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Entries in "Politics"

February 03, 2009

Not letting bygones be bygones

In two earlier posts (here and here), I spoke about some of the ways that political chameleons adjust their views when the environment changes so that they can continue to be in the corridors of power.

Another tactic of political chameleons is to try to get others to forget their role as cheerleaders of disastrous past wars by suggesting that it is a waste of time to re-examine the past, that we should not investigate those who led the country into an illegal and immoral war, and that we should not expose those who ordered the torture of detainees.

Glenn Greenwald points to the tactic of self-servingly suggesting, as the 'liberal' Princeton academic and Iraq-war advocate Anne-Marie Slaughter does, that we are wasting time by apportioning blame for the Iraq debacle and should instead focus on what should be done in the future.

This attempt at enforcing amnesia on the rest of us helps them to shake off their pro-war history. As Greenwald says:

This plea that we all just forget about the unpleasant past -- stop trying to figure out who was responsible for the Iraq War -- has become the principal self-defense weapon of the pro-war political establishment. That's their only hope for evading responsibility for what they've done.
…
But why would we, and why should we, just ignore the question of who spawned this disaster? In trying to determine what to do now, isn't it rather important to know whose judgment and knowledge can be trusted and whose should be considered worthless? From the perspective of their own-self interest, the demand by war advocates like Slaughter and McCain that everyone forget about what they said and did in the past is understandable -- it's natural to hope that one's own wretched and destructive conduct would be forgotten -- but for the country, doing that would be completely irrational.

In another post Greenwald recounts all the excuses now being trotted out by the Iraq war's ardent supporters and brings the focus right back to where it truly belongs, on the fundamental moral issue of the justness of the wars. The chameleons want to avoid discussing this question at all costs because on this issue they cannot escape blame. They want to shift the discussion to tactics and management.

More strikingly, not a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not -- and has no right to -- invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven't attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: "Wars that aren't directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn't be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason." Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

As long as the root premises of our endless war-fighting remain firmly in place, there will be many more Iraqs, "justified" by similar or only marginally different objectives. We need to invade to remove a Bad Government, or stop a civil religious or ethnic war, or prevent mistreatment by other ruling factions of their citizens, etc. etc. -- as though we possess the ability and are blessed with sufficiently magnanimous, selfless political leaders to accomplish any of those lofty goals with military invasions of other countries.

We have to be grateful for real analysts like Glenn Greenwald who holds all these chameleons accountable by keeping track of what they have said in the past. As he says:

Pretending to be a war opponent notwithstanding one's support for the war seems to be a trend today (though not only today). And it is amazing, though it should not be, how easily manipulated the media is by this tactic.

Attention: journalists and news producers: they have these new things now called "computers" that record what people say and write and keep all of that stored. So if someone claims to be a "war critic" or "war opponent," you can actually look and find out whether that is true.

Good advice as always from Greenwald, which is why his blog on Salon is a must read. But don't hold your breath that the mainstream media will take his advice. Remember that those journalists schmooze and socialize with the same people they are supposed to be covering. Holding them accountable for their past words and actions would result in the journalists (oh, the horror!) losing their 'access' to these people or (oh, the even greater horror!) not being invited to their parties.

The pro-war/pro-business one party state depends for its continuance on the ability to make people forget the past so that when the 'enemy' (i.e., whichever hapless country the war party decides should next be invaded) switches from Eastasia to Oceania, we can be made to believe that Oceania is an imminent danger to us or the world and that we have always been at war with it. In the incestuous world of politicians and media and analysts, all have a vested interest in maintaining their ability to rewrite history to suit their needs. Nowadays they do it in ways that exceeds George Orwell's wildest imaginings.

The defense against this is to remember the actual history and the roles that people played in it and hold them accountable.

POST SCRIPT: Sleazy Tom Daschle

Former Democratic Senate majority leader-turned-lobbyist Tom Daschle was nominated by Barack Obama to head the Department of Health and Human Services and be the administration point man for health care reform. Anyone who follows politics fairly closely knows that Daschle epitomizes the corruption of Congress and politics in America, switching smoothly between Congress and working for the very firms that lobby Congress. This article reveals the extent to which he is indebted to the health and drug industries.

As Matt Taibbi writes: "Out of all the bought-off Washington whores who could have been given this job, Daschle is the best one. His fake reform will go the farthest in its approximation of actual action than the fake reform of any other possible whore-candidate."

Glenn Greenwald also weighs in about how Daschle and his wife are neck-deep in the muck of the Washington lobbying culture.

His choice was an indication that Obama is planning to implement some bogus health care 'reform' package that would preserve the huge profits of the medical-health insurance-drug industries, while throwing some crumbs to the uninsured.

It is revealing of the world these people live in that Daschle's explanation as to why he did not report the taxable three-year long gift of a chauffeur-driven limousine was that he had got so used to having such a service that he did not realize it was unusual. He presumably thought that everyone was given a free limousine to be driven around.

But, as usual, the fuss over his taxes is being used to distract attention from the real problem, which is the corrupt and incestuous relationship between politicians and business. Daschle's choice is a good example of how the pro-war/pro-business one party state operates.

I hope his tax problem scuttles Daschle's nomination but I don't expect a much better replacement. Obama has revealed where he stands on health care reform and it is not good.

January 27, 2009

Don't leave Obama alone!

Irish orator John Philpot Curran said in 1790 that "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." This has since been abbreviated to "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" and attributed to many people, including Thomas Jefferson. Those who supported Obama during the campaign should take these words to heart. People have to be extra vigilant when their preferred candidate wins because that is when people let their guard down, thinking that the winners will look after the interests of those who put them into power.

In fact, having your own person win can sometimes lead to times when your interests are most endangered.

Let us not forget that it was Jimmy Carter's administration that started much of the deregulation process that led to the eventual economic crisis we faced, that it was Carter that supported the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan that later morphed into the Taliban, and it was Carter who supported awful dictators like Suharto in Indonesia and Reza Pahlavi in Iran.

This is not to say that Carter was worse than others. In many ways, Carter has been one of the better presidents of recent years and clearly one of the best ex-presidents. But the point is that you cannot assume that just because a candidate supports some or even most of your interests while campaigning, and may even be genuine about it, that he or she will fight for those interests after getting into office.

Bill Clinton is another example. Because he had the support of liberals, he was able to push through policies that went against their interests such as the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, his anti-poor welfare 'reform' program, and letting Wall Street interests dominate financial policy.

It will also be easier for those who wish to privatize Social Security to do it through Obama than through the Republicans, so we will have to be vigilant on that front too.

If one accepts the thesis that what we have is a pro-war, pro-business one party system with two factions, then the interests that elected representative will try to pursue are pro-war, pro-business interests. The only counterbalance to that permanent pressure is to exert counter-pressure.

So one has to be even more vigilant now that Obama is in power because it will be easier for Obama to start a war with Iran because those who would have vociferously opposed Bush on such a move might support Obama on it. Look at how Democrats supported Clinton in his war in the Balkans.

Even though Obama spoke of having talks with the leaders of Iran, he will be under pressure to make unreasonable and unilateral demands of them, to show that he is 'tough'. These demands will of course likely be rejected by Iran, thus allowing for the manufacture for yet another fraudulent case for war with that country, egged on by political chameleons, those warmongers who have now dressed themselves in new clothing and claim to have been critics of past wars.

Already Obama, despite claims to the contrary by US intelligence agencies in its own National Security Estimate, is making unsubstantiated claims that Iran is making nuclear weapons. Hillary Clinton at her confirmation hearing made the same claim. Remember how we got into Iraq because the Bush regime determinedly ignored facts that were contrary to their agenda? It looks like Obama and Clinton are doing the same thing with Iran. Obama is also rumored to be hiring Dennis Ross, former AIPAC lobbyist whom John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt identify as a member of the Israel lobby that seeks the overthrow of Iran's government, to advise him on relations with that country.

As the ever-quotable Glenn Greenwald says:

Right this moment, there are enormous pressures being exerted on Obama not to make significant changes in the areas of civil liberties, intelligence policy and foreign affairs. That pressure is being exerted by the intelligence community, by the permanent Pentagon structures, by status-quo-loving leaders of both political parties, by authority-worshipping Beltway "journalists" and pundits (such as the ones who wrote the wretched though illustrative "What Would Dick Do?" cover story for this week's Newsweek).

If those who want fundamental reform in these areas adopt the view that they will not criticize Barack Obama because to do so is to "help Republicans," or because he deserves more time, or because criticisms are unnecessary because we can trust in him to do the right thing, or because criticizing him is to "tear him down" or "create a circular firing squad" or "be a Naderite purist" or any of those other empty platitudes, then they are ceding the field to the very powerful factions who are going to fight vehemently against any changes. Do you think that those who want the CIA to retain "robust" interrogation powers and who want the federal surveillance state maintained, or want a hard-line towards Iran and a continuation of our Middle East policies, or who want to maintain corporate-lobbyist-domination of Washington, are sitting back saying: "it's not right to pressure Obama too much right now; give him some time"?

As an example of the value of applying pressure, during the campaign Obama was emphatic about closing Guantanamo. But he then began saying that closing of Guantanamo and either trying its inmates using the regular court system or freeing them is not going to be easy because some of the people are 'bad' people who should not be freed but it may not be possible to put them on trial in regular courts since the evidence against them may be ruled inadmissible because it is 'tainted', which is an euphemism for the fact that it was likely obtained using torture and other forms of severe coercion.

In other words, although Obama says that he is against torture, he wants to reserve the right to use information obtained using torture to keep people who have been tortured incarcerated indefinitely. We thus see him sliding into Bush-Cheney mode of thinking, using the same excuse of saying he wants to 'protect' us.

Fortunately his remarks caused considerable uproar amongst his supporters who had taken seriously his vow to close the camp immediately, and the next day he issued a statement saying that an executive order would be signed immediately after taking office, although that still leaves him room to delay closing it.

If many of those who vociferous critics of torture under the Bush-Cheney regime now become silent, thinking that because Obama is 'their' guy (and by definition 'good'), he must have good reasons for doing it, we can be sure that those appalling policies will continue. This is the kind of pressure that must be continually applied on your own people to prevent them being sucked into the maw of the pro-war, pro-business party.

POST SCRIPT: The 50 most loathsome people in America

I usually don't care much for lists of this sort but this one was fun. Obama was #50. Guess who ranked #1?

January 23, 2009

Gaza and the Israel lobby

The main thesis of the book The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy by University of Chicago professor of political science John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard University professor of international affairs Stephen M. Walt can be summarized as follows:

The US gives Israel a level of unconditional military, economic, and diplomatic support that far exceeds what it gives to any other country, both in absolute and per capita terms. This level of support cannot be justified on strategic or moral grounds and in fact has resulted in actual harm being done to the long-term interests of the US and even Israel. The existence of the current policies can only be explained as due to the successful lobbying efforts of a powerful group that they call the 'Israel lobby'. A frank discussion would quickly reveal the negative consequences of these policies but this has not occurred because the lobby not only has the ability to influence the speech and actions of the administrative and legislative bodies, it also tries to stifle in the media any examination of its role in influencing policy by accusing critics of the policy and the lobby of being anti-Semitic, and lumping them with Holocaust deniers and purveyors of various conspiracy theories.

An example of how the Israel lobby reacts to any criticisms of the actions of Israel can be seen in what happened recently to Bill Moyers when he spoke about the human cost of war in general and in Gaza in particular. Here is the original Moyers clip.

I thought it was extremely moving. Not so Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League who immediately fired off a letter to Moyers hauling out the usual charges and accusing him, among other things, of anti-Semitism, 'moral equivalency', and historical revisionism. Moyers is an old hand who knows that anyone who criticizes the actions of the Israeli government has to expect this kind of thing from people like Foxman and responded in his usual tempered manner. You can see the correspondence here and Glenn Greenwald's reaction to the episode here.

But Foxman is refreshingly candid in his demand that the US must not have an impartial stance when it comes to the Middle East. He said that he was "concerned" that Obama might appoint former Senate majority leader George Mitchell as his special envoy to the Middle East, which was announced yesterday. Why? Because he says "Sen. Mitchell is fair. He's been meticulously even-handed. But the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn't been 'even handed' — it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support. So I'm concerned. I'm not sure the situation requires that kind of approach in the Middle East." Fairness is a bad thing? John Rawls must be turning in his grave.

The type of response of Foxman to Moyers (or to anyone who advocates for even slightly more balanced treatment in the Middle East) is actually routine. In 2006 Kenneth Roth of the group Human Rights Watch was attacked when his group produced a report critical of Israel's use of cluster bombs in Lebanon. Roth was promptly accused of making a 'blood libel', participating in the 'de-legitimization of Judaism' and employing 'a classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews.' This was despite the fact that not only is Roth Jewish but his father was a refugee from Nazi Germany.

As Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks said of such responses:

But what's most troubling about the vitriol directed at Roth and his organization isn't that it's savage, unfounded and fantastical. What's most troubling is that it's typical. Typical, that is, of what anyone rash enough to criticize Israel can expect to encounter. In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism.

Writing recently in The American Conservative Mearsheimer analyzes the real purpose of the Israeli assault on Gaza.

The campaign in Gaza is said to have two objectives: (1) to put an end to the rockets and mortars that Palestinians have been firing into southern Israel since it withdrew from Gaza in August 2005; (2) to restore Israel's deterrent, which was said to be diminished by the Lebanon fiasco, by Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, and by its inability to halt Iran's nuclear program.

But these are not the real goals of Operation Cast Lead. The actual purpose is connected to Israel's long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a "Greater Israel." Specifically, Israel's leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future.

Mearsheimer recites the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and why the attack on Gaza might well turn out to be a major setback for Israel. The whole article is well worth reading as is this article titled Israel's Lies by Henry Seigman, former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

One sometimes finds a barbarous way of thinking by those who should know better that if some people are made to suffer on a massive scale, they will simply give up their struggle to achieve justice and let the people inflicting the suffering do what it wants to them. As an example, see Glenn Greenwald's evisceration of the despicable Tom Friedman, who seems to think that raining death and destruction on ordinary Palestinians to achieve political and military ends is just fine, that if you "inflict a heavy death toll and heavy pain on the Gaza population" their elected representatives Hamas can be "educated" into giving up, despite the fact that punishing civilian populations to achieve political and military aims is about as clear a definition of a war crime as you can get.

Oddly enough, this is exactly the same kind of 'logic' of people like bin Laden and groups like al Qaeda, who seem to think that killing huge numbers of American civilians by means of crashing airplanes into buildings would cause Americans to feel defeated, turn on their own political leaders, and reverse their policies in the Middle East. Columnist Mark Steel also noticed this parallel and pointed out in a column laced with black humor, that if you replace "Gaza" with "western" in Friedman's comments, his words could have been written by al Qaeda.

We know how well that strategy turned out. The events of 9/11 resulted in Americans rallying around Bush and unifying them against the terrorists. Even the ever-clueless Friedman earlier said that the 9/11 attacks caused him to rally round his own government and want to lash out in retaliation, using the macho, tough language that seems to come so easily to these armchair warriors safely ensconced in their suburban mansions.

So it's time we got tough. It's time that we looked people in the eye. It's time that the terrorists were the ones who are always afraid, always looking over their shoulder, and to create that, you do have to fight a different kind of war. I was a critic of Rumsfeld before, but there's one thing…that I do like about Rumsfeld. He's just a little bit crazy, OK? He's just a little bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to out-crazy us.

Friedman does not draw the obvious conclusion from his own reaction to 9/11 to what is likely to be the Palestinian reaction to the events in Gaza. As Jonathan Schwarz notes sardonically, "Huh. Well, I'm sure it will work differently on the filthy wogs, given that they're subhuman."

POST SCRIPT: Tide turning?

There are hopeful signs that a more balanced discussion on the Middle East may be starting to take place in the mainstream media. On a recent episode of MSNBC's Morning Joe, thanks to the absence of the regular obnoxious host Joe Scarborough, a surprisingly reasonable discussion took place about what is happening in Gaza.

Part 1:

Part 2:

It was interesting that Richard Haass could say unchallenged that the problem is that Israel has no partners for peace to negotiate with in Gaza since it 'obviously' could not negotiate with Hamas. The idea that Israel has the right to decide who should represent the Palestinians was not challenged. No one had the temerity to ask him whether it would be acceptable if Hamas said that they cannot negotiate with the Israeli government but would only talk with the peace groups in Israel. To pose such an audacious question would be to commit 'moral equivalency', that dangerous sin of applying the same standards to all parties in a conflict.

But things are changing. Veteran Australian war correspondent John Pilger says:

Across the world, people once indifferent to the arcane "conflict" in the Middle East, now ask the question the BBC and CNN rarely ask: Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine does not? They ask, too, why do the lawless enjoy such immunity in the pristine world of balance and objectivity? … In France, 80 organizations are working to bring war crimes indictments against Israel's leaders. On 15 January, the fine Israeli reporter, Gideon Levy, wrote in Ha'aretz that Israeli generals "will not be the only ones to hide in El Al planes lest they are arrested [overseas]."

Let's hope this trend continues.

January 22, 2009

Infantilizing people

One of the extraordinary features of the last decade is the extent to which people have accepted as necessary or even desirable the most appalling crimes done by the government. Arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, torture, sending people secretly to authoritarian countries to be tortured, warrantless wiretaps and other invasions of privacy, have now become seen as 'normal'.

How was this achieved? By political leaders inflating the threat of terrorism in the US, making people terrified, and then acting as if those same leaders alone can protect us provided we give them all the power they ask for to do so. In effect, we have seen the steady infantilizing of people, not unlike a father who terrifies a small child by telling ghost stories so that the child looks up to him even more for protection.

One of the symptoms of this strategy is that one frequently hears the statement by US political leaders, especially Bush and Cheney, that they are taking this or that action to 'protect the American people'. As a consequence of the drumming of this message, ordinary citizens often say in interviews that they expect the president to 'protect' them and that this is his main job.

I find this kind of language to be extremely distasteful due to its highly patronizing and condescending nature. It baffles me that so many people say that they are grateful to president Bush for 'protecting' them from another terrorist attack. It seems to me that this is sign of an infantile disorder, where people feel the need for a father figure to keep them safe from real and imagined threats.

During the campaign, one of the refreshing things about Obama was that he seemed to treat the American people like they were adults, and this was especially so in his speech about race delivered in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright episode. But now Obama seems to have picked up on the Bush-Cheney disease, saying in an interview on ABC's This Week (Sunday, January 11, 2009) that "My number one priority every single day that I wake up is how do I make sure that the American people safe."

Obama should stop not lose sleep over my safety. I do not need or want him to 'protect' me or to 'keep me safe'. I just want him to run a lawful, constitutionally based government and adopt policies that improve the welfare of people, especially those who need it the most.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that the government should not be in the position of providing public security. One of the most important roles of a government is to ensure that people have services that protect them from violence against their person and from crime and fire and flood and other calamities, and that they can call upon those services as needed. The leaders of a nation also have a duty to defend the nation from hostile actions by nations that seek to conquer any or all parts of it.

I am also not opposed to some supposedly 'anti-terrorist' measures like taking off your shoes and not carrying liquids through airport checkpoints. I think that some of these things are excessive and annoying and promote fear and anxiety (which may actually be their main purpose) but they are not gross violations of civil liberties or constitutional rights, which are the things I am most concerned about.

But those are not the kinds of things that Bush-Cheney (and now I fear Obama) seem to mean when they say they must have the tools to 'protect the American people'. What they are doing is trying to conflate two separate things – the normal expectation that people have that they should be safe from everyday crime, with the heightened fear that they will be at the receiving end of a major catastrophe at the hands of mass murderers,

These political leaders are implying that if they are not allowed to be able to use torture and all the other things I listed above, then the next thing you know, al Qaeda or similar groups are going to detonate a nuclear weapon in downtown Cleveland

No one has suggested that these murderous groups have the remotest intention of taking over the US. No other country, however strong, has the remotest chance of ever subjugating the US or has expressed any intention of doing so. It would be insane to even try. If there is a threat to US dominance of the world at all it will come from within, because of economic collapse due to corruption and looting by its own elites and the financial sector, to expensive and unnecessary wars, and the neglect of basic infrastructure and services.

Bush-Cheney exploited the fears of a terrorist attack to gain compliance for acts that violate the laws and constitutional safeguards and basic human rights, on the basis that such violations are needed to 'protect' us from some shadowy external threat. What they were saying is that beyond the normal levels of protection that people enjoy and that can be provided within the parameters of laws while still preserving long-accepted standards of civil liberties, there is another level of protection that can only be achieved by violating those rights for some people, purely on the basis of suspicion. What the government is doing is similar to the protection racket run by mobsters.

I do not need or want this extra level of protection, whether it is from Bush, Cheney, or Obama. The national security state, which is what we have now, is an evil thing that must be dismantled. I would rather take my chances with a terrorist attack than see the systematic dismantling of the long-standing, hard won protections of habeas corpus, the right to a speedy and fair trial, freedom from torture or the fear of torture both here or abroad, freedom from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention, and freedom from the invasion of privacy.

I do not believe that we can be totally protected from internal or external terrorist threats and we pay far too high a price in seeking to do so. We should resist being infantilized by political leaders who are seeking to increase their own authoritarian powers by promoting such fears. We must realize that there are some threats that we have to learn to live with if we are not to see the complete abandonment of the civil liberties and freedoms we have long taken for granted.

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart looks at this protection racket

January 21, 2009

Obama and Russia, Cuba, and the neoconservatives

Jim Lobe reviews some articles and the book They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons by Jacob Heilbrunn who speculates on what the neoconservatives, those instigators and cheerleaders for the disastrous policies of Bush-Cheney regime, will try to do now:

It speculates on the internal splits that the neo-cons are going through as a result of the political campaign and Obama's victory, and the possibility (I would say probability) that at least one major faction — headed by people like Robert Kagan, David Brooks and even David Frum — will seek to forge an alliance with liberal interventionists, presumably led by Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton (although Susan Rice also fits the bill), in the new administration, much as they succeeded in doing during the Clinton administration with respect to Balkans policy. As I've written before, the two movements have similar historical origins (inspired in major part by the "lessons" — "never again" — they drew from Munich and the Holocaust) and tend to see foreign policy in highly moralistic terms in which the U.S. and Israel are "exceptionally" good. While I don't agree with everything in Heilbrunn's analysis, it offers a good point of departure for watching the neo-cons as the Age of Obama gets underway.

As I wrote yesterday, the most immediate foreign policy issues confronting the Obama administration involve Iraq and Afghanistan. On other issues, the residual effects of neoconservative and cold war politics is likely to constrain Obama to continue to follow their agenda, at least for a short while. So far he has taken very much a standard pro-war establishment stand. We will have to observe whether the neoconservatives have any success in infiltrating the Obama administration and influencing its policies in the long run.

For example, during the campaign Obama was absurdly belligerent towards Russia on the Georgia/South Ossetia issue. After first making a fairly reasonable statement calling for restraint on both sides, under pressure he resorted to the required anti-Russian belligerence, blaming Russia (on August 9) for "aggressive actions" while sidestepping the provocations of the Georgian president.

What the pro-war one party state demands is that Georgia be portrayed as this plucky little democratic, innocent, western-friendly country that was suddenly attacked without provocation by the big bad Russians, and Obama belatedly but dutifully got on board with the program. However, as was clear from the beginning for anyone who read outside the mainstream media in the US, this picture was far too simple and that Georgia, far from being purely an innocent party, suffered from the actions of their own reckless president. As always, the unpalatable truth leaks out later in dribs (November 7) and drabs (November 17) long after the strong false but initial impressions have been created.

Governments and public relations professionals know how easy it is to manipulate public impressions if you have first crack at shaping the news. In an article (An Orwellian Pitch: The inner workings of the war-propaganda, LA Weekly, March 21-27, 2003) in which he analyzed the way that lies were used to rush the public into invading Iraq, John R. McArthur quotes Peter Teeley, George H. W. Bush's press secretary when he was vice president, who explained it this way: "You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it." If it happens to be untrue, "so what. Maybe 200 people read [the correction] or 2,000 or 20,000."

