Avdat

Time warp

I'm feeling more magnanimous than I did when I wrote the previous post.  Upon hearing of Jesse Helms' death, I was suddenly transported back to a dorm elevator the day after Helms won one of his re-election bids by, in Jeff Greenfield's words, "running a 1968-style campaign in 1990 and getting away with it."  I and others were in the midst of a furious debate about whether or not being a great friend of the tobacco farmer trumped Helms' Neanderthal hatefulness.

But guess what?  It's not 1990!  It's 2008!  The nation is poised to elect it's first black President.  Gays can marry in Massachusetts and California.  Attempts to privatize Social Security have gone nowhere.  And an all-sticks and no carrots foreign policy has been thoroughly discredited.

Helms won a lot of elections by pandering to every nasty impulse in our body politic, but he and his fellow travelers never translated electoral success into rolling back the drift toward a more tolerant, more generous society.

America has said No to Senator No.  Secure in that, I can say, rest in peace, Senator.

Jesse Helms

I was just about to write something like, Momma told me, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all," and "Don't speak ill of the dead," and leave it at that.  But I see that Yglesias has just trashed that sentiment and the deceased former Senator from my home state in one, fell swoop. 

So, over to you, Matt...

Your grumpy uncle

Big political news last night.  Alas, I was exhausted, and went to bed early without watching a bit of it.

This morning I did catch the highlights of John McCain's speech on NPR.  Now it is true that

1. Barack Obama is a good bit younger than McCain,
2. with a far shorter resume than McCain, and
3. is rather dovish compared to McCain.

So it seems obvious that McCain would want to paint his opponent as too vulnerable to getting fleeced in the covert bazaars of military and diplomatic intrigue to be President.  Experience and the right mix of carrots and sticks in foreign policy are legitimate issues, and it's legitimate to raise them in a way that makes your competition look a bit too green.

But McCain, to my hearing, failed to do that.  He sounded snide, angry even, when a kindly patronizing "Bless his heart" tone might have worked better.

McCain needs to do a better job coming across as avuncular rather than as the surly uncle who only leaves the golf course in Arizona when there's a family wedding back east that he can show up at and ruin.

Cal Thomas is no Gary Hart

Brother Cal urges the Republicans to get on fire with that old time GOP religion.  To which I say, Please Brother Cal; don't throw us Democrats in that brer patch!

Nothing helps the Democrats more than for Republicans to adopt a platform that gets tough with both the Soviet Union and marginal tax rates of 70%.  I mean, aren't the foreign and domestic troubles of the late 1970s still bedeviling us in 2008?

David Brooks gets it:

Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication—National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard—“and now I feel estranged,” he said. “I just don’t feel it’s exciting, I don’t feel it’s true, fundamentally true.” In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed “true.” Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. “American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn’t a big one,” he said. “The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don’t know if they can.”

HT.

In the next few years some Republicans will step forward with some new ideas.  They'll be ridiculed as shallow and/or apostate.  But a protracted period of wilderness wandering will finally orient them in the right direction. 

In the meantime, let's hope that the Democrats actually pass some good legislation that addresses the problems of the early 21st century, before success goes to their heads, corruption seeps in, and today's innovations become the hardened orthodoxy of the future.

Prognostication

I still think that the likeliest scenario is that John McCain will win the White House, and Democrats will increase their majorities in both houses of Congress.  McCain is the most popular politician in the country, and his reputation for independence will help him distance himself from the extremely unpopular regime in the White House. 

The second likeliest scenario is that the Democrats sweep the federal level.  Their ability to do this depends on hanging Bush's record around the neck of John McCain.

It's very hard to see how the Republicans can make gains in Congress.  If they were going to separate themselves from the Bush administration, the time to do that was years ago.  Throwing Bush under the bus today looks cowardly, like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

Six degrees of seperation

Kevin Bacon, meet Jeremiah Wright:

I don't think this dog will hunt.  Richard Moore is the go-to guy for all things White, Male and Corporate.  BTW, I intend to vote for him.  Only the already converted are prepared to see Moore and Wright as some kind of John Brown-Nat Turner one-two punch in Whitey's mouth.

What else is unbelievable is this "argument" between McCain and the NC GOP.  Anyone who thinks that the presumptive Republican nominee couldn't squelch this in an instant is too naive for politics.  The "argument" lets McCain stay above the fray while his surrogates do the dirty work. 

Fine.  That's what surrogates are for.  Who the candidate is is of no consequence.  If Hillary were the front-runner, you'd be getting email forwards about her lesbianism, and right wing pundits would be clamoring for the Vince Foster case to be re-opened.   

An attorney recently told me, "In court, if the facts aren't on your side, you talk about the law.  If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, then you talk about Mom, Apple Pie and the American Way."

The last option is what the Republicans are talking about.  Or more to the point, they talk about how those values are missing on the Democratic side.  This means that, even if you'd been under a rock for the last seven years, knowing nothing about Iraq, the credit crunch or torture, all you'd have to do is watch this commercial, and you'd know instantly who's side both the facts and the law are on.

Are you more popular than President Bush?

Probably.

Obama may have some dodgy friends (as they say on Eastenders), but he's got more, too.

Holiday

McCain wants to suspend gas taxes during the summer driving season.  What a great idea!  An incentive to put more cars on the road for more miles, burning more fossil fuels, and less money to repair our crumbling transportation infrastructure.

Oh, now I get it!  More cars on buckling bridges means more dead people, and in the long run, fewer cars, and fewer CO2 emissions.  Genius!

My turn to be bitter

It's more than rich that Hillary Clinton is positioning herself as the champion of the religious right voter.  If Bittergate winds up presenting us with a November choice between a warmonger and a person who's not always on speaking terms with The Truth, well then, the American people get the leadership they deserve.

The Purpling of America

If you like maps (and who doesn't?), and if you like politics (and if you don't, why are you reading this blog?), you ought to check out this guy's Electoral College maps.  While a Clinton/McCain match-up is shaping up to give us the same Red-Blue distribution we've seen in the last two election cycles, an Obama/McCain match-up generates a very different look.  Sad to say that the Old North State simply varies from crimson to light red.  But maybe if we work hard...