The NBA: Fixed?

Oops! The big news out of the NBA today isn't game three of the Boston/LA series, it's whether NBA officials are trying to fix the series.

Corrupt former referee Tim Donaghy just came out with two accusations that get at the integrity of the NBA game.

According to Donaghy, undisclosed persons in NBA league management have worked through referees to manipulate the outcome of a 2002 playoff series between LA and Sacramento.

Court documents filed by Donaghy's lawyer detailed the "inner-workings" of a plot in which top league executives used referees to manipulate the games. Donaghy claims two referees were "company men" whose job was to extend a playoff series in 2002 to a seventh game.

The documents did not name the series, but the Lakers-Kings Western Conference finals was the only series in 2002 that went to a seventh game, with the Lakers winning both Game 6 and 7 to reach the NBA Finals.

There's a somewhat analogous accusation that appears to be connected to a Dallas/Houston series.

Donaghy also claims that a 2005 playoff series was improperly influenced, saying that referees were instructed to call illegal screens more strictly on a particular player after an opposing owner called to complain after falling behind 2-0 in the series.

Though the document again does not name anyone specifically, Mark Cuban did complain to the league that year about the officiating after his Mavericks fell behind 2-0 in their series with Houston. Dallas went on to beat the Rockets in seven games.

Given Donaghy's convictions for gambling on games and all around sliminess, it's hard to just take his word for anything.

But so many calls in college and professional basketball are just so obviously bad that any reasonable person would have to wonder if the refs are under instructions to rig the game.

Maybe the game is dirty.

McCain's Imperial Stupidity and Dumbo Boneheadedness. Plus, Is McCain Going to Nominate Karl Rove for Vice-President!?

John McCain's presidential campaign is starting to remind me of the George McGovern campaign in 1972.

In other words, McCain can't do anything right and can't catch a break.

Today's litany of gaffes and brain-dead manuevers includes referring to Vladimir Putin as the president of Germany and refusing to meet with Billy Graham.

I've seen blog comments about McCain being senile in getting Putin wrong right after goofing the al-Qaeda/Iran relation. That's nonsense and bigoted to boot. Sure McCain's 71 and kind of an old 71 because he's a physical wreck. But he was the sharpest guy in the room during the Republican debates. If McCain's senile, so are Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and hard-working Fred Thompson.

McCain's problem is more like "imperial stupidity"--not worrying about getting anything right because you think you rule the world.

It's been a common difficulty among neo-conservatives since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Blowing off Billy Graham is even worse. Billy Graham is exactly what McCain needs in an evangelical religious contact, someone who is both universally beloved and blandly generic in his religion and politics. Hell, I've even come to like Billy Graham. Compared to other evangelical religious leaders he's a tower of humanity, modesty, and decency.

Meeting with Billy Graham was exactly the kind of religious photo-op that McCain needs for his campaign. McCain's people should have jumped at the offer from Rev. Brian Jacobs to broker that kind of meeting. Instead, they basically sent Jacobs a form letter.

And then McCain's campaign topped off the disaster by lying about the whole. McCain's spokesperson claimed that the McCain campaign was trying to arrange a meeting with Billy Graham through the offices of Graham's son and evangelical heir Rev. Franklin Graham.

That would be a good story except that both Franklin Graham and Billy Graham deny that they've had any contact with the McCain campaign.

. . . Jacobs had also been in contact with senior members of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, including persons close to Franklin Graham, and was told they had heard nothing from the McCain campaign about a possible meeting.

On Monday, Larry Ross, a spokesman for Graham, issued a statement to the press confirming that Billy Graham was unaware of any communication between the McCain campaign and his office or his son's.

Lying about Franklin and Billy Graham is just egregiously stupid. Who are people going to believe when the conflicting stories come to the surface--super-prestigious religious figures like the Grahams or the McCain campaign?

But if McCain really wants to make his campaign a rerun of McGovern 1972, he has to nominate a particularly inappropriate vice-presidential candidate. How about Karl Rove? Rove's arrogance and bluster are exactly the qualities that you don't want to see in a VP. Likewise, he's almost as unpopular with Republicans as he is with Democrats and there's still a decent chance that Rove will end up in jail as a result of the various scandals with which he's associated.

If McCain was a real maverick, he'd nominate Big Karl.

Bay Buchanan Partly Nails It

While on KET last Monday, I argued that the presidential election is going to be about Barack Obama rather than John McCain.

Arch-conservative Bay Buchanan forcefully makes the same point.

In reality there is only one candidate. Barack Obama. In November he will win or he will lose. John McCain is relevant only in so far as he is not Barack Obama. The Senator from Arizona is incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls, and has a personality that is best kept under wraps.

Monday Update: Actually, I'd have to say that there are two ways that John McCain can make the campaign about him. First, he can pull various kinds of stunts like his trip to Baghdad, gas tax, and townhall proposals that have the potential to make him look clever. Second, McCain can make himself a negative spectacle by giving extremely poor speeches like his New Orleans speech last Tuesday, and committing little faux pas like refusing to meet with Billy Graham. Otherwise it's about Obama.

Is a Cranky McCain Suitable for the Presidency?

It sounds like John McCain isn't so happy about entering the "tunnel of unlove" of what's going to be an extremely tough 2008 election campaign. Jonathan Martin of the Politico has a story on how unhappy the McCain camp is getting over media coverage at the beginning of the general election campaign.

. . . [McCain's] campaign has spent the last several months finding ways to insert itself into a press narrative that’s been dominated by the just-ended Democratic fight. To that end, they picked up and extended the media-guilting campaign begun by Hillary Clinton and "Saturday Night Live" and sharpened their critique of Obama.

But in doing so, they’ve already raised the question of whether McCain can maintain his upbeat warrior image while running an uphill race against an opponent for whom the candidate can barely conceal his contempt, and covered by a press the campaign sees as biased.

The cranky edge in McCain's media demeanor can be seen in McCain's responses to questions about Obama in a Newsweek interview that's come up online. Concerning Obama's comments that he honored McCain's accomplishments even if McCain didn't honor his, McCain ended a long response by expressing resentment over Obama's treatment of him.

I think it's important to point these things out, and I will. And I don't believe it's disrespectful to do so. I think it's part of the evaluation process that the American people are doing.

By the way, do you think it's disrespectful for him to have distorted my comment about being in Iraq for a hundred years? Every objective organization in America said that's a false characterization of my remarks in the context of what's necessary to stop the casualties and have a victory, rather than saying we are going to be in a war for a hundred years. I have given other speeches saying we are going to win this
war, and we are winning it now, and he refuses to acknowledge that.

McCain could have stopped by arguing that he wasn't being disrespectful of Obama, but he just couldn't help express resentment over the pummeling he took for his "100 years in Iraq" remark. An underlying problem for McCain here is that the Newsweek interviewers were asking him a number of questions about his opinion of Obama. As spoiled as McCain has been by all the positive media attention he's received over the last ten years, it seemed like he was annoyed that the spotlight is now so much on Obama. Perhaps some of McCain's resentment is that "messiah" seems to outrank "maverick" with the media.

It isn't going to get any easier for McCain either.

Yesterday, the Mail had an online story about John McCain's first wife. Carol McCain was seriously injured by a car accident while McCain was a prisoner of war in Hanoi and ultimately needed 20 surgeries to address the problem. She was also permanently disfigured and it didn't take John McCain long to start sleeping around after he got back.

Ultimately, he traded up for his second wife Cindy.

In a lot of ways, I don't think the story of Carol McCain makes McCain look that bad. To me, the selfishness and immaturity is mostly just human. But the Mail story does take the glow off McCain's war hero image. and probably didn't do for his disposition.

To add insult to injury, Ross Perot (who helped Carol McCain financially while John was a prisoner of war) called up Newsweek to get some payback for old grudges by trashing McCain's character even more.

It makes you wonder how many other people have longstanding grudges against McCain.

In the final analysis, the question isn't about whether McCain can maintain his "upbeat warrior image." It's whether he has the emotional make-up needed to be president over the next four years. If he is elected, John McCain will have the shortest honeymoon since Lincoln's first inaugural. McCain would be facing enhanced Democratic majorities in Congress, an unpopular war and a potentially bad recession.

And he'll be responsible for all those problems from day one.

Aside from loyal supporters like Mark Salter, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham, John McCain will also be pretty much alone as president. Having never had political loyalty himself, McCain won't get any from either the Republicans who loathe him or the Democrats who would think he won because of racism.

The crankiness we see from McCain now will be ten times worse if he becomes president. The bottom line on McCain is that he just can't take the heat

Smearkrieg No. 14, Diet Smearing

Now that Obama has won the Democratic nomination, the Republican smear campaign is springing into life.

