StudMuffin McCain--Always a Boy Toy

A few days ago, I wrote that it was very likely that John McCain's wife owned the Arizona cabin where McCain entertained reporters with some manly barbecuing.

I definitely called that one right. According to Jamison Forser of Media Matters:

Well, guess who owns John McCain's "rustic cabin" -- the one with the guest house and the pool? Cindy McCain, the wealthy and politically connected Arizona beer heiress McCain married shortly after leaving his first wife, and just in time to move to Arizona to run for Congress.

But this is where liberal journalists like Forser and bloggers like Digby go wrong. For liberals, the only point about McCain is the media's "hypocrisy" in ignoring McCain's finances while they obsess about the finances and lifestyle of Democrats like John Kerry and John Edwards. Why not focus more on the media's romance novel-like swooning over McCain, their determined efforts to nurture his campaign, and make everything comfortable for him. John McCain is the media's "StudMuffin" just as much as he's Cindy McCain's StudMuffin and he leads the coddled life of someone who expects everyone to love him the same way his wife and the media love him.

And if people treat McCain any other kind of way, he'll throw a fit.

Nancy Pelosi's Gut and Mine

Nancy Pelosi is definite that there's going to be no "dream ticket" with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton together.

Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have been floating the "dream ticket" idea lately, but Pelosi is emphatic about the combined ticket not happening because the Clinton camp had been claiming that "Senator McCain would be a better Commander in Chief than Obama."

When pressed by reporters on Thursday to explain why she felt so strongly about the matter, Pelosi replied: “Do you want me to go through a lifetime of political gut? Take it from me. That won’t be the ticket.”

Needless to say, my political gut is a lot less highly developed than Nancy Pelosi's--maybe because my father was a garbageman rather than mayor of Baltimore.

But Pelosi might be off the mark here. It might be the case that a Clinton/ Obama ticket might become more likely as things get tougher between Clinton and Obama.

A joint ticket might be the only way to mollify the supporters of the loser.

It also might be the best way to produce some positive news for the Democrats after a long, contentious primary battle.

That's what my gut says anyway.

Who Actually Got the Call at 3am?

Hush!

--Cue somber music--

Last night, there WAS a call at 3am.

The call was about whether American financial markets would fall into a tailspin--possibly sparking a global economic collapse.

The "venerable" Wall Street brokerage company Bear Stearns was unable to make payments on its loans and there was a strong concern that the failure of a company like Bear Stearns would lead to a crisis of confidence in financial markets.

The Fed used a little-known power it last exercised in the 1960s to stem a run on Bear Stearns that could have sent multibillion-dollar losses cascading across the world financial system, causing more failures on Wall Street and threatening to choke off global economic growth.

Decisions had to be made. Was the federal government going to be a party to the bailout? If so, what kind of bailout? Who would be involved? What would be the conditions?

If something was going to be done, it had to be done right away.

So, who got the call?

Was it President George Bush?

No, as far as I can tell from the Washington Post article, George Bush slept peacefully.

Instead, the call went to Ben Bernanke, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn, New York Fed President Timothy F. Geithner, and Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh conferred in those early-morning hours on calls, which also included Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Undersecretary Robert K. Steel. The Treasury Department had no formal role in the plan, but Fed leaders consulted Paulson and Steel for their financial markets expertise and to get their support.

Frankly, I'm reassured that Bush, Cheney, and the people in the White House were still sleeping while these decisions were being made. Maybe we'll get through the next ten months after all.

Bring on the Blood

My humble opinion is that the fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is more like the legendarily pathetic brawl between Julius Erving and Larry Bird in 1984 than a real championship fight.

Or even a hockey brawl

But serious and important journalists are starting to get antsy about the Democratic bloodbath. So, I'm going to take a second or two to be worried about the whole thing.

. . . . . .

Well, I'm glad that's over.

My point is that people like myself have been urging the Democrats to be tougher for a long time now. Why should we recoil now that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are finally starting to bloody each other up after "only" 15 months of campaigning?

So bring on the blood.

