Month: August 2008

Here’s a fascinating post from a right-wing "patriot":

My take: At least Jimmy Carter was "smart" enough to fool the voters with his toothy grin and pleasant countenance during most of the long 1976 campaign season. Obama, and for that matter his wife Michelle ("for the first time in my adult life, I’m proud to be an American"), have clearly not done so. They have turned "America has problems, and we can fix them," which is of course a common theme and perfectly defensible, into "America as a nation has declined," which is much harder to defend, and certainly harder for a fundamentally optimistic nation to swallow, especially when that message is delivered to a 7 year-old girl.

This explains why Old Media is giving Obama’s statement the near-silent treatment.

He’s responding to an off-the-cuff statement from Obama to a child that

"America is …, uh, is no longer, uh … what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children."

It seems to me that if "optimism" means always saying that America has never fallen or failed, then Ronald Reagan was an inveterate pessimist. His campaign in 1980 was premised on the notion that America had objectively declined as a nation under the hapless presidency of Carter. His optimism was about how to improve that. How, after all, could it have been "morning in America" if it had never been night?

Obama’s position is exactly Reagan’s in this respect.

He represents a repudiation of the past eight years in which America has clearly declined, its standing in the world reduced more dramatically than under any previous modern president. When the American president has shown contempt for the rule of law, when he launched a war without UN approval because of pressing evidence that turned out not to be true, when he mismanaged that war grievously for years, when he removed America from compliance with the Geneva Conventions, when he added over $32 trillion to the debt the next generation has to pay and turned a surplus into an annual deficit of half a trillion dollars, when he has squandered eight years without leading on the question of non-carbon energy, when he has revealed that his administration is not able to respond to a historic natural disaster … then, yes, this country has declined. More precipitously than at any time since the Carter debacle – who at least was able to combine international fecklessness with a historic peace agreement in the Middle East and a stronger record on human rights.

To vote for the party that gave us the past eight years is not optimism. It’s clinical denial.

McCain almost directly copies from the Clinton campaign’s attacks on Obama from this spring. The full radio address:

Good morning, I’m John McCain. As you may know, the Democratic National Convention is just a couple of weeks away. It was four years ago, at the same gathering, that America heard a fine speech from an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. He’s done pretty well for himself since then. And the smart money in Denver is on another celebrated performance.

But even the most stirring speeches are easily forgotten when they’re short on content. Taking in my opponent’s performances is a little like watching a big summer blockbuster, and an hour in realizing that all the best scenes were in the trailer you saw last fall. In the way of running mates, Senator Obama should consider someone with a knack for brevity and directness, to balance the ticket.

In the meantime, let me take a stab at a plot summary of the Obama campaign:

America is finally winning in Iraq, and he wants to forfeit. Government is too big, and he wants to grow it. Taxes are too high, and he wants to raise them. Congress spends too much, and he proposes more. We need more energy, and he’s against producing it. Energy in particular seems to confound Senator Obama, because if there is any problem that can’t be solved by words alone it’s America’s need for secure and affordable energy supplies.

So far, he’s managed to come up with an energy plan that’s so timid only OPEC and a few interest groups in his own party are happy with it. And this week, Senator Obama set about correcting that impression.

First there was his call for Americans to check their tires — which is commonsense advice, but hardly has the makings of a national energy strategy. If we can’t drill our way out of the problem, it seems even more unlikely that we can inflate our way out of it.

Next came Senator Obama’s mention of offshore drilling — formerly known in the Obama campaign as a "gimmick" and a "scheme." As more people notice that his answer to most every form of energy production is "no," my opponent tried to simulate a "yes." He pledges a vague willingness to possibly consider limited drilling as part of some hypothetical compromise at an undetermined date. Careful listeners are still waiting for an actual commitment to offshore drilling.

Apparently, Senator Obama was trying to get credit for changing his mind on drilling, without actually changing his position against drilling. This was the rare case of a politician actually hoping to be accused of a flip-flop. But even that would be giving Senator Obama’s energy plan too much credit. As of today, he still has no plan to produce more oil by drilling offshore. And my opponent’s most memorable flip-flop remains his frequent criticism of the Bush-Cheney energy policy, despite voting for the Bush-Cheney energy bill in 2005 — a bill I opposed and voted against.

Finally, Senator Obama proposed to release oil from our nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For those keeping track, this comes exactly a month after he said he was firmly against using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

A serious energy plan involves a lot more yes’s than no’s. And that is why I say yes to drilling, here and now. Yes to 45 more nuclear power plants to provide our country with electricity. Yes to clean coal technology, so that we can create jobs and use America’s most abundant resource. Yes to renewable energy sources, so that we can shift away from petroleum over the long term. Yes to a break from the federal gasoline tax, so that our government helps you in a time of need instead of just adding to your costs. In short, yes to all of the above — to a bold plan for achieving energy independence that starts today.