But how much life is there in the old smear machine? In terms of "smears and rumors of smears," the big item is a rumor. Right-wing bloggers are bragging that someone has dug up a video of Michell Obama using the term "whitey" in a public forum.

But so far no tape.

The Sean Hannity approach to smearing is to slime Obama as a "radical." Here are a couple of Hannity's comments from an article by Andy Ostoy in Huffington Post.

"I am telling you, Barack Obama will move this country in a direction that is so radical that it will shock your senses."

"He (Obama) has views that would probably shock the average American."

"He's a Radical left winger, to the left of George McGovern."

Hanity's even re-named his show The Stop Radical Obama Express. But we need to be careful in determining how calling Obama a radical is a smear. In many ways, it's logical for someone like Hannity to view Obama as "hardcore leftist." Hannity is so far to the right that he views Democratic proposals for national health insurance as "socialized medicine" and probably still believes that social security is part of the growth of "communism" in the United States. For Hannity, it takes a "radical left-winger" to contemplate NOT attacking Iran and Syria.

The smear lies in dredging up the names of "dangerously" left-wing or black nationalist "friends" of Obama, magnifying the significance of every direct or indirct connection Obama may have had with them--perhaps even fantasize some connections--and implying that their agendas have to be Obama's agenda. Here's the conservative blog Protein Wisdom flogging Obama's "radical connections" for all they're worth.

As to the only specific claim Ostroy raises, it is pretty easy to point toward Obama’s longtime personal and fundraising relationship with former PLO flack Rashid Khalidi, including the thousands Obama (and Ayers) helped funnel to the Arab American Action Network, run by Khalidi’s wife, which calls Israel’s founding a “catastrophe.” Indeed the evil Hannity covered this on television recently. Or one could point to to the high-level staffers who are Nation of Islam members, or to his past relationship with Palestinian activist and Islamist Ali Abunimah. Or to the longtime spiritual adviser who declared Israel a “dirty word,” gave Louis Farrakhan a Lifetime Achievement award, and reprinted a Hamas manifesto. Or to Obama’s coterie of advisers urging a more “even-handed” approach to the Israeli conflict, and his previously stated desire to unconditionally meet with with Iranian Pres. Ahmadinejad – who is known for denying the Holocaust and wanting to wipe Israel off the map. Indeed, Obama cannot help but echo Arab-Palestinian positions, even in trying to make himself appear pro-Israel.

If anyone can actually follow Protein Wisdom's tortured innuendo, the idea is that Obama's relationship with an unnamed spiritual adviser (Jeremiah Wright) implies that Obama approves of Louis Farrakhan. That is a smear. Obama doesn't approve of Jeremiah Wright's black nationalism let alone Farrakhan's. Protein Wisdom also implies in a smearing kind of way that Obama peddled a Hamas manifesto on the streets of Washington while he was a senator and wants to conspire with Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map.

But this stuff is so thin that it might as well be called "diet smearing." What happened to the big, fat play to racial fears in the Willie Horton ads or the blatant lies of the swiftboating campaign against John Kerry? Why can't the GOP attack dogs claim that Obama is gay, that he has gang connections, or that he murdered somebody in Chicago? Republican smear artists portrayed Bill Clinton as a serial killer responsible for half the deaths in Arkansas as well as Vince Foster. Why can't they accuse Barack Obama of killing one person out of all the murders in Chicago last year?

Ultimately, it's just as tough an environment for right-wing smear artists as it is for the Republican Party in general. Yesterday's smears just don't cut it anymore. On the one hand, tolerance for the blatant kinds of racial stereotyping of the Willie Horton ad has decreased dramatically since 1988. Tolerance for gay stereotypes isn't that high either. Another problem for Republican smear artists is that the rise of liberal blogging means that any attempt at smearing is going to be met with a combination of moral outrage and ridicule by the left.

It also means that smears are going to be fact checked. So it's going to be a lot tougher to lie about Obama being a gang member than it was about the Clintons killing Vince Foster.

Because of the tough environment for high-profile smearing, right-wing smearing smearing has gone underground with conservatives spreading e-mail rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Clearly these efforts have had an effect. Some of my daughter's eighth-grade friend now assume that Obama's a Muslim.

But the effect is primarily with voters who already oppose Obama. The GOP attack artists have not been able to come up with an approach to smearing Obama that "moves numbers" in the sense of convincing a significatnt percentage of voters to support John McCain.

Perhaps they won't.

Not Ready for Prime Time: A Self-Critique

Well, I saw the tape of my appearance on KET the other night. And let's put it this way. I'm not ready for the media big time.

Or a lot of media contact in general.

Problem No. 1--Stammering. I go "uhh, uhh, uhh" a lot when I talk. One of the RSI stalkers said something about counting 40 of them during my hour on KET. It was probably more like 200 or 250 for the whole hour. The stammering sounded so bad to me on KET that I'm surprised that I have a lot of success in the classroom. It must be my charm.

Problem No. 2--The Eyes. The first thing that came across on KET, even before I started talking was my moving eyes. I can move my eyes without moving the rest of my body. I also look up in the air when I'm talking as though I were looking for words. I know I do that in class as well. But it definitely looks disconcerting on television.

One of the things I found interesting about Sen. Robert Stivers and Sen. Gerald Neal was that they were able to speak fluidly with a minimum of eye movement, relatively little in the way of hand motions, and few uhhs or othe hesitation sounds. Of course, talking so much to the media helps.

Problem No. 3--The Look. I don't look at myself in the mirror a lot--mostly for shaving, brushing my teeth, and the ten seconds I spend a day combing my hair. I don't like getting my picture taken either. So, it was disconcerting to see myself for an hour straight on television. I have an odd kind of look. It's still easy to see the little boy in me even though I'm well into my fifties. I often say that preachers and priests look like "little boys in old men's bodies." Mrs. RSI points out that I was saying that about myself as well.

Problem No. 4--The Message. Some of the things I said were pretty effective. I made a good point about the ability of African-Americans like Barack Obama to work across both black and white communities. I also had a good response to the questions of "black racism" by pointing out that Hillary was initially ahead of Obama with the African-American vote. But it would have been better if I had been more consistent in my contrariness. I gave into some of the cliches of racial politics more than I should have.

It's kind of interesting. That's the first time I have participated so extensively in the kind of cultural interaction that I normally criticize in my historical writing.

It was an interesting experience.

Live Blogging Hillary's Concession Speech

12:29, My daughter Miss Teen RSI and I have dueling computers set up so we can watch the speech on one computer while I can blog on the other. I'm SUCH a good dad. Hillary's half an hour late. I just got off the phone with my mom. She's still bitter about Hillary losing to Obama, but her reasons for hating Obama have switched from Obama being "black" and "blacks taking over everything" to Obama being arrogant. Seeing my mother's racism is one of the saddest things I've had to deal with in an extemely sad year, but it is interesting that her racism switched from "open racism" to "colorblind" racism. She even said that there weren't any racists in my home town of Waverly, NY. Yeah, right.

Mrs. RSI has been mopping the floor. I've got to get back to putting away clothes.

12:40, This Hillary speech is the most highly anticipated surrender since Appomattox, but the top Democrats are taking a relaxed approach. Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea didn't even leave their house until after noon and the speech is only going to be 20 minutes long. According to CNN, Obama's playing golf in the Chicago area. I don't know why the politicians are acting so cool, but I feel the tingle of momentousness myself and I'm not mocking Chris Matthews at all here.

I asked my daughter how it felt to be "Miss Teen RSI." She said she without a hint of sarcasm that she was "deeply honored."

12:46, Hillary's on-stage by herself in a pantsuit of her very own getting a "Standing O" from 1500 people. No Bill, No Chelsea, No Mark Penn--Hillary's the big dog in the Clinton camp now.

12:49, Hillary's giving thanks to her supporters, people like me who took their daughters to Hillary events. She got almost 18,000,000 votes. That's a lot of people to thank and she's taking her time with stories of young women and old women. My mom, 73, is one of the older women who supported Hillary to the end.

12:52, Not exactly a soaring speech, but Hillary doesn't do soaring. What she's saying is heartfelt and it does does connect. Now, Hillary's promising to stay on the front line. She hits the transition line exactly right--taking the energy of her campaign and her supporters and helping elect Barack Obama as the next president.

And there's her endorsement.

Lots of cheers, but there is an echo of booing from the crowd as well.

12:55, Now the testimony to Obama. The goal is to put the country on the right path and supporting Barack Obama is the way to do that.

I think she would do better to say that "Obama won and I lost" as part of her testimony. American politics has a strong monarchical streak. She needs to kiss his ring.

