They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but everyone knows that’s not true. Being parted from the object of your affection may indeed, in some cases, lead you to idealize that object – you forget the small things that bug you and recall all the good times. But it’s more likely that if you even have time to think about that lovely object – there is, after all, a reason for the absence and you’re probably quite busy with something pressing – you gain some objective perspective. You could just as easily be asking yourself what the hell you were thinking, and also, over time, start to forget object-details, the precise eye-color and such. You’re in a different place with different people, and, as there are things to do, you need to pay attention to the immediate. Step back and things can change.
Here in Los Angeles, Sunday, May 4, 2008 it was a day for perspective. Sometime in the night the sole cable provider on the West Side had major problems – no internet access at dawn, and then no cable television. It was a day for reading hard copy, for the hefty Sunday Los Angeles Times and those books everyone has lying about – you know, the ones you meant to get to, eventually.
There may have been big doings going on politically, or geopolitically, with all sorts of insightful comments everywhere, or not. One couldn’t tell. There were the brief snippets of news on the radio, and the useless blather of the call-in talk shows, but many of them are weekdays shows, so you got repeats, highlights of previous shows, or infomercials for wonder drugs (with very odd ingredients) that promise to purge all the toxins from your system. You didn’t want to think about that too carefully. Lakers fans had to listen to the big playoff game on the radio, and use their imaginations, in a far more pleasant way.
But stepping back from the immediate is good – perspective is nice. You couldn’t watch the Sunday morning political shows. You had to read about them later, and that was probably best.
It seems the big deal was Barack Obama appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, facing that master of “gotcha journalism,” Tim Russert, for a full hour. Hillary Clinton spent a full hour on ABC’s This Week, being grilled by George Stephanopoulos, that fellow who worked in the Clinton White House for her husband and for her. He owes his career to the Clintons. It sounded like it would be great political theater – Obama in a clever and nasty Harold Pinter psychodrama and Hillary Clinton in a lively Feydeau farce (but not in French and maybe without a flea in her ear).
The Associated Press framed this as an attempt by these two “to woo superdelegates” – high stakes stuff not aimed at us mere mortals – and offered this analysis. Russert hammered away at Obama over Jeremiah Wright and Stephanopoulos agreed that Hillary was wonderful. The odd thing is the AP referring to Obama’s Zen-like calm in the face of what seemed more and more like vicious nonsense – “displaying the calm self-confidence that has long made him seem both unflappable and aloof” – and Hillary Clinton being ” feisty” and “at turns funny, combative and wonky.” And there was this:
In contrast with Obama’s coolheaded demeanor, Clinton was at times almost overeager - wide-eyed and smiling, rejecting an on-set armchair in favor of standing and gesturing to the audience.
At least she didn’t jump up and down on the sofa, giggling madly, as Tom Cruise had done on Oprah.
It was all probably not worth watching – just a sales job. The product was temperament. Someone has to decide which is more presidential – grinning enthusiasm or calm, unflappable self-confidence. That’s for the superdelegates to decide.
More interesting things were going on elsewhere. Late in the evening, when the cable company resolved their router problems, you could find them at the one-stop place for political video clips, Crooks and Liars, where you could find this clip, Charlie Rangel ripping into Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition:
Blitzer: The criticism of Barack Obama is that what Jeremiah Wright said at the National Press Club, Congressman Rangel, was no different than what he’s been saying for some time, and he should have known that these controversial remarks would be made. Is this explanation that Senator Obama is making good enough for you?
Rangel: It’s disgraceful that he has to make any explanation for anything. The intrusion of the media and Republicans into the sacred relationship that worshipers have with their spiritual leaders I think is going to come back to haunt us. To think that we have to go into the lives and the beliefs of Rabbis and Priests and ministers and Imams is absolutely ridiculous. We’ve got a war on. We’ve got an economy that’s splintered. I think the media should be more responsible and start dealing with those issues. I don’t think many people care what reverend Wright thinks and I don’t see why any candidate should have to explain what…
Blitzer: But Congressman, even Senator Obama last Sunday said this was a legitimate issue given the nature of - he wants to be President of the United States. If there’s a right wing politician, let’s say a Republican politician that has an extraordinarily close relationship with a pastor who is making outrageous statements has been a member of that church for 20 years. Wouldn’t that be fair game?