Personally, I'm glad that Clinton and Obama are learning how to dish out the pain. Given that Democrats have been taking it for so long, watching Hillary and Barack be aggressive is a refreshing change.

Everybody connected with the Democratic Party needs to toughen. The candidates need to develop thicker skins and longer claws. Democratic and independent voters should get used to seeing a little political gore on their computer and tv screens. And liberal op-ed writers and reporters need to stop being such all-consuming wimps.

Tough times are ahead. If Clinton or Obama wins, they're going to be facing the mess in Iraq, a recession, and a heavy load of financial and abuse of power scandals left over from the Bush administration.

No doubt, some right-wing twit will be talking about "treason in the White House" even before the winner moves in.

Any Democratic president is going to get an extremely rough ride. So, they might as well prepare for it now.

And I'm still supporting Hillary.

Raising the Racial Sludge

Josh Marshall (of TPM fame) has an interesting take on the relation between Geraldine Ferraro's comments and the Hillary Clinton campaign in an article for The Hill.

But the simple fact is that we wouldn’t be seeing this stuff now if it weren’t for the fact that this is the kind of campaign Hillary Clinton’s staff has decided to wage — often directly and at other times indirectly by not reining it in among her supporters when it crops up on its own. Wright is news today because Ferraro was news in the days just previous. Are her comments racist? That’s a loaded word. And there have been cases where the Clinton team has gotten a bum rap on these matters. What I do know, however, is that Clinton’s campaign and her surrogates have injected the subject of Obama’s race into this campaign too many times now for it to be credible to believe that it is anything but a conscious strategy.

In other words, Marshall isn't sure that Ferraro's comments were racist but does believe that the Hillary is injecting race into the campaign in a way that constantly reminds voters that Obama is "the black candidate."

My view is the polar opposite. Sure racism is a loaded word, but it applies well to Ferraro's comments about Obama being ahead because he's black and she herself being attacked because she's white. When Ferraro said that Obama is ahead because he's black, she was (knowingly I believe) dredging up the racist idea that blacks have become a "favored group" in American society or that blacks can only be successful because of affirmative action. My mother, a Democrat who's even more disgusted with Obama's success than Ferraro, expresses an allied racist idea when she claims that "blacks are taking over everything."

If either Hillary or Obama had gotten farther out ahead, this kind of racist sludge wouldn't have been dredged up from the depths of the segregationist past. However, the white racism was always there and the hard-fought character of the primary battle is bring it up.

But is the Hillary Clinton campaign specifically seeking to dredge up these kinds of white supremacist sentiments by continually reminding voters that Obama is black?

If they were, they would be worse than bigots because they would be trying to stimulate bigotry for political advantage. That would put the Hillary people disgusting in a Karl Rove kind of way.

But I don't think that's the case.

If Hillary Clinton herself or the Hillary campaign were seeking to "inject" racial poison into the campaign, they would have arranged for Bill Clinton to keep making racial remarks after his analogy between Obama and Jesse Jackson served to stereotype Obama as the "black candidate."

In fact, the opposite happened. Bill Clinton was given a new set of talking points, sent off on a Dan Quayle type tour of small towns, and became generally less prominent in Hillary's campaign.

That's a sign that Hillary didn't like the fact that Bill's comments and didn't like the fact that his comments drove African-American voters into the Obama camp.

I've argued several times that much of the Clinton campaign's maladroitness on race comes from their general lack of skill in dealing with African-American audiences and issues. That's because Hillary's staff is largely white and the general clumsiness of whites in dealing with non-whites rather than beinga specific strategy.

The Hillary campaign's problem with race is their whiteness rather than their white racism.

More Ranting About Spitzer

Three reasons I'm so ticked off about Eliot Spitzer:

1. Justice Denied Again. Spitzer made his reputation by going after financial abuses and outrageous salaries on Wall Street. Needless to say the abuses are still going to be there whether Spitzer is governor of New York or not. But Spitzer's diddling around with prostitutes is going to delegitimize the efforts of other people to rein in the abuses.