In a post in 2005, I gave several examples of this lying technique in action. Uri Avnery points to some new examples in the current Israeli assault on Gaza

An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.

Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army "revealed" that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.

Later the official liar claimed that "our soldiers were shot at from inside the school". Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.

But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the Israeli public was completely convinced that "they shot from inside the school", and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.

So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a "symbol of Hamas rule". Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the "most moral army in the world".

Governments that lie take careful measures to prevent independent voices from gaining access to the news. In the case of Gaza, until yesterday Israel prevented journalists from entering Gaza, even defying the order of its own Supreme Court to allow them in. As a result, the only independent news sources are from Al Jazeera and from individuals, such as this eyewitness report from an Irish human rights worker that details in horrifying detail the terror and destruction that Israel has inflicted on the people of Gaza.

The morgues of Gaza's hospitals are over-flowing. The bodies in their blood-soaked white shrouds cover the entire floor space of the Shifa hospital morgue. Some are intact, most horribly deformed, limbs twisted into unnatural positions, chest cavities exposed, heads blown off, skulls crushed in. Family members wait outside to identify and claim a brother, husband, father, mother, wife, child. Many of those who wait their turn have lost numerous family members and loved ones.

Blood is everywhere. Hospital orderlies hose down the floors of operating rooms, bloodied bandages lie discarded in corners, and the injured continue to pour in: bodies lacerated by shrapnel, burns, bullet wounds. Medical workers, exhausted and under siege, work day and night and each life saved is seen as a victory over the predominance of death.

BBC reporters now allowed in say (and the videos show) that parts of Gaza looks like it has been hit by an earthquake with entire neighborhoods flattened and bodies still buried in the debris. The killing of a well known doctor's daughters in their own home is another example of the horror inflicted on the people of Gaza.

But the Israeli government knows that by limiting first access to the news to its own sources, by the time the truth emerges and makes it into the mainstream press, it has had time to shape public perceptions in ways that are hard to correct.

This is why you have to be skeptical of the statements made by any political leader or government, especially in the immediate aftermath of some major event. They are not trying to inform you, they are trying to shape perception in their favor, and using the fact that they are the ones with immediate access to the media to distort the truth.

The only foreign policy area where there is some hope for quick improvement with the Obama administration is with Cuba. The tide seems to be turning as far as Cuban-American sentiment goes towards Cuba. The older hard-line anti-Castro embargo supporters are dying off and the younger generation wants to create normal relations. This may enable the cautious Obama to open channels towards that country, which has suffered so cruelly from the sanctions, without suffering loss of domestic support. Cuba's president Raul Castro has offered to hold direct talks with Obama and I hope he accepts.

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart on Bush's final media blitz - clueless to the end

Is there anyone less capable of being reflective than Bush?

January 20, 2009

Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan

Yesterday I gave my sense of the direction the Obama administration is likely to go on domestic policy. When it comes to foreign policy, I expect continuing trouble in the coming years, perhaps even worse (if you can imagine it) than what we experienced during the Bush years.

Obama may be able to fulfill his campaign promise to get out of Iraq fairly soon but I worry about his repeatedly stated goal to escalate the war in Afghanistan. The latter country has long been a pawn in geopolitical games played by big powers and its people have suffered tremendously as a consequence. It has also historically been a graveyard for foreign armies and there is no reason to expect anything otherwise this time. It is true that Obama is putting more pragmatic and less warmongering ideologues in the top ranks of the defense and security agencies but that in itself is no guarantee of a good result.

The fact that his administration is stacked with people who have plenty of formal academic credentials is no guarantee that they will not create huge foreign policy disasters. We have to remember that the incoming John F. Kennedy administration also brought with them an ivy-league educated technocratic elite. As chronicled in David Halberstam's memorable book The Best and the Brightest, they got America hopelessly mired in Vietnam. Even the 'best' technocracy cannot make a bad policy successful, and trying to remake other countries to one's own liking by invading them is always bad policy, not to mention a clear and unequivocal violation of international law and morally unjustifiable.

If Obama is not careful, Afghanistan could be his Vietnam, the millstone around his neck the way Iraq was for Bush. His best hope might be for a new intelligence report to come out that Osama bin Laden is dead, which some intelligence people already believe to be true given his long absence from the public eye, and use that to say that the battle is over, the man responsible for 9/11 is gone, and that it is time to put that event in the past and move on. (The release last week of an audiotape by bin Laden, if it turns out to be recent and authentic, will dash that hope.)

Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai has given Obama an opening by calling for a timetable for a withdrawal of US troops and he should seize it.

This does not mean that the US can wash its hands of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those two countries have suffered terribly because of US actions and we have a moral obligation to help them rebuild the infrastructure that we have been party to destroying. Sarah Chayes gives an eye-opening account of the problems in Afghanistan and how the corruption of the US-supported Karzai government is increasing the influence of the repressive Taliban and the warlords.

It is unfortunately true that unstable states tend to bring to power the most hard line extremists and Afghanistan is a good example of that, where the Taliban gained power because of its ability to bring about order, even though it represents a brutal and repressive Islamist ideology. But the disorder that provided them with this window of opportunity did not arise spontaneously. As I pointed out nearly two years ago there was a deliberate US policy decision taken by the Carter administration to intervene and destabilize Afghanistan so as to lure the Soviet Union into invading that country, so that they would get stuck in their equivalent of Vietnam. The Carter administration did this by having the CIA begin aiding the Islamic forces called the Mujahadeen in July 1979, six months before the Soviets invaded.

As a result of that invasion, Afghanistan has been in turmoil ever since. The US supplied arms and ammunition (including sophisticated Stinger surface-to-air missiles) to the Mujahadeen fighting the Soviet army, and the Soviet Union eventually was forced to withdraw in 1989, leaving behind a government they had put in place. But that government was unstable and collapsed in 1992, leading to a period of instability. The Taliban, originally a loose confederation of local units, became a unified body in 1994, gained popularity surprisingly quickly, and took over the government in 1996. The founder of the Taliban Mullah Mohammad Omar was once a Mujahadeen fighter.

Current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was at that time executive assistant to Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzerzinski, the architect of that inhuman strategy, that saw the people of Afghanistan as merely expendable pawns in superpower political games. (Brzerzinski is one of those political chameleons who is now re-branding himself as a 'sensible' foreign policy voice because of his mild criticisms of Bush's Iraq war policy.)

There is a rich irony in Obama now having Gates in charge of fighting the very forces in Afghanistan that he once helped create. But for the long-suffering Afghan people, caught in the middle of a war involving the US and its NATO allies, its puppet Karzai government, the Taliban successors to former US proxies the Mujahadeen, and the warlords, this is no laughing matter. Right now it seems that the US is trying to combat the Taliban by supporting the warlords, the very people whose oppressive and exploitative behavior resulted in the Taliban gaining popularity because they drove the warlords from power.

The US owes the Afghan and Iraqi people a huge debt for what it has put them through. The best way to do that is to focus on building roads, hospitals, schools, and providing good government wherever it has control. Otherwise the people will have no incentive whatsoever to risk the wrath of the brutal Taliban and warlords. It is when people have an interest in preserving their society that they will oppose, often with great courage and sacrifice, those who seek to oppress them.

So while I do not expect much from Obama, I hope that he will at least do the following: end the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, help rebuild those shattered countries, and end the practice of torture and renditions. On the last point on torture, some of his appointments for the Justice Department give a glimmer of hope.

So on the day of his inauguration, I wish Obama well. He at least starts out with one big advantage. No president could be as appallingly bad as the George W. Bush.

POST SCRIPT: Ah, memories!

Marcus Brigstocke during last year's campaign.

January 19, 2009

What to expect from the Obama administration on domestic issues

On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, I want to muse on what we might see in the coming years.

There has been considerable hand-wringing amongst some liberal supporters of Obama about the people he has selected so far for his administration, since many of them are warmed over Clintonites and other establishment types. But I have not been really surprised. As I have said repeatedly, Obama is a cautious and centrist politician. He is definitely not a progressive, even though some progressives read into his words and campaign more than what he actually said he stood for. The willingness of so many people across the political spectrum to think that Obama represents them is probably a measure of how fed up they are with Bush. Obama is seen as not-Bush and that is enough for them.

I expect Obama to continue the bipartisan practice of being servile to Wall Street financial interests because they are the true rulers of the economy. It will be interesting to see if he can resist the efforts of those who are using the bailout of the auto industry to achieve their long-standing goal of destroying unions, even though the unions are not the cause of the auto industry's troubles.

I do not expect him to push for real changes like a single-payer universal health care system, even if such proposals are advanced by members of his own party, like Congressman John Conyers and his House Bill 676 which calls for just such a sensible plan.

H.R. 676, also called the United States National Health Insurance Act, is a bill to create a single-payer, publicly-financed, privately-delivered universal health care program that would cover all Americans without charging co-pays or deductibles. It guarantees access to the highest quality and most affordable health care services regardless of employment, ability to pay or pre-existing health conditions.

The benefits over the plan over the current wasteful, inefficient, and positively cruel system that actually profits from denying needed health care should be obvious to anyone. (See my earlier series of posts on this topic.) But this bill will be strenuously fought by the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries and some physician group lobbies because they make huge amounts of money from the current system. It will also be opposed by those who have no idea of how such a system operates in places in France and have been completely brainwashed into thinking that the 'free market' system works best for everything (despite the evidence of the collapse of the unregulated financial sector) and that it will mean they will have no choices in their doctors and hospitals or that they will have long waits to see a doctor. I cannot see Obama or the Congress, most of whom have been bought by these lobbies, taking any action in furthering bill 676 unless there is huge public pressure on them.

As readers of this blog know, I supported Obama over McCain in the last election. But as soon as he is inaugurated, I will immediately become one of his critics. It is nothing against him personally. He seems like a nice person, to the extent that one can infer the nature of public figures. But as someone once said, it is very hard to figure out what a politician really thinks and it is not worth the effort to do so. What a politician may want to do and what he or she actually does are not the same.

All elected officials need to have pressure put on them constantly in order to get them to do the right thing and to counterbalance all the pressure they receive from the moneyed interests that normally control them. So I disagree with those who say that we should leave Obama alone at least for awhile and not criticize him because to do so is to give ammunition to his enemies. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

Politicians, by definition, respond to political pressure. Those who decide that it's best to keep quiet and simply trust in the goodness and just nature of their leader are certain to have their political goals ignored. It's always better -- far better -- for a politician to know that he's being scrutinized closely and will be praised and supported only when his actions warrant that, and will be criticized and opposed when they don't. (emphasis in original)

Just because Obama is sympathetic to a particular policy does not mean that he will push for it on his own. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to a group of people who were appealing to him to act on a deeply felt cause "I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it."

So my hopes for an Obama administration have never been very high and his appointments so far have not caused me to change my mind about what to expect. But he is a realist and pragmatist and such people, given the circumstances, can sometimes be pushed to take radical steps that they are not temperamentally inclined to simply because they do not rule out sensible policy options purely on ideological grounds.

The best we can hope for from an Obama administration are some sensible actions on some domestic issues. To get us out of the economic troubles, he is correctly pushing for spending on big projects to repair and improve the nation's infrastructure, actions that will at least create jobs and improve everyone's lives by uplifting the environment and providing better services. Even though it will increase the deficit and the national debt in the short and intermediate term, at least we will have some public good to show for it. This is definitely better than the stupid Bush policy of sending people checks (even to those who don't need them) and encouraging them to spend it on expensive baubles like flat-screen TVs. Unfortunately Obama seems to be caving in to Republican pressure to give tax cuts to those who don't need it.

I do expect Obama to take some positive steps on policies to create sustainable alternative energy sources, on increasing conservation measures, and on the environment because I think in those areas the public has come a long way towards those views and he can count on their support.

So there is some hope on a few sectors on the domestic front. On foreign policy, things don't look so good, as I will discuss tomorrow.

POST SCRIPT: Don't let the door hit you on your way out

As George W. Bush leaves office with deservedly the lowest approval rating of any president (22%) since Gallup started measuring it 70 years ago, David Letterman lists his top ten Bush moments.

January 16, 2009

Journalistic courage

(On January 8, 2009 Lasantha Wickramatunga, the outspoken editor of a Sri Lankan newspaper The Sunday Leader was brutally murdered on his way to work in the heart of the capital city Colombo. It was the work of a so-called 'death squad', those shadowy armed and violent groups that act with impunity in many countries.

Anyone who follows these things closely knows that the reason such 'death squads' can act so brazenly and are almost never captured and tried is because they are almost always a paramilitary arm of the government itself, often consisting of security forces out of uniform, and thus enjoy immunity. Their role is to intimidate and terrorize and eliminate all those whom the government dislikes. See this report on the murder and the events leading up to it to see how these death squads operate in Sri Lanka, but it is similar in many countries.

Wickramatunga knew that he was incurring the enmity of the government and that as a consequence his life was in danger. So he wrote an editorial before his death that was to be published in the event of his murder explaining why he was taking the risk of speaking out. It appeared on January 11, 2009. I am reproducing it in its entirety because it is an eloquent testimony to what true journalism is, and it also provides a window into the thinking and motivation of an extraordinarily courageous person.

His article shames us all about our own timidity to speak the truth, even though the risks we run are trivial in comparison to those he faced. It should especially shame our Washington beltway journalists, for whom the mere threat of not being invited to cocktail parties is enough to keep them from reporting anything even mildly embarrassing to the members of the pro-war, pro-business one party elite.

Explanatory notes: The 'Mahinda' he refers to is the president of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapakse, who is also the leader of the current governing party, the SLFP. The main opposition party is the UNP. LTTE refers to the Tamil Tigers, an ethnic group that has been fighting with successive governments for a separate state for nearly three decades.)

And Then They Came For Me Lasantha Wickramatunga

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood. Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

The Sunday Leader has been a controversial newspaper because we say it like we see it: whether it be a spade, a thief or a murderer, we call it by that name. We do not hide behind euphemism. The investigative articles we print are supported by documentary evidence thanks to the public-spiritedness of citizens who at great risk to themselves pass on this material to us. We have exposed scandal after scandal, and never once in these 15 years has anyone proved us wrong or successfully prosecuted us.

The free media serve as a mirror in which the public can see itself sans mascara and styling gel. From us you learn the state of your nation, and especially its management by the people you elected to give your children a better future. Sometimes the image you see in that mirror is not a pleasant one. But while you may grumble in the privacy of your armchair, the journalists who hold the mirror up to you do so publicly and at great risk to themselves. That is our calling, and we do not shirk it.

Every newspaper has its angle, and we do not hide the fact that we have ours. Our commitment is to see Sri Lanka as a transparent, secular, liberal democracy. Think about those words, for they each has profound meaning.

Transparent because government must be openly accountable to the people and never abuse their trust. Secular because in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society such as ours, secularism offers the only common ground by which we might all be united. Liberal because we recognise that all human beings are created different, and we need to accept others for what they are and not what we would like them to be. And democratic... Well, if you need me to explain why that is important, you'd best stop buying this paper.

The Sunday Leader has never sought safety by unquestioningly articulating the majority view. Let's face it, that is the way to sell newspapers. On the contrary, as our opinion pieces over the years amply demonstrate, we often voice ideas that many people find distasteful. For example, we have consistently espoused the view that while separatist terrorism must be eradicated, it is more important to address the root causes of terrorism, and urged government to view Sri Lanka's ethnic strife in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism. We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens. For these views we have been labelled traitors, and if this be treachery, we wear that label proudly.

Many people suspect that The Sunday Leader has a political agenda: it does not. If we appear more critical of the government than of the opposition it is only because we believe that - pray excuse cricketing argot - there is no point in bowling to the fielding side. Remember that for the few years of our existence in which the UNP was in office, we proved to be the biggest thorn in its flesh, exposing excess and corruption wherever it occurred. Indeed, the steady stream of embarrassing exposes we published may well have served to precipitate the downfall of that government.

Neither should our distaste for the war be interpreted to mean that we support the Tigers. The LTTE are among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations ever to have infested the planet. There is no gainsaying that it must be eradicated. But to do so by violating the rights of Tamil citizens, bombing and shooting them mercilessly, is not only wrong but shames the Sinhalese, whose claim to be custodians of the dhamma is forever called into question by this savagery, much of which is unknown to the public because of censorship.

What is more, a military occupation of the country's north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self respect. Do not imagine that you can placate them by showering "development" and "reconstruction" on them in the post-war era. The wounds of war will scar them forever, and you will also have an even more bitter and hateful Diaspora to contend with. A problem amenable to a political solution will thus become a festering wound that will yield strife for all eternity. If I seem angry and frustrated, it is only because most of my countrymen - and all of the government - cannot see this writing so plainly on the wall.

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government's sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.

The irony in this is that, unknown to most of the public, Mahinda and I have been friends for more than a quarter century. Indeed, I suspect that I am one of the few people remaining who routinely addresses him by his first name and uses the familiar Sinhala address oya when talking to him. Although I do not attend the meetings he periodically holds for newspaper editors, hardly a month passes when we do not meet, privately or with a few close friends present, late at night at President's House. There we swap yarns, discuss politics and joke about the good old days. A few remarks to him would therefore be in order here.

Mahinda, when you finally fought your way to the SLFP presidential nomination in 2005, nowhere were you welcomed more warmly than in this column. Indeed, we broke with a decade of tradition by referring to you throughout by your first name. So well known were your commitments to human rights and liberal values that we ushered you in like a breath of fresh air. Then, through an act of folly, you got yourself involved in the Helping Hambantota scandal. It was after a lot of soul-searching that we broke the story, at the same time urging you to return the money. By the time you did so several weeks later, a great blow had been struck to your reputation. It is one you are still trying to live down.

You have told me yourself that you were not greedy for the presidency. You did not have to hanker after it: it fell into your lap. You have told me that your sons are your greatest joy, and that you love spending time with them, leaving your brothers to operate the machinery of state. Now, it is clear to all who will see that that machinery has operated so well that my sons and daughter do not themselves have a father.

In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. Not just my life, but yours too, depends on it.

Sadly, for all the dreams you had for our country in your younger days, in just three years you have reduced it to rubble. In the name of patriotism you have trampled on human rights, nurtured unbridled corruption and squandered public money like no other President before you. Indeed, your conduct has been like a small child suddenly let loose in a toyshop. That analogy is perhaps inapt because no child could have caused so much blood to be spilled on this land as you have, or trampled on the rights of its citizens as you do. Although you are now so drunk with power that you cannot see it, you will come to regret your sons having so rich an inheritance of blood. It can only bring tragedy. As for me, it is with a clear conscience that I go to meet my Maker. I wish, when your time finally comes, you could do the same. I wish.

As for me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man. And I have not travelled this journey alone. Fellow journalists in other branches of the media walked with me: most of them are now dead, imprisoned without trial or exiled in far-off lands. Others walk in the shadow of death that your Presidency has cast on the freedoms for which you once fought so hard. You will never be allowed to forget that my death took place under your watch. As anguished as I know you will be, I also know that you will have no choice but to protect my killers: you will see to it that the guilty one is never convicted. You have no choice. I feel sorry for you, and Shiranthi will have a long time to spend on her knees when next she goes for Confession for it is not just her owns sins which she must confess, but those of her extended family that keeps you in office.

As for the readers of The Sunday Leader, what can I say but Thank You for supporting our mission. We have espoused unpopular causes, stood up for those too feeble to stand up for themselves, locked horns with the high and mighty so swollen with power that they have forgotten their roots, exposed corruption and the waste of your hard-earned tax rupees, and made sure that whatever the propaganda of the day, you were allowed to hear a contrary view. For this I - and my family - have now paid the price that I have long known I will one day have to pay. I am - and have always been - ready for that. I have done nothing to prevent this outcome: no security, no precautions. I want my murderer to know that I am not a coward like he is, hiding behind human shields while condemning thousands of innocents to death. What am I among so many? It has long been written that my life would be taken, and by whom. All that remains to be written is when.

That The Sunday Leader will continue fighting the good fight, too, is written. For I did not fight this fight alone. Many more of us have to be - and will be - killed before The Leader is laid to rest. I hope my assassination will be seen not as a defeat of freedom but an inspiration for those who survive to step up their efforts. Indeed, I hope that it will help galvanise forces that will usher in a new era of human liberty in our beloved motherland. I also hope it will open the eyes of your President to the fact that however many are slaughtered in the name of patriotism, the human spirit will endure and flourish. Not all the Rajapakses combined can kill that.

People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted. An example that has inspired me throughout my career in journalism has been that of the German theologian, Martin Niemoller. In his youth he was an anti-Semite and an admirer of Hitler. As Nazism took hold in Germany, however, he saw Nazism for what it was: it was not just the Jews Hitler sought to extirpate, it was just about anyone with an alternate point of view. Niemoller spoke out, and for his trouble was incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945, and very nearly executed. While incarcerated, Niemoller wrote a poem that, from the first time I read it in my teenage years, stuck hauntingly in my mind:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: The Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.

January 15, 2009

Breaking the rule in discussions about US policies

In yesterday's post, I spoke about the unwritten rule that politicians, reporters, and commentators in the US are expected to follow when it comes to discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A similar rule exists when it comes to discussion of the policies of the US government. Glenn Greenwald points out where this rule leads, where now 'serious' commentators dismiss the idea that people in the Bush-Cheney administration should be tried for war crimes because 'they meant well' and supposedly had 'good reasons' for committing awful acts, such as trying to 'keep the country safe from terrorists'. He points out what happens if you carry that argument to its logical conclusion.

"[V]irtually every single war criminal in history can recite good reasons for undertaking "excessive" measures. Other than psychopaths who do it exclusively for sadistic entertainment, every torturer can point to actual fears, or genuine threats, or legitimate grievances that led them to sanction violence and brutality.

But people like Goldsmith, Drezner, Douthat, and The Los Angeles Times Editorial Page can only see a world in which they -- Americans -- are situated at the center. They cite the post-9/11 external threats which American leaders faced, the ostensible desire of Bush officials to protect the citizenry, and their desire to maximize national security as though those are unique and special motives, rather than what they are: the standard collection of excuses offered up by almost every single war criminal (my italics).

If ostensible self-protective motives are now considered mitigating factors in the commission of war crimes -- or, worse, if they justify immunity from prosecution -- then there is virtually no such thing any longer as a "war crime" that merits punishment. Every tyrant and every war criminal can avail themselves of this self-defense. But advocates of this view -- "Oh, American officials only did it to protect us from The Terrorists" -- can't or won't follow their premise to this logical conclusion because their oh-so-sophisticated and empathetic understanding that political leaders act with complex motives only extends to their own leaders, to Americans.

But the rest of the world's war criminals -- the non-Americans -- have no such complexities. They are basically nothing more than Saturday morning cartoon villains who commit war crimes not for any rational or justifiable reason or due to some grave predicament, but rather, out of some warped, cackling pleasure or to satisfy their evil, palm-rubbing plot for world domination and conquest.
…
This is the self-absorbed mindset that allows the very same people who cheered for the attack on Iraq to, say, righteously condemn the Russian invasion of Georgia as a terrible act of criminal aggression. Russia's four-week occupation of Georgia is a heinous war crime, while our six-year-and-counting occupation of Iraq is a liberation. Russia drops destructive, lethal bombs on civilian populations, but the U.S. drops Freedom Bombs. Russian leaders were motivated by a desire for domination even though they withdrew after a few weeks; Americans, as always, are motivated by a desire to spread love and goodness.

Jim Henley adds that "The United States government has always engaged in war crimes and human rights violations. What's different this decade is that, under the leadership of a terrible president, our elites have become vociferous advocates of the goodness and rightness of war crimes and human rights violations." (emphasis in original)

Matthew Yglesias says, "According to the perverse rules of our post-9/11 discourse, willingness to verbally endorse the idea of having other people torture strangers counts as a form of courageous "toughness" akin to, you know, actually doing something brave. And the rot has, I'm afraid, spread pretty far."

