Month: January 2008

It’s every pundit’s final resort.

Thinking over last night again, I realized that, for the first time in memory, I actually liked parts of Hillary Clinton’s performance. I liked her unplugged comfort with her own vile hackery. I like her when she’s transparently shameless. I like watching a woman politician tearing into a guy like a rottweiler with issues. It’s the feminist in me.

When she went for Obama over his respect for conservative ideas, she knew it was a phony charge, but she clearly relished wielding it. Ditto the Rezko swipe. And her gob-smackingly brazen lecture about Obama not taking responsibility for his own words – this from Bill Clinton’s wife? And watching her, you could see she was loving it. There was this absolute unconcern for propriety – especially the unconscionably tacky interventions of her husband. There was a relish in small-bore partisan attacks. She is steeped in the old politics, and there’s something clarifying about watching her enjoy flinging the dirt that is now caked under her fingernails.

This was always there, of course. But for a few moments, the patina of bien-pensant benevolence fell off. We didn’t have to endure the trademarked Clinton sacrifice-myself-for-saving-the-world routine. We could appreciate her for the gutter politician she is, deep down, all the way down. The real Clinton is actually more palatable than the Mother Teresa act we have had to deal with in this campaign so far. This is the Clinton who yacks it up with Sidney Blumenthal in her spare time, the Clinton whose main concern with her husband’s sexual pathologies was the damage it might do to her career. I can handle that candidate, even respect her, even as I loathe her. But it won’t last, alas. That’s part of the game. She won’t allow us the pleasure of her own self-awareness for long.

Do I sound like I’m resigning myself to the inevitable? Nah. You’ve got to have hope. The logic for Obama and McCain still outstrips re-electing the Clinton Machine. She’d be terrible for the country and the world in many ways. And the terms on which she is winning this campaign – Bill’s terms – guarantee endless psychodrama and dysfunction in the Oval Office. But at least we now begin to see her and her classless, needy, lying lech of a husband for what they are.

Politicians. The kind who cannot remember any more how painful it was when they had their sense of shame removed.

It’s the former president who has managed to ignite fond Democratic memories of the 1990s to rally a base majority against Obama. Matthew Continetti captures the dynamic well:

These days the former president’s “outbursts” serve a dual purpose: they lend the impression that Senator Clinton is the insurgent running against the media-supported Obama, while also creating the illusion that it is the former president, not his wife, who is actually the candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Jim Manzi on Hillary Clinton’s sublimation. She’s not worldly enough for some of the nuns I have known.

Kevin Drum thinks Americans simply don’t want to move on:

I lean toward the Hillary approach because I think the Obama approach only works when there’s already a real groundswell of support for significant change (as in the 30s, 60s, and 80s, for example) — and as much as I hate to say it, I just don’t see that at the moment.

This is the relevant issue, I think. I wrote:

If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do.

My own view is that America’s crisis is a very deep one. The markets are reflecting the fact that seven years of Bush have added $32 trillion to future debt, and there is no one able to either raise revenues or slash entitlements to get us back to fiscal sanity. Iraq has shown that America’s imperial burden is becoming greater and greater even as her major rivals, China and Russia, get stronger and stronger. The threat of Jihadism is as salient today as it was in 2001. Climate change is a challenge the political system seems utterly unable to confront. The cultural, racial and religious divisions tearing America apart are as powerful as we allow them to be. Another election campaign that actually deepens this polarization will render it even harder to overcome.

I fear dark times ahead. Which is why I favor McCain and Obama. Both can rally their own supporters while appealing beyond them. We need that unifying potential – not because unity is always a good thing. But because sometimes it’s necessary. Like: now.

Matt Cooper and Larry Kudlow both like the three quarters of a point cut. James Pethokoukis says it’s good for Bernanke’s image. Felix Salmon is more skeptical:

Now the Fed is charged with keeping employment high and inflation low; it’s not charged with protecting the capital of investors in the stock market. So this action smells a bit like panic to me, and it might also have prevented the kind of stomach-lurching selling which could conceivably have marked a market bottom. I have to say I don’t like it.

My worries here.

You can make a broad case for his candidacy – even for a religious right supporter like Dennis Prager. But you cannot get around the fact that he is a vicious, vindictive, power-abusing, sorry little tyrant of a human being. Do not the endless stories of his using the might of his office to punish and persecute the weak and vulnerable and personal enemies tell you something about his character? And doesn’t that matter in a president?

The judge says two things that merit wider dissemination:

"There is no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed anyone in the United States or elsewhere."

And:

Cooke said she was giving Padilla some credit—over the objections of federal prosecutors—for his lengthy military detention at a Navy brig in South Carolina. She agreed with defense lawyers that Padilla was subjected to "harsh conditions" and "extreme environmental stresses" while there.

"I do find that the conditions were so harsh for Mr. Padilla … they warrant consideration in the sentencing in this case," the judge said.

"Extreme environmental stresses"? Is that another euphemism?