No? Then just know that Schmitt has found the actual loan agreement, and it’s amazing –
On the one hand, it goes out of its way to redefine “collateral” as not including any public money. On the other hand, it contains the following startling passage…
Additional Requirement. Borrower and lender agree that if Borrower [McCain's campaign committee] withdraws from the public matching funds program, but John McCain then does not win the next primary or caucus in which he is active (which can be any primary or caucus held the same day) or does not place at least within 10 percentage points of the winner of that primary or caucus, Borrower will cause John McCain to remain an active political candidate and Borrower will, within thirty (3) days of said primary or caucus (i) reapply for public matching funds, (ii) grant to Lender, as additional collateral for the Loan, a first priority perfected security interest in and to all Borrower’s right, title and interest in and to the public matching funds program, and (iii) execute and deliver to Lender such documents, instruments and agreements as Lender may require with respect to the foregoing.
Huh? The translation:
You read that right: in exchange for a loan, John McCain gave away his right to decide for himself whether or not to stay in the race for the Presidency. And he did so in order to use his eligibility for future matching funds, rather than the funds themselves, as collateral.
And here’s what Schmitt says:
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan.
That doesn’t make McCain look so good. Luckily it’s so complex no one will get it.
And there was that Obama “pledge”:
Obama’s precise statement was, and has always been, “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” That’s an artful statement, and it’s not artful in a “meaning of ‘is’” sense — it’s exactly the right answer. A commitment to “preserve a publicly financed election” would have to mean much more than whether both participate in the system. It would require some significant agreement about how to handle outside money, 527s, “Swift Boat”-type attack groups, party money, etc., and other factors that have undermined the last two publicly financed elections, from both sides. It is hardly an evasion to describe this as an agreement to be negotiated, rather than a simple pledge.
The implications of that:
The side story here is why many of the “traditional” campaign finance reform advocates and the Times and Post editorial boards still seem so hypnotized by McCain-as-reformer, a pose he adopted for a period that ended years ago, that they cannot call him on his evasion of public funds in the primary, and are happy to be used to echo his first partisan attack in the general election, against someone who, unlike McCain, really has been a remarkably consistent and hard-working supporter of public financing, at both the state and national level.
Nope, it’s too hard to understand.
And anyway, McCain has good financial and economic advisors, although Andrew Ferguson at the conservative Weekly Standard wonders about that too:
What makes it odd is [McCain's economics advisors] aren’t like each other at all, at least when it comes to their economic views. A couple of them, if you put them in the same room, would set off an intergalactic explosion like the collision of matter and antimatter.
One adviser, Jack Kemp, is the man who talked Ronald Reagan into embracing supply side economics in the 1970s, which launched the Reagan boom of the 1980s. He’s the world’s bubbliest advocate of tax cuts, dismissing the traditional Republican fixation on balanced budgets as “root canal” economics. Another adviser, Peter Peterson, is root canal economics. He’s a dour Jeremiah who called the Reagan boom a “mad, drunken bash” and thinks steep tax increases on income, gasoline, tobacco, and alcohol, on top of a 5 percent consumption tax, are necessary to put the government’s finances in order. He and Rudman run the Concord Coalition, an advocacy group that regards the federal government’s budget deficit as the country’s foundational economic problem.
See Matthew Yglesias at the Atlantic:
Under the right circumstances, having advisors from competing schools of thought would probably be an asset. I would like to see the next president hear a take from the labor-liberal side of things and the neoliberal Bob Rubin school before making a major decision. Indeed, it would probably be smart to run things by some smart people from all the way on the other side of the political spectrum. The best policies can often secure support from a variety of different perspectives, and certainly complicated undertakings tend to be improved by accepting some critical input. The trouble is that to make something like this work you need the person in charge to actually be capable of assessing different kinds of advice and ironing them into something resembling a coherent policy and there’s little in McCain’s background to suggest that he has any idea of how to season a policy with a touch of Kemp and a dollop of Peterson.
He says we’ve seen this before:
Under the circumstances, someone or other is likely to emerge as the main driving force behind a McCain administration, just as George W. Bush turned out to be 98 percent Cheney/Rumsfeld and only 2 percent Powell/Armitage, but there’s no way for we the voters to predict in advance. Just as with McCain’s general ideological meandering, we’re left to take on faith that his personal powers of Straight Talkiness should give us reassurance that he’ll do the right thing even though he can’t communicate any kind of remotely clear vision of what the right thing is.
It’ll be the Bush years all over again. And on the day McCain was endorsed by the president’s father – it was Presidents Day, after all – the New York Times points out the problem with the son:
Senator John McCain’s campaign advisers will ask the White House to deploy President Bush for major Republican fund-raising, but they do not want the president to appear too often at his side, top aides to Mr. McCain said Sunday.
But even as the consensus was that Mr. McCain needed to “stand in the sun” on his own, as one adviser put it, without the large shadow cast by Mr. Bush, left unsaid was the difficult calculus the McCain campaign faces: Using Mr. Bush enough to try to make the tough sell of Mr. McCain to conservatives but not so much that he will drive away the independents and some moderate Democrats that Mr. McCain is counting on in November.
Logan Murphy summarizes the problem:
We have a sitting president that is so toxic that the front runner in his own party doesn’t want to be seen with him that much and the front runner himself is equally despised by the base of the party. To make matters worse, McCain is vowing to follow directly in W’s footsteps with more wars, more torture, less jobs and more tax cuts for the rich - the list goes on and on and it’s not selling with Independents and “moderate” Democrats.
Are we looking at two of the most hated men in the Republican Party? If this is the face of the 2008 GOP ticket, it’s going to be a very long year for them, indeed.
But we may get four or eight more years of them. And the world knows what that means - Spencer Ackerman was recently in Mosul and saw a Provincial Reconstruction Team helping to oversee a terrorism trial and teach the Iraqis all about the rule of law:
Then at the end, as people are milling about and chatting on their way out the door, one of the PRT officials tells a judge how important it is to stand up against terrorism and promote equality and fairness before an impartial system of law. The judge nods at the platitude. “Tell me,” he says through a translator, “is it true that in America, Bush can fire prosecutors he doesn’t like?”
Ah, Presidents Day! It was nasty.