12:58, An interesting development--Hillary is giving gay rights the same status as civil rights and labor rights. That's the second time she's mentioned gay rights. That's a new and very welcome departure.

12:59, Now the reference to Bill. She's married to him, but I'm not. Bill was a big negative to her campaign because he's so stuck in the 90's.

1:01, Much of Hillary's argument is that the only way to make progress is to elect a Democrat and that she shares his optimism about America. I forgot whether "Yes, We Can" is Hillary's or Obama's slogan.

Now, it's elect Barack Obama for health care, fiscal responsibility, a strong middle class, energy independence, solving global warming.

She's ending every policy issue by saying "that is why we must help elect Barack Obama our President."

And the crowd seems to be turning as well. I don't think the Hillary camp has any reason to be bitter about the Obama campaign. A lot of Obama supporters on the internet blogs were viciously sexist, but none of that came out of the Obama camp itself. The Obama side didn't fight any harder for advantage than the Hillary people. It really is time to move on.

1:05, Getting beyond the 3:00am ad, Hillary emphasizes that Obama has answered the question of whether an African-American can serve as president and the answer is yet.

1:06, Moving to gender--wanting an America that "embraces the potential of every last one of us." She wants women to enjoy "equal opportunities, equal pay, and equal respect." That's great! I wish she had done more of this early in the campaign.

The speech is getting better as she goes along.

"Never listen to anyone who says you can't or shouldn't go on"

1:10, Now Hillary's putting herself in the line of progress for women's rights and civil rights from Seneca Falls to the suffragettes to MLK. Too bad she didn't mention Betty Friedan. I would have liked to see Hillary do a better job of putting the two things together and emphasizing progress for African-Americans. But very few if any white politicians have any competence when it comes to race and Hillary is taking a shot at it. She deserves credit.

1:12, Emphasizing that she's not going to look back to the wouldas and couldas and that she's going to work her heart out to elect Barack Obama for president.

1:13, And now she's moving to the end. Is there one more soaring line in her acknowledgements of friends, family, and staff? Let's see. Yes, there is something that is interesting. She's emphasizing that our imperfect humanness means that we need each other and need to help each other. Now there's a difference between Hillary and the Republicans, especially the activists of the right. For people like Ann Coulter, our imperfect humanness means that we get plenty of opportunities to kick people when they're down.

1:17, In the final analysis, this speech has to rate as pretty good. I would have liked to see a more explicit concession but I'm also pretty sure that the crowd would have booed an explicit acknowledgement that Obama won and that the boos would have been the lead story in the media. So, I'm okay with a less explicit concession as well.

1:19, Having come from a political family in NYC, Mrs. RSI relentlessly "works the crowd" everywhere she goes. As a result, our family has a vested interest in seeing how Hillary works the crowd. You've got to give her credit. She's out there circulating, shaking hands, and talking with people. It must be tough when you lose like that.

There it is. Hillary's concession. Onto more housework.

Signs That the Party's Over

I remember Chris Gatling of the Cleveland Cavs commenting in 2000 that he liked George Bush because Bush "knew how to party" or something like that.

Well, it looks like the party's over with the economy.

It wasn't exactly Black Friday but the economy got a triple whammy of bad news. The unemployment rate was up half a point for May with the trend looking to continue. It also looks like the era of three dollar gas is over with gas going up almost ten dollars a barrel.

And finally, stocks were down 400 points.

True, that can be interpreted as froth. But things don't look good underneath the froth either. Consumer confidence is scraping bottom. The mortgage crisis is still there and living standards look to sink even further below the levels current when George Bush was elected president.

The Bush presidency is like Bush's life. It's a story of squandered inheritance. Bush inherited a strong economy, a well-ordered government, and a considerable amount of international prestige.

And he wasted it.

The Distance From Yesterday

A couple of interesting items on cultural and political distance from the left-wing journalist Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, were circulating yesterday.

First, there is the distance traveled in Democratic Party nominating Obama for President. In 1966, however, whites in and around Chicago switched to the Republican Party in opposition to the Open Housing Act and civil rights for African-Americans. From Pearlstein's point of view, white resentment over civil rights, urban riots, the anti-war movement, and the counter-culture would form the core of the "Nixonland" phenomenon that has dominated American politics up to the present. Whites were also literally up in arms about the prospect of African-Americans moving into their neighborhoods. They were killing black kids who strayed onto "their territory" and responded to MLK's march on Cicero with violence. Pearlstein reproduces several hate-filled letters from whites to Sen. Paul Douglas to make the point even more poignant.

Given that Obama emerged from Chicago to become the first African-American nominated for President by a major political party, Pearlstein emphasizes that the moral progress between 1966 and today is unbelievable. Despite the political domination of Republicans and conservatives at the highest levels, American society has made remarkable progress.

And he's right.

But that's not the whole story. Pearlstein uses the venemous right-wing response to Ted Kennedy's brain cancer to illustrate the enormous and potentially murderous tension between right and left in contemporary America.

Pearlstein sees the right as weakening because they're still complaining about Ted Kennedy, Vietnam, and (if you're Ann Coulter) the rejection of McCarthyism, and not coming up with any fresh grievances.

Here I believe that Pearlstein's mistaken. The right is currently weak for three reasons in descending order of important.

First, the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans proved to be incompetent and corrupt. This made conservative claims to the value of the traditional, anti-intellectual masculinity represented by George Bush and Dick Cheney seem almost comical in their absurdity.

Second, white suburbanites have embraced racial integration, gay rights, and secularism while rejecting the religious right in the most visceral way possible. The disgust of white, college-educated suburbanites with the conduct of the right-wing during the Terry Schiavo case and evolution controversies was almost palpable and is now being attached to right-wing rejection of global warming.

Third, most of the country has rejected both the Goldwater small-government conservatism of rejecting the New Deal and the Gingrich big-government conservatism of putting Social Security, health care, and public education on a "market" basis. Conservatism isn't "intellectually exhausted" so much as the right hasn't come up with new conservative concepts to replace failed ideas like privatizing social security that were being energetically promoted just three years ago.

But that doesn't mean that the right-wing has lost inspiration for its resentments. At the root of those resentments is the bitterness that white conservatives feel over being subject to negative moral judgments of liberals, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and other groups. That bitterness is almost palpable in conservative blogs like Protein Wisdom but it permeates right-wing communication in general. Conservatives are in a box. They often view stigmatizing blacks, gay people, and Hispanics as a fundamental element in their freedom as Americans but hate being stigmatized themselves as racists, homophobes, and bigots with all their bitter hearts.

Of course, there are other sources for conservative resentment. But I would like to suggest that bitterness over the moral judgments attaching to conservatism is the most powerful continuing source of conservative resentment in American society.

And it will continue to be so.

Obama Starts Taking Charge

ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE BEHIND THE TIMES. Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, wrote in yesterday's New York Post that the Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama because Democrats had "fallen in love."

IN the end, the Democrats fell in love.

At least, half of them did - and the party establishment, as represented by the superdelegates, wasn't going to deny them their inamorata.

That's just so 2007. In fact, Obamamania has been over ever since the Jeremiah Wright story broke. If Lowry had been following the Democratic primaries at all, he would know that Barack Obama won because he had a better plan for contesting the primaries, out-organized Hillary in the post-Feb. 5 caucuses and primaries , and then fought tooth and nail to preserve his advantage through the rest of the nomination battle.

If Obama wanted to win the nomination, he had to outbattle a real heavyweight in Hillary Clinton. And he did. Barack Obama inspired a lot of initial enthusiasm among his natural high-income, white demographic at first, but he is the Democratic nominee as a result of his strong public presence, great planning, heavy spending, and dogged determination.

Obama the Leader. Now that he's won the nomination, Barack Obama is showing his leadership ability by quickly confronting Joe Lieberman over Lieberman's aggressive advocacy of John McCain, campaigning in the Appalachian areas of Virginia where he's weakest, and speaking out to damp down vice-presidential speculation.

Obama also met with Hillary Clinton tonight.

Obama's not only the nominee, but he's also moving quickly to exercise his authority as the new leader of the Democratic Party.

Score me as impressed. Now, I just need to make my first campaign contribution of the general election.

The Ultimate Sting: Was Bush Scammed into Invading Iraq?

THE STING. One of the my pet theories about the Iraq War is that the Bush administration was the target of a massive swindle by Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi. Just like a lot of scam victims are romantics about money, Bush and Cheney mooned over remaking the Middle East from an American power base in Iraq and were eager to hear anything, anything that would justify their little invasion. So, the Iraqi exiles provided specious claims about Saddam and nuclear weapons, Saddam and mobile bio-terror labs, and Saddam and al-Qaeda. They also fed the Bush administration specious "assessments" about how American troops would be welcomed as liberators and how easy it would be to create democracy.

