Category: The Dish

Sometimes, you just can’t get off the can.

The evidence for their pro-Clinton bias is thin.

"When they hold three fingers in front of your face and say it’s two, I don’t know what to do."

Jon says he wants to hide under his bed rather than counter their pure dishonesty. I’ll be candid. I got a nasty cold this week but I took to bed yesterday, mainly because I felt almost sick from covering the Clintons. They really do get under your skin, as sociopaths can. They make you want to flee all political activity; they make you want to give up; they make you realize that truth and politics need not have any connection if you have long since had your sense of shame surgically removed. Empower them with all the ugliness of Republican race-baiting and hysteria and the cumulative backlash is literally sick-making.

Which is, of course, the point. If they can nauseate an entire generation out of politics, they still have a chance at the spoils.

Bulldog Pundit is candid enough about the Limbaugh strategy:

Yes, I’ve considered the fact that whomever the Democrat nominee is will become the next President.  I won’t be voting for either of them in November (I plan to switch back to being a Republican right after the primary), but if one of them does win, I’d rather it be Hillary that Barack Obama.

And no, I won’t feel the least bit “dirty” by voting for Hillary. Given the strategy, I’d feel “dirty” if I didn’t do it.

The race-baiting will be hyped to the rafters by the partisan right. Reynolds, Kaus, Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh: they will all be throwing all they can at Obama as a black boogeyman in the next few weeks, and eager to keep Clinton in the game. Beating a Clinton with black and young voters deserting the system en masse this fall will be relatively easy. And so using Jeremiah Wright against Obama is critical now, under the cover of the Clinton campaign.

I should add that the Wright issue is not out of bounds. It was always there; it is still there. Obama has addressed it and has to re-address it. You will see more of Wright on Fox News in the coming months than you will John Gibson. But the glee with which the partisan right is trying to conflate the racism of Wright with the post-racial politics of Obama is a depressing spectacle. I think they understand that keeping this country divided by racial suspicion is in their interests. Obama threatens that model. He has to find a way to get through this. He can’t be adding to the fray. He needs to give another speech – a big speech – about the need for America to overcome these feelings. He needs to pivot off this campaign. And get off defense – which he cannot win – and onto offense, with a positive, constructive, multiracial message that uses today’s toxic headlines for chart a less toxic path to a strong showing in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

The logic behind this seems inescapable to me:

For the record, Senator Obama came out of the Mississippi primary with an advantage of 99,000 votes over Senator Clinton, more than I had predicted based on his edge in Alabama. That puts his margin in the nationwide popular vote — by a measure that includes Florida but not Michigan — at more than 500,000.

As I noted yesterday, it will take a colossal victory, almost 60%, for Clinton to get a 200,000 vote edge out of Pennsylvania. And if she does that, there is no plausible scheme under which she could pick up the remaining 300,000 votes to gain even the dubious moral claim of an edge in the popular vote.

The racial stuff is a sign of desperation. The Clintons have to find a way to destroy Obama in the next month or so or his claim on the nomination will be democratically irresistible. Obama needs to chill and fight fairly on. It’s his to lose – unless they get into his head, and everyone else’s, with the kind of emotional hoopla that Ferraro represents. Eyes on the prize, guys.

And I’m not just sure about that. I’m HIV-positive.

A reader writes:

Mickey is being deliberately obtuse, as is Ferraro. It is really breathtaking that anyone who has paid any attention to this campaign could seriously maintain that Obama’s blackness is the sum total of what he brings to the race, or the reason he has won it. His superb out-organizing of Hillary alone proves that to be nonsense. And what it says at base is that a person’s blackness is the only thing that someone like Ferraro is willing to notice, regardless of what that person has achieved and what gifts and talents the person brings to bear. And if such an attitude is not racist, the word has no meaning.

Ferraro’s statement and Mickey’s post amount to a statement that black people can just forget it if they think this country is willing to let them escape the box that we have put them in.

Boxes, however, make people comfortable. All you can do is endure against that impulse. It’s maddening to know, for example, that Mickey will always see me, beneath everything, as gay. That’s the box I’m in; and short of denying that box or ignoring it altogether, I cannot win with the Kauses of this world. But I can hope that younger people will see outside this box, as well as in it. Seeing both is the key. That’s the hope Obama represents and it’s why watching the forces of reaction and resentment this week has become so intensely depressing. But if I didn’t believe that the box could be overcome, I wouldn’t have supported Obama in the first place. I’m not alone in hoping for this.

Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.

Not without some practical drawbacks.

A reader writes:

Watching the Democrats self-immolate during this election, which should have been a slam-dunk for the party, has really made me question its abiity to lead this country at all, ever again. If someone, anyone, could explain to me how this party is fit to lead, please, let them explain. From its ineffectual performance in Congress since the midterms to its fratricidal primary warfare, the Dem party seems determined to prove that it has outlived its usefulness. Now, gifted with a candidate who represents a new start for the future–who offers an attempt to show the country how we can at least attempt to transcend the most divisive elements of racism, prejudice and partisanship (no, not get rid of them completely, but at least kick them a ways to the curb in the name of progress and solving this country’s very serious current challenges), it has instead chosen a fight to the death to re-install a desperate, discredited monarchy that is taking refuge in the last century’s cultural and identity wars.

What the hell?

And where is the party’s leadership? Cowering in the shadows. Unlike the Republicans, who are at least attempting to unite around their candidate and present a grown-up face–and whose candidates were Emily Posts compared to the Clintons in their effort to maintain some of the party’s dignity during the primaries–too many Dem leaders are standing around watching this ridiculous spectacle hands in pockets.

Gore? Edwards? Biden? Richardson? If they really backed the Clintons they’d have said so by now, but rather than come out and stand up for the future, they’re hedging their bets. Hoping for Cabinet posts? The Republican drop outs, meanwhile, immediately moved to unity, endorsing McCain quickly.

Dems will say this is healthy. Democracy is messy! Oh, please. Maybe it WAS healthy. Now it’s just nuts. No offense to the Palestinians, but you know that saying that "they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity?" Well, the Dems have become the Palestinians of U.S. politics.

This election will signal the end of my identification as a Democrat. I’ve had it. And I can’t imagine I’m alone in thinking and feeling this way. Can’t the party see this?

A reader writes:

If you did not hear Clinton’s interview with Steve Inskeep on NPR this morning, be sure to give a listen. It shattered my Obama optimism.

Inskeep gave her several of the hard questions you write about every day, and she parried every one. She sounded — not was, but sounded — rational, logical, sensible (Obama-like?) in explaining why the MI and FL delegates should be seated, and denying she ever said McCain was more qualified than Obama. Some of her answers were such whoppers that Inskeep actually repeated the questions, his voice rising with incredulity.

The woman is an absolute assassin. Ice water in her veins. A second-generation terminator (yeah, the liquid-metal kind). As a politician, I fear she is light years ahead of Obama, and I am very, very afraid.

Mickey Kaus claims that my Atlantic essay making the case for Obama is essentially the same as Ferraro’s racist comment. But clearly, my case for Obama is rooted in his ability to transcend race, reframe our foreign policy, overcome the divisions of the boomer era and cast a new moderate light on our religious divisions. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to read the piece – written when Obama was twenty to thirty points behind and given no chance against the inevitable Hillary – and think it was saying that the only reason Obama has been succeeding is because he’s black or that the primary reason for his candidacy is his race. My point is that his complicated ethnic and international heritage makes him very well suited to project America’s soft power to the world, if he becomes president, as well as helping to represent the next generation, whose views of ethnicity, race and identity are much more complicated than their parents’. My deeper point is that Obama’s virtues as a politician – his ability to unite, his capacity for reason, his solid judgment and even temperament – have nothing to do with race at all.

To argue, as I did, that this mastery of complexity is a new and positive thing in our politics is obviously not the same thing as echoing Ferraro’s racial and gender resentments about Obama’s beating Clinton in the primaries. To argue that a teenager in Lahore would get this message instantly from Obama’s face if he were president of the United States is not to say that Obama’s candidacy is only successful because he’s black. The most important point that teenage would get is not about Obama but about America: that we are not bound by racial or religious animosity, but open to all. And it would reflect Obama’s capacity to transcend his race rather than exploit it.

Of course, Obama’s race is a salient issue. We’re human. Obama’s skill has been in not denying that but in not exploiting it either for the purpose of identity politics. I guess this complicated point is lost on some, like Mickey. But I’m guessing others see what I’m arguing.