Ezra Klein posts today with the most plausible explanation I have read for the emotional attachment of the press to Senator John McCain.
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Month: February 2008
[digg-reddit-me]I’ve been talking with one of my friends about what this election means recently. He’s in favor of Senator Hillary Clinton – and I, obviously, favor Senator Barack Obama. His argument is essentially that Mr. Obama is too “green” (although my friend believes Mr. Obama would be exceptional in eight years or so) and that Ms. Clinton would provide competent if uninspired leadership making her the better choice for today. There are a lot of grounds to dispute this on – whether Ms. Clinton’s “experience” means much; whether she would be a competent manager – her campaign planning suggesting otherwise; whether she could accomplish anything, as divisive as she is; whether or not she will win; whether Mr. Obama lacks sufficient experience when compared with Ms. Clinton; whether Mr. Obama is “green”.
I think all of these raise legitimate points. But the argument I choose is the one that convinced me in the end to support Mr. Obama over Ms. Clinton, Senator John McCain, former Senator John Edwards, and the rest of the field. Simply, the American experiment is in bad shape.
We have an executive today who does not respect the rule of law, who has acted imperiously (only slightly more so than President Bill Clinton); we have a corrupt culture in Washington that refuses to take action to reign the executive branch in, or even to protect their own prerogatives; we have a media environment that rarely focuses on hard-hitting news and often reports on important topics as a matter of “he said, she said” without resolving factual conflicts between the diverging accounts; we have an increasingly partisan politics that divides Americans into two teams despite great consensus on major issues; our foreign policy is increasingly imperial, if well-meaning; the bubbling conflicts around the world have been exacerbated in the past decade – and a “return to normalcy” that Ms. Clinton promises will not be sufficient to quell them.
What we need is a president who will be willing to return some of the powers Mr. Clinton and President George W. Bush have taken unto their office; a president who will be able to start a serious discussion of the long-term issues facing America and then unite the citizenry to try to take steps to deal with these issues. It’s unlikely any individual could accomplish all of these things – but Ms. Clinton does not seem inclined to even try. Her campaign is not about where America is headed – but about micro-initiatives to make segments of the population a bit better off. There’s a time for that approach to politics, but that time is not now.
My friend agreed with virtually everything I said above. Yet somehow, he doesn’t see America as in a fundamental crisis – and because of this, he sees Ms. Clinton as the more “safe” choice.
Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Charlie Savage, and Lawrence Lessig (and former Governor Mario Cuomo) have all helped convince me of the urgency of this crisis with their constant clear-sighted analyses – and thus moved me to support Mr. Obama as the only candidate with the potential to begin to tackle these issues.
But somehow, despite the relatively widespread knowledge of the state of our government and our politics, something is missing; some urgency. People tend to think: it can’t happen here. Glenn Greenwald, reflecting perhaps a similar frustration to mine, tried to explain part of the issue by way of comparison:
Imagine if, say, Vladimir Putin was accused by his own top officials of systematically spying on Russian citizens for years in ways that were patently illegal, but he then manipulated the courts to ensure he was never accountable, and had his political allies in parliament block any investigations, so that the activities remained concealed forever and he was never made to answer for what he did. Think about the grave denunciations that Fred Hiatt, Charles Krauthammer and the State Department would be issuing over such authoritarian and lawless maneuvering.
That’s exactly how our country operates now. When high political officials here are accused of breaking the law, they need not defend themselves. Congress acts to protect and immunize them. The courts refuse even to hear the lawsuits. And executive branch officials are completely shielded from the most basic mechanics of the rule of law.
No hyperbole is necessary to sustain the Putin comparison. It’s demonstrated by the facts themselves, by how our system of government works now. None of the “great controversies” of the Bush years, involving multiple accusations of lawbreaking, war crimes and other forms of serious corruption, has resulted in any legal process or investigations or ajudications because our government officials have been vested with omnipotent instruments to shield themselves from accountability, or even investigation, of any kind.
