Without a Doubt

It does take you back to October of 2004, sipping coffee and skimming the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Should you even try the Sunday crossword?  Will Short, the guy responsible for those, and so pleasant on the radio, had made a fool of you often enough – so no, read the articles. Ron Suskind, at the time, was writing about the Bush administration – he had great access and all sorts of insiders were talking to him, explaining how things worked. So there was Without a Doubt, and it included this now famous passage:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

We found out much later this was probably Karl Rove, not that it matters much. Focus on Rove, or focus wider – on the various disasters created or abetted by this administration as they all ignored reality, dismissed detail and insisted what they thought really should be so was actually so, even if it clearly wasn’t – and you miss the big concept. All political activity may be essentially a denial of reality – call it vision, or idealism, or inspired leadership, or dangerous delusion, the key element is insisting that what you think is so, what experts think is so, what historians think is so, what economists thinks is so, just isn’t so. You will inspire people and change things, or you will terrify them – no one wants a madman at the helm. Leaders should, we seem to think, be tethered in some way to the real world. There’s a certain comfort in that.

Fast forward four years. Geraldine Ferraro is calling Barack Obama lucky – lucky he’s a black man, as otherwise he’d presumably be some minor nobody. If he were white or female he’s be long gone by now.

Some have defended her, saying she was not making a racist argument – that Obama is really a nothing compared to Clinton, just a guy cruising along getting breaks because he can say he’s black – but rather she was saying something positive, that it is kind of wonderful we live in a country where he’s doing so well. That’s what she said she meant. The less generous interpretation prevailed – that she was saying that we white people should resent him, as he’s getting a free ride, and that’s just not fair.

Whichever it is hardly matters now – Hillary Clinton saw which way the wind was blowing and apologized to all black voters, saying she didn’t think whatever Ferraro said was so, and assured them that Ferraro was gone from the campaign, and said she was also sorry her husband had joked that Jesse Jackson had also won South Carolina long ago, just as Obama did now, so that state didn’t matter, as it was a black thing. She threw in an apology for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina for good measure. Better safe than sorry. This was a big and wide blanket apology.

Of course the problem with that Ferraro comment was actually a bit larger. The problem is that neither interpretation had much to do with reality. Obama, all agree, is a rather awesome candidate, and would be so if he were puce, mauve or taupe – or a nice floral pattern perhaps. And, if you take the more generous interpretation of her words, you do know the country hasn’t come as far as she would like to claim – race is still a big issue.

So really, she’s not a racist. She’s detached from reality. In short, she is a politician.

Over at Obsidian Wings, “Hilzoy” applies a little bit of analytic philosophy to Geraldine Ferraro’s claim that Barack Obama would not be a serious candidate for President if he’d been white or female:

If I were Hillary Clinton, I would have asked Geraldine Ferraro to resign, since if I were Hillary Clinton, I would be running a different sort of campaign. And if I were a black man and had wheels, I would be the first black male trolley car ever, not to mention the first being ever to be both a public transit vehicle and a mammal. Aren’t counterfactuals fun?

Yes, they are. And they are the stuff of politics. You get used to it.

And that leads to Thursday, March 13 – Clinton’s interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR. She said that the Michigan and Florida elections were fair and should count, said that she never claimed McCain was experienced and Obama was not, and said she had not hinted that Obama would be her running mate. It didn’t have much to do with reality. Actually, it didn’t have anything to do with reality. It was much like Rove talking to Suskind, or Dick Cheney saying to Time Russert that he never said “the insurgency was in its last throes” even after Russert ran the tape. Amazing.

To review – regarding the Michigan primary – that was scheduled way early, against the party’s rules, so the party said it wouldn’t count, the delegates wouldn’t be seated. Each candidate signed a pledge not to campaign there or participate. All the candidates removed their names from the ballot. She didn’t. It seems she has a different interpretation of what the word “participate” means. She won with fifty-five percent of the vote – the rest went to “undecided.” She now says the others could have left their names on the ballot and just chose not to. That’s their problem. One thinks of her husband’s response to that grand jury long ago – it all depends on what the meaning of “is” is. She’s slick.

