Month: August 2008

Reflecting on Josh’s memo haul, Fallows contemplates the danger of e-mail:

…the perfection of the technology for spreading and sharing written material has made writing weirdly less useful for conveying private thought. It’s risky as a way to share thoughts about running a political campaign; it’s reckless as a way to say anything about any other person you might not want him or her to hear. The evolution of technology may return us to the era when the no-tech face-to-face meeting, or the hard-to-copy handwritten note, is the most secure means of communication. And when written statements, even in the "privacy" of email, are necessarily blanded-down by pre-knowledge that they could turn up somewhere unexpected months or years or decades later.

And that’s why we may never know at all what Dick Cheney has really been up to these past eight years. Which is how he likes it. I prefer the indiscreet Clintonians.

Crowley notes that Rick Davis is careful to not rule out McCain taking a one term pledge. The Anonymous Liberal thinks Obama better get a response ready just in case.

At least Doug Hattaway knew it:

"We cannot secure enough delegates to win; we cannot overtake him; the math simply doesn’t work … it is imperative that we provide … a clear and tenable answer to the single most important question we face."

His last-ditch option was a revote in Michigan and Florida. He was ignored.

"The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun, and a third party would come in then anyway," – Mark Penn, in a Clinton campaign memo.

Read the whole memo. Then watch the McCain campaign. The same smears, the same attempt not to engage Obama’s ideas but to stamp him as a cultural alien. Money quote:

I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.

He told the people of NH yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell—but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up.

How we could give some life to this contrast without turning negative:

Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century.

And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back.

Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.

From Barna’s new study:

For the most part, the various faith communities of the U.S. currently support Sen. Obama for the presidency. Among the 19 faith segments that The Barna Group tracks, evangelicals were the only segment to throw its support to Sen. McCain. Among the larger faith niches to support Sen. Obama are non-evangelical born again Christians (43% to 31%); notional Christians (44% to 28%); people aligned with faiths other than Christianity (56% to 24%); atheists and agnostics (55% to 17%); Catholics (39% vs. 29%); and Protestants (43% to 34%). In fact, if the current preferences stand pat, this would mark the first time in more than two decades that the born again vote has swung toward the Democratic candidate.

Josh Green’s Hillary-busting expose of the chaos and drift and nastiness that bedeviled her campaign is a must-read. I’ll be noting memos through the day, but Josh’s conclusion is pretty hard to ignore:

Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency. What follows is the inside account of how the campaign for the seemingly unstoppable Democratic nominee came into being, and then came apart.

Bullet. Dodged.

(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty.)

Kevin Drum points to the smartest – because it is the most honest – defense yet:

At the end of 2006, (a) the violence stemming from the bombing of the Golden Mosque had started to burn itself out, (b) the Awakening movement had begun turning Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda in Iraq, (c) ongoing sectarian cleansing, as horrible as it was, had created an opportunity for greater stability in Baghdad, and (d) Muqtada al-Sadr’s ceasefire, if we could persuade him to continue it, removed a huge source of sectarian violence. In other words, the security situation in Iraq was on the cusp of something potentially dramatic, and it was possible that a small nudge might make an outsized difference. The surge was that nudge.

But the neocon right needs to talk as if the extra troops made all the difference. The truth is: they were shrewdly deployed to help galvanize a multiplicity of already-existing trends among Iraqis. But if you begin to describe Iraq as a sovereign country, able to make its own decisions and able to restore some level of non-chaos to its own communities, with the US merely nudging, the case for staying there for ever diminishes.

The neocons aren’t stupid. They always advance the arguments that help sustain the case for more American control everywhere, indefinitely.

Even David Simon couldn’t make this up:

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”

And so theories once used to defend white supremacists are now being deployed by urban drug gangsters.

Goldberg worries:

I’m not naive enough to think that Israel won’t act in its perceived national security interest simply because its actions might endanger Jews overseas. And I wouldn’t like to see Israel paralyzed into inaction out of such a fear — though, on this particular issue, the threat of the Iranian nuclear program, I’m far from convinced that Israel should act militarily.

The only thing that can be done is for Jewish institutions to prepare themselves for attacks that would almost certainly be launched in the wake of an Israeli strike. And, as of right now, the American Jewish community is not prepared at all.

An Israeli attack on Iran would take the religious war now threatening the planet to a new level of unpredictability and terror. No one would be immune from the consequences, least of all Israel, and Jews everywhere. This is not necessarily a reason to eschew it, if it could actually prevent worse consequences. But that case doesn’t hold much water.