Month: August 2008

A reader writes:

While I understand your clear-headed delineation of each of the candidate’s broad strengths and weaknesses, you’re really missing an important way that race does play a role in this election. There are swaths of White Americans still relatively uncomfortable with African Americans in positions (political) power. More to the point race plays a role in people’s aversion to Obama not necessarily because out and out they hate black people but rather they don’t trust or believe he deserves to be president.

The problem for Obama is that, given his age, biography and the seemingly relative ease with which he has ascended, his success just gets to people. He is a vessel for all their pent up angst against what they see as the alleged favorable treatment that being black affords due to "liberal bias" and its accursed affirmative action policies.

These are the people who have a few discreet boxes for African Americans (ghetto/hood, entertainer, preacher man, pimp, athlete, single-mom, etc.) that are understood and accepted. These people also have a sense of history and while they may not acknowledge it, were often witnesses to and fully aware of the rabid racism of pre-civil rights America.

It comes down to this: "How can we trust someone who comes from a group we previously defined by very limited boundaries (dancin’, preachin’, ballin’) and give him access to the most powerful job in the world? We’ve always had the power and we resent them having it and what they could with it, especially against us."

That’s why the celebrity thing works. It devalues and diminishes Obama to the fast talkin’ Black guy. Can’t trust that. In his biography, they don’t see bootstraps they see affirmative action. In his remarkable defeat of Clinton they see "white guilt" and the usurping of the proper hierarchy. For PUMAs and the rest it’s all about the "uppity negro" who needs to know his place (since policy wise they’re on the same side being former Clinton supporters).  The irony is that the founding principles of America created the possibilities for a Barack Obama (I mean it is a democracy right?), the America these people supposedly so love and want to protect. This really isn’t about changing policies for a lot of people it’s about keeping power in the hands of "good" White Americans who deserve it more (Paging Geraldine Ferraro..).

Dean Barnett questions "how genuinely scandalized the Democrats are by McCain’s wealth" and doesn’t think that the attack will work:

If McCain spends a lot of money on his wardrobe, it doesn’t show. He may wear $550 loafers, but (and I say this respectfully), he still manages to look extremely frumpy. He doesn’t wind-surf or snow-board. Having been laid as low in his life as he was in Vietnam, McCain just doesn’t come across as the kind of rich guy who floats above the concerns of the ordinary citizen.

But if he puts mega-rich theocon Romney on the ticket, the class war needs no organization, does it?

… are the Democrats who haven’t yet signed off on his candidacy. That’s McCain’s worry. Yes, they’re Hillary supporters. But they’re also Democrats. And what this convention will be about is reminding Democrats that McCain is a Republican, and insisting that he would represent four more years of Bush policies. If Obama can ove his 80 percent Democratic support number to 85 percent, things look rosy. Ambers notes one more thing:

Obama’s campaign has polling data suggesting that an unusually large number of pro-choice Democrats don’t know that McCain is pro-life.

Riitta Ikonen uses costumes in her art:

The artist in her own words:

My work is concerned with the performance of images, through photography and costume design. Certain items, usually small and insignificant, excite me to the point where I have to wear them and then document that process. The super- garments I make open up new experiences. In my costumes tremendous things happen – to me and to the people I work with. Today I exploded an egg in the microwave. Next, I want to make an egg costume.

Check out the Bigfoot hoax story on Fox here. Then click on the link that says: "Click here to see more photos of Bigfoot and the press conference." This is what you find.

Ezra Klein makes the case for Lieberman as veep:

…if McCain wins with Lieberman, he wins as John McCain, uniting figure. Not as the next Bush. Not as the Republican candidate. McCain’s definitely a hardline conservative, but he clearly aches to be understood as a maverick. How much the better if his win could be attributed to that reputation rather than to some smartly negative ads and brazen supplications before Rick Warren. A Lieberman pick, in other words, lets John McCain campaign — and possibly win — on his terms, which has to be an appealing prospect. And as Obama is still ahead, and flusher with cash, and discovering an open line of attack on McCain, and suddenly armored on foreign policy, it’s not as if McCain’s current strategy is proving such a startling success that he can draw a straight line from here to the White House.

The campaign is getting uglier:

A very incisive critique of the McCain campaign’s constant disavowal of the notion that they are questioning Obama’s patriotism, and constant insistence in other statements that he is a traitor to his country, seeking to legislate defeat in Iraq, because it would allegedly help his domestic political fortunes.

Some readers have cited McCain’s support for the surge as evidence of his capacity to "put country first" even if it were politically disadvantageous. What this analysis misses, to my mind, is that opposing the surge was never a possibility for McCain. He had staked his position on a more aggressive campaign in Iraq long before the primaries, and had every reason to use the surge as his differentiating marker in the campaign. It was his big bet which he had no real choice but to hope would pay dividends. And it did.

But in this, his own political interest and the interest of advancing a policy that deepened US involvement in Iraq were one and the same. He made no real choice for country over his personal political fortunes. In the narrow window of salvaging catastrophe in Iraq, the two were inextricable. And historians may well one day debate whether the decision to double-down in Iraq was the moment when the US succeeded in Iraq or the moment when the entrapment became too deep to escape from.

Poulos gets meta on Kristol:

For Kristol to win the day, he must convince Republicans that Joe Lieberman both is and is not a Republican, or that he is not a Republican yet ‘actually’ is. Because it’s impossible to convince anyone that Joe Lieberman is a Republican, period, unless he switches parties, at which point it will be impossible to convince anyone that he is, full stop, a conservative. In order to do this, Kristol must create an ontological crisis in the Republican identity.

The point of Lieberman is the Middle East: a clear sign that neoconservatism’s worldview will not just survive the last eight years but actually become even more ascendant. A Lieberman pick would be a way of ensuring that the US never withdraw from Iraq and use it as a base from which to attack Iran. It would also be an indication that the next administration will treat Russia as a global enemy, as if there were any doubt about the new Cold War that McCain is eager to start. And China, of course. The Chinese are enemies as well.

Kristol understood a long time ago that the social issues are critical to bringing evangelicals into a grand alliance with neoconservative foreign policy machers. Issues such as abortion and gay rights are instrumental to neoconservatism. They are domestic means to foreign policy ends. The end is war – and the restoration of national greatness to a great, and always extending, neo-empire.

"I will be telling my delegates that I will vote for Barack Obama. How they vote is a more personal decision. They want to have their chance to vote for me. That is what traditionally happens … some people are having to make up their minds because there are arguments pulling them both ways," – Hillary Rodham Clinton, preparing for 2012.