Of course she has repeatedly said that she has a lifetime of experience, McCain has a lifetime of experience, and Obama “has a speech he gave in 2002.” That has been discussed endlessly. It seems now that she never said that. And she never said that “maybe you’ll see both of us on the same ticket” – the AP and all the other media must have confused her with someone else, perhaps. She is slick.

John Cole, the former pro-Bush man, discusses this and more at Balloon Juice, and decides Hillary Clinton is insane. He says she is a sociopath – “There really is no other way to describe it.”

There is another way to describe it. She is a master politician.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s pro-Obama readers is upset:

It shattered my Obama optimism.

Inskeep gave her several of the hard questions you write about every day, and she parried every one. She sounded – not was, but sounded – rational, logical, sensible (Obama-like?) in explaining why the MI and FL delegates should be seated, and denying she ever said McCain was more qualified than Obama. Some of her answers were such whoppers that Inskeep actually repeated the questions, his voice rising with incredulity.

The woman is an absolute assassin. Ice water in her veins. A second-generation terminator (yeah, the liquid-metal kind). As a politician, I fear she is light years ahead of Obama, and I am very, very afraid.

Another, noting how she knee-capped her interviewer, said this:

Holy shit was it infuriating.

I think the thing I hate the most about Clinton/Bush style politics is that it completely disables the press. It was obvious that Inskeep thought she was full of shit, but what can he do? Her answers were divorced from reality, but in a way that makes them sound reasonable. The only word that comes to mind is “double-speak.” Either Inskeep can accept the rhetorical landscape that she presents, or he can call her a liar. Either way he’s screwed. If he plays by her terms, she wins. If he calls her a liar, she plays the victim card, rails about the biased media, and wins. Trying to merely challenge her assertions in an intellectual way is bound to fail as well, because she’ll just spit out more double-speak, putting the interviewer back at square one.

If all Obama accomplishes as President is to cripple this kind of politics, I will consider him a resounding success. Oh, and congratulations, Senator Clinton. You and your husband now share mental space in my head with George W. Bush. Yes you can destroy my good will for you and your husband. And I’m sure you are ready on day one to make me want to tear my fucking hair out.

Sullivan added this – “I wonder if the Clintons understand what they are doing to people – people who weren’t Clinton-haters in the first place, people whose votes they need.”

They know. They’re winning.

And then there was this curious item (the link has audio clips):

Though the campaign later argued that he hadn’t said it, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief campaign strategist told reporters this morning that Sen. Barack Obama “can’t win the general election.”

Mark Penn made the comment during a conference call in which the Clinton campaign and two of her supporters – Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter – argued that Obama has sent Pennsylvanians a bad signal by allegedly downplaying the importance of that state’s April 22 primary.

… Here is what Penn said. We’re posting a little more than 2 minutes of his opening statement because we want to make sure you get the full context. It’s in the last 20 seconds or so that he says Obama “really can’t win the general election.” As you’ll hear, he also says that “if Barack Obama can’t win” in Pennsylvania, “how could he win the general election?”

Then it gets better:

Later, a reporter asks what he meant. Clinton campaign communications chief Howard Wolfson jumps in to say that “Mark did not say that.”

Then Penn says that if Obama doesn’t win the Pennsylvania primary, it “raises serious questions” about whether he can win the general election.

You’re in the room, you hear the words, and you’re told you didn’t hear the words. It’s masterful, or quite mad.

The Obama campaign released a rather dry response:

Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor this evening sent this statement to reporters: “It can’t inspire too much confidence in the Clinton campaign when their pollster ignores both polls and math by making comments as divorced from reality as this one. Senator Obama is leading in delegates, states won, the popular vote, and fares better than Senator Clinton against John McCain in poll after poll, including critical swing states like Iowa, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Wisconsin.”

That pretty much comes down to a challenge. Hey, you Clinton folks – we over here like to deal with reality. How’s it going over there? That’s not slick. But it’s nicely nasty.

