Month: August 2008

Black Voters vs The Clintons

They did it, and Penn didn’t see it coming:

Overall, Clinton lost 100 points of support among black voters in about 120 days: a truly remarkable achievement. Since black voters make up about 20 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, a 100-point swing among black voters translates to a 20-point swing among all voters. And that, essentially, was how the primary was lost. In national trial heats, Obama was polling about 20 points behind Clinton throughout most of calendar year 2007, and wound up polling about 5 points ahead of her for most of the period after Super Tuesday. That is a 25-point swing, and 20 of those 25 points came from black voters.

Dissents Of The Day

Goriurielsinaigetty

A reader writes

I think you are generally correct in your assessment about the situation in Georgia, especially on the point that America plainly lacks the moral authority and credibility to seriously deride the Russian position. But you ended your latest post with a cheap shot.  You say:             

Maybe we should start complaining when as many Georgians have perished as Iraqis – and when Putin throws thousands of innocent Georgians into torture chambers.

I get the point as it concerns the moral and even practical bankruptcy of the Cheney Gang.  But this lingers into territory where I’m not sure you want to be.

I know you don’t want to cast aside the real, existing humanitarian suffering going on in Georgia (both for Georgians and Ossetians, as this superb analysis shows). So why insinuate that said suffering is tangential to the issue, even if it is intentionally over the top to prove a larger geopolitical point?

Instead, we should start complaining immediately when any Georgians have perished at the hands of Putin’s criminal negligence and blatant disregard for human life, whilst at the same time giving not an inch to Bush and Cheney’s own hubris and disregard for human dignity. Of course, America’s past actions have been morally reprehensible on face, with the practical corollary that this makes our current geopolitical leverage vis a vis Russia next to impossible. But Russia is its own agent, and with the profoundly authoritarian Putin (to say nothing of the corrupt and generally incompetent Saakashvili) still controlling Russia’s policies, proper humanitarian outrage remains our most credible weapon, even if its language is sometimes hijacked for the whims of tyrants.

Another is blunter:

That’s a ghastly thing to write. Our own national sins and failures do not excuse Russian violence and aggression, nor do they relieve us of the obligation to condemn or oppose such immoral acts. It is one thing to embrace geopolitical realism, to recognize that even tacitly encouraging the Georgians was a catastrophic mistake, to acknowledge that this sort of Russian response was to be expected, and to resolve that prudence and caution dictate a measured reaction that carefully considers our interests and the price of intervention. It is quite another to conclude that American misconduct ought to grant carte blanche to other powers to follow suit, or that no violation of human rights is worth condemning until it exceeds our own. There is a middle course here; one need not advocate intervention to recognize Russian brutality.

Points taken. And readers sure can point out Russia’s excesses. But Bush cannot without answering to his own war crimes. What Russia is doing is reprehensible, but it also reveals the deep problem of moral legitimacy that the Bush administration has fostered. If the world – not without reason – suspects that America went to war under false pretense, and has trashed the Geneva Accords, then our capacity to rally world opinion on a matter like Georgia is compromised. The impact on America’s entire support for human rights and international law of the past eight years is only beginning to sink in. But it’s real. And it’s why the only way to regain it is to elect someone who opposed the war and who will end torture for good.

(Photo: A Georgian man checks the pulse of a body after they were hit by a Russian shell in Stalin square, on August 12, 2008 in Gori, Georgia. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered an end to the military operations against Georgia, which had been widely condemned by the internationally community. Following their sustained incursion into the disputed Georgia region of South Ossetia, Russian troops have been given orders to withdraw. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

Christianist Watch

James Dobson’s outfit urges his followers to pray for torrential rain during Obama’s acceptance speech. Could you make this up?

I guess I should go on record as arguing that it’s a huge mistake to have that speech in a stadium anyway. Like the Berlin speech, which has in the end become a liability for Obama, the mass rally will turn off more people than it will inspire. The moment will be historic enough without the overkill. Unless, of course, the speech is really, really good.

Obamacon Watch

Warren Coates (a Milton Friedman student) provides one of the more grown-up, free-market defenses of the current shift to a reconstructed left in public policy. Disenchanted with the statist, utopian and negligent conservatism of the Bush years, he’s ready to give the Dems a shot. The conservative failure has been so deep and its consequences so dire that a new start is needed.

Coates believes, as I do, that it will not be the end of the world for free market conservatives if Obama wins. It wasn’t when Clinton won. Although there are many areas in domestic policy where I disagree with Obama – I’d pick entitlement cuts over tax hikes, I’m leery of cap-and-trade, I worry about the creeping socialization of healthcare – the much bigger issues of a return to constitutional norms, to a realist and prudent foreign policy, a return to the Geneva Conventions, a restoration of America’s reputation in the world, and a rebuke of the Morris-Rove politicking of the past generation compel me more.

Read Coates’ appreciation for Barney Frank’s reconstructed liberal pragmatism on housing and you can see a conservative who is actually more driven by the common good and by political pragmatism than one who is driven by ideology, partisanship and cultural insecurity.

We need more of this sensibility. And the machine of Rove, having now swallowed the McCain campaign whole, will not provide it. It will, rather, extend the period in which the American president is as bellicose as he is weak, rather than as restrained as he is strong.

Money quote:

I am a Barry Goldwater Republican. I believe that we and our families and friends are largely responsible for our own well being,

that government should be kept small and focused on what only it can do well, that free markets are the most effective way to create and allocate wealth, that the individual freedoms, checks and balances on government, and separation of church and state in our constitution and its Bill of Rights provide the best environment for my personal moral and material development and in which I can live in harmony with my neighbors, and that if I work hard (which almost always means serving the needs of others) I have the best chance of doing well for myself and family. I believe in a strong national defense (but not empire building) and international collaboration and cooperation in today’s globalized world. In order to keep them relatively honest, governments operate under significant disadvantages relative to private enterprises with free trade, but there are some things that only government can do or do best and therefore they should be done well.

I think that these principles best serve the establishment of a just and prosperous society for all.

McCain’s Memos

Josh Marshall knows no campaign message is accidental:

During the campaign there was a lot of clucking about whether the [Clinton] campaign’s message just accidentally stumbled on to charged words and associations. And now we can see what was obvious at the time — that the people in charge of the message weren’t sloppy and unlucky but rather what you would expect, professionals following a detailed plan.

Now how about Sen. McCain? You see his ads lining Obama up with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, a new ad with the tagline "hot chicks dig Obama" (yes, those are the actual words in McCain’s ad) and countless montages of Obama as pop music sensation. How do you think McCain’s memos read?