2. Sympathy for New York Democrats. I've lived in two of the super Republican rural counties in Upstate New York (Tioga and St. Lawrence). I know how hard it is for Democrats to make any headway. Spitzer's morally bankrupt behavior with prostitutes betrayed years of hard work by local Democrats to prepare the way for a popular Democratic candidate like Spitzer was in 2006.

3. Doing a John Bolton Within. Amanda Marcotte writes:

I propose that the problem with prostitution is unique not because sex as a service is unique exactly. I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash. In order for prostitution to be legal and yet still viable, the scheme either has to preserve the customer’s right to treat the prostitute like trash (which is why it works in Nevada, though it does the actual prostitutes little good), or an illegal side market of prostitution will flourish next to the legal one.

Just a "kiss up/kick down" guy like John Bolton was always looking for opportunities to abuse those below him, prostitution is about "buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash." In other words, guys like Eliott Spitzer are seeking the opportunity to be assholes without paying any consequences for their degrading behavior toware women.

Too Embarrassed to Gloat

Because of that *&%# asshole Eliot Spitzer, I don't have either the heart or the moral standing to gloat over the embezzlement scandal at the Republican National Campaign Committee. Damn him.

Does McCain Know Any Non-Bigoted People on the Religious Right?

It doesn't seem like it. TPM has a story today on McCain referring to an Ohio megachurch minister by the name of Rod Parsley as a "spiritual adviser." In itself, that's fine. As the case of Eliot Spitzer demonstrates, prominent male politicians need all the spiritual advice they can get to keep it in their pants. But Rev. Parsley also claims that the U. S. has a historical mission to destroy Islam.

I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.

I don't know why. The hundreds of millions of wealthy Europeans who live just fine without religion in their lives are much more of a threat to American Christianity than Islam. Because we view Islam as the enemy, fighting Islam is something that invigorates Christianity. But the Europeans are killing Christianity through lack of interest in religion altogether.

But then again, perhaps Rev. Parsley is trying to "guide" Sen. McCain into a major military assault on Switzerland and other countries with low rates of church attendance.

Drifting Towards Obama or Putting My Mouth Where My Money Is!

I recognize that Geraldine Ferraro no longer has an official connection with the Hillary campaign, but I think the Ferraro episode has led me to drift over the line toward supporting Obama more than Hillary. It bothered me that Ferraro thought she was helping Hillary Clinton with her garbage about Obama only being ahead because he's black and it bothered me even more that Hillary Clinton didn't disown Ferraro imediately.

I'm not overly excited by the idea of switching to Obama and dislike a lot of Obama's facile rhetoric about overcoming race, class, and gender divisions. Likewise, I don't accept Obama's assumption that the war with the right is going to disappear if Obama wins the election. I'm sure I would vote for Hillary if the Kentucky primary were held today.

However, I also sense that my support for Hillary is based more on reluctance to give up my previous support than anything else. One could say that I'm torn about who to support, but it would be more accurate to see me as gradually drifting toward the Obama side. Perhaps I've been doing so ever since the South Carolina primary.

Or maybe I'm just putting my mouth where my money is. I've contributed twice as much to Obama as I have to Hillary.

Eliot Spitzer's Inner John Bolton

I have some advice for Eliot Spitzer. Hey Eliot! Your lame apology is not enough. Now that it's been revealed that you've used prostitutes, you need to grab your sword and fall on it. If you're not satisfied with euphemism, then just run yourself through. No, I don't mean you should kill yourself. You should commit political suicide and resign. If you want to do something really appropriate, you should politically disembowel yourself as well.

Geraldine Ferraro Blows It for Hillary, Updated

A lot of Hillary surrogates have made stupid comments about Barack Obama and race. Bill Clinton, Robert Johnson, and Ed Rendell are probably the most prominent.

So, I should have done this week ago.

But it should now be obvious that there are a lot of Hillary surrogates who have no clue about how to talk about race under political pressure without sounding racist.

Today's Geraldine Ferraro's turn (from Kos).