Rangel: Of course not. Of course he’s a candidate. He doesn’t want to take all of you on and I’m probably over the hill but the truth is that you guys know that his beliefs have nothing to do with someone that went to the church, and if we’ve got to get into the Jerry Falwell’s and into the Robertson’s and to the number of people who have what appears to other religions to be bizarre beliefs we’ll never get to the issues that Americans were concerned about. I know that every American is more concerned with who is going to be a better Presidential candidate and a better President more than they are on anything that happens in the church that Senator Obama went to.
It’s about time someone said that. Blitzer looks stunned – he was just repeating conventional wisdom, after all. What did he do wrong? Rangel told him he was trading in obvious bullshit, and, implicitly, that Blitzer wouldn’t know a real issue if it bit him in the ass. Cool – it was the wrong day to lose all electronic connection to the outside world.
And there is this clip from Fox News Sunday, where the head of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, faced off with Chris Wallace. That promised to be hot. It was:
Dean: Chris, the Republicans… for the last 30 years, the Republican (play)book has been to race bait and to use hate and divisiveness. In 2006, the American people said no to that; I think they’re going to say no to that in 2008. It is true that the economy, the war and healthcare are more important to the American people. They are tired of the divisiveness of what the Republicans have done to them. And that’s why the Republicans are in trouble. Deep trouble. Another four years of George Bush is not what we need…
Wallace: Governor, are you suggesting that bringing up Jeremiah Wright is “race-baiting” and hate and divisive?
Dean: Yeah, I am suggesting that kind of stuff. I think when you start bringing up candidates that have nothing to do with the issues… uh, when you start bringing up things that have nothing to do with the candidate, nothing to do with the issues, that’s race-baiting. And that’s exactly what it is. Just like Willie Horton was race-baiting so many years ago. I think we’re going to take… we’re going to turn the page on this stuff. I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on issues, but the biggest issue of all is we don’t use this kind of stuff. We never have used this kind of stuff and we’re not going to start now. America is more important than the Republican Party and that’s the lesson the voters are about to teach the Republicans.
Damn, missed that, and also missed this:
Dean: No, I think it was the right thing to do [boycott Fox debates and appearances] because there are some things in the news department that really have been shockingly biased. And I think that’s wrong. And I’ll just say so right up front, but it is important also for us to not… we shouldn’t punish the viewers of FOX by staying away. Now those viewers have had an opportunity to look at the debates on other channels, now they’re going to have an opportunity viewing on this channel and I think that’s fair.
Man, he walked into the lions’ den and let it rip. It’s about time.
Of course, after the internet connection came back up, it seems there was something else that should be noted. Over at what is pretty much the voice of the neoconservative world, the Weekly Standard, decided Hillary Clinton was actually becoming one of them:
She’s running a right-wing campaign. She’s running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan - “The Bear in the Forest” - ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she’s doing it with much the same symbols.
And the transformation is almost complete:
And better - or worse - she is becoming a social conservative, a feminist form of George Bush.
Against an opponent who shops for arugula, hangs out with ex-Weathermen, and says rural residents cling to guns and to God in unenlightened despair at their circumstances, she has rushed to the defense of religion and firearms, while knocking back shots of Crown Royal and beer. Her harsh, football-playing Republican father (the villain of the piece, against whom she rebelled in earlier takes on her story) has become a role model, a working class hero, whose name she evokes with great reverence. Any day now, she’ll start talking Texan, and cutting the brush out in Chappaqua or at her posh mansion on Embassy Row…
And they love what they think is coming:
She might run to the right of McCain, if she makes it to the general election, and get the votes of rebellious conservatives. Or she, Lieberman, and McCain could form a pro-war coalition, with all of them running to pick up the phone when it rings in the small hours.
That’s interesting, and Ben Smith here shows us her latest anti-Obama NRA-style pro-gun mailing in Indiana, with this comment:
The mailing - perhaps the sharpest-edged of Clinton’s five negative mail pieces in Indiana - casts him as a typical politician, saying different things to different audiences. It also revives his damaging comments in San Francisco that small town people cling to guns.
Then, making the harsh case more broadly, the mailer asks: “What does Barack Obama really believe?”
The piece is particularly striking coming from Clinton, who has been seen for most of her career as a firm advocate of gun control, but more recently has emerged - without dramatically shifting her stance on specific issues - as a defender of the Second Amendment who fondly recalled being taught to shoot by her grandfather in Scranton.