Regaining control over the cost and supply of energy in America will not be easy, and it won’t happen quickly. But no challenge to our economy and security is more urgent. And you have my pledge that if I am president, we’re going to get it done. Thanks for listening.

My take on why Obama has stalled in the polls:

The shift away from the Republicans is pronounced everywhere and few doubt that the Democrats could make big gains in both House and Senate this autumn. This is partly behind the worries about Obama: he’s trailing his party by a significant margin. However, it may be that the margin is precisely what’s giving voters pause. The threat of the kind of Republican agenda that propelled George Bush from 2002 to 2006 is, after all, much diminished. McCain, moreover, is not so bad a figure to deal with a Democratic Congress from the perspective of many independent voters, especially since Congress is pretty much reviled as well.

The choice has evolved to that between an all-Democratic government, headed by a senator whose newness is still one of the most striking things about him, and an old, familiar warhorse who irritated all the right Republicans at one point or another and has a record of bipartisan achievement. Seen in that light, the voters’ reluctance to swing behind Obama in landslide numbers is understandable.

Obama has huge liabilities.

He has never held real executive office and has been in Washington barely for a single senatorial term. He came out of nowhere to dominate the scene in ways that many Americans are still trying to process. He has been criticised as a far-left extremist, a prissy elitist, a cynical centrist and a secretly Muslim fraud. Examining this figure who is asking to be president at the tender age of 47, watching him adapt and move on the national state, is a sensible precaution. Americans are a prudently cautious lot and it speaks well of them that many are reserving final judgment.

Very sad news about Isaac Hayes, whose departure from South Park because of his membership in the Super Adventure Club was so strange and not a little creepy. In his honor, here’s an early classic clip when Chef introduces his chocolate salty balls:

A good question:

How can someone being portrayed as "the biggest celebrity in the world" also be painted as radical and out of the mainstream? Either Obama is like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton: a fluffy, substanceless, mass-consumed but empty celebrity-for-celebrity’s sake, or he is an unfamiliar and dangerous other with a hidden anti-American agenda.

When these kinds of attacks contradict each other, it’s a good bet that both are being made not because the McCain camp actually thinks they’re true, but because they’re just trying to find anything to bring the guy down. You throw it all until something sticks. Just like the Clintons did. And that worked out great for the Clintons, didn’t it?

Perhaps one of my favorite pieces of verse ever written, by Emily Dickinson:

Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like water-lilies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!
Oh, some wise man from the skies!
Please to tell a little pilgrim
Where the place called morning lies!

Ross’s posts have added to my enjoyment of Adam Gopnik’s review. This latest one on Chesterton, enthusiasm and Catholicism is great. Money quote:

Not all of these doubters will be moved by Chesterton’s style of apologetics, which asks them to approach Catholicism like a man from, say, 1355 entering a FedEx store for the first time – that is, as though they’d never even conceived that an institution like the Church might be possible, let alone an enduring player in human affairs. And perhaps some would be convinced by the more jaundiced, world-weary, "it’s horribly flawed but it gets the job done" approach to apologetics that it seems as though Gopnik might prefer. But you don’t turn to Chesterton for jaundiced world-weariness, and complaining that his enthusiasm for the Church is akin to a child’s enthusiasm for a post office or a railway station is like complaining that Schopenhauer is too pessimistic, or Waugh too savage: If you don’t like childlike enthusiasm, you don’t have any business liking Chesterton.

In my darker moments, I see only the flaws of the Church. When I’m calmer, all I can see is the miraculousness of its existence at all.

(Photo: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty.)

The WaPo makes the case:

After all was said and done, the jury was convinced that Mr. Hamdan was simply a low-level, uneducated father of two who stuck with a job chauffeuring Osama bin Laden because it paid well enough to support his family. It is one thing for a defense lawyer to assert such a benign explanation, another for a military jury sitting in judgment to endorse it. Apparently nothing contained in evidence introduced in secret sessions persuaded jurors to believe otherwise.

That was Mark Penn’s advice to the Clintons about Obama this spring. Money quote from Penn:

“All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050. … Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American 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."

It’s Rove-Morris in a nutshell. The McCain camp is now trying the same thing. In my view, a critical issue in this election is whether we are going to reward this kind of politics – rooted entirely in feeling, in prejudice and in group loyalties – or whether we can return to a greater emphasis on how to win this war and how to restore the Constitution. At this point, only Obama represents any kind of move forward from this. McCain has signaled he’ll do whatever the Clintons tried – and then some.

(Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty.)