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

What a load of garbage!!! Obama's not leading the race for the Democratic nomination because he's black. Obama's winning because he's an extremely likable figure, who's a bright guy and a super-talented politician. Like anybody else born in the United States, Obama has to play the race cards he's been dealt. But he's played those cards extremely well. Obama has been able to be progressive on the issues without being either a ferocious partisan or heavily identified with minority politics. He has a cool androgyny that plays well with white independents, moderates, and young people while he's also become effective at appealing for black votes.

Barack Obama isn't ahead because the country is "caught up in the concept" of a "black man being president." Obama and Hillary Clinton are pretty much tied in the polls. To the contrary, Obama is ahead in the delegate count because he's made better campaign decisions than Hillary and because his campaign staff has outplanned, outhustled, and outfought Hillary's staff. I still think Hillary would make a better president, but Obama has shown that he's just as much a heavyweight as she is.

That's something that Hillary's surrogates need to catch up on.

Update--Today, Ferraro is claiming that she's being attacked because she's white. It sounds like 75 years of racial resentments are catching up with her. In some ways, she reminds me of my 73 year old mom who is reacting to Obama's success with a lot of racist garbage. It's both sad and disgusting.

McCain and the "Look at Me Express"

One of the themes of those who disdain the Obama campaign is the idea that Barack Obama is "self-centered." That's especially the case in relation to the various patriotism slips by Barack and Michelle Obama. Here's an item from Blogs for Bush:

Even if he "forgot" to show the proper respect, his "forgetfulness" is illustrative of his priorities; and is likewise illustrative of his contempt toward those who before him have made the ultimate sacrifice so that he and other ungrateful, smug, self-centered adolescent rubes can ramble on about how love of and respect for one's country mean nothing. After all--he didn't have to pay for his freedoms.

Of course, it takes a lot of self-centeredness for anybody to launch a major campaign for the presidency--including Barack Obama. But self-centeredness is not nearly as important to Obama's campaign as it's going to be to John McCain's. Here's Stephen Hayes discussing how McCain's going to campaign after he takes a trip overseas to "look presidential" and gives a "significant national security address."

After that, McCain will begin a cross-country tour emphasizing his life story. His advisers believe that while most Americans have a vague sense that McCain served his country in the military and in political life, they don't actually know his story. This trip--the "Service to America" tour--is intended to fill out that narrative. It will feature stops in cities and towns that have somehow shaped his life. Among them: McCain Field in Mississippi; the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where McCain graduated fifth from the bottom of his class; Pensacola, Florida, where he trained at the Pensacola Naval Air Station; and Jacksonville, Florida, where he lived upon returning from his time as a POW in Vietnam. At each stop, the campaign will emphasize one aspect of McCain's character and talk about why it will be important in the White House.

In other words, the main justification for electing John McCain president is going to be his "character" and McCain is going to go from place to place displaying "one aspect" of his character after another. Issues like the war, foreign policy, the economy, and the environment are going to get short shrift as McCain focuses attention on himself, his character, and what it means to be as great as John McCain. Obama and Clinton use personal anecdotes to bring attention to their policy prescriptions. Stuck with unpopular policy prescriptions, John McCain is going to focus on himself. He might as well call his campaign plane the "Look at Me Express."

I'd Pay For Do-Over in Florida and Michigan

I can get behind the Democratic Party doing the Florida and Michigan primaries over. It's the only way to be fair to the Michigan and Florida Democrats whose votes are currently being shut out from the process.

Even more importantly, the do-over would continue the tremendous excitement and enthusiasm that's the Democrats into June. It would raise a lot of cash as well. According to James Carville, it would cost $30 mill to hold the do-over primaries. My bet is that the Hillary and Obama campaigns would be able to raise double that for Florida and Michigan campaigns. I know I'd kick in $50 dollars a so.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Hillary would have an advantage in both states going in. Holding a do-over in Michigan and Florida would also give Hillary a chance to show that she can go hermana a hermano with Obama in a couple of important swing states and win.

Let's get it done.

Apres Denny Hastert?

Democrat Bill Foster won today's election to replace recently resigned former Republican leader Denny Hastert in the House of Representatives. Foster pulled down 53% of the vote over the Republican candidate Jim Oberweiss.