As is the case with all successful frauds, the Iraqi exiles got what they wanted and their targets got stuck with the bill.

MULTIPLE DECEPTIONS. Two new items about the Bush administration's conduct before the war emerged today.

First, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report claiming that the Bush administration knew that their justifications for the Iraq invasion were false at the time.

Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said the administration's actions went far beyond simply being misled by bad intelligence.

"There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence," Rockefeller said in a statement. "But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

The argument of the Intelligence Committee was that Bush knew that his claims about Saddam Hussein in relation to 9-11, al-Qaeda, mobile bio-terror labs, and nuclear weapons were either rejected by American intelligence or not confirmed by American intelligence. For Jay Rockefeller, that means that the Bush administration was acting deceptively.

But that doesn't get at the depth of Bush's deception.

To ferret out exactly what the Bush administration was doing, the Intelligence Committee needed to ask itself where the Bush administration was getting their false or unverifiable information from. Were they making it up? Engaging in right-wing fantasizing (and there was plenty of that going on after 9-11)? Or was the Bush administration getting their information from specific sources like Iraqi exiles?

THREE MIGHT HAVES. I know this is speculative, but I'm going to try it anyway. The Bush administration might actually have given greater weight to the unverifiable claims of interested parties than it gave to American intelligence. Given that outside claims concerning the Iraqi government supported the Bush administration's objective of justifying an invasion, Bush might have favored those claims even though they knew that the claims were either unverifiable or false. In other words, the Bush administration might have been willing to be scammed itself in the service of deceiving the American public.

This is where the second item comes in. McClatchey News, which has done great reporting on Iraq since well before the invasion, has a story about how the Iranian government might have been involved in a scam to provide the Bush administration with false information.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday. . . .

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

It appears that Iranian exile and notorious fabrication artist and arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar was attempting to "penetrate" to the highest levels of American government to provide hostile (intelligence) claims about Iraq and promote a ridiculous scheme to overthrow the Iranian government. The McClatchey writer John Wolcott thinks that Ghorbanifar was actually a double agent working on behalf of the Iranian government trying to get the Bush administration to remove one of Iran's enemies by invading Iraq.

The upshot of Wolcott's article is that multiple parties in Iraq and Iran were targeting the Bush administration's prospective invasion of Iraq as the fulfillment of their own dreams and feeding the Bush people phony "raw intelligence" to bolster their case.

So where does that leave the Bush people. Bush, Cheney, and other top administration officials are well known to be arrogant and incompetent. They're liars and they're also war criminals.

Now it turns out that they were chumps as well.

Celtics in Seven

Right now, the Lakers are up by two in Game 1 of the NBA championship. I'm rooting for the Celtics--mostly because I've always liked Kevin Garnett.

I also think the Celtics are going to win in seven.

From my point of view, the Celtics look like a better team. The final isn't going to be about Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett. Bryant is the best player in the world, but he's not so much better than Paul Pierce that'll he'll be able to carry the Lakers all by himself. The same with Garnett in relation to Pau Gasol.

For the Celtics, it gets down to whether Rajon Rondo and Ray Allen are going to play winning basketball from the guard slots.

For the Laker, the x-factor is Lamar Odom.

The way I see it is that Rondo is going to be able to trigger Boston's offense in a way that more than offsets Odom.

That what makes it Boston.

Update. Boston won 98-88 and they did it by gaining a lot of little edges. Koby Bryant had an off night and only outscored Paul Pierce by 2. That was more than balanced off by Kevin Garnett outscoring Pau Gasol by 9 and Ray Allen getting 17. My key guy, Rajon Rondo, was . . . well, key. Turning the Big Three into a Big Four, Rondo had 15 points, 5 rebounds, and 7 assists with only 2 turnovers. Tubby probably could have made better use of him at UK.

The Concession Announcement from Hillary

I haven't looked at the news yet. But I did have this "personal" letter from Hillary Clinton in my e-mail this morning. It's official. She's going to announce her concession and kiss Obama's ring on Saturday. It's too bad, but that's the way it goes. All hail Barack Obama.

Here's the letter.

Dear Ric,

I wanted you to be one of the first to know: on Saturday, I will hold an event in Washington D.C. to thank everyone who has supported my campaign. Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people working for our campaign. Every minute you put into helping us win, every dollar you gave to keep up the fight meant more to me than I can ever possibly tell you.

On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.

I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise.

When I decided to run for president, I knew exactly why I was getting into this race: to work hard every day for the millions of Americans who need a voice in the White House.

I made you -- and everyone who supported me -- a promise: to stand up for our shared values and to never back down. I'm going to keep that promise today, tomorrow, and for the rest of my life.

I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise.

I know as I continue my lifelong work for a stronger America and a better world, I will turn to you for the support, the strength, and the commitment that you have shown me in the past 16 months. And I will always keep faith with the issues and causes that are important to you.

In the past few days, you have shown that support once again with hundreds of thousands of messages to the campaign, and again, I am touched by your thoughtfulness and kindness.

I can never possibly express my gratitude, so let me say simply, thank you.

Sincerely,
Hillary Rodham Clinton

McCain: A "But" President?

On Tuesday night, RSI had some fun with John McCain's disastrous New Orleans speech. But today is a time for some serious reflection on some of the disadvantages of a John McCain presidency.

The "But" President . . . . A John McCain presidency would be a "but" presidency. To win the election, McCain has to get a lot of voters to have thoughts like this. McCain has to get conservatives to say "I don't like McCain but I like Obama and the Democrats even less." For moderates, it would be "I don't agree with John McCain on anything, but I'm going to vote for him anyway." McCain has no constituency outside the the mainstream media, Arizona, and perhaps the military. Everybody else will be a "but" vote.

That means that a McCain administration would command no loyalty, draw on no reservoir of good will, and have no honeymoon. And he'll get tested early because of the war. Congress is going to have to vote to re-authorize funding for the war in Iraq and the Democrats are going to have bigger majorities in both the House and the Senate. If the Democratic leadership decides to push to end the war, they'll still have public opinion behind them. What's McCain going to do? If McCain wins the presidential election, he'll win despite his support for the war, not because of it. What's he going to do if spending bills arrive without authorization to spend more money on combat operations in Iraq. Bush was eager to shut down the whole government to get more money for the war. I have a hard time seeing McCain as being willing to go for broke like that?

Likewise, what happens when things get rough? When gas hits 5$, unemployment climbs over 6%, or the war in Iraq heads south again. Who is McCain going to count on for support? Republicans? That not only unlikely, but it's easy to see conservatives as trying to sabotage a McCain presidency unless he is willing to toe the conservative line. McCain won't do much better with the Democrats. If the McCain ship starts to sink, Chris Matthews will be the only person manning a lifeline.

THE EXCRUCIATINGLY PAINFUL PULPIT. It was well known that McCain is a terrible public speaker even before he made his pitiful New Orleans speech on Tuesday. In this regard, McCain is the opposite of President Bush. Never being committed to disciplining himself before strangers, Bush has always been clumsy and tongue-tied at informal events. However, Bush has had effective moments in his set speeches. McCain can be extremely effective in informal settings but doesn't have the most elementary skills in formal settings.

But guess what? Presidents of the United States have to give a wide variety of speeches in formal settings both here and abroad. In fact, the "bully pulpit" is one of the most important ways for a president to get out his or her message. How can McCain be anything like an effective president if he makes all his speeches excruciatingly painful? Bush was an embarrassment to the whole country. Wouldn't McCain be even more so?

THE CONSTITUTION OR THE WAR. John McCain has flip-flopped on a lot of issues lately, including comprehensive immigration reform, taxes cuts for the wealth, torture, and talking with Hamas. But his most disturbing change of mind concerns presidential power. Last December, McCain answered a question about Bush's claim to have "inherit" powers that allowed him to override the law by saying that

I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.

However, during the on-going debate over warrantless wiretapping/telecom amnesty legislation, the McCain campaign has come out fully in support of the Bush administration approach.

neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Glenn Greenwald thinks that McCain has now adopted the right-wing's most extreme views on executive power.

In order to satisfy the right-wing extremists he now needs, McCain . . . is now spouting theories of the Omnipotent President virtually equivalent to those used by John Yoo, David Addington and Dick Cheney over the last seven years to impose radical changes in how our Government functions.

