Month: August 2008

Don’t Mention Honorable Campaigning

A sensitive McCain snaps at Time interviewers.

There’s a theme that recurs in your books and your speeches, both about putting country first but also about honor. I wonder if you could define honor for us?

Read it in my books.

I’ve read your books.

No, I’m not going to define it.

But honor in politics?

I defined it in five books. Read my books.

[Your] campaign today is more disciplined, more traditional, more aggressive. From your point of view, why the change?

I will do as much as we possibly can do to provide as much access to the press as possible.

But beyond the press, sir, just in terms of …

I think we’re running a fine campaign, and this is where we are.

Do you miss the old way of doing it?

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Rope-a-Dope?

A reader sees a pattern:

I have this feeling Obama is holding back for the debates. Rope a dope.

This convention was about healing the party, activating the team – don’t forget his secret weapon, his ground game – and making himself and his family part of our general cultural consciousness, part of our American family. People fear what they do not know (ever noticed that?). We have to get familiar with Barack – Barack has to become Barack – and then we’ll accept his attacks on McCain. They will be equals. I think Barack knows that, and he’s playing his game.   

Let McCain and his Rove-dogs bark all they want now. Let them punch themselves silly, until they can’t manage one more swing… in the meantime, we fall in love with Barack. Do you remember Ali coming off the ropes in Zaire? Did you see him in the crowd last night?

Bargaining With Moscow

Yglesias tackles Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham:

Given that we have no way of forcibly dislodging Russia from Georgia, a person genuinely concerned with Georgia’s interests might see a bargaining opportunity. Here we have a missile defense program that terrifies the Russians, yet does us no good against the rogue states that are nominally its target. A deal could be struck here. A deal that would not only help secure our objectives in Georgia but would also allow the US-Russian bilateral relationship to refocus on vital issues of terrorism and nuclear proliferation rather than ethnic disputes in a remote mountain region.

Of course, last night’s Biden rhetoric was no subtler.

Georgia: In Context

A reader writes:

Equating Georgia and South Ossetia/Abkhazia as ‘factions’ is totally silly. Georgia exists as a polity for  a millennium (incorporating Abkhazia and the area known now as South Ossetia), it has a literate culture going way back (their alphabet was invented in the 5th century AD, their national epic, Rustaveli’s The Knight and the Panther skin was written in the 13th century). This is a culture that has produced great theatre directors (Robert Sturua has directed acclaimed productions in London and at the Edinburgh festival), films shown at Cannes,  women’s world chess champions, world renowned choirs etc. This cultural richness has involved  the various ethnic and linguistic groups resident in Georgia (Kartvelians, Mgrelians, Laz, Svan, Jews, Armenians etc.).

Neither Abkhazia nor South Ossetia (or Ossetia) have any past as (independent) polities.

They emerged due to Russian attempts at divide and rule, fueled in part admittedly by the fact, as Totten’s source indicates, that some ethnic minorities in Georgia have not always been given their due. But this is not a situation qualitatively different from the centralism characterizing e.g. Spain or France.

In time, as Georgia would try to fulfill the conditions of EU accession one would hope to see appropriate autonomy granted to certain provinces. The impatience you seem to display when discussing Georgia seems to stem from the fact that Saakashvili (unwisely) got very deep into bed with a variety of neocons, not realizing that involvement with as incompetent an administration as Bush’s could lead to disaster.

If Totten’s report is correct, Saakashvili didn’t manage to avoid a trap set for him by the Russians, a clever tactician he aint. But that’s quite different from being a crazy adventurer, as he was originally portrayed (and as the Russians seek to portray him.). It is certainly in the interest of the West to support Georgia, not only as an embattled people with a long standing and rich culture and not least due to its strategic importance (oil, proximity to Iran etc) but also because this is a case of a domino effect: if the Russians get away with this, they will move on to Ukraine, Moldova etc

   

My point was not to diminish the cultural richness and national identity of Georgia. It was to worry that the US does not have a dog in the fight over regional autonomy within Georgia or within Russia. And the question of how we can deter further Russian pressure on Ukraine, Moldova or Azerbaijan while securing critical Russian cooperation in the war on Jihadist terror is not reducible to Cold War blather.

But again: this is not to excuse Putin or Medvedev. It’s to insist that the West needs to respond to this intelligently, rather than moving instantly to isolating and marginalizing Russia.

Biden Bloggy Reax

Ross on Joey:

He bellowed, he rambled, he stumbled over his words – but he got the job done. It wasn’t as smooth as Clinton, but it was more of the anti-GOP red meat this convention desperately needed. All in all, tonight was a reminder – the first in what seems like a while – that this is an election that the Democrats really, really ought to be able to win.

Instapundit:

Biden started off strong, but ran long. The Obama folks may want to persuade him that less is more — but I suspect that his own staffers tried that earlier in this election season. Still, a good performance, though not in Bill Clinton’s league by any means.

Eve Fairbanks:

I wish Biden had taken a page from John Kerry and expressed more personal disappointment in his friend: “I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years. But every day I learn something new about candidate McCain,” as Kerry put it. Biden just mentioned his friendship with McCain and then went on to critique his policies, as though they were two unrelated things. Kerry was sharper.


Karen Tumulty:

The first section of Biden’s speech isn’t that different from the one John Edwards gave in 2004. In fact, Edwards used the exact same riff, imagining parents sitting around their kitchen tables at night worrying about their finances. But I remember listening to Edwards and thinking, I wonder how many people hear him and feel like he’s describing them instead of poorer people they can’t really relate to. Maybe it’s the fact that four years later, the economy is worse and financial struggles have moved up the income ladder. But I bet Biden’s examples–"we owe more on the house than it’s worth", "another year and no raise?"–hit home with more people.

JPod:

Biden didn’t offer specifics about what Obama would do. But he framed the discussion in terms of the way Republicans have mishandled American foreign policy. I think he’s wrong about a lot of that, but it’s not intended for us; it’s intended to sway independents and others who don’t follow these matters very closely and might be swayed by the attack.

Jonathan V. Last:

The first thing that jumps out from Biden’s speech is that the tone seems to appeal to the Jacksonians in the Jacksonian / Academic divide that Michael Barone explored during the primaries. He talks about "honor" and fighting and bloodying the nose of neighborhood bullies and the bearing of crosses. This is not the type of imagery that Obama has been comfortable trading in.