Unlike Kos and dday at Digby, I don't think winning this election is a sign that Democratic utopia had arrived. Oberweiss wasn't a strong enough candidate to make the election a true test of a Democratic Party surge.

But I do think that an Obama or Hillary victory in November will result in a dramatic shift away from the Republicans in particular and conservative ideology in general. If either Obama or Hillary become president, there's a good chance that the Democrats will be working with big majorities for the next 10 or 12 years.

Ironically, conservative Republicans are counting on John McCain to hold the fort for them until the Conservative Brand recovers from the Bush administration.

Apres Denny--the Democratic deluge? Probably after Barack instead.

McCain Bad Decision Watch #1

One of my personal hypotheses about John McCain is that he's not a good manager or decision-maker. In fact, he's basically a one-man band kind of guy. McCain's most comfortable in situations where it's just him on the spot--off-the-cuff speaking, television interviews, town hall meetings, and debates. His presidential campaigns work best when it's just McCain, a few of his close allies, and a bus rolling across the countryside. McCain especially likes to be coddled in as everybody's "studmuffin" and is at his best when he's being coddled, nurtured, and buttered-up by the mainstream media.

Otherwise, he gets angry and has the kind of temper tantrums he threw at Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times.

At the same time, McCain doesn't "do" organization very well at all. McCain's never been good at building campaign organizations himself, never been good at hiring people to build campaign organizations, and never been good at fundraising. Perhaps McCain just isn't effective when it isn't "all John all the time."

Now that McCain is the Republican nominee, however, he's going to be the head of a large campaign organization, he gets to choose the top leadership of the Republican National Committee, and he has to be coordinated with various Republican elites.

My bet is that McCain botches up the whole thing and makes his general election campaign even tougher than it was going to be.

The first evidence of McCain's poor decision-making was the idea to seek out the endorsement of a megachurch superstar and general all-round bigot like Rev. James Hagee. That led to three straight days of uncomfortable backtracking. Following the NYT story on Vicki Iseman, McCain now has had two straight weeks of bad press in the wake of sewing up the Republican nomination.

Not a great start.

Today, Robert Novak complains about McCain choosing Carly Fiorina as the finance chair for his presidential campaign.

Conservatives and party regulars were not happy about the selection of Carly Fiorina to head the Republican National Committee's "Victory 2008" campaign raising funds for the presidential election . . . .

Federal Election Commission records show Fiorina contributed nothing to the Republican Party the last eight years. Her only political giving was to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign -- $2,100 in 2006 and $2,300 in 2007. Fiorina was at McCain's side when he campaigned in the critical Michigan and Florida races.

Fiorina has no standing in the conservative movement and has taken no position on the abortion question.

Given her status as a celebrity ex-ceo of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina is going to serve mostly as a celebrity spokesperson for McCain's poorly formulated and ad hoc economic policies. If she's really in charge of campaign fund-raising as well, it's most likely another bad decision on McCain's part.

McCain Frays His Lifeline

My initial read of the John McCain campaign is that McCain has a lot better chance of flopping his way to a landslide defeat than he has of giving Obama or Hillary a serious fight. Sure, McCain looks like a serious contender and he has a serious contender's poll numbers (6 behind Obama in today's RCP average). But John McCain also looks a lot like Rudy Giuliani late last year. Giuliani was still on top of the polls but he was also on the verge of looking ridiculous as the media started documenting his two divorces, estrangement from his children, fights with NYC firemen, and his bachelor pad in the terrorist command post. Giuliani sank like a stone after yet more revelations.