However, since the 2006 election, extremists on the right have become even more extreme about presidential power than Greenwald acknowledges. Right after the election, Newt Gingrich called for curtailing the First Amendment. Other prominent conservative spokesmen than began to pick up the theme after the Democratic leadership began moving to cut off funding for the war. Harvard University conservative Harvey Mansfield discussed the virtues of one-man rule in times of war while columnist Thomas Sowell wrote about military dictatorship as the only solution to American "decadence. " Likewise, former Reagan defense official and long-time neo-con think tank warrior Frank Gaffney spoke warmly about imprisoning anti-war members of Congress like Carl Levin of Michigan. For a lot of conservatives, commitment to the war in Iraq trumps their commitment to the American constitution and American political institutions. If democratically-elected institutions aren't willing to support the war, then they are willing to overturn the Bill of Rights, Congress, the Courts, and democracy in general.

This is an issue for John McCain as well. Does McCain follow this extremist line of conservative thinking or would he be willing to oversee an American military withdrawal from Iraq if an elected Congress refused funding or would he rather overthrow the Congress and establish one-man rule in the name of pressing on with the war. I know this question seems fanciful, but I believe that this is a problem that John McCain will face if he's elected president. There's going to be larger and more confident Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate next year. If Obama is not elected, the chances are good that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi could make an early decision on whether to pull the plug on the war anyway. At that point, "President" McCain would have to decide which he's more loyal too, the War or the Constitution.

Obama on McCain's Favorite Table

"Pinball Wizard"

Even on my favorite table
He can beat my best
His disciples lead him in
And he just does the rest . . .

That deaf dumb and blind kind
Sure plays a mean pin ball.!!!!!

The Who

Barack Obama--pinball wizard?

In a way, the U. S. is going to see whether Barack Obama is so far ahead of John McCain as a presidential candidate that he can look better than McCain in McCain's best environment.

John McCain is a terrible public speaker, doesn't have huge amounts of money for campaign advertising, and is pretty clueless about organizing large scale political campaigns. But McCain does excels in townhall meetings. So McCain sought to minimize his disadvantages during the campaign by challenging Obama to hold a series of townhall meetings with him.

And Obama has at least provisionally accepted the challenge.

In townhall meetings, candidates usually take questions from the audience in a fairly informal atmosphere. The questions from the audience usually aren't that tough or pointed. But doing townhall meetings can still be difficult. Townhall audiences care a lot more about the substance of issues than the media. As a result, candidates have to be sure-footed on the issues in a way that they don't really have to be with the media.

Likewise, townhall audiences don't care about the things that obcess the media. They're not concerned so much about the horserace or electability. They also don't care about scoring "gotcha" questions like the Tim Russert query about licenses for illegal aliens that started Hillary Clinton's slide. In a certain way, this makes townhall meetings easier for candidates because they feel less of the obvious pressure generated by the media. But townhall audiences can also wrongfoot candidates who are used to fending off the standard media questions.

The main difficulty with townhall meetings for candidates is that members of the audience often frame their questions in terms intense personal feelings, tragic events, or genuinely insoluble problems. In this context, presidential candidates are expected to frame their answer in terms of three imperatives--demonstrating empathy for the questioner, providing a substantive answer, and manuevering for political advantage. Candidates need to do all of these things simultaneously and they need to make it look easy and sincere.

In other words, doing townhall meetings effectively requires a real gift for impromptu political theater.

That's why townhall meetings were Bill Clinton's natural environment. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton showed that he had a gift for projecting empathy through a television screen, was a master of policy detail, and was nimble on his feet. He looked great while George Bush I looked bored and detached while he was checking his watch.

John McCain has done his best in townhall environments during the Republican primaries has reason to believe that he could outshine Barack Obama in townhall settings because Obama hasn't exactly shined during debates.

But even on McCain's favorite table, Obama will probably beat his best. During the Republican primaries, McCain did townhall meetings that had three characteristics that will apply to his townhall meetings with Obama: 1. McCain was by himself and could therefore revel in the narcissism of the moment; 2. McCain was interacting with Republican audiences
3. McCain was getting questions about Republican issues.

That's not going to apply. During a townhall with Barack Obama, McCain isn't going to be the sole object of attention. Instead, he'll be at a disadvantage because he'll have to compete for attention with a formidable scene-stealer like Obama. The other thing is that McCain is going to be getting questions from Democrats and independents about health care, the economy, global warming and other issues that he's not particularly interested in. Unless McCain has a lot of new tricks up his sleeve, there's a good chance that his very stale version of the standard Republican applause lines isn't going to work very well.

Even on McCain's favorite table, Obama has to be a favorite to look better and that's probably why Obama was so eager to take McCain up on his challenge.

McCain: Politics is Harder Than I Thought

Here's some video of John McCain's speech tonight in New Orleans. I'm not sure what's most painful about McCain's delivery. But there's a lot to choose from.

The whole speech is shot through with domestic policy lists in which McCain clearly has no interest.

His applause lines are flatter than four-month old Coke.

It's hard to find words to describe how the mechanical impression of McCain's arm movements and turns. Let's put it this way. His arm movements are not nearly as forced as his ghoulishly phony smile. Whatever you do, don't buy anything from this guy.

One snide characterization of George Bush I speech was "Memo: I care." With John McCain, it's more of a long-winded "Memo: I'd like to look like I care, but it's a lot harder than I thought."

Not exactly a winning message.

IT'S OBAMA

The big story today is that Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination for the presidency and gave a great victory speech in St. Paul, MN.

Congratulations to the Obama campaign. Barack Obama has been an extremely attractive presidential candidate and he and his campaign organization have done a great job of playing on his personal appeal, plotting out a winning campaign strategy, and fencing attacks from Hillary Clinton and John McCain. As somebody who likes the rough and tumble of politics, I've been extremely impressed with Obama's ability as a political counter-puncher. Obama also did a great job of handling the Jeremiah Wright controversy. All of Obama's virtues as a speaker, thinker, and political performer were on display in his Philadelphia speech and he deserves a great deal of credit for dealing with Wright's comments head on like that.

It's a cliche that the Obama nomination is an historic event in the history of American society. But the historic character of the event is a cliche that I'm proud to repeat. Barack Obama is the first African-American to be nominated by a major party for the presidency. It's an enormous accomlishment for Obama as an individual. It's yet another major advance for African-Americans as a group and it's a major cultural accomplishment for white people as well.

As a white person who is often depressed by the racism of other white people, I want to focus on that thought for a second. Certainly, the Obama campaign is the first time that white people in the United States have really been ready for a big step in racial progress. Although African-Americans and their abolitionist supporters were ready for the end of slavery in 1863, neither Southern whites nor Northern whites were prepared to see the end of the slave system and neither were able to adjust. The same was the case with end of segregation during the 1970's and 1980's. Indeed, it pains me to say that I still don't think it's an exaggeration to say that tens of millions of white people are STILL not prepared to live gladly within a racially integrated society.

However, millions of white Americans were ready, willing, and eager to support Barack Obama's presidential campaign. That includes northern whites, southern whites, blue-state whites, red-state whites, liberals, moderates, independents, and a fair number of conservatives. Needless to say, the racist backlash has already begun. Nevertheless, Barack Obama's campaign has done a lot to make the United States the "one country" he says it is.

And that's a great thing.

McCain's Victoria Secret

Breaking news! Miss Teen RSI thinks that John McCain is wearing the same Victoria Secret "Bubble It Up" lip gloss that she wears. What do you think?

"The worst is death, and death will have his day"

This quote from Shakespeare's Richard II came to mind today as I was driving home from a visitation in Danville, KY for the infant son of one of the best of my former students.

It was tremendously sad. The poor little guy was born with a dwarfism condition that made it impossible for him to breathe on his own. Eventually, the parents agreed to take him off the ventilator to save him from further suffering and he died yesterday.

It all must have been tremendously painful.

As someone who survived a traumatic infant injury, I've always been impressed with the tenacity of life in all of its forms.

But yesterday, death did have his day.

A Couple of Notes on KET

Not having been on a television interview show before, I was getting more and more nervous as Mrs. RSI and I were driving to Lexington.

But then I remembered that I couldn't possibly do worse than the interview show on politics I did just before the New Hampshire primary in 1992. Talk about blowing it. I blocked on Bill Clinton's name and then made a joke about how I had forgotten his name because he had no chance to win after the Gennifer Flowers fiasco.

Of course, it's not like my skills as a prognosticator have gotten any better.

Like everybody else, I had Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination and the battle with Barack Obama as helping the eventual winner shape up for the general election. To the contrary, it looks like Hillary might concede tomorrow and that the nomination fight has at least temporarily created more bitterness within the Democratic Party than it has between Dems and Republicans.

Moving on.