Sullivan, again, doesn’t seem to get it. He wants this all to make sense, so he applies logic:

Increasingly, the only rationale I can think of for the way the Clintons are now campaigning is that they are running for 2012. They want McCain to win, if they can’t. Why else be this self-destructive?

Rove would laugh. It’s about creating your own reality. Others just step back in awe. That worked just fine for Bush, sort of.

Jonathan Chait at the New Republican gets it:

She needs to convince the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to split for her by about a 2-to-1 margin. The only way she can get a split like that is if she can persuasively argue that Obama is unelectable. And the only way she can do that is to make him unelectable. Some people have treated this as an unfortunate byproduct of Clinton’s decision to continue her campaign. It’s actually a central element of the strategy. Penn is already saying he’s unelectable. It’s not true, but by the time the convention rolls around, it may well be.

That’s then why Clinton was subtly hinting that Obama is secretly a Muslim – see her on Sixty Minutes here – that all we have is his word for that. 

That’s working. Now Thirteen Percent of Registered Voters Think Obama Is a Muslim:

When the same pollster asked the question in December, 18 percent said Protestant, 2 percent said Catholic, 8 percent said Muslim, and 70 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.

Obama belongs to the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side.

You see the trend – the number who believes he is a Muslim has almost doubled. Clinton did fire the two staffers in Iowa who sent the “Obama is really a Muslim” email to millions – it’s not her fault. She really is slick.

Still the United Church of Christ may be a problem. See The Sponge Story Has Legs (That Sponge Has Legs?) from January 2005:

When I was ten years old, in 1957, the United Church of Christ (UCC) was formed. My family’s Congregational church – my mother’s father was a Congregational minister – merged with a bunch of others. The Evangelical and Reformed folks joined us, or we joined them – Paul Tillich and that crowd. It was an administrative thing – we still were a Congregational church. It was just that the idea floating around then was that inclusion and agreement were good things, so we merged and shared office supplies with the Evangelical and Reformed church two blocks further down Smithfield Street and stuff like that. But it really was an “inclusion” thing.

The rest is about Jerry Falwell and his attempt to stop production and broadcast of the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons, as the character was clearly gay and the cartoons telling our children being gay was not a mortal sin and wholly evil. Along the way there was the bit with the major networks refusing to run ads produced by the United Church of Christ – ads that said everyone was welcome in the United Church of Christ, even gays. That was too controversial, so the ads never ran. So Obama may not be Muslim, but some may think he’s in the wrong church.

He’s certainly in the wrong parish:

Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11 – Obama’s Pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Has a History of What Even Obama’s Campaign Aides Say Is ‘Inflammatory Rhetoric’ 

Obama has long said he doesn’t agree, but that may not be enough. Obama is not slick.

As for the polling, see Matthew Yglesias:

At this point, I think we’ve all stopped hearing arguments of the form “Obama lost Massachusetts in the primary so he’ll lose it in a general election” or “Obama won South Carolina in the primary so he’ll win it in a general election” but there’s a frustrating persistence of the idea that performance in a primary campaign in a swing state might be a good indication of general election strength there. In reality, there’s just very little reason to believe that. I would very strongly prefer Obama over Clinton, but that doesn’t stop me from very strongly preferring Clinton over McCain.

And then he points to this post from Noam Scheiber, commenting on new Pennsylvania polling data:

A poll showing that Obama can get blown out in the Pennsylvania primary and still hold his own there against McCain suggests working-class white Democrats simply prefer Hillary, not that they find something inherently objectionable about Obama, whom they’re apparently happy to support in the general.

Yglesias:

Right. The poll indicates that Clinton will do much better than Obama in the Democratic primary but Obama will do slightly better than Clinton in a general election. There’s nothing paradoxical or even counterintuitive about that, but somehow we’ve gotten twisted around in knots over this sort of thing.

Ah, that was the idea all along. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” as Rove put it so nicely. Reality is for suckers, and losers.