There are occasions for comparing actions and trying to create some kind of moral calculus especially if one is looking at the unfolding of history and trying to point out how cycles of violence usually become more cruel. But if an act is a murder or an atrocity or a war crime, then it remains so irrespective of who commits it or whether other people also do it. Justifying or excusing or minimizing an evil by pointing the finger at another evil only leads to a continuing cycle of evil.

During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in August 2006, I covered some of this ground before in a four-part series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4) describing how this kind of tribal thinking leads to never-ending violence and death and destruction, made even worse by smug feelings of self-righteousness by the perpetrators.

Part 3 is particularly relevant to today's and yesterday's posts. In re-reading what I had written in it, it was depressing to see that if you replace the words Lebanon with Gaza and Hezbollah with Hamas, that essay would apply with equal force to the events of today. Will we ever learn?

POST SCRIPT: Prosecutions for torture and war crimes

Lawyer Phillipe Sands, who directs the Centre for International Courts and Tribunals at the University of London and is author of the book Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betryal of American Values, discusses with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air how war crimes are considered so evil that international treaties have declared that people who commit them should have no refuge. They are considered crimes against humanity, so that citizens of one country who committed those acts within their own country, can still be prosecuted by other countries.

So the fact that US authorities may choose to ignore the war crimes committed by its own citizens by not prosecuting them because they were done by 'our' people only increases the chances that prosecutors in other countries might open investigations. He says that many people in the Bush administration had better be very cautious about going abroad because they might be subject to arrest, the way Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was when he visited England.

January 14, 2009

Breaking the rule

My series of posts last week on the events in Gaza caused unease for some readers because of their strong criticisms of the actions of the Israeli government and military, such as the siege that had been going on for years and the massive assault that has been going on the past month.

The unease was expressed in one comment by HRK who said:

I've been a long-time reader of your blog, but I have to say, I'm somewhat confused by this latest series of posts. Although I understand - and to a large extent agree with - your basic idea that the Israeli policies are self-destructive, I don't understand why you seem to be giving the Palestinians a free pass on this one. I know plenty of other sources don't, but as that your basic stance seems to be that civilian deaths are an unnecessary evil, wouldn't it be better to point out the lack of regard for it that both sides have shown in the past?

HRK was quite perceptive in sensing that there was something slightly out of kilter and I can understand his/her confusion. It arose because I had broken the rule regarding how one comments on particular issues like the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The rule in the US is that whenever the actions of the Israeli government are criticized, it must be immediately preceded or followed by equal or harsher criticism of the Palestinians. Otherwise one is deemed to be 'not responsible', or biased, or worse.

Moreover, the rule requires the opposite behavior when the parties are switched. Harsh criticism of Palestinian atrocities against Israelis need not be accompanied by a similar balancing act, such as pointing out equivalent or worse acts by Israel. In fact, attempting to do so immediately opens one up to criticism, the charge that one is 'excusing' the atrocity, or implying 'moral equivalency' between the two sides. (Read journalist Robert Fisk's experiences with this.)

HRK's confusion about what my stance was is an indication of how much this rule has been internalized, so that it is assumed to be the norm that everyone must follow. Anyone who violates the rule is immediately subject to having his or her motives questioned.

I do not choose to follow that rule and will criticize actions that need to be criticized on their own merits without worrying about what motives may be imputed to me. Anyone who has read my writings will know that I think that tribal allegiances based racial, ethnic, religious, and national identities are not only stupid but even evil, and that the resultiing wanton harming of civilians that is a consequence of these allegiances is also an evil, whether done by al Qaeda, the US, Israel, the Palestinians, the Sri Lankan government, the Tamil Tigers, or whoever. Life is precious and ordinary people have the right, wherever they live, to be free of the fear of being the victims of political power plays.

The implication that 'moral equivalency' is necessarily a bad thing is another symptom of how these kinds of rules are internalized. It seems to imply that 'our' side because of our very nature, by virtue of who we are is morally superior to 'their' side. Hence 'our' actions can never be evil by definition, but must be due to mistakes or accidents or unavoidable events. Meanwhile 'their' actions, even if identical to 'ours', are intentionally evil, carried out with cruel deliberation. So again, by definition, there can never be moral equivalency between acts committed by 'us' and 'them', even if the acts themselves are identical.

This kind of thinking is endemic and can be found in discussions of almost all conflicts, not just with Israel and Palestine. Uri Avnery tellingly describes how the dominant power uses its propaganda power to shape the narrative structure.

Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government ("The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets") has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

The kind of thinking decribed by Avnery illustrates the worst kind of tribalism, where we demand to be judged by the good intentions that we say lie behind our actions, while we judge 'them' by their actions alone and the intentions that we get to assign to them. To look at the actual acts and use the same standard of judgment for those committed by both sides is to commit the sin of moral equivalency.

The propaganda system can only work if we internalize the rules of discussion set by the dominant forces and follow them unthinkingly. It is encouraging that more and more people are breaking them.

Next: Breaking the rule in discussions about US policies

POST SCRIPT: Israel's clout with the US

In this report that appeared in the Jerusalem Post (January 12, 2009), we see that not only can the Israeli prime minister order George W. Bush about, he feels free to brag publicly about doing so.

The Security Council resolution passed on Friday calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza was a source of embarrassment for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who helped prepare it but ultimately was ordered to back down from voting for it and abstain, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday.

Rice did not end up voting for Resolution 1860, thanks to a phone conversation Olmert held with US President George Bush shortly before the vote, the prime minister told a meeting of local authority heads in Ashkelon as part of a visit to the South.

Upon receiving word that the US was planning to vote in favor of the resolution - viewed by Israel as impractical and failing to address its security concerns - Olmert demanded to get Bush on the phone, and refused to back down after being told that the president was delivering a lecture in Philadelphia. Bush interrupted his lecture to answer Olmert's call, the premier said.

America could not vote in favor of such a resolution, Olmert told Bush. Soon afterwards, Rice abstained when votes were counted at the UN.

As John Cole says: "I am not sure what Israel has on us that they can extract billions of American taxpayer dollars every year and dictate our foreign policy, but it must be something pretty good. The craziest thing about this is the silence of the jingosphere. Had this been any other nation bossing around Bush’s Secretary of State, or, god forbid, France, can you imagine the wingnut Voltron that would have been formed in outrage? As it is, crickets."

Juan Cole tries to understand why Israel's prime minister would so openly boast about his power over the US president and US foreign policy.

December 29, 2008

Film: The Road to Guantanamo

(As is my custom this time of year, I am taking some time off from writing new posts and instead reposting some old favorites (often edited and updated) for the benefit of those who missed them the first time around or have forgotten them. The POST SCRIPTS will generally be new. New posts will start again on Monday, January 5, 2009. Today's post originally appeared in September 2006.)

Last Sunday, I saw the powerful film The Road to Guantanamo (directed by Michael Winterbottom) at the Cleveland Cinematheque, that precious jewel in University Circle which screens films that one cannot see anywhere else.

The description of the film says that it is a "harrowing mix of documentary and reenactment. It traces how three British Muslim men who flew to a wedding in Pakistan in late 2001 ended up in Afghanistan, where they were arrested by Northern Alliance soldiers and accused of being Al Qaeda fighters. Though never charged with any crime, they spent two years in the American military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before being released. Their testimony anchors this sobering film that won the Best Director prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival."

The film differs from the normal documentary format, which usually consists of news footage mixed with talking heads, with a "voice of god" voiceover narration. Since the film deals with the treatment these people received in prison camps in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, which the Bush administration has gone to great lengths to keep reporters, lawyers, and human rights groups out of, there was no way that the filmmakers could have obtained any actual video news footage of their treatment in captivity.

So they went instead for the dramatic re-enactment, with actors and sets used to provide a visual representation of what the three young men (all in their early twenties) said they had experienced. And what the film revealed was the various forms of torture that the men experienced while in US custody.

There was no attempt by the filmmakers to claim that the film was anything more than what it clearly showed on the screen, which was the story as told by the three men. But Joanna Connors, the Plain Dealer Cultural Critic, clearly took offense at the film, using surprisingly harsh language in her February 15, 2006 review to denounce it. I say "surprising" because Connors is, if her previous film criticisms and columns are any indication, somewhat "liberal" in her outlook, and thus her reaction sheds an interesting light on how journalistic professionals see their role, which was the topic of last week's series of posts on the media. (I have written elsewhere about the useful role that such 'tortured liberals' play in advancing the pro-war agenda.)

Connors' review said the following:

[I]n the last few years, the multiplex has become the new Op-Ed page, a place for blunt, straight-up polemics on war, the environment, elections and other divisive subjects. Where films labeled documentaries once signaled "factual," they now abandon all pretense to following journalistic methods and leave audiences in the dark, so to speak, about what is true and what is opinion.
…
Winterbottom's film tells [the young men's] version of what happened. Take note: It is their version, without any supporting evidence from neutral observers -- say, human rights groups or journalists -- or rebuttals from the British or Americans.

But Winterbottom doesn't make that clear, or clear enough, given that he shows U.S. soldiers, and others, administering torture so brutal it makes the photos from Abu Ghraib look like fun and games.
…
Winterbottom blurs the line between propaganda and truth by using several documentary techniques: The shaky hand-held camera, the extensive on-camera interviews with the three men, the location shooting (except for the scenes at Gitmo, which were shot in Iran) -- all signal "news" to audiences. He mixes these with "dramatic reenactments" of the events using actors, a cheesy technique straight out of "Crime Stoppers."

Then Connors reveals how far she has bought into the administration's arguments that in this "war on terror", anything goes and normal legal safeguards, let along human rights, be damned.

Are the men telling the truth? Who knows? Their story has enough holes to justify their capture, imprisonment and interrogation. On the other hand, the refusal of the United States to allow lawyers into Guantanamo on behalf of the prisoners and news accounts about Abu Ghraib, secret CIA prisons and violations of international law weigh heavily on the other side. (my italics)

The idea that people can be kept in jail for three and a half years, not allowed to see families or lawyers, and subjected to torture (what she coyly refers to as "interrogation") just because their story has "holes" is an amazing testimony of the power of this administration's rhetoric of the 'war on terror to cow even 'liberals' to go along with them. Are the three men telling the truth? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that they were not charged with anything for the entire time of their long captivity, and then when they were sent back to Britain they were released immediately by British police who could not find any reason to charge them. So the presumption has to be that the men were telling the truth. Does the phrase "innocent until proven guilty" not mean anything to Connors? And even if they were guilty of something, does she feel that it would that justify the treatment they received?

This kind of call for a fake balance is the result of the media propaganda model. While the suffering endured by the prisoners is very real, there is no evidence whatsoever that these concerns "weigh heavily on the other side" as Connors asserts. The Bush administration seems quite gleeful and unconcerned about violating all the norms of behavior and is pushing for even more leeway to use torture.

Connors sums up: "Whatever one's views on the war or one's political views, the enflamed, out-of-control situation in the Middle East makes releasing this movie deeply, almost unforgivably irresponsible."

'Unforgivably irresponsible'? Really? It is interesting that the administration has permanent license to make repeated unrebutted and unsubstantiated statements (which the media dutifully repeats) that claim that everyone they catch is an 'evildoer' or 'bad guy' or 'terrorist'. These are staples of the current news and the lack of balance is not denounced as "irresponsible." This is because the administration is always given the presumption of credibility, despite their shameful record of lies and deception. And yet, one person makes a film telling the story from the point of view of the prisoners, and suddenly there are demands for 'balance'. This is a good example of how journalists internalize certain attitudes and do not realize they are serving in a propaganda system.

Given the state of the news media, it may be that this kind of documentary is the way of the future. One can see why mainstream journalists are worried by these developments and oppose them. The director of the film Michael Winterbottom has created successful commercial films (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 24 Hour Party People, Welcome to Sarajevo are among his credits) and uses his skills at dramatization to bring the events to vivid life. He knows how to create a dramatic impact. Since he is not a professional journalist (at least as far as I am aware) he may not have internalized the need to provide the kind of phony 'balance', which in actual practice means tilting the story heavily in favor of the government's version of events in order to garner the approval of mainstream journalists.

The visual power of film is probably what arouses the concern and ire of those who support the government. Paul Krugman describes in his September 18, 2006 column in the New York Times, the torture that prisoners of this administration undergo. He writes:

According to an ABC News report from last fall, procedures used by C.I.A. interrogators have included forcing prisoners to ''stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours''; the ''cold cell,'' in which prisoners are forced ''to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees,'' while being doused with cold water; and, of course, water boarding, in which ''the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet,'' then ''cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him,'' inducing ''a terrifying fear of drowning.''

And bear in mind that the ''few bad apples'' excuse doesn't apply; these were officially approved tactics -- and Mr. Bush wants at least some of these tactics to remain in use.

I'm ashamed that my government does this sort of thing. I'd be ashamed even if I were sure that only genuine terrorists were being tortured -- and I'm not. Remember that the Bush administration has imprisoned a number of innocent men at Guantanamo, and in some cases continues to imprison them even though it knows they are innocent. (my emphasis)

These are strong words. His description of the methods or torture are disturbing but lack the kind of emotional punch that a visual representation can provide. When you see some of the very things described by Krugman on the screen, you are filled with revulsion. You wonder how any human being can treat any other human being like that.

This is why these kinds of documentaries are powerful. And dangerous. And why they will be opposed and denigrated by some members who see themselves as the guardians of the "objective" media.

See The Road to Guantanamo if you can. And see our tax dollars at work in the service of barbarism.

Shutting down Guantanamo and places like it around the world is an urgent need.

POST SCRIPT: Year in review

I normally find the year-end review stories in the media extremely tedious and skip over them, except for the lists of those who died. But I give an exemption to cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

December 19, 2008

Beware of the 'tortured liberal'

The reason I usually disdain labels like liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican that are bestowed on people by the media is that their main purpose is to establish the author's bona fides with specific segments of the population as a means of influencing them on what to think about a particular issue. For example, many people who consider themselves liberals take their cues from what prominently labeled 'liberals' say. So if you can get a 'liberal' spokesperson to advocate a policy, many liberals will take it seriously even if the policy is antithetical to their values. This was on prominent display during the lead up to the Iraq war, when many so-called media liberals were swept along by the hysteria of that time.

Media analyst Edward Herman writing in 2002 astutely identifies the value of people like the allegedly 'leftist' Christopher Hitchens to furthering the aims of the pro-war one party state.

Christopher Hitchens is a real asset to the war party, because he is a facile writer and covers over by vigorous assertion and imagery his new reactionary politics and the feeble intellectual defenses he musters for it. His value is enhanced by the fact that he is a "straddler," that is, a man in transition from an earlier left politics to apologetics for imperial wars, but with a foot still in The Nation's door and a harsh critic of Kissinger and Pinochet. He is therefore presentable as a member of the "rational left" or left that has "seen the light." Such folks are much honored by the mainstream media.

I have noticed that in the lead up to wars, National Public Radio (frequently labeled as 'liberal') becomes effectively National Pentagon Radio, so enamored do they become of military strategy and hardware. In 2003, I could barely listen to their Pentagon correspondent Tom Gjelten, so pro-war was his coverage, so admiring of the technical prowess of the US military, that he seemed to forget about the devastating toll on ordinary people at the receiving end of all the so-called 'smart bombs' that he rhapsodized about.

Or take another allegedly 'liberal' commentator, the Washington Post's columnist Richard Cohen. His relentless navel-gazing and total self-absorption is on display in his column on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 (Page A27), where he talks about how he was for the Vietnam war before he turned against it, then describes how he was similarly for the Iraq war before he turned against that too. Despite his fascination with himself, he does not even see the clear pattern that he himself describes: That he always supports the wars the pro-war party wants, bleating his timid opposition only when it is too late and public opinion has turned conclusively against it.

Things are precisely the same with Iraq, and here, too, I … originally had no moral qualms about the war. Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat -- and not just a theoretical one -- to Israel. If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war -- silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. (my italics)

It is incredible that Cohen thought that violence against other people was justified because it would make us feel better. Also he says his support for the Iraq invasion increased because he was annoyed by what antiwar activists were saying. For such people it is always about them and their feelings, and not about others. We should kill people in other countries because it will make us feel good. Of course, we should use violence in a 'prudent' manner, whatever the hell that means, because we are (of course) good people.

Do not be surprised when people like Cohen (like Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon) use their belated critiques of the management of the Iraq war to re-brand themselves as being 'war critics' in order to promote the next war. They will wave their 'liberal' flag as a cover to hide their past and disguise their true role. This mindset is endemic in the ruling class.

David Edwards of Media Lens writing in February 2003 warned us to be careful of the ‘tortured liberal’ in the media: "There is nothing tortured about it - media fortunes have long been made by mastering the 'liberal' art of appearing to care while doing nothing to oppose those who clearly do not give a damn. This is what earns the nod from the powers that be."

The role of these 'tortured liberals' is not to demand that governments abide by the constitution, international law, and accepted legal and moral principles, but instead to persuade the public to go along with whatever geopolitical policies the one party ruling class determines is necessary. They do this by creating a fake consensus by excluding those who disagree. Right now the goal is to get people to believe that before the war 'everyone' thought that invading Iraq was either a good thing to do or unavoidable. This is manifestly false. In fact, the opposition to the war worldwide was overwhelming.

On February 11, 2003, prior to the Iraq war, we had a forum at Case where many speakers (including me) exposed the fraudulent case being made for war and its immorality and illegality, let alone the absence of credible evidence. None of us were full-time journalists or analysts, merely ordinary people with day jobs. If we, simply by not limiting ourselves to the US mainstream media, could see through all the lies being spread, why could not these so-called liberals in the media? Because they are 'tortured liberals' who, as Edwards points out, know exactly what role they must play to keep their privileged positions.

Media analysts Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon just released their annual list of The Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year and the "WHO WOULD HAVE PREDICTED?" award goes to the New York Times:

The Times op-ed page marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion in March by choosing "nine experts on military and foreign affairs" to write on "the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wish they had considered in the prewar debate." None of the experts selected had opposed the invasion. That kind of exclusion made possible a bizarre claim by Times correspondent John Burns in the same day's paper: "Only the most prescient could have guessed ... that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well as nearly 4,000 American troops; or that America's financial costs by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008." Those who'd warned of such disastrous results were not only prescient, but were routinely excluded from mainstream coverage.

Note that the people I have criticized are considered 'moderate' commentators, so-called 'reasonable' people, 'centrists', 'liberals', and even 'leftists'. I am not even bothering to analyze the ravings of people like Michael Ledeen and William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer or third-tier pundits like Jonah Goldberg, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the like.

Given the drubbing that the Republicans have received in the last two elections we should not be surprised to see even the neoconservatives trying to disguise their past and move into key positions in the Democratic party, in order to continue to give their views some clout. They will be aided in their transition by the mainstream 'liberals' in the media who will not be so rude as to dig up their past statements.

Because they all benefit from a mutually convenient agreement to forget the sordid roles they have played in the past.

POST SCRIPT: Requiem for a campaign

Matt Taibbi, one of the best gonzo journalists around, sums up the McCain campaign:

It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do.
…
The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. … But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. … Instead of a plan, they had an endless succession of dumb ideas scrapped at the 11th hour in favor of even dumber ones.

You should read the whole thing.

December 17, 2008

Examples of political chameleons

In Monday's post, I spoke about how we can expect to see the political chameleons of the one-party ruling class try to camouflage their past in order to blend in with their new political environment. Glenn Greenwald, easily one of the best political analysts around, sees right through this strategy. He reveals the truth about people like Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, who use their home in the allegedly 'liberal' Brookings Institution to help pursue this goal.

To lavish themselves with credibility -- as though they are war skeptics whom you can trust -- they identify themselves at the beginning "as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq." In reality, they were not only among the biggest cheerleaders for the war, but repeatedly praised the Pentagon's strategy in Iraq and continuously assured Americans things were going well. They are among the primary authors and principal deceivers responsible for this disaster.

But as always, Tom Friedman provides the clearest example of such shameless self-serving revisionism. Greenwald points to what the so-called 'liberal' New York Times columnist was saying in 2003 justifying the invasion of Iraq on PBS's Charlie Rose show:

We needed to go over there basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. . . .

And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? …

Well, Suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about.

We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could [my italics]. That's the real truth.
…
And guess what? People there got the message, OK, in the neighborhood. This is a rough neighborhood, and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message. But they got the message and the message was, "You will now be held accountable."

What does Friedman say now (November 29, 2008) was the reason for the Iraq war?

It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries.

Really? That is what you thought all along? He seems to have replaced those revenge-filled early words with pompous platitudes. Observe how he has conveniently forgotten the sordid past and his own role in it, switching from insane bellicosity (what he called 'the real truth') about teaching those dastardly Muslims a lesson by hitting Iraqis on the head with blunt objects (just because they are the most convenient target), to noble goals of collaborating to create a model civil society. He can make such a switch effortlessly because he has had so much practice at it.

Friedman, like many mainstream commentators both 'liberal' and 'conservative', has no compunction about people in other countries getting killed in wars to satisfy his own lust for destruction or some weird private geopolitical theory. Here he is writing in 1999 (New York Times, April 23) about the need for heavier attacks on Serb civilians during the conflict over Kosovo:

Let's at least have a real air war.... It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road, and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

Bill O'Reilly (whom most people would consider to be at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Friedman) said something very similar six days later, showing how united the pro-war one party ruling elite is.

I believe that we have to go in there and drop leaflets on Belgrade and other cities and say, 'Listen, you guys have got to move because we're now going to come in and we’re going to just level your country. The whole infrastructure is going.'... Any target is OK. I'd warn the people, just as we did with Japan, that it’s coming, you’ve got to get out of there, OK, but I would level that country so that there would be nothing moving—no cars, no trains, nothing.

Notice again the smug arrogance of power, writing with the confidence that no other country can make similar threats against their own country. Would they approve of their own neighborhoods being flattened by bombs because another country did not like some US policy? Do none of these people know or care that what they are advocating, the destruction of civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, and sewage systems that have no direct military value, is a war crime?

The Geneva Conventions (Protocol 1, Part IV, Chapter III, Article 54) says quite clearly:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

The examples I've given above can be multiplied. Chris Floyd chronicles Friedman's relentless bloodlust while media critic Edward Herman similarly calls out 'leftist' Christopher Hitchens as another pro-war demagogue who vociferously supported the wars started by Clinton and Bush despite the heavy toll they inflicted on civilians, and even gleefully joked about Afghanistan being "the first country in history to be bombed out of the stone age."

This is why the labels liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, have such little value in most discussions. They are merely the veneer to disguise one party rule and the desire to impose American will and power on the rest of the world, whatever the cost on ordinary people.

POST SCRIPT: Media complicity with the one-party state

Why is it that members of the war party get so much air time in the media while anyone who critiques the policies of the one-party state gets shut out? Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman clearly laid out how it works in their classic 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. A documentary of the same name was made in 1992 that presents the key arguments in a very entertaining manner. It is well-worth viewing.

Here is a short clip from that documentary that explains how the very organizational structure of the programs on TV prevents any real discussion of important issues, to be replaced by the uttering of conventional wisdom platitudes.

This is why only extended commercial-free discussions that allow for in-depth analysis, such as Bill Moyers's program Buying the War on PBS, are the only things worth watching on TV.

December 15, 2008

Political chameleons

In analyzing politics in this country, the key to unlocking its underlying structure is to realize that what we have is essentially a single pro-war/pro-business party and that the Democratic and Republican 'parties' are merely factions of that one party, differing mostly on some social issues or on tactical matters. This underlying unity ensures that there is continuity in the overarching attempt to create an economic and political empire, using the military to achieve that goal when other means fail.

But ordinary people do not like not having choices in their leaders so we need to have a two party façade and this means requiring people to think of themselves as Democrats and Republicans, even strongly partisan ones. But only the middle class takes these labels seriously. The poor suspect that the entire system is rigged against them and in favor of the rich, while the very rich know this for a fact.