McCain's in an analogous situation. Certainly, his candidacy has strengths. The Republican Party will support McCain, the media worships him, and he's generally well-liked by moderate and independent voters. But McCain's in several kinds of binds. Worst of all, McCain has no natural base outside the media that he's been cultivating for decades. McCain used to have a base among moderate and independent voters but that was seriously weakened by his full-throated support for President Bush's surge. In fact, McCain's situation with moderates and independents is now extremel fluid. Centrist voters are still willing to give McCain a chance, but they're also open to criticism of McCain for his support of Bush's surge, his flip-flopping on immigration and torture, his position on social security, his temper, and his history of adultery back in the 70's. McCain's standing among moderates and independents also depends on the continued enthusiasm of the mainstream media for the McCain campaign. In fact, the media serves as a kind of lifeline for McCain these days. If the establishment media either gave up on him or started to treat him like he was ridiculous, McCain would lose his line to the moderate and independent voters he would need to have any chance in the general election.

This is why McCain's angry exchange with Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times was such a risky gambit. I'm sure McCain precipitated the exchange partly as a way to show right-wing talk show hosts and conservative bloggers he was eager to stick it to the Times. But it backfired because it made McCain look like a stupid bully. Bumiller asked a challenging but innocent question about McCain's switching from the Republican Party to independent status in 2001 and flirting with accepting a vice-presidential nomination from John Kerry in 2004. McCain could have just denied the stories, but he decided to badger Bumiller about asking the questions in the first place. McCain's attack on Bumiller in front of a group of reporters was stupid because the stories about the incident are going to remind conservatives of how little loyalty McCain has to the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Even more dangerous for McCain is the fact that the mainstream media now sees that McCain can blow up at them as well as Republican senators, military officials, and homestate Arizona politicians. In other words, McCain was putting his media lifeline to moderate and independent voters at risk and increasing the danger of looking ridiculous and implausible to voters at large.

Of course, it's going to take more than one incident to undo the good will McCain's built up with the media over the last fifteen years. But it is safe to say that McCain frayed his lifeline today.

Supporting Hillary, Respecting Obama

A commenter asks how I can be supporting Hillary if I'm so critical of the Hillary campaign and ready to recognize the virtues of Barack Obama and his campaign.

That's a fair question.

My answer is this. I believe that Hillary Clinton would make a better president than Obama and that she's right in viewing the United States as a fiercely divided country. However, I'm also very critical of the Hillary campaign because they've done a poor job of making her case and because the candidate herself sometimes seems stuck in the "New Democrat" politics of opposing the left as much as she opposes the right.

Concerning Obama, I believe that his vision of transcending the politics of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation is a fantasy. At the same time, I'm more than willing to acknowledge the effectiveness of his campaign and am beginning to see ways in which the "fantasy of unity" can become a "dominant fact" of American politics.

In other words, I support Hillary but am more than willing to acknowledge the power of the Obama campaign.

How Obama Would Unite

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer asks how Barack Obama can be a "uniter" if he hadn't supported "bi-partisan" legislation like warrantless wiretapping, immigration reform, and the "gang of 14" deal to end Democratic filibusters on Bush judicial appointments.

The answer is simple.

Obama's premise is that an Obama victory would mean that the Republican right-wing would no longer exist as a meaningful force in American politics. It's not that Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Ann Coulter, Tom Coburn and the rest of the right-wing would disappear, or be disappeared. It's just that so few people would be listening to them that they wouldn't matter anymore.

Divisions of race, gender, sexual orientation, rich and poor, and young and old can be transcended only if the right-wing politics of hate no longer has the ability to exploit those divisions. For Obama, the politics of the future is one in which the Gingrich/Limbaugh right is magicked back to its pre-Ronald Reagan irrelevance and people on the left no longer have to be so aggressive in fighting them.

In this sense, the decline of the activist right means that the left can get back to the business of governing for the common good and working out the compromises with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans needed to get things done.

In Obama's world, the decline of the right liberates the left from the politics of opposition as well. No Limbaugh means that MoveOn.org and Kos aren't needed either.

Hillary's idea is that the next Democratic president is going to have to fight with right-wing figures like Charles Krauthamer from Day One. Obama's idea is that people like Krauthammer are slated to disappear from the political scene as surely as last of the big dinosaurs were going to disappear after the giant meteor hit in the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm more in agreement with Hillary. But I'd worry a lot about Obama if I were Charles Krauthammer. That's because an Obama victory might mean that millions of people are getting ready to tune out the Charles Krauthammers of the world.

