Month: January 2008

Larison:

I raised a glass to Obama for defeating Hillary in Iowa, but it is time for everyone to sober up and stop pretending that drippy and meaningless optimism constitutes the path to good government …

One question to ask yourself about Obama is this: if he were white, would I ever support him?  Presumably many of his current supporters would, since they are also on board with his very progressive politics, but how broad a base of support do you suppose he would have?  Would it actually be good for the country and for black candidates in the future if the first black candidate to contest for national office were so far removed from Middle America as Obama certainly is? 

There is a difference between "drippy and meaningless optimism" and hope. If Obama were white, of course, he would not be who he is. And his long experience in balancing various parts of his identity, allowing no single part to define him, have led to the kind of judgment and maturity that I’d like to see in any presidential candidate. White or black.

Mark Falcoff has a must-read on the looming Republican crisis:

If Huckabee goes on to win more primaries he will have a reasonable claim to the nomination. He may, of course, lose New Hampshire, New York, California and Michigan. But let’s suppose that he manages to win enough primaries in the southern and border states to make the results in those three states irrelevant. It’s all a question of numbers. In spite of itself, the party might end up with him as its nominee, and with it, heading down the shortest road to disaster since the Goldwater debacle of 1964.

Make no mistake about it: an electoral defeat of these dimensions would represent a major watershed in the history of the Republican party. It would be faced with only two possible roads forward.

One is to become the party of the religious right, a sectarian agglomeration somewhat like the small ethnic parties in inter-war Europe, perhaps capable of holding some governorships and seats in Congress but never again competitive in a presidential election. The other would be to cut itself free from the religious right and seek to appeal to the wide and growing tranche of independent voters who are socially liberal but economically conservative. In that case the Republican party would gradually resemble some of the “liberal” (that is, conservative) parties who periodically win national elections in Western Europe or Canada. These parties are friendly to market-based solutions to economic problems—that is, they are broadly libertarian.

Think this is impossible? Think again.

Mike Allen and Ben Smith:

Conversations with campaign officials make it clear they feel besieged, and unsure how to sap Obama’s momentum.

Observers have long worried about the over-crowded and chaotic detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, where torture and murder of detainees has occurred under the command of George W. Bush. Now another ominous sign:

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.

By the end of this administration, the Geneva Conventions will have suffered a bigger blow from their original champion than any in their history.

Positive reviews from Greg Mankiw and Andrew Samwick. Mankiw:

Obama shows extraordinary clarity and honesty about the effects of the policy he is proposing.

Boston, Massachusetts, 2.30 pm.

A reader writes:

I am square in the middle of the boomer generation, and female. I have been meaning to write and say that younger people are not the only ones who respond to Obama. You are starting to use "boomers" in the same way you have for a long time used "left," as a mindless, lazy, overgeneralizing all-purpose blame container.

Blaming never helps.  Sometimes it’s important to assess responsibility, but that’s a different thing, and it won’t be accomplished with labels like "the left," "the right," "boomers," or whatever, because those labels are so overbroad as to be meaningless in any complex analysis.  "Boomers" are people, just like your generation.  Being people, they are just as varied as any other group you could put a label on.  Being people, they are a maddening mixture of virtues and vices, good habits and bad.  Being people, many of them wanted to leave the world "better" (and yes, definitions differ) than they had found it.  They — we — did no better, but also no worse in my opinion, than any generation before us.

The world is a mess today not because it has boomers in it, but because it has humans in it.  I totally agree that there are deep-seated destructive habits shaping our national discourse, and that my generation has helped to create and indulge those habits; one of the reasons Obama brings tears to my eyes is that he offers a hope that we might actually shape some newer and less destructive habits.  You aren’t helping by driving a wedge between generations.

As bad at spinning as he is at polling.

"I was simply incorrect." I mentioned the fib here. Good for Romney for fessing up to it. But it’s another moment when his desire to close the sale sometimes leads him into factual inexactitude.

The most respected poll in New Hampshire, which had Obama and Clinton very close, now shows an Obama 10 point blow-out. It also gives McCain a 6 point lead. If Romney cannot win his neighboring state … ?