Servicing this system is an entire class of people who do not really care about party labels or even political philosophy as such but have very narrow agendas that can be advanced whichever party is in power. This is why they can so easily shift back and forth between the two. Because the Democrats are now in control and in a position to dispense favors, look for media institutions like Fox News to shift its views and change its programming to be more favorable to Democrats. Its owner Rupert Murdoch cares mostly about making money and in other countries has shown himself quite capable of shifting his political allegiances depending on who can do him the most good. We already hear stories that Murdoch dislikes the way Fox News operates and despises Bill O'Reilly.

We can also expect to see a lot of people who once enthusiastically supported Bush and Cheney start maneuvering to portray themselves as critics in order to wheedle their way into the new administration. They will be aided in this by the media, which likes to see the permanent establishment class run things. Some of the agendas of these political chameleons are personal. For example, there is a whole industry of political commentators, analysts, and think-tankers whose main goal is to stay in the media eye, to be highly visible. That is how they earn their living. Such people will now shift their views, tacking to the prevailing winds.

During the heyday of the Bush-Cheney fiasco, these people found all kinds of reasons to justify the concentration of executive power, the Iraq war, torture, extraordinary renditions, lack of oversight of the financial and environmental sectors, and the undermining of responsible government by the placing of party hacks and ideological loyalists in important positions, especially in the Departments of Justice and Environment. Now they talk about the 'excesses' of the Bush-Cheney administration, that 'mistakes were made', that some people were 'overzealous', and so on. Very rarely will you see any acknowledgement that they were accomplices in, and enablers of, all of it.

You already saw this happening with attitudes towards the Iraq war because that fiasco became plain to see much earlier. The fundamental problem that the single pro-war/pro-business party faces is that the general population is not unthinkingly pro-war (or pro business) so the one party leadership has to keep finding new ways to convince them that although past wars were usually disasters, the next war is a good and noble cause that must be fought.

One strategy is to make people think that even those who opposed the previous wars support the new proposed war. This process has already started. The way the warmongers do this is to now advertise themselves as having been either against the Iraq war or critical of it. They then try to extrapolate this tenuous claim to make it seem like they always took a principled stand against the war. They will then be described in the media with the preamble "Even fierce critics of the Iraq war such as …" This puts them in the position of supporting the next war from the position of being 'antiwar activists' and thus allow the warmongers to suggest that the next war must be a good one if it has persuaded even such 'principled opponents' of previous wars.

The neoconservatives will be among those who try to make this shift. In my series on the future of the Republican party, I foresaw a bleak time ahead for Republicans because of the intramural battle for the leadership by the old-style conservatives, the neoconservatives, and the Christianists. One thing that might save that party is if the neoconservatives see little likelihood of it getting back in power soon and abandon it. Their departure will enable the old style conservatives a better chance of regaining their former leadership role since religion by itself does not really provide a governing political philosophy.

The neoconservatives will then try to re-enter the Democratic party which was their original home anyway, because the old-style Republican conservatives who once dominated that party were always a little leery of the kinds of reckless foreign adventures favored by the neoconservatives. They will try to do this by rewriting history. They will shift positions and start to claim that they had reservations about the war all along. The more brazen will say that they opposed some or all of the Bush-Cheney policies. They will be aided in their makeovers by the Obama administration's centrist let's-get-along mindset, which will prevent them from taking a too critical look at the past of those people.

But if you look back at the actual record, you will see that these so-called opponents were initially strong supporters of the Iraq war, shifting to merely tactical criticism of how the war was conducted by the Bush administration when it became clear that it was going badly.

Next: Examples of such political chameleons

POST SCRIPT: Stephen Colbert chimes in on the 'War on Christmas'

November 14, 2008

Election analysis-7: The Obama campaign

While there may not have been much consistency in the McCain camp's strategy, there was no doubt about Obama's. Taking advantage of president Bush's abysmal approval ratings, the Obama campaign steadily plugged away at hanging Bush around McCain's neck. Bush has the unenviable record of being the most unpopular president in history. People were repeatedly reminded that Bush has been an awful president, who has got the nation stuck in two interminable wars while the economy soured, and that McCain represented a continuation of those policies while Obama represented a new direction.

While other issues have also been raised on the periphery, they have not been contradictory to the main message. Bush has been criticized for his tax cuts for the wealthy and McCain's present support for those cuts has been used to tie him even more closely to Bush. McCain has been linked to Bush's policies favoring big corporations. And who among us haven't heard hundreds of times the repetition of McCain's own proud statement from earlier days that he voted over 90% with Bush? We have also repeatedly seen the photos of Bush and McCain awkwardly embracing, with McCain in a subservient pose, further solidifying the image of McCain as a Bush acolyte.

McCain's desperate need to try and remove the Bush albatross from around his neck can be seen in his statement in the last debate that he was not Bush and that if Obama wanted to run against Bush then he should have run in 2004. That was a good line that got appreciative laughter from the audience but it also was a reminder of how successful Obama was in linking McCain to Bush. McCain at one point even tried to argue that it was Obama who would represent a continuation of Bush's policies, a truly pathetic attempt to separate himself from Bush.

McCain's attempts to emerge from Bush's shadow failed.

McCain has not been helped by his association with President Bush, the poll suggests. Fifty-four percent of voters think McCain would continue Mr. Bush's policies, and the president is extremely unpopular: his approval rating now stands at 20 percent, the lowest ever recorded for a president. His disapproval rating of 72 percent matches his all-time high, first reached last month.

McCain gave the Obama camp some additional openings. By picking Sarah Palin to be his running mate without proper vetting, McCain opened himself up to the charge of being reckless with the nation's security, lacking good judgment, and being impulsive. By 'suspending' his campaign during the financial crisis and even threatening to skip the first debate because of it, he opened himself to the charge of being erratic and incapable of keeping on top of multiple issues, and reinforced the image that he was impulsive.

All these things enabled the Obama campaign to raise questions about whether McCain had the required temperament for the office he was seeking. But unlike the changes in the McCain campaign strategy where new messages sometimes undercut the old, these multiple new charges against McCain could be layered on to the basic idea, without contradicting or distracting voters from the core message that McCain would represent a continuation of Bush's policies.

The Obama campaign was not perfect. But they were steady. They seemed to have a carefully thought out plan and they stuck with it. Even in the immediate post-Palin period when they lost their lead in the polls, they did not seem to panic but simply rode out that setback.

One could see the organization early on in the primaries where they skillfully pulled out a win in the Iowa caucuses based on sheer organization and grass-roots effort, seriously denting Hillary Clinton's image as the inevitable candidate. They stumbled badly in New Hampshire but learned enough from that to regroup and forge ahead.

Their success in winning the Democratic nomination was in carefully exploiting the delegate awarding rules for each state that were mostly based not on winner-take-all but on a district-by-district basis. By aiming to win even by a tiny amount all those districts which had an odd number of delegates, and avoiding big-margin defeats in districts that had an even number of delegates, they were able to rack up good delegate counts even when they were losing state voter totals overall.

Once they had the nomination, I think they realized that this was the Democratic Party's election to lose. Bush and the Republicans were so unpopular, and the two wars and the sour economy were such millstones around that party's neck, that as long as the Democrats stayed focused and calm did not make a big blunder, they would win. I think that the lack of traction of the Jeremiah Wright issue convinced the Obama camp long before the rest of us (including me) that race was going to be a relatively minor factor.

What was impressive about them was their message discipline. They stuck to their story whether the polls went up or down. In this they were aided by the fact that they kept the media focus on Obama and not on the campaign surrogates, and Obama is a very disciplined speaker. It was telling that even though I follow politics closely, and knew that Obama's close campaign advisors and managers were David Plouffe and David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, I had never seen them on TV or in YouTube clips until election night and had no idea until then what they even looked like. In contrast, I had seen McCain's campaign staff repeatedly all over the place.

The more surrogates that you have speaking for you, the more mistakes that get made and mixed messages that get sent and the public gets confused. The McCain campaign was overflowing with surrogates and pseudo-surrogates like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder, some of them saying outrageous things that drew attention to themselves rather than to the candidate they were supposed to be promoting.

It was after the selection of Joe Biden that the Democrats started going off-message since some media attention began to be focused on him. My impression of Biden is of a rather shallow man, someone who is not a deep thinker but wants to be thought of as profound and loves the sound of his own voice. Such people are liable to say stupid things in trying to impress audiences and this proved to be the case as he committed some gaffes here and there. But it was too late to help the McCain campaign. Compared to the Palin disaster, Biden, for all his faults, seemed like a brilliant choice.

POST SCRIPT: Mormons and California's Proposition 8

California's anti-gay proposition 8 passed due to support from blacks, Republicans, conservatives, and older people and Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons. A lot of the funding for the antigay effort came from the Mormons, even though most of them don't even live in California.

This has aroused renewed interest in that religion and why they might hate gays so much. This article describes how the Mormon religion arose from the fertile imagination of a person who mixed together three elements that were intriguing the people of his time.

November 13, 2008

Election analysis-6: McCain's last ditch attempts

The next attempt was to try and portray Obama as the dangerous and unknown 'other', the man with the mysterious past, who consorted with 'terrorists', had a strange and Muslim name, unusual and partly foreign family history, who had associated with a pastor who had called upon god to damn America, and so on. The McCain campaign did not identify Obama as the anti-Christ, but one can be sure that some of their fervid religious supporters were doing so. All these were attempts to portray him as someone 'not like us', "who does not see America as we do" (to use Sarah Palin's words), whose loyalties were suspect.

While this was a totally despicable tactic, another problem is that it was hard at this late stage to make the charge stick that Obama was a dangerous, wild-eyed, Marxist, Islamic, terrorist. After all, the country had seen him for almost two years and over twenty debates looking calm and self-assured and surrounded by establishment figures like Warren Buffett, responding with a steady hand to the financial crises and other issues as they came up.

Even strong McCain supporter Charles Krauthammer had to concede that Obama seems so unflappable that even if a grenade went off in the room he would still manage to complete his thoughts in a coherent way. Such coolness does not jibe with the idea of a wild-eyed radical.

The next-to-latest message, when it seemed almost certain that McCain was going to lose, was to argue that a divided government is good for America and since the Congress is assuredly going to be in Democratic hands, people should vote in a Republican president to thwart any action. 'Vote for a stalemated government' is not an inspiring message, to put it mildly. Furthermore, while it may have some appeal in good times when people don't want the government to mess things up, when times are seen as tough as they are now, people want things to happen and to have decisive action. They want things to change and stalemate and gridlock is the last thing on their wish list.

The very last message was a weird one that emerged at the end of the campaign. It was alleged by McCain and Palin that Obama was going to bankrupt the coal industry. Even I, who have the luxury of being able to follow politics fairly closely, was baffled by what they were getting at and had to do some digging to find out what was going on. It turns out that this is a piece of esoteric politics, involving some consequences of cap-and-trade greenhouse gas environmental policies. Furthermore, Obama's policies on this issue are similar to ones that McCain has supported in the past and for which he was also accused of bankrupting the coal industry.

Did the McCain camp really think that the state of the coal industry was an attention grabber in the last few days before the election? How many people would know or care about the workings of the coal industry? It was quite surreal. The only reason I could think of for bringing this up at this late stage was that he hoped it would get some votes in the coal mining Appalachian regions of Pennsylvania and Ohio, two states on which the McCain-Palin camp was pinning its hopes.

The problem for the McCain camp has been that each of these alternative messages seem to have been developed on the fly, not thought through, and not given much chance to take hold. If a new message did not produce quick results, it was summarily abandoned and a new message promoted. This rapid fire switching gave the impression of a campaign lurching from issue to issue and gave the Obama camp the opportunity to hammer home the message that McCain is erratic and impulsive.

Also, some of the messages contradicted each other and led to confusion, not a good thing when you are trying to define your opponent negatively. After all, how can you say that Obama is an arugula eating, country club, Hollywood-style, elitist celebrity, while at the same time that that he is a Marxist terrorist sympathizer? How can he be the faithful follower of a 'dangerous' Christian minister Jeremiah Wright while also being a Muslim? To successfully pull off such successful double lives would require Obama to have the skills of The Scarlet Pimpernel or Raffles.

It was not surprising that none of these scattershot attacks on Obama worked. If you seek to define someone negatively, it has to be done early in the campaign and have at least some basis in reality while your opponent is still a blank slate in the minds of voters. Once people have formed their own impressions, it is hard to change them.

It is telling that even at the end, the lack of experience issue was still the major concern that some people had about Obama, suggesting that it had always been the McCain's strongest argument. This charge had some factual basis and was introduced early enough to be a defining issue for many voters. But now those concerns were superceded by even greater concerns about Palin's lack experience.

McCain had problems from the start. Bush and the Republicans were deeply unpopular. The drop in violence in Iraq, rather than benefiting him as someone who had strongly supported the surge, had the effect of taking Iraq out of the news and becoming a non-issue. The economic crisis arrived at a bad time, focusing attention on his own admitted weak spot.

But when the history of this campaign is written, I suspect that the direct and indirect fallout from the Palin selection will loom large as the one single event that caused his campaign to lose focus and stumble.

POST SCRIPT: Palin and Africa - Getting even weirder

Remember the Fox News report quoting an anonymous aide to McCain who said that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent? Palin's followers were outraged by this leak and demanded the leaker be identified and punished.

Well, a McCain aide "Martin Eisenstadt" did admit to the leak but it turns out that his whole character is a hoax. He was also responsible for the false story that Joe the Plumber was related to Charles Keating, which I mentioned on my blog.

A knowledgeable commenter Samantha, who says she is a freelance reporter for the BBC and seems to know a lot about "Eisenstadt's" history, mentioned this hoaxer in a comment on this post. She has been following "Eisenstadt" and if you click on her name it will take you to some really interesting stuff where she interviews him.

What is still not clear from this latest story from the New York Times is what is the hoax: the actual story that Palin did not know that Africa was a country, or the claim that "Eisenstadt" is the leaker. The article is not precise on this.

November 12, 2008

Election analysis-5: The Obama as Marxist-Socialist gambit

The next lurch in the McCain campaign message came with Joe the plumber and the 'spreading the wealth' issue. The progressive tax code advocated by Obama has been long standing policy in the US, but abruptly became transformed into a symbol of socialism. Suddenly Obama became a Marxist, the one who wanted take money away from hard-working people and give it to shiftless loafers.

To work, this message depends on hiding the history of tax policy in the US and fostering the false assumption that the amount of one's income directly correlates with the amount of work one does, so that taxing rich people more and poor people less can be equated with taking money from hard working people and giving it to other people. It also has racial undertones since 'hardworking Americans' in this context is often code for white working class people, and 'other people' is code for people not willing to work as hard, which is code for welfare recipients, which is code for 'black'.

It was at this point that the McCain campaign descended into farce. I have seen campaigns in which ordinary people became symbols for points that the candidates wanted to make. But I have never seen a campaign where such people are plucked from obscurity and become transformed into actual spokespersons for the campaign, traveling along with the candidate to various events, appearing at rallies, and on TV to speak as surrogates on behalf of the campaign, as Joe the plumber and later Tito the builder did.

It was quite an amazing thing to see McCain and Palin depend so heavily on Joe the Plumber and the crowds chanting his name. Joe and Tito played the lead roles in a huge cast of characters characterized by first names and occupations. It became yet another joke with references sprouting to George the president, Dick the hunter, Ben the banker, and so on.

McCain again went overboard in his praise, describing Joe as "an American hero, a great citizen of Ohio and my role model." Someone he met for the first time a few weeks ago and whom he barely knows is now a 'hero' and his role model on the basis of a single question he asked Obama?

But apart from the absurdity of promoting people you have plucked out of the crowd into speaking for you, it also carries a risk. Like with Sarah Palin, there may be lots of things in such people's lives that may be embarrassing but you don't know about, and such political novices are also likely to commit huge gaffes. It did not help when Joe made the preposterous claim without a shred of evidence that Obama's election would bring 'death to Israel'.

It was also later revealed that Joe's family had to go on welfare on two occasions and he had to concede that the welfare system was what enabled them survive temporary adversity and raise themselves into the middle class. So he had personally benefited from the very policies that he now condemned as Marxism.

The attempt by the McCain camp to take Obama's 'spreading the wealth' response to Joe the Plumber and make into a major campaign weapon against Obama proved to be a total bust. The Joe the Plumber gambit seemed to indicate that there were no limits to McCain's willingness to debase himself. In its desperation to find a winning message, the campaign was becoming a joke.

The problem with this strategy is that McCain seemed to think that the views of the people in the immensely wealthy circle he moves in represent the views of most people. It turns out that most people are not as horrified at the idea of 'spreading the wealth' as McCain and Palin seem to think they are. This question has been repeatedly polled and the results are fairly consistent.

Across the nine times the question has been asked, a majority of Americans have agreed with the thought that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed. The current 58% who agree is one of the two lowest percentages Gallup has measured (along with a 56% reading in September 2000). Sixty-eight percent agreed in April of this year and 66% in April 2007.

In fact, one of the biggest champions of the progressive tax code is one of the conservative heroes, someone McCain likes to quote a lot, that well-known Communist president Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt also strongly supported the estate tax on inheritances, which the very rich in this country have been strongly campaigning to kill by calling it a 'death tax'.

The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

The progressive income tax is as American as apple pie.

POST SCRIPT: Campaign withdrawal pains

The Onion News Network reports on the disturbing phenomenon of Obama campaign workers struggling to find new meaning for their lives.

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

November 10, 2008

Election analysis-3: The fallout from the Palin selection

Soon after the selection of Sarah Palin, it quickly became clear to almost everyone that McCain and his campaign team knew hardly anything about her and had not vetted her carefully before selecting her. This was extraordinary considering that McCain had sewn up the Republican nomination by early March, giving him about six months to carefully think about whom he wanted to be vice president. To wait until the last minute and impulsively do something so important seemed evidence of a lackadaisical approach to governing.

On election night, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, one of the reported four finalists to be McCain's running mate, was interviewed just after Obama had become elected. I knew the others in the running (Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge) and I could see why the campaign might not be excited about them, since they both seemed kind of dull and stodgy, not adding much to McCain's appeal. But I had never seen Pawlenty before and he seemed to me to have many of Palin's positives (youth and energy and ideology) without all of her obvious negatives.

Pawlenty spoke fluently and well about the issues that drove the campaign, and graciously about Obama. Furthermore he is an evangelical Christian and is solidly in step with their anti-abortion, anti-gay agenda, although in the early 1990s he was not quite as hard-line. As he spoke, I became increasingly mystified as to why McCain had overlooked him for Palin. Did McCain simply have one of those failures in logical thinking that often afflicts men when in the presence of an attractive woman?

I think that the Palin selection was the tipping point, the moment when news media and mainstream commentators began to question their earlier infatuation with McCain and started wondering about both his judgment and his temperament and his much vaunted experience. As doubts about Palin grew, sentiment shifted to viewing Obama, not McCain, as the reassuring person voters were seeking.

All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee.

And in a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people for his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.
…
While a majority viewed Ms. Palin as unqualified for the vice presidency, roughly three-quarters of voters saw Mr. Obama’s running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, as qualified for the job. The increase in the number of voters who said Ms. Palin was not prepared was driven almost entirely by Republicans and independents.

The campaign's attempts to suggest that she actually was highly experienced and capable were also not selling well. Despite their earnest attempts, most voters were simply not buying the idea that being the mayor of a small town in Alaska and governor of that state for two years counted as serious experience. While it could be plausibly argued that Obama did not have much experience either, he had at least been campaigning and constantly in the public eye for almost two years, debating other candidates in the hard-fought primary elections about two dozen times, and fielding numerous press conferences and other encounters with the public.

Over time, this high level of extended exposure had given the public a sense of familiarity with him that enabled them to form their own judgments of him, and they seemed to be reassured by his knowledge of the issues and his calm temperament. He also had the time to recover from unfortunate off-hand comments, such as his statement that some 'bitter' voters cling to 'guns and religion'.

One of the interesting lessons about the Obama candidacy is that it may actually be easier for another non-traditional candidate of the future (say a Hispanic or other ethnic minority or woman or gay or Muslim or atheist) to run for president than for vice president, because for the former you first have to spend a lot of time in the public eye during the primaries and people are able to size you up for themselves, while for the latter you are suddenly thrust onto the national stage and people do not have the time to become comfortable with the novelty features you bring. When running for president you have the time to try and overcome people's first impressions of you. When 30,000 voters were polled back in 2006 as to whom they would vote for in a then-hypothetical McCain-Obama contest, the only contests Obama won were in Illinois, Hawaii, and Washington, DC giving him a grand total of 28 electoral votes compared to McCain's 510, showing how much impressions of Obama have changed as a result of being constantly in the public eye.

So the electoral map went from this in 2006 to this on election day.

The voters had no such alternative means of sizing up Palin and so her early missteps were image-defining events for her that seemed to indicate incompetence and ignorance, and she simply did not have time to repair the damage.

POST SCRIPT: Are people ready for the new sheriff?

November 07, 2008

Election analysis-2: The Palin mistake

I think it is true that vice presidents by themselves do not lose or win campaigns. It might be tempting for some McCain supporters to put all the blame for their loss on Palin, but that would not be fair. It is true that she did reveal herself to be out of her depth and made some serious missteps, but Dan Quayle faced similar doubts about his abilities and yet the Bush-Quayle ticket won quite handily in 1988, by a margin of close to 8 points, which these days would be considered a landslide.

But while Palin may not have directly been the main cause of the McCain loss, I think that she did contribute substantially in an indirect way, by derailing the McCain campaign theme of the importance of experience, and they never seemed to recover from that.

The process began with the Democratic convention August 25-28, with Obama's speech to a huge crowd at the football stadium in Denver bringing the Democratic convention to a rousing finale. Obama's poll numbers went up by five points and he had a 6 point lead by September 1, as he got the usual benefit of a week of highly choreographed convention puffery designed to put him in the best light.

For some reason, rather than viewing Obama's rise to a six-point lead in the polls at the end of August as the usual temporary boost arising from a smooth party convention, and waiting to see if it would be eclipsed by their own convention and bounce the following week, the McCain camp seemed to panic and feel that the election was slipping out of their grasp. And this led to the first, and I believe ultimately fatal, mistake from which the McCain camp never recovered.

They seemed to want to, with one single move, grab the headlines, erase the lead, and wipe out all the positive images of the Democratic convention and so, on August 29, they made the surprising announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate, announcing it the day after Obama's speech.

This tactic undoubtedly worked in the short run. It created a lot of anticipatory excitement for the Republican convention held September 1-4, and overshadowed the positive coverage of Obama's speech, just as they must have hoped it would do. During the week of the Republican convention and just after, McCain's numbers shot up rapidly to 48% by September 8, giving him a 3-point lead over the rapidly falling Obama, and a 9-point overall swing towards McCain in just one week.

How much of this was due to Palin and how much McCain might have got anyway simply due to the nature of convention bounces is not clear. But Palin undoubtedly helped. She clearly ignited the passions of the party faithful. Suddenly the Republican party rallies, formerly lackluster affairs struggling to draw big crowds, became boisterous and enthusiastic, with packed audiences cheering loudly.

It looked like they had hit on a winning combination: McCain's experience and Palin's looks and crowd appeal, all mixed in with her down-home outsider status. The two of them were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, going to ride into Washington, clean up the mess, and solve all the country's problems.

Looking back, this was the high point of the McCain campaign.

But as I wrote back on September 3 during the Republican convention, the Palin choice seemed to me like one of those ideas that seem brilliant at first and can be intoxicating but leave a long and deep hangover. It is one of the very few times when I have made a political prediction that turned out to be correct, so forgive me for quoting myself on it.

Someone once said that the most common last words expressed by reckless men before they do something stupid is: "Hey guys, watch this!" The McCain decision strikes me as exactly one of those ideas, something that looks bold and daring and exciting in the heat of a brainstorming session where a few people are trying to "think outside box" and make a stunning impression, but where all the negatives only show up in the cold light of day. It is then that you realize that there is a very thin line separating 'thinking outside the box' from 'being out of your mind'.

I think that this decision is going to haunt McCain. His and her ardent supporters are trying to put on a good face and saying that this move is a 'game changer'. I think they are right but not in a good way for him. It risks changing a narrow race into a blowout victory for Obama.

