Clinton At Harvard

A reader comments:

A wonderful speech, but hard to ignore the "hypocrite" label when contrasting those words with the advice Clinton gave to Kerry in 2004 to focus on the "one tenth of one percent" by demonizing gays and supporting a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Or the fact that he signed DOMA into law. Or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Plenty can talk the talk (and Clinton is a master), but I’d like to see the walk. 

Picky, picky. My reader needs to be sent to HRC re-education camp, in order to erase something called memory of the 1990s.

Fear and Loathing On The Right

Illegalrallydavidmcnewgetty

A reader writes:

Absolutely right Andrew. I am an occasional listener to talk radio on my drive to work and I have been listening in on the anger of conservative talks show hosts (Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity) and, oh my God, their callers. It’s unbelievable. You would think that these people, who are here because the primarily Republican business owners wanted and used cheap labor, would be treated with more sympathy. Or that their desperate attmepts to arrive in the land of the free and the brave would elicit at least some measure of admiration for their determination to seek a better life. In one actual sense these "illegals" are the cream of the crop – those, evolutionarily speaking, who are adapting as best possible to their environment. Yet, the hate spewed against them on radio was so intense I literally gagged.

I agree with you: if Hispanics were listening in on these shows, they are hardly likely to vote Republican for years to come. It wasn’t just about illegals, it was about what kind of illegals these were.

If you don’t see this, you need to think for one second how this stuff sounds to someone who isn’t a member of the majority in this country.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty.)

Obama and Responsibility

A reader writes:

Obama said:

"… by taking mutual responsibility for each other as a society, and also by asking for some more individual responsibility to strengthen our families."

It’s a lovely soundbite. But the problem is not that society doesn’t take enough responsibility, but that the division of responsibility between society and the individual has lost all balance. And you don’t fix a balance problem by adding weight to both sides.

Senator Obama talks like this because he wants more spending and social responsibility and so offers a trade: we’ll look for more individual responsibility if you take more social responsibility. It’s lot like Bush, who got the idea from Clinton. But his basic motivation leads to statements like this:

"We need to start supporting parents with young children. "

What’s with the "start"? I thought that with welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, head start, public education, public housing, etc, we "started" supporting parents a long time ago. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for all of that – but it’s a bit much to say we haven’t yet "started"  with the support.

I don’t want politicians talking about individual responsibility as a marketing strategy for their constituencies’ interests. I want them talking about it because they understand it’s the source of the problem. Anyone who is talking about equal additional increments of social and individual responsibility is marketing, not solving.

Challenging The Christianist Left

The attempt to dragoon the Democrats into Christianist politics is celebrated here by Jim Wallis. But check out the comments. Most are mad as hell. I don’t think the religious left has appreciated how much of the current Democratic popularity is bound up with a secular revolt against Christianism (and that secular revolt includes many people of faith). Re-tooling Christianism for the left is not an answer. It compounds the problem. If the Democratic leadership continues to pander to the religious left, I suspect their party will split more deeply than the GOP.

Mickey Explains

His explanation of the collapse of the immigration bill:

Maybe it’s about not being able to take the worst ideas from the left (instant legalization of illegals) and the right (second class guest workers), put them together, call it centrism, bask in fawning MSM coverage and ram it down the throat of voters who don’t want it!

Maybe it is. And maybe it’s all about the collapse of the Republican coalition. My feeling is that this kind of bill requires a president to corral it through the Congress, a president who is able to persuade his own supporters and explain to the public why this kind of compromise is the best available. We don’t have such a president right now. He is despised by the entire middle and left, and he has alienated the base of the right. As a lukewarm supporter of the bill – I can’t see any other feasible rubric to deal with border security and the 12 million people who are already here, won’t leave, and have jobs to do – I was nonetheless never persuaded that this bill was essential. The president’s arrogant condescension toward his critics didn’t help. And the passion was almost all on the extremes.

So no tears. In general, I’m happy to see laws not being passed. I’m not convinced that this bill or any bill would dramatically increase national security, and so fail to see the urgency. If this means that we can concentrate on border enforcement in the near future, so be it. Politically, I tend to think this will hurt the GOP badly in the long term. The reason is not the cogency of many of the arguments; it’s the patent cultural and social panic that animates the Republican gut. This fear of the other and need to demonize and objectify it is obviously the emotional core of the opposition. You can see it in their faces. If these immigrants were Poles or Italians or Irish, I can’t see the Mickey-Dobbs-Limbaugh coalition getting so upset. I say that not from the basis of their arguments (which are largely respectable) but from the hysterical tone of their remarks. I guess as a gay man, I have come to recognize that tone. More and more members of minorities hear it coming from the GOP. It will come back to haunt them.