Something is up with all this, and with her mad drive for a gas tax holiday this summer, which no one believes will do any good at all. There’s not one economist who hasn’t said this is nonsense. So in the Stephanopoulos interview we got this:
“I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” program. A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”
See Matthew Yglesias:
Economists, environmentalists, everyone who’s thought about the issue for ten minutes, etc.
I’m not going to say that our public policy should blindly conform to the consensus among the economics profession, but the gas tax holiday is an illiteracy on a much deeper level - there’s simply no support for this idea among people who’ve looked at it in a serious way. That’s not elitism, that’s reality, and what Clinton’s selling is Bush-style misgovernment.
Yep, reality is latte-drinking elitists. That worked for Bush.
And Obama keeps saying things like this:
Does anyone here really trust the oil companies to give you the savings, when they could just pocket the money themselves? There’s not an expert out there that believes that this is going to work. There’s not an editorial out there that has said this is actually the answer to high gas prices. In fact my understanding is today, Senator Clinton had to send out a surrogate to speak on behalf of this plan, and all she could find was - get this - a lobbyist for Shell Oil to explain how this is going to be good for consumers. It’s a “shell game” - literally.
But she persists:
There are a lot of people in Indiana who would really benefit from a gas tax holiday. That might not mean much to my opponent, but I think it means a lot to people who are struggling here, people who commute a long way to work, farmers and truckers.
Mark Kleiman of the UCLA School for Public Policy catches her error:
Ummm… Senator? Didn’t anyone tell you that fuel used in farm vehicles doesn’t pay the gasoline excise tax (p. 36)?
Not that she minds lying to the voters, but the problem is the farmers already know it.
Ah, reality again – that’s such a bother. But on the other hand, Josh Marshall here says she simply has no more sharks left to jump and links to Robert Reich’s blog:
When asked this morning by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”
I know several of the economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn’t heard her remark and said he couldn’t believe she’d say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as “politics as usual.”
We all know the game.
Mark Kleiman elsewhere says, however, that pandering is a character issue:
A correspondent thinks I’ve missed the main point about both “obliterate Iran” and the gas tax holiday. For Clinton, who has run on being the grown-up, experienced policy wonk in the race, the willingness to talk complete nonsense when the situation is desperate not only contradicts her major claim to office it raises serious questions about her character. Her behavior on those issues has, by contrast with the behavior of the [other] Democratic candidate, profoundly un-Presidential.
“Experience,” it is said, “isn’t what happens to you; it’s what you make of what happens to you.” Which candidate looked “experienced” this week?
Yep, someone has to decide which more presidential – grinning and rather mindless enthusiasm, or calm, unflappable self-confidence based in reality.
And, yes, Stephanopoulos gave her a chance to back off her “obliterate Iran” statement, but she chose to reiterate it instead (see this). Kleiman argues this is madness on two levels:
Morally: Seventy million people live in Iran. They are currently ruled by a religious dictatorship covered by a thin veneer of “controlled democracy”: the voters can vote, but only for candidates the mullahs approve in advance. Threatening to “obliterate” them because of an action by the government they didn’t choose means offering to outbid Hitler, Stalin, and Mao in the mass-murderer auction.
Diplomatically: The current Iranian regime has an unsure grip on power. Younger people and the educated urban elite (think of it as the Iranian version of the Obama constituency) hates the current ruling clique and would like to move toward democracy and civil liberty. Iran’s wealth and military power make it a key player in the Middle East, and the fact that Iranians aren’t Arabs means that Iran isn’t necessarily part of the anti-Israel coalition. (The Shah was strongly pro-Israel, and that wasn’t what caused him to fall.) Bringing about regime change in Iran by fostering the growth of democratic forces must rank very high on any intelligent list of American foreign policy objectives: much higher, for example, than achieving a stable Iraq.
And after a discussion of Iranian politics, he offers this:
Even during the Cold War, no American President ever explicitly threatened to “obliterate” the Soviet Union. Clinton’s comment raises serious questions about her fitness for the office she holds, let alone the one she is seeking. It is precisely because the United States has the biggest stick in the history of the world that we can and must talk softly.
Like the gas tax holiday, “obliterate Iran” is a position that none of Clinton’s sophisticated supporters can embrace. It was designed to please the boobs who confuse bluster with strength, and those Jews so full of hatred of all things Muslim that they have lost hold of whatever moral principles they used to have. Having embraced voodoo economics (and even the Republican idea that listening to experts is elitist) in the gas tax holiday, Clinton has now embraced cowboy diplomacy. (My apologies to any actual cowboys who may read this.)