While the immediate aftermath of the choice and the McCain-Palin ticket's rise in the polls seemed to prove me wrong, later events revealed that the choice was indeed a mistake. While the initial response to the choice of Palin was tremendously positive, it turned out that the price McCain paid for it was too high because, as I pointed out at the time, by selecting Palin, he had unilaterally disarmed himself of the main arrow in his quiver, that of the message of greater experience which, while not exciting, seemed to have been working for him. McCain could no longer plausibly argue that experience is the most important factor in selecting a president because he had clearly not thought it that important in selecting his own vice president.

The Palin selection started what turned out to be an irreversible decline in McCain's fortunes because of the lack of a plausible alternative to the now abandoned message of experience.

Next: The Palin fallout

POST SCRIPT: Africa is a continent? Who knew?

Fox News tells us that Sarah Palin is planning to run for president in 2012. But more revealingly, it also reports on why the McCain camp did not want to have Sarah Palin give any press conferences and highly restricted her unscripted appearances.

So the McCain camp realized almost immediately that she could not handle the job but pretended she could. It makes a mockery of their campaign pitch that they were the ones who put country first.

This is going to get ugly. Palin supporters are taking names of those who are leaking damaging information about their idol, and vowing revenge.

November 06, 2008

Election analysis-1: Campaign fortunes and campaign coverage

Now that the voting is over, I want to compare the way that the two campaigns were run.

Some years ago, I read an analysis that looked at media coverage of political campaigns. The analysis found that when reporters covered candidates who were leading in the polls, they would say that the operation was going smoothly, staffers were cheerful, with all the elements working in concert to provide a winning message.

But the reports of losing campaigns invariably found lots of missteps, gaffes, disunity among staffers, money woes, and lack of a consistent and coherent message.

What was interesting was that these reporters' perceptions were mainly correlated with the candidate's standing in the polls, not any real differences in the facts of the campaigns. So when a losing candidate started to get ahead in the polls, suddenly his or her campaign became the smooth one and the previously smooth winning campaign became the target of innuendo about all kinds of internal problems.

Part of the problem is that a candidate who is behind almost always has to adapt by changing the tone or content of the message and/or reorganizing the campaign staff. While this is a practical need (since there is no point in continuing a losing strategy), such measures can be unfairly portrayed as implying that the campaign lacks direction or coherence or is disunited or as even panicking. A winning campaign, by contrast, does not need to make any major changes and can thus be seen as steady and assured and united.

I think this analysis largely holds up, which is why one should not take at face value all the reports that have emerged during the last weeks of the campaign about the disarray in the McCain-Palin campaign. They were trailing in the polls most of the time and thus received the usual pattern of treatment.

But while all these reports of infighting can be ignored, there is one objective fact that cannot be denied and that is that McCain has been guilty of not having a coherent message and being too willing to switch from one issue to another as the main theme of its campaign. Now that it is over, with hindsight, we can see more clearly the arc of the campaign that we could only dimly glimpse while it was still going on.

The campaign first seemed to think that experience was the winning issue for McCain. They hammered home the idea that McCain was the seasoned hand while Obama was the new kid, still wet behind the ears and not yet ready for the responsibility of being president in these supposedly dangerous times. This had the advantage of making what might have been a negative (McCain's age) correlate with a positive (age=experience).

They attempted to portray Obama as a lightweight and even an airhead, an elitist celebrity not to be trusted with the nation's highest elected position. Recall in the early days the relentless hammering of him as someone famous for just being famous, whose only ability was giving good speeches, and not having any real achievements to his name. This campaign reached its apex with the advertisement juxtaposing Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Even Karl Rove got into the act and contributed to this image, famously saying: "Even if you never met [Obama], you know this guy. . . . He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Rove did not seem to realize (or care) that the picture he painted tended to remind people of his own former boss George W. Bush rather than Obama. Also it was rather strange to accuse Obama, someone who had to struggle up from a tough childhood, of being a country-club elitist when McCain is one of the wealthiest people in the country, owning multiple expensive homes and cars. Rove was overreaching and this must have been due to overconfidence in his ability to remake an opponent's image. After all, he managed to make John Kerry seem like a liar and coward about his Vietnam service while his own team of George Bush and Dick Cheney did everything they could to successfully avoid going to Vietnam.

Although the experience argument was not persuasive to me personally, I thought that it could well turn out to be a winning message. Ever since 2001, there has been a deliberate campaign to make people fearful for their safety in order to push through policies that would have never had a chance otherwise, and many people are still looking for a protective father figure to be the president. McCain fitted that persona better than Obama, especially early in the campaign. Even at the end of the campaign, when voters spoke positively about why they prefer McCain, they often brought up the experience factor.

Although a campaign focused on experience was not an exciting message and McCain is by no means a charismatic person, by relentlessly drumming that message of experience versus celebrity lightness, he steadily kept closing the gap, from the lowest point in his polling on June 29 when he was at 40% and 7 points behind Obama, to within just one or two points by the end of August. Things seemed to be going well.

Then he picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate

Next: The wheels come off the Straight Talk Express.

POST SCRIPT: Ballot issues

Sad to say, California's proposition 8 denying gays the right to marry passed, as did other anti-gay measures in Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas. Although I am confident that full and equal rights for gays are inevitable, these results will set the achievement of that goal back by a few years.

The good news is that young people rejected the ban by margins of 2-1. This makes me hopeful that in the future such measures will be supported only by die-hard religious people, and they will not command a majority.

On the abortion front, South Dakota defeated the attempt to ban all abortions except in the case of rape or incest and Colorado defeated their anti-abortion initiative that sought to define a person to "include any human being from the moment of fertilization." California's attempt to limit abortion also seems likely to be defeated.

Meanwhile, the state of Washington allowed physician assisted suicide and Michigan approved the medical use of marijuana, both of which are positive steps.

November 05, 2008

A new hopeful beginning

As someone who has been a keen observer of politics all my life, it is easy to become cynical at times. After all, I have seen in this country and others government after government, politician after politician, come into power on promises that they would create a more just and equitable society, and end up serving the interests of only the rich and powerful. It is easy to conclude that democracy has failed its promise and that the whole exercise is a waste of time.

But sometimes, very rarely, something happens that restores my sense of hope and inspires me to dream big again, to think that despite detours we are on the right road, that peace and equality and justice for all, everywhere in the world, may not be an impossible dream after all.

I have seen two things that I thought I would never see in my lifetime. The first was the peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa. I thought that would never happen, let alone the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and his subsequent election as President of that country. I never in my wildest dreams thought that the Afrikaaners who ruled that country with a vicious grip would give up power without a bloody revolution.

The second impossible thing has now come to pass. A black man has been elected as president of the US. And even more improbably, someone with a strange, Muslim-sounding name and a foreign father, just seven years after the attack on the World Trade Center created a virulent strain of xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in the country.

And yet, here we are today, with Barack Hussein Obama poised to become the 44th president of the United States.

As I have said many times, I am not expecting too much from Barack Obama. He seems by nature to be a cautious, thoughtful, centrist, which makes all the allegations during the campaign that he was some kind of secret Islamic-Marxist-terrorist-Nazi all the more laughable. He does not strike me as having a radical agenda for change.

But my expectation of caution is not entirely due to his personality and temperament. People like him face the crushing burden of being a 'first' (the first minority or woman) to occupy a position, any position, previously only held by white men. Such people are hesitant to take risks because they have very little room for error. If they mess up, it will be portrayed by many as due to the inability of the entire group that they are taken to represent. George Bush is easily the worst president in US history, a colossal failure by any standards, but that is not taken as evidence of the incapacity of white males to do the job. But let Obama be even a modest failure, and he will set back the cause of black people for several generations. He knows this as well as any other minority or woman who breaks through a barrier, and this will make him hesitant to take bold steps.

What may yet make him a great transformational leader despite these constraints is not his own inclinations but the fact that he is inheriting a country and a world that is in a serious mess, driven into the ditch by the most incompetent American president in history. Obama's essential pragmatism, exceptional organizational skills, and ability to select and keep competent people to be around him (well exemplified by the smooth professionalism of his campaign) may result in him being forced to take radical steps simply to solve the deep problems he inherits, especially those of two unwinnable wars, and a hollowed out economy that is incapable of supporting the imperial ambitions of its current leadership

In that he may be like Franklin Delano Roosevelt elected in 1932 just after the collapse of the stock market in 1929 and at the beginning of the Great Depression. He was by no means a radical either but set in motion sweeping changes largely because he had to, and he had the persuasive skills to convince people that these were things that absolutely had to be done.

Obama faces similar challenges. He also has impressive persuasive and inspirational skills, similar to Roosevelt. But will he rise to the challenge as Roosevelt did? Or will his cautious nature allow him to be swayed by all those political insiders who will try and immediately surround him and persuade him to continue roughly along the same road that we have been going on, tinkering only at the edges?

I hope that Obama will either seize the moment, or be seized by it, to rise to greatness.

But that question will be answered in the future.

Today, I just want to savor the moment.

POST SCRIPT: Ashali

On Monday night my daughter Ashali attended a Joe Biden rally in Philadelphia and ended up on the stage behind Biden. The event was broadcast on CNN and a video clip ended up on YouTube. You can see her below the letters 'BA' in Barack.

November 04, 2008

The internet election

Today the seemingly interminable campaign comes to an end. My feeling is that this was the first real internet election, where this medium dominated the process. The internet has been at the forefront of organizing, fundraising, news gathering and dissemination, and analysis. It has profoundly changed the dynamics of campaigning for good and bad, but mostly for the good.

The speed and unfiltered nature of the internet can lead to the propagation of wild stories about candidates that have no basis in fact, and this election had them in plenty. It had been both disturbing and amusing to read the wild stories that have circulated. But at the same time, the investigation of these stories and their debunking also took place rapidly.

In past elections, the last two weeks of a campaign were when all the really dirty tricks were pulled and laws bent or broken. Voters would get pamphlets and phone calls conveying scurrilous and false information about opposing candidates or there would be efforts at intimidating and otherwise suppressing the votes of supporters of opponents. Such things would start out largely local and small scale and by the time it became significant enough to reach the attention of the major media, it would be too late to investigate and debunk before the election, and after the election people were too tired and dispirited to care as much about things that were now moot.

But in the age of the internet, last minute smears are not as effective. Word quickly gets out as to what is happening locally and people can compare notes and do their own investigation and combat the smears almost in real time. So the window during which you can launch an unrebutted smear has become much smaller, down to just one or two days before the election.

To some extent, the major media has been complicit in its own demise by not realizing that they could still fill a vital niche by providing time for genuinely knowledgeable people to speak about topics. While the internet does allow for people to get direct unfiltered news, there is definitely a role for some filtering system that can bestow a seal of credibility to otherwise unknown people who have nevertheless important information to share. For example, when Terry Gross interviews people on her NPR radio show Fresh Air, I listen even if I don't know the person simply because I assume that she would not put a total crackpot on the air. I have reasonable confidence that the interviewees have been screened and do have something useful to say, even if I disagree with them.

But much of the mainstream media has instead devoted far too much time to people and things that properly belong on the internet, namely trivial news and instant commentary and opinion by people who don't know much more than you or me.

For example, in my hotel room when I was staying in Las Vegas, after being driven from the casinos by its noise and garishness, I decided to do what I only do when I am staying at a hotel, and turned on the cable TV news channels. I do this periodically to confirm to myself what a waste of time such programming is and it did not disappoint.

I watched CNN for about an hour or so. Both Anderson Cooper and Larry King spent an inordinate amount of time on the sad story of Ashley Todd, the young Republican campaign volunteer who made up a story about being assaulted by a black Obama supporter who carved the letter B on her cheek.

In that one hour of TV I must have seen her 'perp walk' (where an accused person is escorted by police from a building to a car with hands handcuffed behind her back) at least half a dozen times. What is the point? True, to make up a story of a black man assaulting a young white woman because of her politics during an election campaign in which race is bubbling to the surface was a terrible thing to do. But once it was clear that the whole thing was a hoax concocted by a seriously disturbed woman, the news element of the story was over. What remained was only of interest to psychologists. Why was it necessary to repeatedly humiliate her by showing the perp walk? Even though she did an awful thing, as a result of this repeated showing, my sympathies were with her. These perp walks are a form of voyeurism that we can do without.

The rest of the time on CNN was spent with a panel of four people (two Obama supporters and two McCain supporters) discussing (actually talking over and through each other) about the Todd case and its implications for the election, Joe Biden's statement about the danger of a crisis and its implications for the election, the infighting in the McCain camp and its implications for the election, and Sarah Palin's shopping spree and dismissal of fruit fly research and (you guessed it) its implications for the election.

In other words, it was a total waste of time. There was not a single substantive issue discussed in any way that would have enlightened the viewer or provided a deeper understanding of anything, not even historical context. Everything was discussed in terms of the political process here and now and what effect it would have on the voting. These 'analysts' love to pontificate on how 'the voters' would react to some trivial news when they have no better idea than you or me. The time would have been far better spent having someone knowledgeable talk about why people study fruit flies.

After watching for a little over an hour, I had had enough. What amazes me is that these talk shows continue to have an audience day after day! What do people watch them for? Any actual new information can be gleaned within the first few minutes introducing the topic. There seems to be hardly any time when a genuinely knowledgeable person on some issue is brought in and allowed to explain it in depth. And of course, one is forced to endure the repeated commercial breaks.

In the days before the internet I would be forced to watch such shows in the hope that between these gabfests they would have some actual news. But now I can find news about any topic with just a few clicks in a few minutes.

Which brings me back to the mystery of why people still watch these so-called 'news' shows now that the internet can satisfy their news needs. Is it for the gladiatorial nature of the verbal jousting, seeing it as an alternative form of competitive sports? Do people get pleasure in seeing 'their' team get the better of a verbal duel with the opposing team?

Is it to actually see what semi-famous people look like? I must admit that it is marginally interesting to see and hear people whose names were familiar to me only from reading things by them or about them. For example, I now know what Bay Buchanan looks like, for whatever that is worth. But that has only a fleeting novelty value.

There must be something about these shows that I am missing, that keeps viewers returning. But what is it? I am truly baffled.

POST SCRIPT: Christianity as crazy as Scientology?

Bill Maher discusses politics and religion with Jon Stewart.

Part 1:

Part 2:

November 03, 2008

Sarah Palin's 'Checkers' speech

Most people have probably heard a reference to Richard Nixon's 'Checkers' speech.

Just a few days after he had been selected by Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 to be the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket, the New York Post ran a sensational article with the headline "Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary." This allegation of having a lavish personal lifestyle paid for by others outraged many Republicans, and leaders in the party called for his removal and replacement with someone not tainted by gifts from influence peddlers.

Faced with his imminent ouster, Nixon made a bold gamble, going on nationwide TV (not so common in those days) on September 23 with a speech defending himself. With his wife Pat by his side, he said that he had accepted $18,000 from this group but that it had been used to defray political expenses and that none of the money had gone for his personal use nor had he done any favors for the people who had given the money.

He then explained that he was not a rich man, came from a poor family, and described how he and Pat had struggled all their lives. He then went through his family finances in extraordinary detail to show that they were just regular folk, barely making ends meet.

What I am going to do -- and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics -- I am going at this time to give to this television and radio audio -- audience, a complete financial history, everything I've earned, everything I've spent, everything I own. And I want you to know the facts.
…
First of all, we've got a house in Washington, which cost $41,000 and on which we owe $20,000. We have a house in Whittier, California which cost $13,000 and on which we owe $3,000. My folks are living there at the present time.

I have just $4,000 in life insurance, plus my GI policy which I have never been able to convert, and which will run out in two years.

I have no life insurance whatever on Pat. I have no life insurance on our two youngsters, Patricia and Julie.

I own a 1950 Oldsmobile car. We have our furniture. We have no stocks and bonds of any type. We have no interest, direct or indirect, in any business. Now that is what we have. What do we owe?

Well, in addition to the mortgages, the $20,000 mortgage on the house in Washington and the $10,000 mortgage on the house in Whittier, I owe $4,000 to the Riggs Bank in Washington D.C. with an interest at 4 percent.

I owe $3,500 to my parents, and the interest on that loan, which I pay regularly, because it is a part of the savings they made through the years they were working so hard--I pay regularly 4 percent interest. And then I have a $500 loan, which I have on my life insurance. Well, that's about it. That's what we have. And that's what we owe. It isn't very much.

And then came the famous part that is still remembered and gave the speech its name:

I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.

One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don't they will probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election.

A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog, and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was?

It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers.

And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

That speech, though widely mocked now for its bathos, proved to be a political masterstroke and saved Nixon's career. Eisenhower was impressed and decided to keep him on and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket went on to win in a landslide. You can see the video of the speech.

I was reminded of the Checkers speech when Sarah Palin spoke recently in response to the news that the Republican party had spent $150,000 to purchase clothes for her and her family from high-end stores like Nieman-Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. This charge of living a lavish life funded by others was seen as seriously damaging to the image that was being created of her as being a simple hockey mom.

In trying to defuse the issue and regain her 'just regular folks' image, Palin gave a watered down version of Nixon's speech in which she said:

Those clothes, they are not my property. Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the RNC purchased, I'm not taking them with me. I am back to wearing my own clothes from my favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska.
…
Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of accessories, didn't think that we would be talking about it, but my earrings — I see a Native Americans for Palin poster… These are beaded earrings from Todd's mom who is a Yupik Eskimo up in Alaska, Native American, Native Alaskan.

And my wedding ring, it's in Todd's pocket, 'cause it hurts sometimes when I shake hands and it gets squished…A $35 wedding ring from Hawaii that I bought myself and 'cause I always thought with my ring it's not what it's made of, it's what it represents, and 20 years later, happy to wear it.

The speech was not as well crafted as Nixon's because Palin does not have the gift for maudlin self-pity that he had. It also did not have the same level of detail, but otherwise was true to the spirit of Checkers. All that was missing was the mention of a puppy.

POST SCRIPT: Palin falls for a prank call

A pair of well-known Canadian pranksters call in to a radio show on which Sarah Palin was featured and, talking in an exaggerated Inspector Clousseau-like French accent, pretend to be the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. She fell for it and hilarity ensues. You can listen to the conversation here.

The Candian Press describes the call in detail in which 'Sarkozy'

identifies French singer and actor Johnny Hallyday as his special adviser to the U.S., singer Stef Carse as Canada's prime minister and Quebec comedian and radio host Richard Z. Sirois as the provincial premier. . . . Finally, he mentions a notorious Hustler video titled "Nailin' Paylin," describing it as "the documentary they made on your life."

The mind boggles. How could Palin possibly have thought that the French president would violate all protocol and interfere in the elections of another country and contact an American candidate for the vice-presidency via a radio talk show? Surely it should have been clear to her midway through the interview that the guy was pulling her leg?

At the very end, the caller tells her she has been pranked. One can't help but feel sorry for her.

October 31, 2008

Obama's infomercial

I watched the 30-minute program on Wednesday that was produced by the Obama campaign. I watched out of curiosity more than anything else. Since I can't stand even 30-second advertising spots, I was expecting to be bored by what would essentially be a really long commercial. I even feared that it might be Obama giving one long speech. Although he gives good speeches, I am pretty much speeched out at this point.

It was not too bad though, not too cheesy, more along the lines of a PBS documentary, and had good production values. The cutting between the stories of families and his policy prescriptions was a good idea.

The ratings seem to indicate that it was a big success:

An infomercial on behalf of Mr. Obama was a smashing ratings success on Wednesday night, proving to be more popular than even the final game of the World Series — and last season's finale of "American Idol." The audience for Mr. Obama's program far exceeded the expectations of television executives — and many political pundits who questioned whether Mr. Obama was engaging in overkill in buying a half hour on so many networks.

Mr. Obama's 30-minute commercial, which played on seven networks, broadcast and cable, was seen by 33.55 million viewers, according to figures released by Nielsen Media Research.
…
"I was shocked by the number Obama was able to draw," said Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. "It's just a stunning number."

The early part was bit choppy and lacked continuity. I expected each family's story to be followed up by his solution for the specific problem they faced but the first two stories did not quite do that. For example, the second vignette featured an old couple who thought that had enough money to retire but the husband had to go back to work at Wal-Mart in order to pay his wife's medical bills. But Obama's plans to deal with health care did not immediately follow but came later in the program.

The second half of the program seemed to be much better. The segue at the end to the live rally in Florida was a bit gimmicky but smoothly done and showed that the campaign is capable of tight scripting and scheduling, right down to the very second.

Would the program have changed any voter's minds? I doubt it, and I expect the Obama camp does not expect to either. I suspect that the goal was to reassure those who have already decided to vote for him that they had made the right choice, to show Obama as a calm and thoughtful person, looking presidential. I think they succeeded in doing that.

One noteworthy feature of the program was that Obama did not mention John McCain even once. It was focused entirely on the problems faced by people and what he would do to address them. This quite a contrast with what the McCain-Palin duo has been doing recently. Their message has been highly Obama-focused, almost a non-stop attempt to portray Obama as a dangerous and mysterious and unknown and untested socialist-terrorist-radical, to which their supporters have added other weird things like saying he is a Muslim or even not an American. The complete nutcases have been trying to propagate even more bizarre stories, not worth retelling here.

McCain-Palin have even sunk to the character assassination of a respected Columbia University scholar Rashid Khalidi, using merely the fact that Khalidi is Palestinian to insinuate that he is a neo-Nazi. Josh Marshall and John Judis make the convincing case that the McCain-Palin campaign has to be the sleaziest and most despicable in modern American political history, which is saying a lot considering past campaigns run by the likes of Karl Rove and Lee Atwater.

It is also kind of a bizarre message at this late stage to try and raise such outlandish stories, considering that Obama has been running for president for about twenty months and has been under constant scrutiny. Will this strategy sway voters? I have no idea. I think it will energize the faithful and maybe cause some undecided people to perhaps vote for McCain.

I notice though that when McCain-Palin supporters are interviewed, after saying all these crazy things, they often end up saying that they could never vote for someone who was pro-choice. So ultimately, that is what is driving these people. They do not want a pro-choice president and are willing to say whatever is necessary to achieve their goal, even if it means lying. It is ironic that these people often call themselves 'Christian values voters'.

The infomercial was narrated by Obama himself, and it struck me that he has a very good radio voice, smooth and modulated. When he retires from politics, he could have a successful second career doing voice-over narration for documentaries or as an interviewer on NPR.

POST SCRIPT: The Great Schlep

Sarah Silverman urges young Jewish people to go to Florida and canvass their grandparents to support Obama. (Language advisory)

October 17, 2008

The Barack and Joe Show

I watched the final Obama-McCain debate. As usual, I found it hard to judge a 'winner', despite the fact that I used to debate myself and have judged debates. The problem is that when I was a debating judge, one used evidence, arguments, and coherence as major criteria. Personality traits, quirks, body language, etc, were not really factors to be considered, becoming significant only if they distracted from the major points.

But political debates are not like that. Because they are not an extended discussion focused on a single proposition but jump from topic to topic, the secondary criteria become far more important. It becomes more like a beauty contest, valuing style over substance.

Personally, I thought McCain did a lot better than he had in the past. He seemed more alert and feisty (perhaps a little too feisty at times) but he still gives the appearance of someone barely controlling his anger. Obama as usual seemed unflappable, even though he seemed on the defensive quite often. From what I read yesterday of what the professional pundit class said immediately after the debate, they seemed to roughly share my views.

So what are we to make of the immediate snap polls that show Obama a clear winner? (See here, here, and here.)

In the debates, viewers seem to be largely looking, not so much at issues, but how the candidates comport themselves, which is why the calm and collected Obama is wiping the floor with McCain. I think that what this reveals is not good news for McCain. I think that many people have made up their minds for Obama and their feeling that he had handily 'won' the debate simply reflects their sense that his performance affirmed their choice, that they had no second thoughts or regrets.

There is a good analysis by Joe Klein about how the professional pundit class simply has not caught up with the reality that the public's view of what is important has shifted drastically from what it was in the past, which is why they are caught flat-footed by events like these, not able to gauge the popular reaction.