In a minimally functioning Republic, when our political leaders are accused of concealing wrongdoing, Congress investigates, uncovers what happens, and informs the American people. When political leaders are accused of breaking the law, courts decide whether that occurred. None of the branches of government do that any longer. They do the opposite: they not only fail to perform those functions, but they affirmatively act to block investigations, help the conduct remain concealed, and ensure that there is no adjudication. When it comes to ensuring that the NSA spying scandal specifically remains forever uninvestigated, secret, and unexamined, telecom amnesty will be the final nail in this coffin, but it is merely illustrative of how our political culture now functions.
The failure of many Americans to realize how close we are to losing the essence of the American experiment has many causes. But at root, it is a failure of imagination.
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How not to lose
Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.
Introducing Senator Hillary Clinton at a rally yesterday. Right – attacking the majority of voters in this groundbreaking Democratic primary is the way to win the race. But at least he advances the Clinton attack line – “She’s tested!”
This is a question I have been asking myself:
Then I look at Clinton and wonder why she’s fighting so fiercely against her fellow Democrats after doing so little to fight Bush’s destructive policies when he was riding high in the polls. I think this is part of what the young voters sense too…
[digg-reddit-me]Jonah Goldberg at the National Review believes that the debate over American torture is “stinks of political opportunism.” He apparently missed the point made by Morris David, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions in Guantanamo this weekend in the Times. And he apparently doesn’t care to take into account the fact that torture often produces false evidence. But he does have this to say:
I don’t like waterboarding, and I hope we never use it again. I have respect for those who believe it should be banned in all circumstances. But I do not weep that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spent somewhere between .03 and .06 seconds feeling like he was drowning for every person he allegedly helped murder on 9/11.
Then again, I think it would be horrific if we used that logic to justify waterboarding. It’s not a technique that should be used for punishment. Nor do I think that evidence obtained from forced confessions should be used in trial. Those are paving stones on the road to a torture state.
Reading this, I guess that Mr. Goldberg and me have more in common than meets the eye. But what Mr. Goldberg doesn’t acknowledge here is that whether or not “coerced interrogations” will be used as evidence is still an open question in the upcoming trials of the “Guantanamo Six”. More important, he doesn’t deal with the executive acceptances of torture – from redefining it to mean only “pain equivalent to death or major organ failure” as John Yoo did while advising President Bush, to the many less dramatic instances where evidence of torture was “lost” or destroyed, as lower level employees were blamed for following vague directives to “take off the gloves”.
I think many sympathize with Mr. Goldberg’s formulation – of not caring for torture, but not caring about the fates of these mass murderers.
What Mr. Goldberg doesn’t seem to get is that he is not just apathetic about the torture of men who likely deserve it – he is also giving the President of the United States, an individual in a position of extreme power, a license to break the law when subservience to the law is the only thing that separates a President from a King.
If the President believes he or she must break the law in order to save lives, and judges that breaking the law is the only course available – then he or she should do so. But upon breaking the law, they must then submit to it. For if an individual is able to break the law with impunity, the entire system breaks down.
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No comment.
For a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics…Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background…
From Lisa Schiffren of the National Review. (h/t Patrick Appel.)
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Bloomberg calls it ‘fraud’
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Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane of the Times have a solid piece today on Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., the former head of CIA’s Directorate of Operations. The piece seems to suffer from a bit too much editing – but it gives the reader a flavor of the lurking back story behind Mr. Rodriguez’s role in the destruction of the interrogation tapes.
As an example of editing gone wrong, the story begins with this intriguing opening:
It would become known inside the Central Intelligence Agency as “the Italian job,” a snide movie reference to the bungling performance of an agency team that snatched a radical Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003 and flew him to Egypt — a case that led to criminal charges in Italy against 26 Americans.
That’s about as far into the matter as this story goes – although I’m sure the story isn’t breaking here for the first time.