The Threshold Ploy: I Kind of Like It

I generally like Daily Kos even if I think their posting is a pretty vanilla version of the left-wing views I hold as well. Contrary to Kos top-poster devilstower though, I thought today's Hillary gambit on national security was pretty well done. It was a two-part rhetorical manuever. First, Hillary defined the "commander-in-chief threshold" as a kind of magic criteria for evaluating presidential candidates. The idea is that people shouldn't vote for anyone for president who they can't imagine as crossing the threshold of being credible in wielding the imperial power of the United States. In retrospect, the American public was mistaken in thinking that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had ever crossed that threshold and we now realize the gravity of our collective error.

Then, she claimed that both she and John McCain had crossed that threshold and challenged voters to determine whether they thought the same of Barack Obama.

“I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold. That is a critical criterion for the next Democratic nominee to deal with.”

I don't agree that John McCain has crossed any kind of threshold about being commander-in-chief. McCain's basically another Dick Cheney, somebody who's developed the ability to sound rational and informed in relation to defense policy at the same time he's a completely unhinged warmonger.

But Hillary's running against Obama right now rather than McCain. So there's no harm in implying that she would be seen more as McCain's equal on foreign policy than Barack Obama and I'm sure that Hillary herself believes that. Despite his many weaknesses as a candidate, John McCain does have a lot of political capital as a "straight-shooter" on national security and other issues. As a result, there is a real question about whether Obama would be taken seriously on national security issues during a general election campaign and Hillary is right to try to figure out a way to push the question to her advantage.

Another thing I like about the idea of a "commander-in-chief threshold is that she introduced the concept while forwarding her own proposals on the war effort in Afghanistan. But did The Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp" report what those proposals actually were?

Not on your life.

Point Coulter

This blog doesn't often find itself in agreement with Ann Coulter. But yesterday's Coulter column does make a good point about liberals.

Liberals believe, often accurately, that if they say the same thing over and over again 1 billion times, people will believe it: "Bush lied, kids died," "We've lost in Iraq," "Reagan is stupid," "Bush is stupid," "Republicans are stupid," "Global warming is destroying the planet," "Gloria Steinem is good-looking" and -- their most provably false assertion -- "Bill Clinton is the most talented politician of his generation."

For some reason, Democratic politicians and consultants believe that saying the same thing "over and over again 1 billion times" is the route to political success. During the 2006 campaign, Nancy Pelosi said "Republican culture of corruption" so many times I got blue in the face. Likewise, Obama has two words--"change" and "hope"--that he and his supporters repeat over and over again zillions of times. But Hillary Clinton's campaign has to be the worst. Her senior campaign staff spent more than $100 million dollars while debating between "strength" and "warmth" before finally stumbling last week into a combination of strength, warmth, media criticism, and taking on Obama. Stunned by her new versatility, Ohio voters gave her a ten-point victory.

In the days leading up to the Ohio and Texas contests, Clinton presented herself as the victim of media bias and displayed a sense of humor on "Saturday Night Live" at the same time her staff was holding daily conference calls attacking Obama on his trade record and for his ties to an indicted real estate developer. The yin-yang approach -- going positive and negative at the same time -- may not have been deliberate, but it seemed to work.

"There has been a long-term disagreement on strategy over whether to focus on character . . . or raising questions about Senator Obama," said one top Clinton aide who was at the core of the fight. "What's happened over the last two weeks is we've done both."

The main reason for the endless repetition of catch phrases is the assumption by Democratic candidates and consultants that their constituencies are an electoral minority. Paralyzed by fear that the Republicans will be able to mobilize their "natural majority," Democratic candidates ride any kind of Democratic-favorable catch-phrase or slogan into the ground. But voters take this kind of rigidity as a sign of weakness in the same way that they view the Democratic leadership as weak because of its endless surrenders on Iraq war funding, warrantless wiretapping, telecom immunity, and other issues. Democrats are now a majority by almost every measure. The Democratic leadership should start feeling their strength and hitting the Republicans from several angles at the same time.