Like almost everyone, I was startled by the starring role that Joe the plumber played in the debate. For those who haven't seen the video of the exchange between Obama and Joe that was constantly being referred to, here it is:

There have been suggestions that Joe was a McCain plant. His story seemed a little too conveniently suited to McCain's needs. A hard-working man, who after 15 years of putting in 12-hour days is finally able to buy a plumbing business that will provide him an income of $250,000, just the level at which Obama's tax plan raises taxes. He is now aggrieved that just as his hard work is paying off after all these years, he will be paying higher taxes to support poorer people who (by implication) are lazy good-for-nothings unwilling to work as hard as him. It tied in too neatly with what the McCain camp was saying.

DailyKos has done some research on plumber Joe and seems to find that rather than being your regular plumber thinking of starting his own business, three other businesses are owned in the same neighborhood by someone with the same name as him. He also does not have a plumber's license.

Furthermore he shares the same unusual last name as Robert Wurzelbacher, who is Charles Keating's son-in-law and also lives in the Cincinnati area like Joe. If you recall, Keating went to jail for defrauding investors in the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s. John and Cindy McCain were Keating's close friends and McCain was one of the Keating Five senators reprimanded for ethics violations for using his influence to help Keating.

It may be that Joe has no connections at all to Keating, and that Wurzelbacher is a common name in the Cincinnati area. I am sure that further inquiries will bring that information to light.

But while all very intriguing, for the purposes of the point I wish to make, it does not matter if Joe is a McCain plant or not. I had seen the exchange of Obama with Joe earlier this week and had been planning to write about it today. I thought the exchange was interesting and although Joe seemed to start and end the discussion as a McCain supporter, the way that Obama interacted with him was quite revealing about him and his policies.

It supported my view that these 'debates' should not be moderated at all but simply a free exchange between voters and the candidates so that we have more of these kinds of Joe-Obama discussions.

The voters could be selected randomly, like juries are, and they could ask the candidates anything they like and be allowed one follow up question, with the only restriction being a time limit for their questions to avoid speechifying. The only role for the moderator would be to keep tabs on the questioner's time.

I would not bother seeking out only so-called independents either. If people are genuinely uncommitted at this late stage, that means they have not really been paying attention. It should not matter if some of the people selected are rabid partisans out to 'get' the opposing candidate with difficult questions or throw softballs at their own or are even nutcases asking off-the-wall questions. How candidates respond to such people says a lot about them, and we are likely to learn a lot more about them in this format than from the current one that favors regurgitation of talking points and bits of stump speeches.

The trouble with having the present professional-journalist-as-moderator format is that these establishment journalists select questions about the kinds of things that they want to talk about and are drearily predictable. As a result, even the people offering up questions at these 'town hall' sessions tend to pose the kinds of questions that they think the moderators will like and thus select. No wonder these debates tend to be snoozers.

I think seeing more encounters like Obama and Joe (whether he was a McCain plant or not) would be far more interesting.

POST SCRIPT: Palin supporters

Al Jazeera interviews some of the people attending a Sarah Palin rally. Disturbing.

October 16, 2008

Sarah, mean and small

Like most people, I was startled by the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. My first reaction was that it was a bad choice, for reasons that I wrote extensively about earlier. (See list of 'Recent Entries' on the right.)

My misgivings with her were mainly because there are too many potential hazards with thrusting an unknown and unexamined person suddenly into the media spotlight. Although I have never been a fan of Joe Biden, his selection did not set off similar alarm bells because he has been around so long that there were unlikely to be any unpleasant surprises surfacing during the campaign

I also knew when her selection was announced that there was an ongoing ethics investigation ('troopergate') into Palin's attempts to fire her ex-brother-in-law and I did not believe that McCain would choose someone with something so potentially serious hanging over her head right in the middle of a campaign

It was not that I did not think she was competent for the position of vice president and potentially president. There are probably many unpolished gems among the population, who could turn out to be great leaders if given the opportunity. I simply did not know enough about her leadership qualities to make such a judgment.

But now the evidence is in. Subsequent events have made it pretty clear that far from being an uncut diamond, she is pure rhinestone, all flash and no substance. Her two interviews with people like Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, well-known for conducting celebrity-style interviews and hardly noted for their aggressive questioning, revealed someone completely out of her depth even in responding to boilerplate questions. She seems to be lacking in curiosity, and unable to string coherent thoughts together or even speak in understandable sentences. Since then she has retreated to the bosom of sycophantic followers, giving interviews only to people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Hugh Hewitt.

She has not held a single press conference, an astonishing thing for someone who aspires to the second highest office in the land.

But what has really turned me off is that she has revealed personality traits that are unbecoming in a leader. They show that she is a petty, small-minded, and vindictive person, who has few if any scruples about attacking her perceived opponents, willing to sink to depths that are deplorable even by partisan political standards.

She seems to not care about truth and seems comfortable constructing an alternative reality to shield her from it. One sign was her willingness to repeat over and over again to her adoring fans the lie about her saying 'thanks but no thanks' to the 'bridge to nowhere', even after that assertion had been thoroughly documented to be false.

Another was her recent assertion that the troopergate report released last week completely cleared her of any hint of ethics violations when it explicitly stated: "Finding Number One of the report says: "I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act."

Such things are amazingly brazen and show a disconcerting disconnect either from reality or from truth. Is it any wonder that the Anchorage Daily News describes her response as 'Orwellian' and that it was "an embarrassment to Alaskans and the nation"?

The troopergate report also revealed a degree of startling degree of vindictiveness and abuse of power. The extent that she and her husband went to get her ex-brother-in-law fired, even to the extent of firing his boss for not firing him (which would itself have violated civil service rules), shows a creepy obsessiveness that is disturbing.

The newspaper went on "They had no sense that the power of the governor's office carries a special responsibility not to use it to settle family scores. They had no sense that legal restrictions might prevent the troopers from firing Wooten. They had no sense that persistent queries from the governor's office might be perceived as pressure to bend state personnel laws."

People who abuse their authority over others should never be put in a position of power.

Her casual use of language to suggest that Obama is some kind of dangerous and unknown person who 'palls around with terrorists' suggests a reckless disregard for the basic elements of decency. In watching those clips of her saying such things, one did not get the sense of someone performing a distasteful task because of orders from the campaign. She was acting like she thought it was perfectly acceptable, even enjoying it. She actually seems to revel in the muck.

It should also be remembered that the alleged 'terrorist' William Ayers, whatever his past, is still alive and living in Chicago as a professor of education at a university there. He is not some fugitive in hiding. Repeatedly and publicly calling him a terrorist in these inflamed times is to encourage some crazy person to try and harm him.

The Republican Party has a range of people from old-style establishment conservatives to right wing extremists. The establishment conservatives tend to value knowledge and expertise and know that one has to deal with reality. They clung on to their party even when George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove systematically set about creating an alternative reality, manufacturing 'facts' to suit their needs, shredding the protections of the constitution, plunging the country into disastrous and immoral wars, crating skyrocketing budget deficits by massive tax giveaways to the rich, and using torture on prisoners.

But Sarah Palin has proved too much even for these loyal establishment conservatives. They see her as beyond the pale and one now sees a steady stream of them announce that they cannot support her and are either calling for her to be dropped from the ticket or saying they are going to vote for Obama, even as the rabid base calls upon her to increase her vicious attacks.

It is too late for McCain to drop her, of course. The two are now joined at the hip, for better or (more likely) for worse.

Sarah Palin has become the bridge to nowhere for the Republican Party.

POST SCRIPT: John Cleese on Sarah Palin

He finds her even funnier than the other Palin.

October 15, 2008

McCain's debate dilemma

It was no secret that the McCain-Palin campaign was in trouble two weeks ago. With the elections looming, they were stagnant in the polls. The Palin boomlet was gone and she was increasingly seen as a liability, firing up the base but alienating pretty much everyone else. McCain's stunt of 'suspending' his campaign to solve the financial crisis was widely viewed as at best erratic and at worst a pathetic attempt to gain attention.

As was predicted by many observers, the campaign tried to turn things around by going nasty, attempting to paint Obama as the 'Dangerous Other', the person who is 'not like us'. There were allegations by McCain and Palin that we don't really know who he is, that Obama has mysterious past that is unexamined, and that he has perhaps secrets that he wants to conceal.

These kinds of vague suspicion dropping are meant to create a canvas onto which people can project their own fears and phantasms. And the crowds at the McCain-Palin rallies and the third-tier pundit fringe in the media dutifully obliged. Obama is secretly a Muslim, Obama is an Arab, Obama is a terrorist (for some of the more deranged and ignorant, all three are equivalent), Obama is a radical, and so on. Of course, the fact that Obama is black was undoubtedly enough fire up the racist elements. .

Palin's comment that Obama 'does not see America like you and me' and has been 'palling around with terrorists' was a particular low point, inciting some people to yell out 'traitor'.

It is true that anybody in a crowd can shout out unpleasant things. It is the climate that the speaker sets up and how he or she responds that is significant. It is an unfortunate fact of life that it really does not take much talent to be a rabble-rouser. People have pent up latent hostilities and insecurities that they normally keep a lid on for fear of societal disapproval. But when a public figure seems to signal approval of such sentiments by silence and even encourages it in crowds, the top comes off and the hate spews out.

This is what we have seen in the last week or so. The response by the crowds at the rallies to this kind of incitement has been downright ugly, shouting epithets, and for many days McCain and Palin did not rebuke them.

But taking this low road does not seem to have worked. The polls have shown increasing levels of public disapproval of both of them, their support has dropped precipitously, and even their supporters in the establishment have voiced concern at the ugliness. Establishment conservatives are finding the campaign increasingly distasteful and counterproductive and are beginning to say so, further enraging the third-tier pundit brigade.

But even on this issue McCain is erratic. After a supporter at a rally last Monday asked McCain when he was 'going to take the gloves off' (i.e., be even more direct about these types of allegations) McCain responded to the delight of the crowd 'How about tomorrow?" It seemed like was signaling that he was going to be on the attack at last Tuesday's debate and no doubt many of his supporters tuned in hoping to see fireworks. Instead they saw a seemingly befuddled McCain whose main attack on Obama was that he supported an earmark request for a new projection system to replace the forty-year old one at the popular Adler planetarium.

This opened the door for the Obama campaign to gently taunt him and raise issues of cowardice. In an interview with ABC's Charles Gibson, Obama expressed surprise that McCain had not said the things he says in rallies to his face. Biden also chimed in that in his neighborhood if you had something bad to say about someone, you said it to his face.

When Gibson later told McCain about Obama's comments, McCain was clearly on the defensive and said that no one could accuse him of being a coward.

More recently, McCain has rebuked some of the people at some rallies who have raised these issues while at other times has repeated those insinuations, the switch sometimes occurring within the space of fifteen minutes. Then yesterday, McCain has again promised to be aggressive at tonight's debate.

It seems like either he is not sure what to do or is trying to keep Obama off balance, not sure what to expect.

So which McCain is going to turn up at tonight's debate? I am told that the format will be like the first, a more free-wheeling format that allows for more digressions and debate and allows the candidates to bring up issues not related to the questions.

His extremist supporters are expecting him to really sock it to Obama and if he doesn't they are going to be disgruntled, to put it mildly. But history indicates that revealing a nasty side with personal attacks in these debates is a losing proposition.

On the other, the fact that the Obama camp is taunting him with insinuations of cowardice must rankle McCain who likes to portray himself as a hero. The fact that McCain has a volatile temper and flies into uncontrollable rages is well known, although not publicly seen on the campaign so far. The possibility that McCain might be goaded into losing control must be causing some concern to his campaign managers. There must also be the fear that the Obama camp is trying to get him to take the bait and personally attack because they have a response ready.

So while there is a global financial crisis, two wars underway, major problems with health care to be addressed, and large numbers of people losing their homes, what we have is a psychodrama, worthy of a TV show, as to who will win the debate mind game.

We can pretty much expect that the Obama we will see tonight is the same one we have seen all along: cool and cerebral. He is not going to fire anyone up but he is not going to make a fool of himself either.

But which McCain will show up? The sometimes confused grandpa figure, constantly talking about earmarks and how he is a maverick? Or the sneering, disdainful, and arrogant figure, the person who earned the nickname McNasty?

Stay tuned.

POST SCRIPT: Obama = Lisa?

And now a Simpsons metaphor for the candidates.

October 09, 2008

Reflections on the debates

Here's an old joke:

There was this old man who had a favorite hunting story that he liked to tell over and over. Even though his friends and family had heard it many times, he was always looking for a suitable opportunity in any gathering to repeat it.

At one function, there was no break in the conversation that gave him the chance, so he took his walking stick and, when no one was looking, struck the ground hard with it, making a loud report.

In the startled silence that followed, he said "What's that? A gun shot? Well, talking about guns . . ."

Ok, so it's not a great joke. Not even a good one. I am terrible at telling jokes and don't even remember them shortly after hearing them.

The point is that that old joke suddenly popped into my head during the Obama-McCain debate, when McCain took whatever opportunity he got to go on about earmarks. It seems like it is his favorite topic, something that he works into every speech and interview, delighting in the details.

He went on about the three million dollar earmark that Obama, as part of the Illinois delegation, had requested for an 'overhead projector', implying that this for something you find in any classroom and was a boondoggle. It was actually for a projector for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, to project the night sky onto the dome. It is the oldest planetarium in the US and whose current projector is forty years old. Those projectors are expensive.

But that was not my point. Sure, earmarks are not good budget practice. But they are not the worst things in the world. In fact, in the grand scheme of things within the US budget, they are rather small potatoes. If you get rid of every earmark, you would still have huge financial problems. McCain's seems overly obsessed with them even as we are talking of trillion dollar bailouts and while he wants to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to wealthy people.

At some point, you begin to wonder whether McCain's focus on earmarks is a way to avoid talking about real budgetary issues. It seems to have become a gimmick, a way to score cheap points.

The debate itself was a rather boring, I thought. The candidates pretty much rehashed the same things they have been saying for a long time. I didn't think there was a clear winner but the snap polls all indicate that Obama won quite handily. (See here, here, and here.)

The format was awful. So far, only the first debate was a real debate. At times, both candidates seemed to want to break free of the rigid constraints and get more free-wheeling but the smug and self-important moderator Tom Brokaw (easily one of the most annoying people on network news, even worse than Gwen Ifill who moderated the vice presidential debate) kept reining them in, reminding them about the rules that had been agreed upon. His selection of questions was mediocre.

But if the candidates themselves wanted to change the rules in mid-debate, why shouldn't they be allowed to? (There was a great episode in The West Wing when at the beginning of a presidential debate, just after the moderator had read all the detailed rules about time limits and no cross-talk and the like, the candidates decided to chuck them and simply talk back and forth. Too bad that only happens in fiction.)

One item that irritated me was McCain's repeated claim that he knows how to get Bin Laden:

He has said this before, and at other times has also said that he knows how to end the war in Iraq. But if he does know how to do all these things, why has he not told President Bush? Surely, if he "puts country first" then he should have told Bush his secret plans a long time ago to get the country out of the current mess, rather than using it as a lure to get people to vote for him. What if he loses? Is he going to take his secret plans and sulk, refusing to share it with anybody, like a spoiled child? Why doesn't someone question him on the ethics of keeping it secret? It reminded me of Nixon's 'secret' plan to end the Vietnam war.

Meanwhile, last week, NBC news anchor Brian Williams and David Letterman had a surprisingly thoughtful analysis of the campaign so far and the vice-presidential debate (except for some nonsense midway about how great Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert are):

Part 1:

Part 2:

Letterman made a good observation about Sarah Palin taking everyone by surprise with her opening "Can I call you Joe" remark to Biden as they were being introduced. I too thought it a little odd but put it down to a mere affectation. Letterman thinks that she did this in order to set up her planned line "Say it ain't so, Joe" later in the debate. Since it has become clear that during the debate she was reading much of her responses from cue cards, that kind of set up for a 'zinger' would not surprise me.

POST SCRIPT: Train metaphor for candidates

One thing that struck me during the debate was that McCain looked and walked and talked like an old man. His allusions were dated. Some older people have an old-world style is graceful and charming and even reassuring. But McCain just comes across as out of touch and cranky.

(Thanks to a commenter at DailyKos.)

If you liked the train metaphor, then take a look at this one.

October 08, 2008

Obama and the Bradley effect

Will attempts by the McCain camp to paint Obama as some kind of sinister and dangerous figure work?

Analysts seem to feel that such smear campaigns can be effective at times. Recall the absurd situation in 2004 where John Kerry's actual service in Vietnam was ridiculed and called into question by the supporters of Bush and Cheney, both of whom were draft dodgers. Recall also the anti-gay marriage sentiment that seemingly played an important role in that same election.

So far, the normal hot-button issues of sexual orientation and abortion and guns have not played prominent roles in the campaign. This leaves race as the emotional issue that can be exploited. And rest assured it will be, along with all kinds of attempts to impugn the character of Obama using guilt by association.

In trying to run a smear campaign, the McCain campaign is hampered by its own baggage. For every attempt to paint Obama as an elitist, we have the McCains' dozen (?) homes, thirteen cars, and private plane, and the fact that the outfit that Cindy McCain wore at the Republican convention allegedly cost around $300,000.

If they bring up Rev. Jeremiah Wright, they have Sarah Palin's own associations with extreme religious groups, including the weird Rev. Thomas Muthee who blessed her gubernatorial campaign and who prides himself on being able to find witches and run them out of town.

For every Tony Rezko they can dredge up from Obama's past, McCain has his own Charles Keating and his campaign with lobbyists associated with the current financial debacle.

For every allegedly America-hating William Ayers, Palin's flirtation with the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party can be brought up.

Furthermore, Wright and Rezko and Ayers are now old news, their fifteen minutes of fame come and gone, and it is unclear if they will have a serious effect even if they are dusted off and polished to seem like new.

This leaves only race as a major factor to be exploited. And I am afraid it will be. Some months ago Jon Stewart interviewed Barack Obama during the primaries and asked him whether he had a secret plan to enslave white people if he became president. This got a laugh from Obama and the audience but like much of the humor in The Daily Show, it works because it is based on an uneasy reality.

There are undoubtedly some white people who are afraid of giving power to black people. They cannot hide from themselves the fact that black people have been treated atrociously in this country. They fear retribution and wonder if they should take the chance of putting black people in positions of authority. Such people will never vote for 'the black guy'.

We saw some of that sentiment expressed in the primaries, where the Appalachian regions went heavily against Obama and in favor of Hillary Clinton. This Al Jazeera report on racism in Kentucky is striking in the openness of those who think racially.

The question is how far the McCain campaign will be willing to go to grow the size of this group of people by stoking their racial animosities and fears. My sense is that they are willing to go to the very bottom of the sewer and will only desist if it seems to be not working or is backfiring on them.

When Obama's supporters urge him to go for the jugular in response, to take the attack to McCain and Palin, they are ignoring the delicate situation that he is in because of his ethnicity. He cannot take the risk of appearing to be the 'angry black guy'. He has to be passionate but not angry, forceful but not threatening. It is to his credit that he managed to do that so far.

Obama seems to be by nature a cool, cerebral and thoughtful person, and he has reinforced this perception by surrounding himself with solid establishment figures like Warren Buffett, Robert Rubin, and the like. Of course, this also opens him to the charge of being 'elitist', which has become a vague term to suggest that he is smarter than the rest of us and that this is somehow a bad thing.

Then there is the so-called 'Bradley effect' that says that in elections in which a black candidate runs against a white one, opinion polls tend to exaggerate the support for the black candidate because some white people are reluctant to tell posters they are voting for the white candidate for fear of being called racist.

The name comes from the 1982 race for California governor in which the black mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley was leading in the polls all the way to election day, and even in exit polls on that day, only to suffer a shocking defeat when the votes were counted. Subsequent studies revealed that white voters had voted for Bradley in smaller numbers than the polls had led one to expect. Some analysts argue that Obama needs a huge lead in the polls to compensate for the inevitable swing away from him on polling day.

Other analysts argue, based on subsequent congressional and gubernatorial elections, that the Bradley effect has largely disappeared over time. Note that they are not saying that race-based voting has disappeared. There are definitely people who will not vote for 'the black guy' because he is black. What these analysts are saying is that there is no evidence from recent elections that people are hiding their voting preferences from pollsters because of fears of being called racist, and so there is no significant, hidden, systematic racial bias in poll responses.

But there has been no presidential election where the Bradley effect has been put to the test. This election may well be the most heavily polled in history. Right now, Obama leads in the national polls by an average of about 6.0 points which, if it holds up, should be enough of a cushion for him, even if there is a residual Bradley effect at play. The results on election day will reveal to what extent the Bradley effect is still a factor.

POST SCRIPT: Evolutionists flock to Darwin stain!

It's a miracle and proof that Darwin's theory of evolution is true.

October 07, 2008

Brace yourself

Breaking news: Barack Obama is black.

It is quite remarkable how little salience that fact has had in the race so far considering that if he wins, the election of the first non-white president of the United States is an event of major historic significance. While his ethnicity is a complex one, he cannot escape (and has in fact wisely embraced) the shorthand description of being black. For his campaign to have insisted on accuracy would have been to draw attention to trivial questions of race and ethnicity that are at best distractions and at worst would make race too important an issue.

When Obama speaks in a debate or gives speeches or is interviewed, the fact that he is black is not the most prominent impression he makes, at least for me. It is just an incidental item that registers in the background, like that he is tall or slim. Obama is on his way to becoming the Tiger Woods of politics. Just as the latter is no longer 'the black golfer', Barack Obama has almost, but not quite, reached the stage of not being 'the black presidential candidate'. That is quite an achievement.

But the next month will see if he has made the complete transition to Tigerness. We are now entering the last stages of the presidential campaign, something I have been long dreading. With the McCain candidacy declining steadily in the polls and on a direct path to losing despite the Hail Marys thrown by them (selecting Sarah Palin and 'suspending' his campaign because of the financial crisis), you can expect them to now do desperate things.

By this I mean going well beyond the standard negative campaigning tactics of distorting your opponent's record, taking their statements out of context, impugning motives, and focusing on style in order to give misleading impressions. Those things have always been part of politics.

No, I expect them to go nuclear, throwing everything at Obama to make him into the stereotype of the dangerous black man, to seek to change his image from that of a Tiger Woods to more of a Dennis Rodman, to transform him in the eyes of white people from someone whom you would welcome into your home to the kind of person you cross the street to avoid.

The McCain camp has already telegraphed their disgusting strategy and Sarah Palin has started the process:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" because of his association with a former 1960s radical, stepping up the campaign's effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters.
. . .
Falling behind Obama in polls, the Republican campaign plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain's message in the final weeks of the presidential race.
. . .
Palin's remark about Obama "palling around with terrorists" comes as e-mails circulate on the Internet with suggestions that the Democratic candidate is secretly a radical, foreign-born Muslim with designs against the U.S. — even though Obama is a native of Hawaii, a Christian and has no connections to Muslim extremists.

McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis (himself now under a cloud because of revelations of his lobbying links to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) spelled out how such character assassinations are done.

The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don't agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter's basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate's natural supporters.
. . .
It's not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate's political weakness.

(Thanks to BarbinMD for the link.)

Ironically, when Davis wrote the above, he was accusing those in favor of George W. Bush of using those very same dirty tactics against McCain in the 2000 Republican primary campaign when Bush was losing to McCain. Bush went on to win. Since McCain has now hired many of those very same Bush operatives to run his 2008 campaign, we should not be surprised to see a reprise of those tactics, now used by McCain against Obama.

One important factor in a successful smear campaign is the ability to create an 'echo chamber' for these slurs, to get it widely circulated in the media. The current financial crisis has been getting banner headlines and has been used to scare people into voting for this huge bailout. Given that financial issues are using up so much media airtime, it may be harder to get traction for this strategy. I suspect that people are more likely to be swayed by extraneous things when there are no major issues gripping their attention.

