Category: The Dish

David Brooks makes some shrewd points about the Obama candidacy today. Yes: he has had the shine scuffed off him. Yes: his capacity to be a post-partisan unifier would have been easier if he hadn’t been forced into some rather classic primary warfare. Yes: he hasn’t been as deft as he might have been on the cultural issues. Yes: he isn’t the messiah. Yes: a blanket commitment to quit Iraq so quickly may well have to be adjusted in office, depending on events and developments we cannot yet know. And yes, his pivoting off NAFTA has not been pretty.

At the same time, his considerable strengths remain. He is the most persuasive and reasoned liberal on the national stage in a very long time. The inevitable initial swoon was always going to come down to earth at some point, and in some ways, it’s better for the bloom to be swiped off the rose now rather than in September. Despite the caricature, many of us who want Obama to be the Democratic nominee are aware he doesn’t walk on water, has a bit of an ego, has some iffy friends, and some ugly supporters. If the mountain were smooth, you couldn’t climb it.

The great benefit of a McCain-Obama election will be the emergence of two flawed, human, but basically decent men who represent what I think of as the best and most sincere faces of their respective parties.

The chance for a more honest and candid debate about Iraq, terror, healthcare and debt is infinitely higher now than it was six months ago and will be even higher if and when the Clintons give up. Both men have made ugly political compromises in their time. Both have character failings as well as enormous qualities. Both have enormous egos and bad days. They are in short politicians. I, for one, was not expecting saints. But they’re among the best we’ve got, and the emergence of the two of them is a real sign that Americans are engaged again, know we have serious problems and want to tackle them. It will be a tough and fascinating fight. It surely cannot be as depressing and as nasty as the primary season has become among the Dems.

Those two heavy-weights of the Democratic foreign policy establishment have just endorsed Obama. The momentum among super-delegates is now reaching critical mass. And I don’t think even Hugh Hewitt will be able to describe Nunn as a member of the "hard-left."

Jonathan Rauch:

What I think I’ve learned from the surge is that Bush and McCain are right. The surge’s gains are real and should not be thrown away. But Democrats, Lugar, and other skeptics are also right. Bush and McCain have not figured out a way to build on the surge.

This is not for want of strategic ideas. A succession of expert witnesses offered an assortment of suggestions in Senate hearings earlier this month. Here are the leading contenders.

• Instead of propping up the central government in Baghdad, federalize Iraq, decentralizing security and many other state functions.

• Instead of pleading with Iraqis to share power, lock the United Nations, the neighbors, and the Iraqis in a room and broker a deal backed by international muscle and regional support.

• Instead of seeking a national political accommodation, stitch together a patchwork of local cease-fires and enforce them with U.S. and other peacekeeping forces.

• Instead of unconditional engagement (the Bush-McCain approach) or unconditional disengagement (the Democrats’ preferred approach), go with conditional engagement, making continued U.S. support contingent on progress in Baghdad.

The first two options do indeed seem the most promising strategic options right now. "Conditional engagement," however, also means a credible threat – and intention – to leave Iraq if some kind of self-sustaining political arrangement – federalized or otherwise – is not reached. At some point, the McCain commitment to stay for a century if necessary and the Obama pledge to withdraw regardless will have to find a middle line. That’s what the next president will have to figure out. The question is: who would best be able to do that, while bringing the country along with him? At this point, I honestly don’t know. Except that Clinton would be the worst of the current three options.

Tremble at the force, ABC News! Or calm down, Chuck Todd!

The news is no surprise. The reasoning more apposite:

"I saw the ads" — the negative man-on-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama’s bitter/cling comments a week ago — "and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics. And also of the politics of distraction, of gotcha politics. It’s the worst of all worlds. We have three terrible traditions that we’ve developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn’t possibly believe and doesn’t possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I’ve seen growing in Hillary’s campaign. And I’ve come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can’t in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They’re lending legitimacy to a Republican message that’s wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It’s old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It’s just so deeply cynical."

Fallows comments on the debate:

I like and respect Stephanopoulos, and part of what I respect about him is the way he usually conducts his TV interviews. But I also remember dealing with him back in the early Clinton days, he in his role as campaign guy and me in my role as reporter. He understands thoroughly and in his bones what is wrong with the kind of mindless, substance-free gotcha questioning he and Gibson wasted their time on last night. I know he understands it because I’ve heard him shame journalists who were applying the same tactics to Bill Clinton back in the day. What was he thinking? What kind of pressure had been applied to him?[…]

Whatever else happens the next time we choose a president, there has got to be a better way to see candidates operate under pressure than the grotesque system that has metastasized during this electoral cycle. It makes candidates into mere props for bullying anchormen-narcissists. It does no one except the anchormen any good. I mentioned earlier the oddity of Jimmy Carter and GW Bush finding common cause about China policy. Maybe the RNC and the DNC can join hands in freeing political debate from the destructive grip of the networks. And if they can’t do that, maybe we should just go all the way and have the candidates compete eating pails full of maggots on Fear Factor. That’s the logical extension of where we’re headed.

I’ve also known George for a very long time – back to the early Clinton era, when he insisted that "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" was going to help gays in the military. He’s a very nice man, but he went to work for the Clintons. That has to take a toll on your ethical compass.

"’I want to punch Clinton the person, not Clinton the woman.’

These are not separable identities.

I see this notion everywhere—that some violent urge toward Hillary Clinton isn’t aimed at "Clinton the woman," but at some other magical version of her where her sex and gender have been erased, presumably along with the entire cultural context of womanhood. The semantic contortions invoked to extricate "Hillary Clinton the person" from "Hillary Clinton the woman" are an attempt to do an end-run around that context, to create a space outside of reality, where Hillary Clinton exists in some sexless, genderless limbo and people can talk about wanting to injure that non-woman without all the icky negative images injuring actual women conjures for most decent people," – Melissa McEwan.

"I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but my will has been broken. I’ve realised that covering Mrs Clinton’s campaign without explicitly stating that it has turned into a win-at-all-costs operation fueled by phony outrage, hypocritical proclamations and absurd notions of who is electable and who is not is an exercise in deliberate deception, and I can’t do that. Perhaps I am weaker than my colleagues, but a certain fatigue sets in when trying to sort through it all.

This is no longer a campaign based on ideas. It is a campaign focused on tearing down Mr Obama. We all know that’s her only shot at the nomination. I’m tired of pretending otherwise," – the Economist’s blogger.

The Clinton campaign has become a force of pure negativism, a black hole of no. Whatever she would do as president, we now know one important thing: it ill only always be about calculation. She has nothing left.

Watching a water-balloon explode in very slow-mo, courtesy of the latest in cameras. Hat tip: Wired.

… the president keeps sinking:

The poll of polls gives him 28 percent.