The Dish

A reader writes:

I was appalled by Wieseltier’s suggestion that you were an anti-Semite — anyone who has followed your work closely would cringe at the idea — and am now pleased that he did the right thing to clarify his knee-jerk comment. And your response this morning furthers the debate, a good thing. I’d like to take that argument a step further, though.

When you offer a detailed critique of evangelical Protestantism in America, I may agree with the vast majority of your points (and I do), but I know you’re writing about that culture with no lived-in knowledge of the complexities and nuances of why evangelical Protestants think and behave in the ways they do. That’s why some of the Obama smears in Pennsylvania shocked you but didn’t surprise me in the least — I could see them coming from miles away. Similarly, I could offer my own opinions on the narcissistic impulses of certain strains of Catholicism or the Kristol/Lieberman faction of American Jews who conflate this country’s interests with Israel’s, but those opinions, informed or not, would lack a deeper ring of truth because I haven’t lived the experience. That’s why a writer like Reza Aslan is so important — he can describe and interpret the dangers of militant Islam and the larger internal conflict within Islam in far more illuminating ways than, say, Wieseltier or Peretz.

Benedict will be pissed: masturbation keeps men healthier – and certainly at lower risk for prostate cancer. But it’s been a long time since the Catholic church’s claims about "natural law" were actually reflected in what we empirically know about nature. About 700 years, actually.

As a new type of traffic light?

"One in ten voters say they changed party registration to vote in this year’s Pennsylvania primary.  Ten percent of the vote is huge.  That would be five times the past high for a crossover vote with a closed primary.  That’s an absolutely huge number — and once again, ladies and gentlemen, that is Operation Chaos," – Rush Limbaugh, one of the Clinton campaign’s most important supporters.

Friday fun. 
 

London, England, 5.22 pm.

Leave aside the actual merits of the current neocon-Clinton-Limbaugh campaign against Obama – that he’s linked to the Weather Underground, that his pastor is a "racist", that he cannot appeal to Reagan Democrats, that he’s another McGovern, that he’s a closet Communist, etc. etc. What strikes me is the energy with which these pundits actually derive from these associations and debates. It’s quite clear that they really anger up the blood of a certain class of people. And yet they don’t me, particularly. They seem pretty irrelevant to me, in the context of an election about a major war, a teetering economy, a weakened constitution, a mounting level of debt, a plummeting dollar, and a warming planet. I understand that this is politics, that these are vulnerabilities of associations, that these issues have some traction and a sliver of justification, but I still can’t get that worked up about them. Why, I wonder?

When you think about these controversies, you being to realize just how generationally-focused they are. For a lot of people under 40, the Weather Underground sound like an Austin Powers out-take or a rock band. Even if you come to the conclusion (as I do) that William Ayers is a scumbag, the issue is not a dispositive one. Ditto the obvious racial panic around Obama – about Wright, about Farrakhan, about affirmative action. This was Pat Buchanan’s view:

"Obama cannot concede that the anger of white America – that its right to equal justice has been sacrificed to salve the consciences of guilt-besotted liberals – is a legitimate anger."

But doesn’t that "white anger" feel very 1980s to you? Are white voters still motivated in large part by grievances about affirmative action (which, for the record, I strongly oppose)? You’d think that our cultural politics had remained untouched and unmoved since the Reagan era. You’d think that political demography was frozen at exactly the moment boomers came of age.

The truth is: the boomer media class is fighting the last war and misreading the current one. As Ambinder reminds us:

It doesn’t really matter if Barack Obama isn’t doing as well among white working class Dems as Hillary Clinton is. He doesn’t need their votes to win.

This election will be decided by white independents, African-Americans, new Hispanic voters, and a vast influx of younger Americans. Those are the people Obama has brought into the process; and they are the people who will change the face of American politics.

In fact, they already have. But the boomer elites have yet to notice.

In some ways, that’s the electoral question for Democratic super-delegates. The Clintons have managed to create something like the dynamic of previous red-blue general elections within the Democratic base itself. But that makes the base of their support white working class ethnics – the Reagan Democrats. But how would those voters lean if asked to pick between McCain and Clinton? Surely a Scots-Irish veteran hero is more competitive with them than Ms Wellesley. But in the other key swing group – independents – Obama and McCain are much more evenly matched. Moreover, Obama brings a massive advantage among the young and African-Americans and among Republican-leaning well-off independents. Hard to dispute this:

The congressional Democratic leaders don’t draw the same conclusion from Pennsylvania and earlier contests that many observers think they do: that Obama’s candidacy is fatally flawed because he has as yet been largely unable to win the votes of working class whites.

They point out something that has been largely overlooked in all the talk: The Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries were closed primaries. One key congressional Democrat says, "Yes, he doesn’t do really well with a big part of the Democratic base, but she doesn’t do well with independents, who will be critical to success in November."

Minnesota, Virginia, Colorado: these states may be where the real battle will lie.

"It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense. I don’t have anything additional to say. It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense, I don’t have anything more to say … it’s nonsense. I reject it categorically," – John McCain referring to his endorser, John Hagee’s view that Katrina was payback for gays and sins in New Orleans.

Abercrombie & Fitch denies credit for the Obama speech trio:

Tom Lennox, VP-corporate communications for A&F, said the company doesn’t "seek product placement at all." He went on: "We appreciate the exposure, but can not take credit for it. So, thanks to the Obama campaign for this great product placement. We wish we had thought of it."

I blame the gays.