So will the McCain-Palin attempt at raising so-called character issues at such a time work? Or will it be seen as fiddling while Rome burns?

Frankly, I am not a good judge of whether raising extraneous issues will succeed. I don't have a good feel for the pulse of the people. I really should get out more.

While I am very cynical of the way the government serves mainly the interests of the rich and powerful and influential, I am usually more hopeful about the good nature and good sense of people in general over the long term. Each election time I think that people will not be swayed by trivialities and will vote on the basis of what truly will affect their lives. And while most are like that, unfortunately there do seem to be some people who can be swayed by such appeals to their fears and intolerance.

Whether those numbers will be enough to sway the outcome of this election is something I cannot gauge.

Tomorrow: More on racial politics

POST SCRIPT: And now, live, the vice presidential debate!

Saturday Night Live had its by now obligatory Sarah Palin parody with Tina Fey, with the bonus of Queen Latifah playing moderator Gwen Ifill.

October 06, 2008

Government of the Dow, by the Dow, for the Dow

The recent financial crisis and the frantic (and finally successful) attempt by the government and Wall Street to strong-arm the public to provide immediate relief to the very institutions that caused the crisis is striking evidence, if anyone needed it, of exactly for whose benefit the government is run: Wall Street. You can ignore all the blather about how this bailout was needed to prevent ordinary people from financial ruin. That may or may not be true. What is indubitable is that if Wall Street interests were not at stake, nothing would have been done.

As was clearly evident in the past week, while the government can drag its feet for decades, say it is too expensive, and take no action to solve urgent problems like health care, when it comes to giving away nearly a trillion dollars to the financial industry, it can act with lightning speed. And you can be sure that when this money runs out (as it surely will as Wall Street institutions get their greedy hands on it) and next financial 'crisis' appears, we will be asked to cough up even more, and told that otherwise the sacrifices we have already made will be 'wasted'. This is the same argument given for continuing the war in Iraq.

Although I have written quite a bit in recent days about the crisis and the economy and think I have at least some understanding of how things work, one thing I don't understand is how the stock market works. I understand the mechanics of it, of course, but have long given up trying to understand what makes it go up or down on any given day.

It seems to me that stock prices are only loosely based on the actual health and performance of companies and the general economy, and more on expectations of what will happen in the future. It is not based on current data but on predictions of future data. It is closer to astrology or soothsaying than science.

I can pinpoint the very event that made me give up on the whole business as being hopelessly irrational.

Emperor Hirohito of Japan (1901-1989) was the symbolic head of Japan from 1926 until his death. He was revered by his people and considered by many to be a god-king. He was quite ill during the last decade of his life and close to death on many occasions.

I was intrigued and amused by the fact that the Japanese stock market would go up and down quite dramatically based on rumors about his health, and the news organizations would solemnly report with a straight face things like, "The Japanese stock market dropped sharply today on news that Emperor Hirohito's health had taken a turn for the worse."

This was, of course, absurd. The emperor was very old, had been ill for a long time, and was a purely symbolic head of state and had no say whatsoever on how the government or the economy was run. It would be like the British stock indices fluctuating on rumors about the Queen of England. The reaction of the stock market seemed to me then, and still seems now, to be hopelessly irrational.

Although I do not invest directly in the stock market (although my retirement funds are presumably invested in it), I do an experiment on days when there is some fairly big news event, either political or financial. After I listen to the news, I try to predict what that news will do to the stock market that day. I find that there is little or no correlation. If anything, I am more often wrong than right, that what I see as bad news for the economy sends the stock market up, and vice versa. It is clear that I will never get rich speculating as a day trader.

A couple of years ago, Bob Garfield on the show On the Media had a droll report on how the media and financial analysts try to come up with simple explanations to explain the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, usually based on nothing more than sheer guesswork or story-telling.

This is why I never take seriously those people who urge policies based on the stock market fluctuations. They are usually self-serving rationalizations for what they want to do.

For example, on Monday, September 29, the House of Representatives surprisingly defeated the Paulson bailout plan on a close vote. As you can see from the graph, the Dow Jones index immediately headed down, plunging 777 points, and that drop was blamed directly on the vote.

People were issuing dire warnings that it would continue that deep decline and we would all have our retirement funds disappear if Congress did not reverse itself and pass the Paulson plan immediately.

The next day the House was not in session due to a religious holiday and the Dow went up nearly 500 points. Did people conclude that sending Congress on vacation was good for the market? Of course not. They found some other fatuous reason.

Then the Senate passed a revised plan late on Wednesday evening and the market should have been happy on Thursday but it wasn't. (It feels so absurd to ascribe human emotions to the stock market, an institution that deals impersonally with billions of transactions daily but we now take such absurdities for granted.) The stock market declined steeply all through the day, losing about 350 points, for no reason that I could see.

Tension then mounted as the House came back in session on Friday to vote on this new package. The market started the day up and kept rising, gaining about 300 points by 1:00 pm, reaching a peak of 10,766. The House voted at that time and passed the measure quite easily.

Since we were told that the House failing to pass a bailout plan on Monday was the cause of the steep decline that day, you would expect that passing it now would be an occasion for joy. What actually happened was that right after the vote, the market immediately went into a steep decline, losing 450 points to end the day with a net loss.

To me this makes no sense at all. Maybe, to use the phrase coined by MIT professor of business Dan Ariely and which is the title of his book, the market is 'predictably irrational', meaning that there is some method in its seeming madness and I am not expert enough to see it.

As long as the stock market was tethered to the underlying real economy, that may have been true. But I think that the present out-of-control virtual economy, generated by financial institutions that have been allowed to speculate wildly using debt-based securities that were free from regulations and oversight, has resulted in the stock market being connected to the real economy by the slenderest of threads, making rational decision-making impossible.

Maybe it is truly rational and there are people who actually understand it. I know I don't.

POST SCRIPT: Paulson's history

This article points out the little publicized fact that Treasury Secretary Paulson, while head of Goldman Sachs, advocated the very policies that led to the current crisis. And now he has been given a huge check from the taxpayers to 'solve' the very problem he helped create. Nice work if you can get away with it.

Paulson, according to a celebratory 2006 BusinessWeek article entitled "Mr. Risk Goes to Washington," was "one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in their pursuit of profits." Under Paulson's watch, that meant "taking on more debt: $100 billion in long-term debt in 2005, compared with about $20 billion in 1999. It means placing big bets on all sorts of exotic derivatives and other securities."

According to the International Herald Tribune, Paulson "was one of the first Wall Street leaders to recognize how drastically investment banks could enhance their profitability by betting with their own capital instead of acting as mere intermediaries." Paulson "stubbornly assert[ed] Goldman's right to invest in, advise on and finance deals, regardless of potential conflicts."

In testimony in 2000 before the Securities and Exchanges Commission, Paulson as head of Goldman Sachs, argued that Wall Street should be allowed to regulate itself.

Meanwhile, Rep. Brad Sherman of California describes the horror scenarios painted for lawmakers in private sessions before the Monday vote to try and scare them into voting for the bill.

October 02, 2008

Sarah Palin, a river of babble-on*

Tonight the nation finally gets to see Sarah Palin live and unplugged, presumably speaking unscripted.

The last three weeks have been mixed for her. On the one hand, she has drawn large and adoring crowds to rallies and meetings, being a bigger attraction than John McCain or Joe Biden. But despite this, her campaign has gone to extraordinary lengths to shield her from reporters. The two interviews she gave to Charles Gibson of ABC News and Katie Couric of CBS News were excruciatingly painful to watch, as you can judge for yourself from these excerpts from the latter.

Did that make any sense at all? Was there even a sentence in that mish-mash of words?

Ok, maybe that was a bad patch. Anyone can have an occasional brain-freeze. Let's look at an extended clip.

Apart from some flashes of coherence, she again seems to free-associate, gets lost in run-on sentences, degenerates into childish language ("good guys" and "bad guys"?), and throws in a few non-sequiturs for good measure And what was all that about "It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to, to our state."

Is she suggesting that Russian planes routinely violate US airspace over Alaska? Does the Pentagon know this? And are we dependent on the good people of Alaska to keep an eye on Russia and be the early-warning system? Jesus's General thinks that Putin may be keeping a similar eye on Palin.

Here is another extended segment from the Couric interview. It is not reassuring.

What is disturbing is that the kinds of questions Couric asked were ones that could have been predicted, so she should have had reasonable answers ready. There were no questions on obscure matters or that required knowledge of esoteric details. When unable to come up with even an incoherent response, Palin resorts to an exaggerated aw-shucks, I'm-just-a-country-girl shtick that is cringe-inducing.

The inability to be specific and to wander off into mindless generalities is very much on display here, where she is asked to name another Supreme Court decision she disagrees with other than Roe v. Wade.

After not being able to name a single case, she wanders into a thicket of words about the rights of states to decide issues and how she and McCain will change that. Really.

And again here, when she is asked what she reads to get her information.

After saying at one point, incredibly, that she reads 'all of them', she again avoided the question by switching it to an aggrieved implication that people who ask such things must be thinking that Alaskans are ignorant hicks.

She is clearly filibustering, emitting a cloud of words to hide her ignorance.

Palin seems to have been told by her advisors to hit certain talking points and she seems determined to do so whatever the question, come hell or high water. As a result her answers start to wander all over the map as she searches for ways to include each point and she ends up not knowing how to complete the sentence she started. She reminds me of some physics students who, when asked a question to which they do not know the answer, try to bluff their way out by using words like 'energy' and 'entropy', hoping that this will mask their lack of understanding and give their ramblings a veneer of reasonableness. The result is not pretty.

She is undoubtedly articulate and must have some political smarts to be able to reach the level of governor of a state. It is quite possible that she is both smart and ignorant. A lot of politicians are. But what is clear is that she does not know how to use 'political speak' to hide her ignorance the way most seasoned politicians do. She does not how and when to stop talking when she has nothing to say.

It is not that she does not know specific pieces of knowledge that is troubling. It is that she, like George Bush, does not seem interested or curious enough to have even thought about these things. She, like Bush, seems to work off some ideological template that spits out decisions and actions with little deliberation or thoughtfulness.

The reviews of her interview performances have been devastating (see here and here.) The campaign seems so nervous about letting her loose that they would not even let her talk to the press to praise her partner after the Obama-McCain debate (a routine duty for running mates), and instead had her watch the debate in a Philadelphia bar.

But she got into trouble the next day when in, response to a question from a bystander, she seemed to be supporting the position Obama had taken on Pakistan and which McCain had taken pains to criticize just the day before in the debate. Was she not even paying attention to the debate? McCain then had to embarrassingly disavow her comments.

By now everyone must have seen the devastating parody of the Couric interview on Saturday Night Live, made worse by the fact that on many occasions they used her actual words. Though Tina Fey got most of the laughs as Palin, Amy Poehler should get a lot of credit for her dead-on impression of Couric, faced with stream-of-consciousness incoherence, desperately trying to look as if it made some sense.

One of the best things about the first Obama-McCain debate was the more free-wheeling format that encouraged back and forth exchanges, though the candidates took some time to get used to it. It was much more like a true debate although McCain failed to exploit its potential by speaking directly to Obama, for which he has been rightly criticized.

It appears that the McCain camp wants to have a much more structured form for the VP debate, reverting to the 'joint press conference' format, with very little time for back-and-forth, presumably so that Palin will not have to improvise as much and can stick to scripted answers.

In these debates, part of the tactics is lowering the expectations of your own candidate as much as possible since 'victory' is measured (at least by the pundits) by how well you exceed them. The McCain camp has succeeded so well that if Palin just manages to speak in complete sentences, she will have done well, irrespective of what she actually says.

I think she will do a lot more. It is likely that she will come out with both guns blazing, armed with prepared quips and one-liners, trying to resurrect the convention image of the tough, spunky, fast-talking, barb-throwing, woman-of-the-people that so endears her to the party faithful. Whatever the question, she will fill the allotted 90 seconds or whatever by stringing together some tested applause lines.

As a result, she may well succeed in impressing some people.

It should be an interesting evening, though likely to lack much substance.

(* Idea for pun courtesy of that champion of snark Tbogg.)

POST SCRIPT: Bad Disney movie trailer

In an interview, actor Matt Damon said that the selection of Sarah Palin by John McCain was like the plot of a bad Disney movie. Now you can actually see the trailer of that movie.

Damon was also disturbed by reports that Palin thinks humans co-existed with dinosaurs and hopes she will be questioned about it, saying "I need to know if she really think that dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. I want to know that, I really do. Because she's gonna have the nuclear codes."

October 01, 2008

Gambling John McCain

John McCain is known as a lifelong gambler relishing visits to casinos. I have written before that I thought John McCain is also hot-headed and reckless. All these are not signs of the temperament required for a head of state. But his performance last week was extraordinary, even by his own standards.

His week started poorly when the headlines were blaring about a financial crisis and he had to backtrack from his earlier statement that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. He may actually be correct (I am not one who equates the health of Wall Street financial institutions and the stock market with the general economy, although the two are undoubtedly linked) but it was a poor choice of words and timing and he had to immediately retract and explain away, not a good thing to have to do for someone already being portrayed as being out of touch and ignorant on the economy.

Then on Tuesday there was the release of damaging news that his campaign chief Rick Davis's company had received millions of dollars from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide access to McCain. Davis's company was receiving a hefty retainer as late as August 2008 even though both Davis and McCain had said that Davis had no links to the two companies for over two years. So either Davis was lying to McCain or both were lying to the nation. The previously highly visible and voluble Davis who used to be interviewed all the time suddenly disappeared from sight, not talking to reporters

Then came Wednesday. First there was the release of the Washington Post-ABC News poll showing Obama surging ahead with a whopping 52-43 point lead, suggesting that McCain's campaign was tanking and the Palin bounce was gone. Then there was the taping during the day of the interview that Sarah Palin had with CBS News's Katie Couric. Apparently the Palin entourage who watched the interview realized that it was an unmitigated disaster (more on this tomorrow) and that it would dominate the news that evening.

McCain may have felt the need to make a dramatic move to obliterate all this bad news and put the focus back on himself, playing the role he loves of someone who does not play by the normal conventions. So he declared that he was 'suspending his campaign', flying back to Washington to solve the financial situation, and would even skip the much anticipated debate on Friday until and unless there was agreement on the bailout plan. This headline-grabbing move was reminiscent of his dramatic selection of Sarah Palin when it was becoming clear that Obama would have a rousing finale to the Democratic convention.

In tactical terms, both moves worked. They definitely overshadowed the other news, though the Palin-Couric interview still created waves. But just as the Palin selection rapidly declined in effect over the subsequent few weeks, the campaign 'suspension' move had an even shorter life, blowing up in just a few days.

For one thing it was pointed out that McCain's 'suspension' had little meaningful content. He was still giving numerous interviews, his ads were running all over the country, and his surrogates were out in full force putting out his message.

Second, it proved embarrassing when it was revealed that McCain had not even read the Paulson plan, even though it was only three pages long.

Third, it came out that after all his dramatic statements about wanting to solve the problem, McCain was silent at the White House meeting on the plan. It was Obama who was active in the discussions, asking a lot of questions, some of them directly to McCain and not getting any response. McCain seemed disengaged.

Fourth, many lawmakers in Washington were not pleased with injecting presidential politics into the negotiations and openly said that the candidates' presence was not helpful, since neither of them were members of the committees that were responsible for the matters involved in the negotiations.

Finally, the impression arose that the House Republicans had scuttled a tentative agreement at McCain's request after he arrived in DC, so he was now portrayed as part of the problem, not the solution.

McCain was back in the spotlight but not in a good way. Speculations ran rampant as to the reasons for his erratic behavior. Did McCain scuttle the tentative agreement? If so, why? Some suggested that he wanted to ride to the rescue and solve the crisis single-handedly and was disappointed that an agreement seemed to have been reached before he arrived, so he sabotaged it even though he did not have a ready alternative.

Another suggested reason was that what he and his campaign actually wanted was to postpone or even cancel the Biden-Palin debate because of fears that she would be revealed live on national TV to be out of her depth. His campaign's suggestion that his September 26 debate with Obama be postponed to October 2nd (the original date of the vice-presidential debate) and that the VP debate be vaguely rescheduled for a later date seemed to suggest that they were either trying to run out the clock completely or at least stall for more time to help her prepare.

Whatever the reasons, the tactic did not work. Instead attention became focused on his penchant for stunts and what it said about him and his campaign. Slate even ran a list of his next ten possible stunts to grab attention. (#1: Returns to Vietnam and jails himself.)

Faced with mounting criticism and even ridicule, McCain was forced to go to Mississippi for the debate with his tail between his legs, even though there was no bailout deal. During the debate he even weakly conceded that he would vote for the deal that would be worked out in Washington, even though he did not know at that time what eventual plan would be proposed. It is likely that this will be regarded as his worst week in his campaign, one misstep following another.

Oddly enough, I think McCain could have come out of this as a very big winner. There is huge public opposition to the bailout. It was a foregone conclusion that Obama, a good friend of Wall Street, would support the bailout plan in its essential outlines. If McCain had come out strongly opposing the bailout and openly led the efforts to scuttle it, he may have been able to accurately portray Obama, the Bush administration, and the Congressional leadership of both parties as serving only Wall Street interests, and ride a huge surge of public support as the only true champion of ordinary people, all the way to November.

But the gambler lost his nerve and folded. Wall Street enmeshes the political leadership of both parties in a tight embrace. To defy them now would be to defy all the people who have supported him all these years: his financial contributors, his own party's leadership, George Bush, all his close advisors and confidantes, and those with whom he socializes. He would have been turning his back on his own class and he just could not bring himself to do it.

Although McCain rails against Washington elites and praises his own alleged maverickiness, when an occasion came along that provided an ideal vehicle to show his independence in a concrete way and not just as rhetoric, he capitulated. Such is the power of ruling class allegiance.

In the end, he did what he and Palin repeatedly keep saying you must never do. He blinked.

POST SCRIPT: McCain's stunts

Jon Stewart gives his take on McCain's erratic behavior.

September 17, 2008

The Palin choice-11: McCain and Obama on taxes

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

I have looked previously at where Sarah Palin stands on the issues. In this post I will examine McCain's positions. This is not easy to do since McCain has shown himself remarkably willing to change positions for the sake of expediency. Yesterday's Post Script of the Daily Show bio of McCain shows this.

McCain keeps saying that he is a 'maverick' but what that seems to mean to him is that he takes policy positions that serve the purpose of polishing his own image. If that requires him to criticize his own party when his own needs demand it, he does not hesitate to do so, but he rarely follows that up with any actions that actually goes against his party. Steve Benen has been keeping a running list of McCain's flip-flops. It is getting pretty long.

It is important to emphasize that changing one's position on an issue is not by itself bad. If the facts or circumstances change or one is presented with compelling new arguments or evidence, then one should review and revise one's stand. It is the reasons for the change that are important. With McCain, he often does not even bother to give any reason.

Although the campaign has become, as usual, focused on trivialities (lipsticks, pigs, and fish) and culture wars, the really important issues are those of war and peace and the distribution of income, wealth, and services in the country. The one-party/two-factions system that exists in the US requires both candidates to serve the interests of Wall Street and the wealthy. Both Obama and McCain have obliged. It is only at the margins that they differ.

Candidates who strongly favor the very rich (like McCain) prefer to talk in terms of 'averages' (in income or tax cuts), because that can mask huge differences between groups. You can give huge tax cuts to a few rich people and very small cuts to a large number of poor people and still claim that people are receiving a good 'average' tax cut. But what needs to be examined is how it breaks down in narrow income slices.

The Washington Post recently had the kind of political analysis that is worth reading. It analyzed how Obama's and McCain's tax plans would affect people in specific income groups. Such detailed breakdowns are far more useful than broad generalizations.

We see that McCain's policies are heavily skewed to benefit the very wealthy. McCain emphasizes how his policies would give everyone a tax cut and the average benefits would be larger than Obama's plan. That is true, but the graphic clearly shows that lower income groups get tiny tax cuts while the very rich get enormous benefits. Obama gives bigger tax cuts to the lower income groups (those earning below about $100,000), smaller tax cuts to those earning between $100,000 and $250,000, while the very rich have to pay more taxes.

BusinessWeek says:

The [Tax Policy Center] took a look at the various tax proposals put forth by the two candidates and estimated that Obama's plan would lead to a boost in aftertax income for all but the highest earners, while taking a smaller bite out of government tax revenues than would McCain's plans.
. . .
Under McCain's proposals, by contrast—including an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all taxpayers, a corporate tax cut, and a larger reduction in estate taxes than Obama would support—far more of the benefits would go to the top. If his plans went into effect in 2009, married couples in the bottom fifth of the population would see aftertax income go up just 0.2%, while those in the next quintile would see a 0.7% hike. But those in the top quintile would see a bump up in aftertax income of 2.7%.

There is no question that the Bush administration has favored fiscal and monetary policies that have favored the already well-to-do, while gutting the protections that poorer people depend upon. The Wall Street Journal points out that among wage earners, only professionals like doctors and lawyers made more in 2007 than in 2000. McCain's tax policies will enable the very rich to keep even more of their income, accelerating the inequalities that has been going on for some time.

Although Obama's tax plans are a less generous to the very wealthy than McCain's, for me, the biggest factor in favor of Obama is that he is unlikely to recklessly start another war or create international tensions, while McCain is, if possible, even more reckless than Bush.

POST SCRIPT: US-Pakistan clashes?

Lost in the coverage about the presidential campaign and the chaos in the financial markets has been this troubling story about tension between US and Pakistani forces on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan following an incursion into Pakistan by US forces on September 3 that led to the deaths of some villagers.

The BBC reports that a second attempted incursion was stopped because of Pakistan paramilitary troops firing on US forces:

Pakistan's army spokesman has made clear that its forces have been ordered to open fire if US troops launch another raid across the Afghan border.
. . .
Locals said seven US helicopter gunships and two troop-carrying Chinook helicopters landed in the Afghan province of Paktika near the Zohba mountain range.

US troops from the Chinooks then tried to cross the border. As they did so, Pakistani paramilitary soldiers at a checkpoint opened fire into the air and the US troops decided not to continue forward, local Pakistani officials say.

September 16, 2008

The Palin choice-10: The real McCain

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

One of McCain's successes is the way he has managed to cultivate and flatter the press so that they have been very gentle to him and taken his self-portraits of being an honorable, independent-minded maverick at face value, instead of portraying him more accurately as a self-aggrandizing panderer who shamelessly exploits his Vietnam experiences to hide his right-wing agenda and his reckless personality.

The real McCain is a much darker figure. To start to get a better idea of who he really is, watch this 'McCain in three minutes' video, produced by ABC News's Good Morning America.

The darker side of McCain has always been apparent although the media chose to turn a blind eye to it. The Keating Five savings-and-loan influence peddling scandal (which was not in the above video) is one such example of McCain's corrupt politics, quite at odds with his claim to be an opponent of lobbyists and corruption. The Phoenix New Times also details the shady history of the origins of his wife's family's fortune and his participation and benefiting from it.

Meanwhile, a London newspaper lays out the story of how McCain callously abandoned his first wife after she had been disfigured in a car accident, to marry the current one.

McCain has always had an explosive temper that suggests that he is unbalanced. Jeffrey St Clair describes one incident:

In 1992, Robin Silver and Bob Witzeman went to meet with McCain at his office in Phoenix to discuss Mt. Graham. Silver and Witzeman are both physicians. Witzeman is now retired and Silver works in the emergency room at Phoenix hospital. The doctors say that at the mention of the words Mount Graham McCain erupted into a violent fit. "He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room", Silver tells us. "He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us. It was as violent as almost any domestic abuse altercation."

Witzeman left the meeting stunned: "I'm a lifelong environmentalist, but what really scares me about McCain is not his environmental policies, which are horrid, but his violent, irrational temper. I think McCain is so unbalanced that if Vladimir Putin told him something he didn't like he'd lose it, start beating his chest about having his finger on the nuclear trigger. Who knows where it would stop. To my mind, McCain's the most likely senator to start a nuclear war."