What is one to make of all this? Andrew Sullivan, the Times of London, says Obama should make her his running mate:
His model in this should be Abraham Lincoln. What Lincoln did, as Doris Kearns Goodwin explained in her brilliant book, “Team of Rivals,” was to bring his most bitter opponents into his cabinet in order to maintain national and party unity at a time of crisis. Obama - who is a green legislator from Illinois, just as Lincoln was - could signal to his own supporters in picking Clinton that he isn’t capitulating to old politics, he is demonstrating his capacity to reach out and engage and co-opt his rivals and opponents.
Done deftly, picking Clinton could even resonate with Obama’s supporters as a statesmanlike gesture, a sign of the kind of reconciliation he wants to achieve at home and abroad and energize his own party for the fall. It is consonant with his core message: that he can unify the country in a way few other politicians can. It would even help heal the gulf that has opened up between the Clintons and black voters in this campaign. It’s win-win all round.
I hesitate to propose this, but I do think it is now worth actively considering for the first time in this campaign. The test of a president is his ability to recognize his own weaknesses and adjust to them. If he can do that while strengthening his core message, and make his own election close to unstoppable, what would hold him back?
Interesting – and it is unlikely.
But we live in a strange country. See this clip – Sunday morning, on Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer being amazed at how strange it has become:
I saw a story in the Washington Post the other day, where a reporter granted a government official anonymity in order as the newspaper put it, “for the government official to speak more candidly.” Well, that made me wonder. Do we no longer expect government officials to tell the whole story if they must take responsibility for what they say? Even worse, do we believe that is acceptable?
For sure, the White House won no prize for candor last week; it gave the outgoing head of the General Services Administration, Lurita Doan, a big send off by thanking her for making government buildings more energy-efficient or some such, when in truth, she was forced out. She was the object of multiple investigations, suspicious dealings on government contracts, and asking government employees what they could do to help political candidates, which is, of course, against the law. Even the government’s watchdog agency recommended she be disciplined to the fullest extent. Yet the White House spokesman declined to say if her resignation had anything to do with any of that. From the White House came only thanks and confirmation she was gone. The government saw no obligation to say why, which leads me to this: have decades of secrecy, spin and stonewalling conditioned us to accept less than the whole story from the government?
Is telling the whole truth no longer a given? Frankly, I’m not sure. What I do know is more and more people seem skeptical everything the government says and does. What we saw last week may be one reason why.
Or read this review of the new book from Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire.
Key quotes from the book:
In the pointy-headed northeastern America of my experience there were no legends of wandering prophets, no dinner-table discussions about personal salvation. But in the rest of the country you had this weird dichotomy, and advanced industrial economy confidently riding the superconductor and the microchip into the space age while most of its population hurtled backward away from the Enlightenment, living out a Canterbury Tales-type quest for revelation in a culture dominated by superstition and mystery.
And this:
The country, in other words, was losing its shit. Our national politics was doomed because voters were no longer debating one another using a commonly accepted set of facts. There was no commonly accepted set of facts, except in the imagination of a hopelessly daft political and media elite that long ago lost touch with the general public. What we had instead was a nation of reality shoppers, all shutting the blinds on the loathsome old common landscape to tinker with their own self-tailored and in some cases highly paranoid recipes for salvation and/or revolution. They voted in huge numbers, but they were voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody. The elections had basically become a forum for organizing the hatreds of the population.
And this:
Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians’ jobs. The driving motivation of all Washington politicians is to quell or deflect that power, and this is visible even in such a terrible, immediate emergency as the Iraq war, when one would think that some kind of civic instinct would kick in, for five minutes or so at least. But no: instead, a newly conquering congressional majority armed with a fresh mandate essentially spent its first year in office trying to stay on the right side of public anger while maintaining business as usual; it was very plain that the party viewed its end-the-war mandate as a burden, not a privilege.
When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.
Ah, we were always weird. See this 1983 article by Jessica Mitford:
Foreigners are astonished to learn that almost all Americans are embalmed and publicly displayed after death. The practice is unheard of outside the United States and Canada. As Alfred Fellows, an English jurist, wrote in The Law of Burial, “A public exhibition of an embalmed body, as that of Lenin in Moscow, would presumably be dealt with as a revolting spectacle and therefore a public nuisance.”
All you need is perspective.