I was left with both an admiration for Mr. Rodriguez’s character and an anger that it seems unlikely that he will face any consequences for blatantly and deliberately breaking the law. His lawyer characterizes the coda that led him to destroy the interrogation videos as well as cover up the abuses in “the Italian Job” operation as this: “I’m not going to let my people get nailed for something they were ordered to do.”
In describing his reason for destroying the tapes, the Times concludes:
Mr. Rodriguez, who was nearing retirement, saw the tapes as a sort of time bomb that, if leaked, threatened irreparable damage to the United States’ image in the Muslim world, his friends say, and posed physical and legal risks to C.I.A. officers on them.
Again – I sympathize with him. And his distrust of the administration – as well as any political administration – is well-founded. Sympathy cannot override the necessary condition of any free society: that the law must be held above any individual.
There is sometimes an esoteric poetry to scientific explanations of the world. In the Scientific American, Chip Walter described the “primal effects” of a kiss:
Visceral marching orders boost pulse and blood pressure. The pupils dilate, breathing deepens and rational thought retreats, as desire suppresses both prudence and self-consciousness. For their part, the participants are probably too enthralled to care. As poet e. e. cummings once observed: “Kisses are a better fate / than wisdom.”
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Ready from Day 1
[digg-reddit-me]I don’t quite buy the idea that you can judge a candidate by how well they run a campaign – after all, Karl Rove and President George W. Bush ran great campaigns. As The Onion appropriately explained in a headline: “2004 Reelection Campaign Better Planned Than Iraq Invasion.”
But especially in a race between three candidates for whom their campaign is the biggest thing each person has run, it gives some useful insight. Overall, I think campaigns show something – although they do not force candidates to demonstrate all the leadership qualities that are most essential to effective leadership.
Given this, the contrast between Mr. McCain – whose campaign went bankrupt when he was in the lead, and finally gained traction when he was, once again, the insurgent, and faltered again once he regained the lead – Ms. Clinton, whose is now trying to portray herself as the underdog getting delegates on a “shoestring budget” of over $130 million, and who didn’t plan to campaign past February 5th, going so far as to avoid opening up offices in the states holding primaries after that date – to Mr. Obama whose campaign has been masterful, thorough, and well-managed.
Here’s Andrew Sullivan making the point about Mr. Obama:
Then his strategy was meticulous organization – and you saw that in Iowa, as well as yesterday’s caucus states. Everything he told me has been followed through. And the attention to detail – from the Alaska caucus to the Nevada cooks – has been striking…
How did the candidates deal with this? The vastly more experienced and nerves-of-steel Clinton clearly went through some wild mood-swings. Obama gave an appearance at least of preternatural coolness under fire, a steady message that others came to mimic, and a level of oratory that still stuns this longtime debater. In the middle of this very hot zone, he exhibit a coolness and steeliness that is a mark of presidential timber. He played tough – but he didn’t play nasty. Keeping the high road in a contest like this – without ever playing the race card or the victim card – is an achievement. Building a movement on top of that is more impressive still. So far, he has combined Romney’s money with Clinton’s organizational skills and Ron Paul’s grass-roots enthusiasm. No other campaign has brought so many dimensions into play.
Compare this to Ms. Clinton – whose organization arrived months after Mr. Obama’s in many states, who has been out-organized, out-campaigned, and out-thought. Now, over a month-and-a-half after her loss in Iowa that should have demonstrated the power of Mr. Obama’s campaign, Ms. Clinton was not able to gather a full slate of delegates to run in the final primary in Pennsylvania, despite the fact that her vocal supporter, the governor, extended the time she had to get delegates by a week. Last week, Ms. Clinton’s campaign was 20 delegates short in Pennsylvania. After a week, she is only down “10 or 11”. Keep in mind also that Pennsylvania is one of three states that is considered essential for Ms. Clinton to stop Mr. Obama’s momentum – along with Texas and Ohio.
As John Baer of the Philadelphia Daily News observed:
For a national campaign stressing competence, experience, “ready day one,” one might expect a full slate in what could be a key state.
Indeed.