Category: The Dish

Just another day in the 21st century.

An Obama t-shirt in a McCain ad?

Terrace, British Columbia, Canada, 9.15 pm.

Brooks makes a few veep suggestions for Obama:

Sam Nunn and Tom Daschle seem to fit the bill. Nunn is one of those senior Democrats (like David Boren and Bob Kerrey) who left the Senate lamenting the dumbed-down nature of modern politics. Daschle was more partisan as majority leader, but he is still widely trusted and universally liked. As experienced legislators, both could take Obama’s lofty hopes and translate them into nitty-gritty action.

Daschle is dull; Nunn a social reactionary, alas. Larison, as is his habit, scoffs.

A Floridian Democrat writes:

I am Floridian, and was told from the beginning that "my state would not count."  For that reason, I stayed home … to now "count" the Fl vote would disenfranchise me even more than if Fl were not to count at all.  To the DNC & Howard Dean: I played by your rules, decided that you were telling me the truth when you said Fl votes would not count so I stayed home.  Now, you’re going to count it?  Well, screw you.

Packer attempts to summarize me:

Sullivan, a Burkean by philosophy but a radical by temperament, is the most interesting critic of his former conservative allies, and I’ve learned a lot about conservatism agonistes from reading his blog. He says that conservatism isn’t about solving problems but about recognizing the limits of man’s ability to do so, especially in the form of organized activity called government. His breakdown can’t help stacking the deck: conservatism is modest, skeptical, narrowly focussed on what can be done; liberalism tries, promiscuously, to satisfy everyone’s needs. Sullivan believes that the Republican Party went astray when it forgot its philosophical principles and started throwing more feed at the hogs of the electorate than Democrats. He is, in the terms of my article, a purist rather than a reformist, but his unhappiness with the movement is so great that it’s driven him into the arms of his exact opposite, Barack Obama, who is philosophically liberal and temperamentally conservative. Sullivan knows that his Oakeshottian version of conservatism is a very hard sell in a country that expects problems to come with solutions, and he seems to acknowledge that its future here belongs with the reformists like David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Reihan Salam, who are readier than he is to accept that people have a right to want their government to improve their lives, not just to instruct them in the vanity of human effort. I read Sullivan every day, partly to find out how far his disenchantment will carry him in the very strange direction of Obama-style uplift—how long his temperament will win out over his ideas.

It’s a little hard to know how to respond to such a perceptive critique. But, yeah, it’s true. Intellectually, I find so much of Obama’s substance domestically to be anathema. (This is not true of his tilt back toward realism and diplomacy in foreign policy, which could be seen as a return to conservative principles after Bush’s Wilsonianism). I haven’t sat through a single Obama speech without ideologically wincing at something. I fear that in the general election, his recourse to liberal tropes will begin to wear thin.

So why do I find myself still longing for him to win?

Because, I can’t see how domestic policy could become more statist and less responsible than the past eight years. Because I want to see such a record punished with electoral defeat for fear they still don’t know what they did wrong. Because I think Obama’s diplomatic skills and public relations brilliance could serve this country very well. And because of what Obama represents in our collective consciousness.

His candidacy is about renewing what America means to the world and to itself. It is about a collective cultural healing – especially on race. It is about representing the next generation and America’s less domineering but more inspiring place among nations. It is about transparency in government. It is about getting past this brutal cultural polarization for a while. It is about putting reason back into our discourse after the emotional manipulation of the Morris-Rove era. It is about ending torture, restoring Constitutional balance, and adding the power of words, of great words, to restore hope again.

This may sound lofty, but I do not think it is lofty in the way utopian liberalism suggests. It is lofty the way Reagan was lofty and Kennedy was lofty, which transcends ideology. Set apart from their actual achievements in office (on which scale Reagan dwarfs Kennedy), they both recast this country’s self-understanding – and the world’s understanding of America. This shift occurs in the heart, and it is not about promising heaven on earth. It is about being all we can be at this moment in history. It is about us – not policy; our self-understanding – not self-recreation.

This is why even as I disagree with him, I want him to win. My heart says so. And the conservative part of my head has a few months to talk me out of it.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

Eugene Robinson:

If this campaign goes on much longer, what will be left of Hillary Clinton? A woman uniformly described by her close friends as genuine, principled and sane has been reduced to citing the timing of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination as a reason to stay in the race — an argument that is ungenuine, unprincipled and insane.

A reader writes in on the tech-analogy game:

You wrote about Clinton and Obama as two kinds of PC; Clinton as the PC, Obama as the Mac. I propose a different analogy: the candidates as search engines. In this comparison, Clinton is Yahoo, and Obama is Google.

Here’s how the comparison works:

Clinton, like Yahoo, is a product of the 90’s that is very focused on dominating the media. Yahoo has made lots of deals with content providers, while Clinton assumed that her fundraising prowess would allow her to run lots of ads in Super Tuesday states like New York and California. She was sort of right – she raised lots of money and won NY and CA. But, like Yahoo, she underestimated her opponent. Obama, like Google, is a 21st century phenomenon that is more technologically sophisticated and more focused on empowering users. Yahoo once had a chance to take the lead in the social-networking space, but botched it – they bought GeoCities years ago, but then basically abandoned it. Google, on the other hand, bought YouTube and Blogger, and have done good things with both (I use Blogger). And Gmail is much better than Yahoo mail. Which is better than Hotmail. You may have noticed that I am sending this email from Hotmail. That’s because I use Hotmail for business (I get all my subscriptions at this email), but I use Yahoo and Google for personal email. I actually had to sign up for Gmail when I started volunteering for the Obama campaign, because my group was using Google Docs to share information. I also had to join Facebook for the same reason.

To extend this analogy to the general election, McCain is Microsoft – the establishment candidate that, despite all of its best efforts, still has not really figured out how to take advantage of the new technological environment. Microsoft has Internet Explorer, which most Internet users use, so it dominates the Net to that extent. But that’s like the GOP’s ideological embrace of capitalism – it’s old news and so integrated into society that few people notice or dispute it any more.

More here.

Fallows praises Obama’s Wesleyan speech.