Category: The Dish

And the Clintons are in the thick of it. Stanley Fish:

The literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold heads proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the Federalist Society should expel him).

Gasp. Alert Hewitt and Kristol. Richard Posner is a closet communist. Fish is too kind to the Clintons in the rest of his column. But I have to say that his observation about the tactics of this campaign – classic McCarthyite tactics long practised by Rove – is on the mark. And it’s interesting to me that these smears have been aimed primarily at the most obvious agents of real change in this election: Ron Paul and now Barack Obama. When people have ideas and arguments that actually reach and move people, and you don’t have a good argument in response, smearing is the logical next step. And smearing is what the neocons and the far right and the Clintons have been reveling in.

To which one can only respond: don’t let these people smear your future away. It only works if you let them get away with it.

Conyers subpoenas Addington and Yoo.

So many readers seem to be feeling it. I have too. But remember what we’re dealing with here: last fall, no one gave Obama a chance. It was always a very long shot. When I wrote that Obama piece, Clinton was ahead by at least 20 points and it wasn’t budging a jot. Every pundit also expected the classic Clinton-Giuliani set-up for 2008: the perfect boomer red-blue battle. It didn’t happen. The Republicans, from a smaller and demoralized base, gave us McCain. And the Clintons have lost the mathematical chance of winning the nomination by any fair means. The change has already happened.

Obama is a freshman senator; he is 46 years old; he is African-American; he is a liberal – even if he is very gifted in talking to conservatives. He has taken on the biggest brand and machine in American politics, the Clintons, and won. If you didn’t think this would be an uphill struggle, you’ve been deluded. Of course, race will not go away; it will come back again and again and again. Of course, generational resistance will not go away: Obama is a big leap for the over 50s for all sorts of reasons. Of course, the usual Rovian tactics will be used against him – brutally. He does represent real change – culturally, politically, and in terms of global politics. Politicians who represent real change do not win easily; they usually require a real crisis to rise. That’s how RFK and MLK emerged – in crisis, after being smeared (sometimes with a grain of truth) and finally assassinated. That’s how Reagan and Thatcher emerged. We forget how their chances were considered flimsy for so long.

Obama is still in this; and the Wright fiasco gives him a chance to remove this cloud and address it again. He has the most votes, the most states, the most money, the most new voters and the most delegates and the most Senators on his side. This is no time for a failure of nerve – on the part of the Obama team or his supporters.

The only way past this is through it. And it’s not just up to Obama; it’s up to those of us who see him as a vehicle for real change.

From an interview with Patricia Gossman on Afghanistan:

"Recent statistics on security incidents, ranging from gun battles to suicide attacks, show a 40 percent increase throughout the country over last year. Security was the problem from day one after the Taliban fled Kabul and Kandahar in 2001, and six-and-a-half-years later it remains the most urgent priority. On the one hand, this new improved Taliban is fighting NATO and U.S. forces in a wide swath of the country’s south and southeast–even fairly close to Kabul. A few years ago I never thought twice about traveling from Kabul to Pakistan via Jalalabad, or from Kabul down to Logar (a 45-minute drive). I wouldn’t do it now. This time round the Taliban have new tactics too, in line with their Al Qaeda connections. Suicide bombings are a recent phenomenon, and they are becoming more frequent and lethal."

An interactive website.

Jeffrey Goldberg makes a mistake and joins the blogging world. Poor schmuck. But, hey, welcome!

One African-American supporter of Obama has had it with Jeremiah Wright:

To break it down, here’s what Wright is doing:  he’s spitting in the face of the man who defended him, who said he was "like family" and did so without any undertones of private anger or resentment. He did so unconditionally. Now Wright is using his newfound notoriety to become the next racial demagogue, and who cares if it’s at the expense of Obama?  If CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are booking me as the Black Pat Buchanan in a few years, then it’s all worth it!

Obama extended his hand to help Wright above the fray.  Instead, Wright has pulled him back down into the barrel, making it even more difficult for the most talented politician we’ve seen in years to escape the politics of race, resentment and self-victimization that continue to condemn us all.

One response to all this is to despair. We’re seeing many of the worst aspects of America’s culture war come back to target the one politician who had the chance to get us beyond it. It is no accident to me that Wright is of the Vietnam generation that bequeathed us these divides; and it is no accident that the Clintons will eagerly pivot off it; or that the far right will exploit it; or that Obama’s tolerance for a man like this for so many years will hurt him. And yet I refuse to believe that we have to remain captive to this syndrome; I refuse to believe that racial discourse has to be framed by Pat Buchanan and Jeremiah Wright; I refuse to abandon the hope I felt only a few months ago.

This moment is far too important to surrender to the forces that want to return us to the divisions and obsessions of the past. The only way past this, perhaps, is through it. Obama needs to repudiate Wright’s grandstanding and reiterate in clear terms the rationale of his candidacy: that the past is over, and we have to move forward in ending this war in Iraq, restoring America’s standing in the world, repairing the massive and mounting debt, bringing America back to the forefront of human rights, and bringing the best aspects of America to the foreground again.

The world is watching. And we still can.

It’s early in the day, I know, but it feels like that kind of week. Colbert had Feist on last night and I’d never heard of her. Shows what I know. The video is wonderful:

Fallows opines:

The obvious complaint, easily dismissed by reporters, is that press coverage is biased against or "too tough on" this or that candidate. Reporters tell themselves: Hey, we’re tough on everybody. You’re not strong enough to take it, maybe you should find a different line of work.

The more heartfelt and bitter complaint is about the way press coverage seems biased not against any particular candidate but against the entire process of politics, in the sense that politics includes the public effort to resolve difficult issues. (Medical care, climate change, banking crises, military priorities, etc.) For twenty years I have heard this from frustrated politicians — Gary Hart, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Carter, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, they may not share a lot of views but they are as one in this frustration. What galls all of them is the way that the incentives created by most coverage bring out the very worst in most politicians, and discourage them from even bothering to try the harder, more "responsible" path. No one says that press incentives turn potential Abraham Lincolns into real-world Tom DeLays. But the incentives push in that direction rather than the reverse.

Reihan lays out a strategy for McCain to win – by copying the Clinton campaign’s attacks on Obama. But Reihan is intellectually honest enough also to show how hard this will be. I’m not convinced that throwing more government money at the bitter, white working classes with kids is a panacea for the Republicans. But it may be worth a try.