I had prepared for the show by reading in Obama's two books--Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Dreams of My Father is an excellent book about Obama's developing identity as an African-American and I would recommend it to anyone. I can't say the same about Audacity of Hope though. It's basically the Obama version of political boilerplate. If you want to find out what Obama's campaigning on, read Audacity of Hope or Obama's web site. If you want trenchant analysis of American politics and society from an African-American perspective, pick up a book by bell hooks or Patricia Williams.

But my preparation strategy was completely wrong. Most of the material the host of "Kentucky Tonight," Bill Goodman, wanted to discuss had been gathered in the last couple of days. In hindsight, that was no surprise. Given that we were discussing current affairs, it was natural that Goodman wanted to be really up to date. Ironically enough though, I wasn't as prepared as I would have been otherwise because I was so busy doing the wrong kind of preparing.

Still, I had a really good time with the show. I very much enjoyed the other panelists. Bill Goodman manuevered the discussion with genial skill. I'd met Saundra Ardrey of Western Kentucky University several times and knew already that she's a great person. Actually, Prof. Ardrey and I fenced around pretty well about the general election in the sitting room before the show. A view of the pervasiveness of white racism makes her a lot less optimistic about Obama's chances in the fall than I am and we both moved in and out of the rationales for our positions.

I also liked State Sen. Robert Stivers who got appropriately angry about Appalachian stereotyping and State Sen. Gerald Neal who seemed to be both very decent and very smart.

I think I did all right as well and was somewhat reassured that my 13 year old daughter thought I did ok as well. She's a tough critic.

Thinking back on the show, I believe nerves might have caught up to my by the end. As I remember, I was having a little more trouble holding my concentration on the last couple rounds of questions.

Next time I'll do better.

Ted Kennedy Joins Hole in the Head Club

RSI wishes Ted Kennedy well in his recovery from brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.

We also welcome Sen. Kennedy to the "Hole in the Head" club.

Generally speaking, brain surgery requires drilling through a person's skull. Given that the hole created by the drilling never heals, the brain surgery patient has a permanent hole in their head.

I know this might surprise some people, but I've had a hole in my head for almost 54 years. As a stripling of 7 months, I had brain surgery to remove two blood clots that had developed after a fall off a bed.

When my skull was x-rayed after a concussion more than 40 years later, it turned out that I still had the hole from the brain surgery.

Since then, it's practically been raining brain surgery in Morehead. First, it was Rosemary Johnson's husband Donnie getting brain surgery to correct some wiring problems in his blood vessels. In rapid succession, Jason Holcomb needed brain surgery after getting tangled up in a dog leash and falling EXACTLY the wrong way while another friend needed to have brain surgery for much the same reason as Teddy Kennedy.

So, the "Hole in the Head Club" was born.

Brain surgery is much more routine now than when RSI had his done in 1954. At that time, the curmudgeonly Dr. King practically bragged to my parents that ninety percent of his patients died.

Great bedside manner there.

And now Ted Kennedy's in the "Hole in the Head Club" as well.

Maybe I should send him a t-shirt.

Florida, Michigan, and the Bamboozled Democrats

Yesterday, the Rules and By-Laws Committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) made decisions on Florida and Michigan which would not exactly have made Solomon proud.

DECISON ONE-FLORIDA. The Rules Committee decided to let the Florida results stand but only give the Florida delegates half a vote. Given that Hillary won Florida's outlaw Democratic primary, she would have received 38 more delegates than Obama if all the delegates had received their full votes. But Hillary's representatives caved and eventually agreed to the Solomonic decision to split the Florida vote in half.

The Democrats were bamboozled every step of the way in Florida. The Republican legislature and governor in Florida moved the Florida primary into January specifically in order to mess up the Democratic primary calendar.

And they succeeded.

First, the Dems made everybody in Florida angry by forbidding the candidates to campaign and nullifying the results of the primary. Then, they spent five months weaseling around the issue, and finally came up with an unsatisfactory compromise.

And I can't understand why the Hillary people caved here either. Her and Obama were both on the ballot even though they didn't campaign. Hillary won handily in January and still would have won handily today. She should have gotten the full share of convention votes for her victory.

DECISION TWO--MICHIGAN. Instead, the Hillary people decided to take a stand in relation to Michigan. Why, I'm not sure. The Michigan Democratic Party originally screwed up the Democrats by insisting on holding a primary in January after they had already agreed to a Feb. 5 primary. When the DNC retaliated by ordering the candidates not to campaign in Michigan, Obama and Edwards also took their name off the ballot while Hillary left hers. As a result, Hillary got 55% of the vote and Obama got nothing.

At least officially.

What the Hillary people wanted was the full delegation seated and for her to get 55% and Obama nothing. But back to the real world. In fact, Obama would have gotten a high percentage of the vote in Michigan. In fact, Obama's people campaigned to get Michigan Democrats to vote "uncommitted" if they wanted Obama and 40% of the Michigan vote went to "uncommitted." In relation to Michigan, Hillary's people seem to be bamboozling themselves as much as the Michigan Democrats. The best decision probably would have been to give Hillary about 10 more delegates than Obama. That's what the Michigan Democrats proposed. But the DNC only gave Michigan delegates half a vote. So, she only got five.

I'll admit that Hillary has half a beef with the Michigan decision, but getting all of the Michigan delegates would have been grossly unfair to Obama. Ultimately, the DNC decision was closer to fairness than what Hillary wanted.

THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM. The problem right now is with all the Hillary supporters who were so energetically protesting the DNC decisions. Where the Obama campaign had all the energy through Feb., Obama seemed to lose steam as a result of the Jeremiah Wright, bitter white people, and Michael Pfleger controversies. More of the mojo now seems to be with the Hillary campaign and Hillary partisans have all the passion that the Obama people had six months ago.

But it's too late for Hillary. Obama built up an early lead in the caucus states when the Hillary people didn't have their eye on the ball. Likewise, Obama did well enough on Super Tuesday to maintain his lead and was then able to beat Hillary decisively in North Carolina when he really had to. That makes Obama the winner and Hillary still behind at the end of the day. That's fine with me.

The Democratic partisan in me is quite willing to support Obama. But the political analyst in me finally sees where the Obama/Hillary split is going to cause trouble because the unsatisfactory DNC decision is very likely to be the prelude to a very unsatisfactory VP decision. If Obama nominates Hillary, a lot of Obama supporters are going to be very unhappy. If Obama nominates anybody except Hillary, a lot of Hillary supporters are going to be very unhappy. Nobody's going to be satisfied.

And Then There's David Frum REALLY Trashing Bush

Sure, Scott McClellan trashed George Bush in his yet to be published memoir of time in the Bush administration.

But former Canadian immigrant, former Bush speechwriter, and current neo-con columnist David Frum REALLY trashes Bush for hiring people like McClellan in the first place.

George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation. McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office . . . .

To be fair to Bush, bringing people in from one's own state is far from unusual. Jimmy Carter brought in Georgians like the late Hamilton Jordan. Bill Clinton surrounded himself with people from Arkansas, George Bush the Elder had Jim Baker, and Ronald Reagan brought in Ed Mease and other Californians.

But it wasn't the incompetence of the Bush team that galls Frum, it's the weird form of subservience that Bush enforced on the Texas group. On the one hand, Bush like to perpetrate petty little humiliations on the people close to him.

Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock — but Rove did it.)

On the other hand, the "little abuses" would be followed up by "unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity." Frum views the thoughtful gestures as compensations for the abuse. But the humiliations and teasing were really two sides of the same coin. The petty teasing, nicknames, and little abuses continually reminded people like Karl Rove that they were subordinate to George Bush while the little acts of thoughtfulness taught them to appreciate and even value their subordination. Bush was enforcing a peculiarly personal kind of subordination in which people like Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and Harriet Miers all viewed their own sense of value as flowing directly from the magnanimous generosity of George Bush.

Obvious, working closely with George Bush was not a job for independent spirits or strong personalities.

Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.

. . . He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

Frum believes that George Bush chose such a poorly prepared inner circle because he put do much emphasis on personal loyalty and did not articulate "a compelling vision and ideal."

But this is mistaken. According to McClellan, Bush had "a compelling vision" of a democratic Middle East that he tried to bring to life through the invasion of Iraq.

Instead, the problem was that George Bush's personality doesn't have the kind of balance required for any kind of significant management position. What do I mean by "balance" in this context. I don't mean "unhinged" in the sense of having a psychological disorder. Instead, Bush has a strong, domineering personality but does not have great intelligence, overflowing knowledge, a great worth ethic, or any kind of specialized expertise. Bush relies on his "gut" because he doesn't have any other talents, skills, or expertise to rely on.

