Month: November 2010

So what if he wanted to dress up as Daphne from Scooby-Doo for Halloween? A story for our times.

Amy Davidson recoils:

What do people in our government think it means to say that torture is illegal? Is it like violating one of those old statutes that you hear about, still on the books because no one’s bothered to repeal them, forbidding domino-playing on Sundays? Or do they think it’s more like having to call a late-night bar a club and pay an initiation fee of two drinks, or the idea that you can cheat on your taxes as long as an accountant fills out the forms? Something like that seems to be the view of one of the C.I.A.’s lawyers, Daniel Pines. The Washington Post has a piece on a law-journal article he wrote (reflecting, he said, his personal views; but still). There are American and international laws against torture—laws that also obligate us to stop it when we see it—and yet, in Pines’s view, “there are virtually no legal restrictions” on kidnapping a person, handing him to a torturer, and then waiting outside and receiving the information, as long as the torture chamber is abroad and the torturer is not an American …

Yglesias sides with Drum:

[P]re-election I thought of [Prop 19] as a totally quixotic undertaking but it now looks to me like it could realistically happen in the short-term if people organize for a presidential election year. Running the play again in 2012 might just disgust people so maybe 2016 would be the better target year. Or else maybe 2012 in a different state. Either way, I promise to be more engaged next time.

George Packer visits Virginia:

[M]y strong sense is that Obama’s hold on the country clubbers, the miners, and the truck-stop owners was always tenuous at best, and it’s gone. What can he do? What everyone in southern Virginia talks about—in tones of despair—is jobs. The Republican plan—tax cuts, then more tax cuts, then some more tax cuts—isn’t going to make a dent in the staggering unemployment numbers (unofficially, forty percent in Carroll County, according to Crowder). So Obama needs to find a way to put a jobs plan on the table—money to the states for infrastructure, say—and let the other party come to him or not. Then he’d have an argument he might be able to win, even here.

Weekly unemployment claims chart from Calculated Risk.

Ben Birnbaum thinks that the path "looks clear for Gary Johnson to become the Ron Paul of 2012":

What does Johnson make of Palin? On a drive through the foothills of New Hampshire, I ask him. Riding shotgun, he turns the question around on me. "Um, I guess some people think she's folksy," I say from the backseat. "Well, at first she strikes you as folksy," he shoots back. "And then you realize: She might be running for president of the United States! And then, don't we have the obligation to tell her what a terrible idea that is?" Cupping his hands to his mouth, he brays, "Sarah! We love you! Don't run!"

(Hat tip: Matt Welch)

Christopher Orr says "there's a reason why Obama has, to a striking degree in contemporary politics, played up superego at the expense of id":

[Obama's] composed, borderline uptight demeanor allayed white anxiety about his race; and, less self-evident but no less real, his being black saved him from the nerd purgatory of Adlai Stevensonism. Nor is this racial/temperamental balancing act a particularly novel one: think, again, of Colin Powell (prior to Obama, the most broadly popular black political figure in the country) or such breakthrough cultural figures as Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, and Nat King Cole.

Even when Obama has been at his cucumber-coolest–and has earned abuse from the left and center for it–figures on the right have aggressively tried to hang the "angry black man" label on him. A June editorial in The Washington Times (entitled, bluntly enough, "Angry Man Obama") cited his "tough guy" persona and "bullying undercurrent" and tied him to Spike Lee. A year ago, Rush Limbaugh described the school-bus beating of a white student by black students as typical of "Obama's America"; in the run-up to the midterms, Glenn Beck accused the president of "inciting people." The idea that Obama is driven by fury is prevalent enough on the right that Dinesh D'Souza could take it as a given in the title of his Amazon bestseller The Roots of Obama's Rage. Idiotic though it may be, this is not a narrative the president wants to fuel.

Nor should he. Some kind of left-populism would simply empower right-populism. I think the key to Obama's long-term success is being Obama: the calm, restrained, sober, reasonable adult in the room, always focused on actual problems and their feasible solutions. And Chris is right: his race actually helps balance this cerebral and temperamental calm.

He's an Eisenhower in a room full of McCarthys. It may take some patience but we all know who won that game in the end.

(Photo: Jewel Samad/Getty.)

Steinglass predicts:

I think we're looking at two years of mostly nothing. Nothing accompanied by much scratching and shouting, but nothing nonetheless. There's been a bit of debate recently about whether the GOP or the president is more likely to bear the brunt of voter frustration with gridlock. But I don't think the voters who have just elected five dozen new Republican congressmen will be happy to see them do nothing. And I suspect the more somethings they try to do, be it letting insurers discriminate on pre-existing conditions or cutting the budgets of the 99% of government programmes voters like, the less popular they'll be.

Shep Smith dares to ask the question that made Chris Wallace sigh so deeply on The Daily Show: will Sarah Palin ever take real questions from the open press when she begins her run for president? That's one of those questions to which we already know the answer: no. She remains a Fox propagandist, and if she runs, she will remain a Fox-only propagandist, unless Fox's handful of actual journalists, such as Smith and Wallace, are prepared to enrage their viewers.

So 2008 – the first time a vice-presidential candidate never held an open press conference – was the new normal. No candidate need from now on to be grilled by an open press conference. It's all about targeting vague, content-free identity politics through direct media to those already sympathetic. Anything else is "lamestream."

(Hat tip: Palingates)

Roger Ailes passes on Christine O'Donnell as contributor.