In fact, people with skills and expertise would be a constant threat to someone like George Bush because they would always have a dimension of superiority in relation to Bush. In this regard, I wouldn't be surprised if Bush hasn't always kept Rove on a short emotional leash. As talented and hard-working as Rove is, Bush probably needed to remind himself who was boss just as just as he needed to remind Rove. The same would be the case with anybody with real expertise around Bush. Either they had to be the kind of relatively weak personality that needed to be subordinate to someone like George Bush or they couldn't be allowed around his majesty.

Relying completely on personality (and his family name) himself, it can hardly be surprising that George Bush did not surround himself with the best people available.

RSI on KET next Monday

In one of the summer's biggest surpises, I got a call from Bill Goodman of KET to appear on a segment of "Kentucky Tonight" concerning Race and Politics in Kentucky. Goodman wanted to have professors on the panel but was having trouble locating people because of summer vactions, research trips, and traveling. I was probably in the third tier of prospects.

I'll be appearing with State Sen. Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, State Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville and Saundra Ardrey of Western Kentucky University.

The broadcast will be Monday at 8pm.

Obama and Racism: Making the Implicit Overt

In The Race Card, political scientist Tali Mendelberg (who I knew somewhat when she was a grad student at Michigan) argued that implicit and indirect appeals to racial stereotypes were more effective at rousing racial resentment than overt kinds of racist messages.

Mendelberg's most controversial claim is that these ads work best when the appeal is implicit. If the appeal is explicit, she argues--that is, if politicians actually say that blacks are undeserving--then they lose support because they have violated the norm against racism. Although voters will respond unconsciously to an implicit appeal that they don't perceive as racist, they will recoil for reasons of conscience or social disapproval to an appeal that either is, or is seen as, racist. Mendelberg asserts that Bush actually lost support to Dukakis in the closing weeks of the 1988 campaign because, on October 21, Jesse Jackson denounced the Horton ad as racist and Dukakis's running mate Lloyd Bentsen followed suit two days later. That made explicit what had previously been implicit.

One possibility with Obama is that the success of his presidential campaign to date is inducing an unknown number of whites to be more explicit about their racial bigotry. That's certainly the case with my mother in upstate New York. She hadn't discussed race with me in any kind of extended way for twenty years or more, but became obsessed with black people after Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses. Before Obama became a serious contender, my mother's attitudes toward race were characterized by good will toward the few black people she knew and a concern for fairness mixed with racial stereotypes and fond memories of growing up in a Pennsylvania town (Sayre) that (she said) had a law against blacks living there. When Obama emerged, my mother's dormant racism emerged quickly as the source of her animosity toward Obama.

One consequence of the Obama campaign is that it's making people think more seriously about race. But that's not always a positive thing.

The Big Tent in Obama's Head

Contrary to atheist writers Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I don't think that religion is the source of all the world's problems.


But religion is certain the source for a lot of Barack Obama's problems.


Obama's church in Chicago, Trinity United Church, is back in the news for "controversial" comments given by a Catholic priest on white privilege and its relation to Hillary Clinton.


According to Father Michael Pfleger, this is the core of white privilege:

[Unintelligible] to address the one who says, “Well, don’t hold me responsible (gesticulating) for what my ancestors did. But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits (voice rising), throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the money you put into the company you WALKED INTO BECAUSE YO’ DADDY AND YO’
GRANDDADDY AND YO’ GREATGRANDDADDY–(screaming at the top of his lungs)–UNLESS YOU’RE WILLING TO GIVE UP THE BENEFITS, THEN YOU MUST BE REPSONSIBLE FOR WHAT WAS DONE IN YOUR GENERATION ‘CUZ YOU ARE THE BENEFICIARY OF THIS INSURANCE POLICY!

…We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head.

I'm sympathetic to arguments concerning white privilege in the United States. There are a lot of ways that whites are privileged and probably the strongest is the substantial differential in wealth between middle-class whites and middle-class blacks.


Here's an illustration of what I mean. In my home town in upstate New York, the twelve children of an extremely poor African-American family, the McGruders, all got college degrees. Assuming that all the McGruder children attained middle-class status with those degrees, those adult children still would not have had the wealth of the average middle-class whites because they wouldn't have inherited any assets.


Because African-Americans in the United States have been historically excluded from wealth (by being denied credit, excluded from lucrative employment, denied permits, etc.), there is a real sense in which inherited wealth is a matter of "white privilege" as well as family accomplishment. This is what Father Phleger refers to when he views white people with trust funds, 401 K's, and other instruments of wealth as enjoying the benefits of historical racism.


But Father Phleger is also a demagogue who is using a legitimate argument to stomp on Hillary Clinton when she's down.

…When Hillary was crying (gesturing tears, uproarious laughter from audience)–and people said that was put on–I really don’t believe it was put on.

I really believe that she just always thought ‘This is mine’ (laughter, hoots). ‘I’m Bill’s wife. I’m WHITE. And this is mine. And I jus’ gotta get up. And step into the plate. And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said: ‘Oh, damn!’ WHERE DID YOU COME FROM!?!?! (Crowd going nuts, Pfleger screaming). I’M WHITE! I’M ENTITLED! THERE’S A BLACK MAN STEALING MY SHOW. (SOBS!) SHE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE CRYING! THERE WAS A WHOLE LOTTA WHITE
PEOPLE CRYING!

Like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger strikes me as a self-centered asshole who's using the success of Barack Obama's candidacy to promote himself in a way that he knows will harm Obama.

But that's not my point. What's interesting to me is that it seems obvious that Trinity United Church in Chicago is a place where condemnations of whites were heard frequently and Barack Obama would have been a regular member of the audience and it seems like Obama would have had at least some sympathy with the message. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been close to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

There's also the more moderate opinion of Jesse Jackson and black feminists like Angela Davis and Toni Morrison. In this view, American society is still powerfully shaped by the legacy of slavery and segregation but that moving forward would be possible if African-Americans can form alliances with poor whites, white women, and other marginalized groups.

I bet that Obama is sympathetic with this view as well. That was certainly his perspective in his Philadelphia speech on race relations.

But Barack Obama's brain also had room in it for a third view that the U. S. has made so much racial progress since the 60's that race shouldn't matter in a presidential campaign. Obama's views are close enough to the color-blind orthodoxy of race neo-cons like William Bennett that they've expressed positive perspectives on his campaign.

One of the things that makes African-Americans distinct from whites is that they can hold both "black-centric" and "maintream" views in their heads at the same time. Obama's head has been an especially big tent on issues of race and that's been an advantage so far in the campaign.

McClellan Spins Himself, Huff Should Do Same

Scott McClellan--I saw the video of Scott McClellan's interview with Meredith Viera of The Today Show. I don't remember Dick Cheney or Richard Perle ever getting grilled like that in the mainstream media. McClellan actually comes off pretty well in the interview--more an average, everyday guy who got to work for the White House than anything else. He wasn't particularly good at spinning when he was press secretary, but his relative awkwardness comes off well during the interview. Support for the war in Iraq has dropped from 70% right before the invasion to something like 30%. My take on McClellan is that he's gone through a version of the same process of gradually rejecting President Bush that 40% of the American public has also gone through. It's just that McClellan is going to get a fat royalty check for his trouble.

Blogger--Promote Thyself. Arianna Huffington wonders about McClellan's moral authenticity because McClellan came out against Bush's conduct of the White House five years after it would have meant anything.

It's George Tenet déjà vu all over again. How many times are we going to have a key Bush administration official try to wash the blood off his hands -- and add a chunk of change to his bank account -- by writing a come-clean book years after the fact, pointing the finger at everyone else while painting himself as an innocent bystander to history who saw all the horrible things that were happening but, somehow, had no choice but to go along?

But why bother? How many hidden saints have been serving at the top of the Bush administration anyway?

What Huffinton should be emphasizing is that war opponents and left-wing bloggers like herself have been right about the Bush administration's propoganda campaign to promote the war all along and that it's time for the mainstream media to end its near total embargo on war opponents.

Huffington gets in a little plug for herself in relation to McClellan's comments on the media.

McClellan points an accusatory finger at the mainstream media -- he calls them "enablers" and says they were too easy on the administration during the selling of the war:

"The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Great point, Scotty. We and many others made it back in 2003.

But that little shout out to herself isn't nearly enough and the fact that somebody as savvy as Huffington downplays such a key self-promotional moment is an indication of how far the left has to go in effectively promoting itself.

Texas: Next Stop Polygamy

MSNBC reports that the Texas High Court has ruled that all the 430 children fundamentalist Mormon children need to be returned to their parents.

In a crushing blow to the state's massive seizure of children from a polygamist sect's ranch, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that child welfare officials overstepped their authority and the children should go back to their parents.

The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago.

All Texas needs to do now is to decide what to do about the polygamy--which I believe is against the law.

Crossing the Obama/Clinton Line

Hillary Clinton's arguments that she would make a stronger general election candidate than Obama were somewhat bolstered by some Gallup Poll research showing that she would do better in a number of crucial swing states than Obama.

Clinton's 2008 swing-state victories include Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Arkansas, and -- based solely on popular vote (not delegates) -- Florida and Michigan (her swing states total 105 electoral votes). Thus far in May, Gallup has found Clinton leading McCain in these states by six percentage points, 49% to 43%. McCain holds the slight edge over Obama in these states, 46% to 43%. Thus, as of today, Clinton is clearly the stronger Democratic candidate in this cluster of states where she beat Obama in the popular vote.

In other words, Hillary currently holds a six-point edge over Obama in a combination of eight swing states. That puts her over the edge of the margin of error for the swing states. So, the finding is statistically significant.

Still, it left me cold. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was about primaries, caucuses, delegates, and super-delegates. As much as I preferred Hillary, I can see that Barack Obama, for all intents and purposes, has won the nomination and that this kind of at the margin argumentation by the Hillary camp isn't going to change the outcome.

So, I went out and stuck an Obama sticker on my car.

Obama Should Take Up McCain's Iraq Gimmick

I realize that John McCain's "Go with Me to Iraq" idea is just a campaign gimmick and I'm just as sure that McCain's Will come up with a lot of these gimmicks over the next six months. To a narcissist like McCain, running for President is all about drawing attention to his precious self and publicity-seeking gimmicks are an obvious way to attact attention.

If McCain wins, I'm sure he'd have the most gimmicky presidency of all time.

But I still think Obama should take McCain up on the challenge and go to Iraq with or without McCain himself.

Most importantly, it would be a tremendous opportunity for Barack Obama to look presidential. People in the U. S. are dying for some authoritative voice on opposition to the war and Obama could be that voice. Specifically, he could publicly inform Gens. Petraueus and Odierno that the American people oppose the war, he opposes the war, and that he would definitely order a withdrawal if he were elected president.

That would be a presidential moment that Obama could put in his campaign ads from now to the November election and probably use in his re-election campaign as well.

At the same time, Obama could press to meet with people who usually aren't part of the political briefing tour--including Iraqi President Talibani, Kurdish leaders, Sadrist politicians, and members of al-Sistani's Shiite clerical establishment. He could talk about the strength of the Shiite militias, the rampant corruption and the lack of electricity and basic services. Obama could also form opinions on what if anything is being done about it.

If Obama wants to do tours, he could do tours of Mosul, Sadr City, and Basra

It wouldn't hurt Obama to meet some of the thousands of Iraqis who have been falsely imprisoned as well.

When Obama comes home, he could then challenge McCain to travel with him in the United States and meet with the veterans who are being given shoddy health care, have attempted suicide, or have gone through painful divorces.

These men and women are going to be paying for the Iraq War the rest of their lives. Obama should challenge McCain to get to know them better.

Barfing Up Bush: Scott McClellan Aims for the Truth

America is barfing up Bush. Why shouldn't Scott McClellan?

Vomiting, puking, throwing up, retching, and barfing are all terms for the "forceful discharge of stomach contents through the mouth." Personally, I prefer "barfing" because its such a gutteral word that really gets at the discomfort of expelling things back through the mouth that have gone into the stomach. "Barfing" also captures the involuntary quality of the action as well as the feelings of disgust that accompany those discharges.

"Retching" is another good word, but I still think "barfing" hits the mark a little better.

Whatever its called, barfing is a sign that the stuff in your stomach is so intolerable or harmful that it can't be digested any further and has to be rejected back up through the mouth. Stomach bugs, carsickness, and chemotherapy make people barf because the stomach is in no condition to handle food. Too much alcohol makes people barf because it's too poisonous for stomachs to handle. Because a person's stomach just can't handle the awful stuff anymore, it makes a powerful effort to send it back to the world from whence it came.

That's what happened with President Bush and the Bush administration. At the beginning of Bush's first term, America more or less willingly swallowed George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice. President Bush's approval ratings shot up after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and most people bought into Bush administration rationales for invading Iraq. But since Bush's re-election in 2004, almost the whole country has been engaged in one long exercise in barfing up the Bush administration as being too arrogant, incompetent, dishonest, or absurd to hold down any longer.

The Bush administration is just so (fill in the blank) that everyone wants to throw up.

That appears to be what former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is doing in his memoir as well--barfing up the Bush administration. Having defended and rationalized the Bush administration on a daily basis from 2003-2006, McClellan is now condemning everyone and everything he once defended. It's almost like he wants to get the Bush administration out of his system and out of his system for good.

President Bush?

"[Bush] and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war."

Hurricane Katrina?

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

Rove, Libby, and Cheney?

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

The Bush-enabling corporate media?

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq . . . The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Barf, vomit, retch--McClellan is spewing out the Bush administration in all its messy, ugly, glory.
Asked to comment for Fox, Karl Rove thought that McClellan sounded like a "left-wing blogger." But that's actually not a good analogy. What sets left-wing bloggers apart is that they never bought into the Bush administration and therefore never had to barf them back up like Scott McClellan is doing. To the contrary, Scott McClellan is just a normal American who bit hard on the Bush administration and now feels an overpowering need to purge himself.

Who can blame him?

Whoa! Lunsford Leads in Rasmussen Poll

According to Rasmussen Reports, Bruce Lunsford is currently leading Sen. Mitch McConnell by 49 to 44%. This has to be disappointing to McConnell who is sitting on a huge campaign war chest and has been running apparently ineffective commercials for months.

Nobody should kid themselves about whether Mitch McConnell is a formidable opponent. He's one of the smartest people in American politics and he's served four terms in the U. S. Senate despite fundamentally unlikable, having little campaign charisma, and swimming against popular opinion. It's very odd to say this about someone who is a four-term Senator and major political figure, but my impression of McConnell is that he's never been very popular in Kentucky. He's just been a lot smarter and more effective than his Democratic opponents. What's been particularly distinct about McConnell's re-election campaigns in 1990 and 1996 has been his clever use of negative advertising to establish big leads over his opponents for re-election and then hang on as voters started turning to the Democratic candidate.

But the tide running against McConnell might be too strong this time. Now serving as Republican leader in the Senate, McConnell has become a point man for unpopular Bush administration positions on the war, economy, veterans legislation, corruption, and other issues. McjConnell is also a holdover from the big money politics and hyper-partisanship of the Newt Gingrich/Tom DeLay era in Republican politics. Today's Rasmussen survey looks like a sign that Sen. McConnell is not going to be able to use negative ads to jump out to a quick lead and that that he is going to have to go out and press the flesh and really campaign if he wants to hold on to his seat.

McConnel is already trying to tie Lunsford to Barack Obama, but it's not like Lunsford has Obama-type political skills or is a particlarly strong candidate. However, Lunsford has name recognition from previous campaigns for governor and also has access to plenty of money.

That might be enough.

Hard-Working White People, Part III

One of the major problems with almost all of the commentary on the 2008 presidential election is that writers only pose the advantages or problems of one side as determining the winner. In fact, however, Barack Obama and John McCain are going to be running against each other and have to be continually measured against each other.

Today, the focus on some of the liberal blogs is on the problems of Obama with white, working class voters. Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz writes in Huffington Post that Democrats are courting disaster in November because of Barack Obama's unpopularity among working-class whites.

A recent Gallup poll report has argued that claims about Obama's weaknesses among white voters and blue collar voters have been exaggerated - yet its indisputable figures showed Obama running four percentage points below Kerry's anemic support among whites four years ago.

Given that Obama's vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.

Much as I support Hillary, I don't view the nomination of Barack Obama as courting disaster at all. To paraphrase Bill Parcells, Barack Obama "is what he is." He's an African-American politician who exudes smarts and charisma and he's going to appeal primarily to African-Americans, suburban whites, liberals, gays, and women. He's aiming for the many of the same targets as George McGovern and Michael Dukakis, but Obama is a much more savvy politician than either of those two. He's also emerging as the winner of an extremely tough nomination battle with Hillary Clinton. Obama has a much better chance of hitting his targets and putting together a winning coalition of voters outside the white, working-class orbit.

In my opinion, the main questions for Obama is whether he can nail down enough of the suburban vote to take Virginia, build up enough of a majority among the Hispanic vote to take New Mexico and Colorado, and appeal enough to white working-class voters to win Ohio and hang onto Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Given that McCain is likely to run a weak and disorganized campaign, I believe that Obama can accomplish those goals and win handily. But Obama's campaign has to make it happen.