This trait earned him the nickname 'McNasty' in high school and his casual hurling of obscene and ugly language at his wife and others are well known to those who work with him but largely hidden from the public. McCain also publicly made a vicious joke about Chelsea Clinton when she was still a teenager, a joke that was so mean that many major publications refused to publish it.

All these things reveal him to be a person of highly dubious character. Those supposedly religious people and Biblical literalists who like to claim that a candidate's personal character is the most important thing and who think that plastering the Ten Commandments everywhere and praying in schools is the answer to everything seem to have no problem with these revelations, revealing that their religion is one of convenience.

When confronted with any criticism, McCain and his campaign have pathetically resorted to using his prisoner of war experience to excuse anything, a kind of 'get out of gaffe free' card. Steve Benen lists all the times they have invoked his prison experience as a a shield. What is worse is that they simultaneously claim that McCain is reluctant to talk about it, although campaign and the Republican convention highlights that story at every opportunity.

Rudy Giuliani's shameless invocation of the events of 9/11 for his personal advancement was mocked by Joe Biden who said that his every sentence consisted of a noun, a verb, and 9/11. Replace '9/11' with 'POW' and we have a good description of John McCain's answers to awkward questions and criticisms. This trait has become so blatant that even Maureen Dowd (someone who never fails to portray Republicans as macho and decry Democrats as wimpy) became distracted from her usual pathetic obsessions with the Clintons to comment on it.

So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.

McCain's prisoner of war experience is now becoming the butt of jokes and a target of cartoonists

John McCain also seems to be showing himself to be increasingly cranky as can be seen from the Time magazine interview. It seems like he is on a short fuse and I wonder how long it will be before his legendary temper and uncontrollable rage explodes in full view of the media.

The story of McCain's lack of awareness of the number of houses he and his wife own (we still don't know the exact answer. Four? Seven? Twelve?), his lack of knowledge of the make of car he drives (a Cadillac CTS), his $500 Italian shoes, and his fancy lifestyle has exposed the absurdity of his campaign trying to insinuate that Barack and Michelle Obama and his wife are 'elitists'.

If all that was not bad enough, John McCain is running a campaign that is so full of distortions and lies that Josh Marshall concludes that McCain is running the sleaziest campaign in modern history and is clearly unfit for the office he is seeking.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on McCain

Here is a biopic of McCain that accurately captures his opportunism.

September 15, 2008

The Palin choice-9: McCain's recklessness

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

When I first heard that John McCain had selected Sarah Palin, my initial hypothesis was that this was a desperation move, a sign that the campaign's internal analyses were suggesting that the seemingly close national polls were misleading and they were going to lose unless they did something to break out of the rut. It seems like that initial impression was right.

The Palin choice is being portrayed by media analysts as a sign that the McCain campaign felt they needed to solidify the campaign's right wing, evangelical base. Perhaps that is true. It is undoubtedly the case that that group seems very excited by the choice.

But the reports about last minute decisions suggest that there is very little coherence to their campaign strategy. After all, all the indications are that right up till the end, McCain had really wanted Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge but had been warned away from them, saying that this same base would revolt.

But Lieberman and Ridge are not very similar to Palin on social issues. So to lurch abruptly from them to Palin suggests that such policies don't matter at all to McCain, not if he risks losing because of them. It looks like McCain would risk putting the country in untested hands simply to salvage his chances of winning, which makes a mockery of his boast that he "puts country first".

As Kyle Moore says:

At the first sign of trouble, McCain abandoned his game plan and went instead with a high risk maneuver that thus far seems to have some pay off, but is coming with a high cost.

What does that say about how he’ll behave in the realm of foreign policy? Will he abandon any semblance of a safe and tested plan in favor of a high risk move that will put us and our families in danger? What about terrorism? In a McCain administration, I think that this indicates that instead of pursuing a smart and tough anti-terrorism policy, he would engage in a reckless and reactionary response that would only make us less safe and likely put us in another war.

We can discuss the lack of qualifications for Sarah Palin, and there are plenty, but the biggest problem is that it indicates that John McCain’s temperament and judgment is far below the standards necessary to serve in the Oval Office.

Steve Benen adds:

So, what are we left with here? John McCain met Sarah Palin in person once, for 15 minutes. Months later, he then talked to her on the phone for five minutes. Four days later, without a thorough background check, he invited her to be vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

Sensible people of sound mind and character simply don't do things like this. Leaders don't do things like this. Those fundamentally unsuited for the presidency do things like this.

Even David Frum, a conservative and former speechwriter for George W. Bush says over at National Review Online:

The longer I think about it, the less well this selection sits with me. And I increasingly doubt that it will prove good politics. The Palin choice looks cynical. The wires are showing.
. . .
I'd guess that John McCain does not have a much better sense of who she is, what she believes, and the extent of her abilities than my enthusiastic friends over at the Corner. It's a wild gamble, undertaken by our oldest ever first-time candidate for president in hopes of changing the board of this election campaign. Maybe it will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I'd be pounding home if I were the Obama campaign: that it's John McCain for all his white hair who represents the risky choice, while it is Barack Obama who offers cautious, steady, predictable governance.

Here's I fear the worst harm that may be done by this selection. The McCain campaign's slogan is "country first." It's a good slogan, and it aptly describes John McCain, one of the most self-sacrificing, gallant, and honorable men ever to seek the presidency.

But question: If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Other Republican party stalwarts like Michael Murphy and Peggy Noonan are equally worried about what this choice says about McCain, as was revealed by their comments to MSNBC's Chuck Todd when they thought their microphones were off.

(You can read transcripts of the comments here.)

If anything, this entire episode confirms reports that McCain is hot-headed and reckless, a dangerous trait for a president to have. Furthermore, it reveals that these people are very unserious, caring little for policy, and viewing elections as entirely tribal feuds, appealing to the worst of passions, and further trivializing the process.

Now that the lightweight Palin has been picked, the McCain campaign is desperately trying to change the focus of the discussion. Their campaign manager is now saying that this election will not be about issues but about people.

I read that as a signal that we are now going to see a campaign based purely on culture wars (god, family, sex, abortion, race) and the politics of tribal resentments. It worked for the Republicans in 2004 on the issues of gay marriage and the ten commandments.

This time they are trying to sell the idea that McCain and Palin represent 'real people' who will bring change. This Tom Toles cartoon points out the hypocrisy of McCain campaigning as the agent of change. But will it work?

POST SCRIPT: Video of Palin pork

The hypocrisy of Palin/McCain on the earmarks issue:

And cartoonist Mike Luckovich gives his take.

September 12, 2008

The Palin choice-8: The vetting process

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

John McCain's campaign people surely must have been aware of the dangers of suddenly springing an unknown like Sarah Palin onto the national stage. If you are determined to do so, the way to minimize the chance of unpleasant surprises is to have a very long, exhaustive, and fairly open vetting process. But the trade-off for doing so is that you then cannot keep the process secret because too many people are involved and being questioned.

For reasons that are not clear to me, it seems like McCain wanted both a relative unknown and also for the announcement to be a big surprise, and these two things simply don't go well together. He apparently wanted to "shake up the ticket". The fact that Palin's name was kept to just a handful of close advisors suggests that the vetting process was cursory and hurried. As The Politico reports:

They met for the first time last February at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Then, they spoke again — by phone — on Sunday while she was at the Alaska state fair and he was at home in Arizona. . . . The fact that McCain only spoke with Palin about the vice presidency for the first time on Sunday, and that he was seriously considering Lieberman until days ago, suggests just how hectic and improvisational his process was.

The New York Times fleshes out what went on behind the scenes:

Mr. McCain was getting advice that if he did not do something to shake up the race, his campaign would be stuck on a potentially losing trajectory.

With time running out — and as Mr. McCain discarded two safer choices, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable — he turned to Ms. Palin. He had his first face-to-face interview with her on Thursday and offered her the job moments later. Advisers to Mr. Pawlenty and another of the finalists on Mr. McCain's list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.

"They didn't seriously consider her until four or five days from the time she was picked, before she was asked, maybe the Thursday or Friday before," said a Republican close to the campaign. "This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn't get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe or Ridge.

It appears that they are doing the real vetting after they made the selection.

Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin's background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice. The campaign was still calling Republican operatives as late as Sunday night asking them to go to Alaska to deal with the unexpected candidacy of Ms. Palin.

The shallow nature of the vetting process is becoming increasingly clear:

Representative Gail Phillips, a Republican and former speaker of the State House, said the widespread surprise in Alaska when Ms. Palin was named to the ticket made her wonder how intensively the McCain campaign had vetted her.

"I started calling around and asking, and I have not been able to find one person that was called," Ms. Phillips said. "I called 30 to 40 people, political leaders, business leaders, community leaders. Not one of them had heard. Alaska is a very small community, we know people all over, but I haven't found anybody who was asked anything."

The current mayor of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller, said she had not heard of any efforts to look into Ms. Palin's background. And Randy Ruedrich, the state Republican Party chairman, said he knew nothing of any vetting that had been conducted.

State Senator Hollis French, a Democrat who is directing the ethics investigation, said that no one asked him about the allegations. "I heard not a word, not a single contact," he said.

A number of Republicans said the McCain campaign had to some degree tied its hands in its effort to keep the selection process so secret.

We don't know much yet about Palin and what we are learning is clearly not what the campaign intended as a first impression. But this decision and the process by which it was arrived tell us a lot about McCain and his campaign, and most of it is not good.

It has become a cliché to say that the first and most important decision that a president of president-to-be makes is the choice of the vice-president because he is putting the leadership of the country potentially in the hands of that person. Furthermore, the decision is his and his alone. It does not require consent of the US Senate and voters are not required to approve it during the primaries. So how that decision is made says something about how the candidate deliberates.

Perhaps the most pathetic attempts to put her in a positive light have been the statements that Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska is so close to Russia! For sheer inanity, that probably beats the other statement by McCain that "[Palin] knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." Really?

The way the Palin choice was made, irrespective of how well it turns out for McCain, indicates a certain recklessness that does not reflect well on his temperament. Cartoonist Mike Luckovich speculates on what the choice of Palin reveals about how McCain will select his cabinet.

It has become increasingly clear that the McCain camp is banking on the American public being stupid.

POST SCRIPT: How Palin was really selected (language advisory)

September 11, 2008

The Palin choice-7: Her background and positions on issues

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

What do we really know about Sarah Palin, apart from her family life? Here is a synopsis of some of her views.

The news website Alternet gives some background on Palin's political positions and history. We learn that:

• Palin doesn't believe global warming is man-made.
• Palin is the candidate of a powerful far right-wing cabal; her nomination seals their support for the little-wanted McCain.
• Palin staunchly opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.
• Palin supports failed abstinence-only sex education programs.
• Palin is under investigation for allegedly abusing her power as governor to help her sister in a messy divorce.
• Palin has big money ties to Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who has been indicted for political corruption.
• During her time as mayor, Palin drove the town of Wasilla deep into debt.

The Progressive Review has more on Palin's views.

Palin also supports, against all scientific advice, allowing the public to kill wolves by shooting them from planes.

She also believes that we should teach creationism in schools, in addition to evolution.

Since Obama's pastor became a campaign issue, it is instructive to see what her pastors' views are and that can be seen here. She was baptized in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla that is Pentecostal and whose parishioners believes in speaking in tongues and whipping themselves into incoherent frenzies.

Although she speaks as someone who looks out for taxpayers, she got the state to pay her thousand of dollars in per diems for staying in her own home. In fact, Palin seems quite comfortable stating things that are flat-out contradicted by facts.

Her record as Mayor of Wasilla and her attempt to ban books from the public library and fire the librarian when she refused to go along can be seen here.

Her husband and her own past flirtations with the Alaskan Independence Party (whose founder has said "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government" and "I won't be buried under their damn flag,") can be seen here and here.

Palin and her husband also had some failed business ventures.

Given all these negatives, Glenn Greenwald describes how Palin's supporters are trying to shut down criticism of her.

Palin herself has been shameless in her repeated lies about being a stalwart opponent of federal pork earmarks, especially the infamous 'bridge to nowhere', using the same words each time. She first supported it, then opposed it only after Congress cut off funds to build it, and yet still kept the money and used it for other projects.

In actual fact, under her governorship Alaska requested the highest per capita earmarks of any state. She is in fact just the kind of person that John McCain says he detests and thinks is ruining the country.

Steve Benen summarizes why Palin is wrong for the job and what this choice says about McCain.

What should be clear to anyone paying attention is that the McCain/Palin ticket is cynically hoping that people will overlook the facts and vote on the basis of bogus slogans and non-issues.

POST SCRIPT: Leave Sarah Palin alone!

Since Sarah Palin's policies and history cannot bear close scrutiny, the McCain campaign has gone into full victim mode, whining about how mean people are to her, and trying to pressure the media to treat her gently. A famous defender of another beleaguered woman has resurfaced to rescue her. (language advisory)

September 10, 2008

The Palin choice-6: McCain and women

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The reason that is bandied about the most for the Palin choice is that it was aimed at attracting women voters to the Republican cause, especially those Democrats who are allegedly so furious that Hillary Clinton did not get their party's nomination that they were looking for reasons to vote for McCain.

The good thing about McCain's choice of a woman as a running mate is that it reveals that he does not harbor any absurd beliefs that women are not capable of running the country. Thanks to his choice, whichever ticket wins in November will result in either a black president or a female vice-president and this, other things being equal, is a good thing.

On the other hand, the fact that Palin was a hometown beauty queen (Ms. Wasilla, pop: 7,000) and Miss Alaska runner-up (1984) does raise some disturbing questions, though about McCain and not her. There is nothing wrong in being physically attractive and looks and governing abilities are not mutually exclusive.

The problem is that McCain's first wife was a swimsuit model, whom he divorced after she was disfigured in a car accident to marry his present wife Cindy, an extremely wealthy heiress seventeen years younger than him and a Junior Rodeo Queen of Arizona in 1968. The fact that he now picks an attractive woman 28 years younger than him and whom he hardly knew to be his running mate seems to reveal an uncomfortable pattern of McCain as being a man who is more influenced by shallow considerations like looks than is perhaps desirable in someone seeking such a responsible office.

The fact that he has called Palin his 'partner and soul mate' is a little inappropriate for a man with his history. The Jed Report has picked up on some odd behavior by McCain when he first presented her as his running mate that will provide plenty of fodder for body-language aficionados. Watch.

It seems likely that the McCain's advisors became a little concerned about this and have said something to him because McCain has now started to talk about his wife more.

If, as has been widely suggested, McCain specifically wanted a woman to woo over the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton, there were other options. As Steve Benen points out:

I'd just add how striking it is that McCain had more capable women to choose from, but picked one who wasn't even a governor when he started his presidential campaign. Senators such as Hutchison, Dole, Snowe, Collins, and Murkowski were skipped over, as were more experienced governors like Lingle and Rell, as were "mavericks" like Todd-Whitman, as were cabinet secretaries like Rice, Spellings, and Chao, as were business leaders like Fiorina and Whitman.

McCain skipped over more capable women for a younger, less experienced woman he barely knows. This is supposed to impress women voters? Seriously?

This all comes back to the question: Why did he pick Palin? Although Obama and Clinton and McCain all occupy the narrow ideological spectrum demanded by the one-party/two-faction state that currently exists in the US, there is no question that Obama and Clinton are far closer to each other in their views than either is to McCain or Palin. Given the difference that exists between Clinton's and Palin's views on issues, thinking that the selection of Palin would appeal to Clinton's supporters is like thinking that Alan Keyes appeals to black voters.

Clinton supporters had already been moving to Obama. I have no idea about how women as a whole will react to what seems to me like blatant pandering by McCain. But a young woman whose views I respect told me some time ago that she was voting for Obama on the issues but really respected McCain as a person of integrity and principle. She stuck to this position despite my presenting arguments and facts that I thought clearly showed McCain to be a phony who was shamelessly using his war experiences to deflect attention from his policies and serious flaws as a candidate. But she is now absolutely livid about the selection of Palin, saying it revealed McCain to be a 'slimy and shallow manipulator'.

Although this is a sample of one and should not be given much weight, early polls seem to indicate that the selection of Palin, while firing up the conservative and religious base, is not having the intended effect. Andrew Sullivan says that the early results are not encouraging for McCain: "From this first snap-shot (and unsettled) impression, Palin has helped McCain among Republicans, left Democrats unfazed, but moved the undecideds against him quite sharply. I totally understand why." Joe Klein seems to find a similar result. But other polls suggest that white women have indeed moved towards McCain.

But events are still fluid and moving fast. We will have to wait until a few weeks have passed and the conventions fade into memories to see what the true situation is.

POST SCRIPT:A little Googling is a dangerous thing

On the day that Barack Obama clinched the number of delegates he needed to win the nomination, John McCain gave a speech that was widely ridiculed for its poor delivery. In addition, they made him stand in front of a green background that gave him a pasty look and the impression of his head being like a lump of dough bobbing around in a bowl of lime Jello. Since green (and blue) screen backgrounds are used in filming to project backdrops, there has been an explosion of video clips online that have taken his speech and changed the backdrop for humorous effect.

I was startled therefore when shortly into his acceptance speech last week, McCain was once again in front of a bright green background for about five minutes, suggesting another goof-up. But when the camera switched to a wide view, I realized that the green was the lawn in front of a mansion.

But why show a mansion as a backdrop? And whose mansion? For a wild moment, I thought that they might have decided to deliberately flaunt McCain's wealth by showing a picture of one of McCain's many homes but quickly dismissed the idea as absurd.

Josh Marshall was also puzzled by this and investigated and discovered that the mansion was that of Walter Reed Middle School in California. His hypothesis is that someone was asked to provide a backdrop of the Walter Reed Medical Center, googled just the name, came up with this image and used it without checking further. That explanation is consistent with the general sloppiness of the campaign.

Many news organizations have asked the McCain organization about the house but they refused to answer questions, reinforcing the impression that this was an embarrassing mistake. The middle school principal has also complained about her school being used for political purposes without her permission. (Josh Marshall has an update.)

September 09, 2008

The Palin choice-5: To close the age and health gap?

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Another possibility for the Palin choice is that perhaps she was selected to close the age and health gap between the McCain and Obama tickets.

There is no question that the Obama campaign just oozes energy (despite Joe Biden), while John McCain does not. McCain was born even before Obama's mother was, and it shows. Whenever Obama and McCain are shown together, McCain comes out looking the worse.

Obama projects the kind of youthful vigor that Americans like to see in public figures ever since TV started playing a big role in the 1960 election and kept their presidents constantly in the public eye. John Kennedy is the model for this (he carefully hid his serious health problems from the public) and it is no accident that George W. Bush spends a lot of time being seen hacking away at brush and riding bikes. These are deliberate image creating events, to show people that their leaders are fit and energetic.

These age and health concerns about McCain have so far been flying under the radar and mostly raised by comedians and cartoonists portraying McCain as a cranky old man. No one wants to be accused of ageism and only humorists can get away with raising this touchy subject. The Obama campaign has studiously avoided any direct mention of age, perhaps because it would be in poor taste and also might cause a backlash among the large percentage of voters who are elderly.

But lingering, low-level concerns about this issue undoubtedly exist. Polls have long shown that voters find McCain's advanced age (72) a bigger concern than Obama's ethnicity, and his multiple bouts with melanoma are well known. Reagan having Alzheimer's disease during the latter stages of his presidency have also raised concerns about electing the oldest first-term president ever.

So was Palin picked to compensate for this perceived age and energy deficit?

If so, it might have had the opposite effect. One consequence of the Palin pick is that the issue of age and health of McCain have now moved front and center, as people will undoubtedly start taking into consideration the odds that she will be asked to assume the presidency in the event of McCain becoming incapacitated. People are now consulting actuarial tables to figure out what are the chances that she will have to take over at some point. The age concerns have gone mainstream

Furthermore, being constantly seen next to the very young-looking and vibrant Palin is undoubtedly going to make McCain look really old, like he is her father or even her grandfather. For all these reasons, I had expected McCain to pick someone in their fifties or sixties, old enough to not make McCain look bad by comparison but young enough to appear dynamic. Palin went completely against that expectation.

While choosing a fresh face unknown to the nation does have some advantages, I have written before of the dangers involved in putting a novice onto the national stage. Another problem is that although Palin seems bright and able, she simply hasn't had the time to get up to speed on many issues.

Furthermore, she would not have as yet mastered the skill of seasoned politicians in being able to distinguish between those questions that call for a response that has been carefully scripted to be 'on message' and cater to targeted constituencies, and those which are outside the predictable and for which you have to learn the art of the 'non-response response', where you speak in bland generalities without really addressing the question. They also know how to filibuster, running out the clock by talking about extraneous issues without pausing and allowing the questioner time for follow-ups.

Really good politicians know how to subtly modify both classes of answers so that the answers seem fresh and not robotic. Furthermore, their families need to learn that they should be seen and not heard or when pressed, give similar non-answer answers. To engage with their questioners in a thoughtful way is to be avoided because it runs the risk of committing a 'gaffe'. Even the more seasoned Obama sometimes makes the 'mistake' of trying think a question through rather than giving a formulaic answer. It is a sad reflection on the state of politics that treating voters as intelligent is a bad thing politically.

The media love to focus on gaffes because they make news, are easy to understand and report, and don't require the hard work of analyzing policy positions. As a result, politicians make it a priority to avoid making any verbal missteps, even trivial ones. But even seasoned politicians can occasionally trip up and make the kinds of gaffes that the media will focus on, whether it is trivial or important. It is inevitable that Sarah Palin, simply because of the lack of time to prepare and however much a quick study she might be, will make some.

James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, predicts that we are going to see her and the McCain campaign plagued with having to explain away one gaffe after another. One campaign operative even made the extraordinary assertion that she may only give set speeches and never take questions. The McCain campaign, by hiding her away from questions for so long has set the bar so low that even a marginal performance will be seen as effective.

I personally do not think she will make many gaffes because most journalists are drearily predictable, sticking to a very narrow range of questions and policy perspectives, and this makes it easy to prepare responses in advance. Her first interview is with ABC's Charles Gibson, who was identified by Glenn Greenwald back in May as a reliable water-carrier for Republican talking points, which probably explains why he got the interview.

This absurd media obsession with gaffes has arisen because we seem to expect our leaders to be able to immediately spit out answers to any and every question. But even for a president, very, very, few issues require a snap judgment, and those that do are usually fairly trivial. How ridiculous the situation has become can be seen by the fact that no politician can now say in answer to a question, "That is something that I will need to think about, gain more information, and consult with experts before I reach a conclusion", even though that would reveal a deliberate and mature thinker.

But McCain seems to think that making quick decisions is a good thing and takes pride in it, as if it were a competition.

"I make them as quickly as I can, quicker than the other fellow, if I can," Mr. McCain wrote, with his top adviser Mark Salter, in his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For." "Often my haste is a mistake, but I live with the consequences without complaint."

This adds further evidence to his reputation for recklessness.

The problem is that if he becomes president, he is not the one who has to live with the consequences of his hasty mistakes. We do.

POST SCRIPT: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Over the weekend, the government took a major step in bailing out these two mortgage giants, the latest development in the continuing mortgage crisis.

Economist Michael Hudson explains what happened and why

The next president is going to inherit a major headache caused by rampant, unchecked greed in the mortgage sector.

September 08, 2008

The Palin choice-4: Shameless double standards

(Although it may look on the surface as if this blog has become obsessed with Sarah Palin, it really is a chance for me to express some thoughts about politics in general, using her story as a hook. So I hope those who are sick of hearing about Palin will bear with me. For previous posts in this series, see here.)

By now, there cannot be a single person in the country who is not aware of the intimate details of the Palin family. We now know about Palin's unwed daughter's pregnancy, that this news was released by the McCain campaign to counter the rumor that this same daughter is the real mother of Palin's youngest child who was born in April with Down's syndrome, her husband's DUI conviction a long time ago, the messiness of her sister's divorce and their involvement with it, and other problems with the law. It has become a tabloid-style soap opera, putting things that should be private into the full glare of the national media spotlight, with promises of more lurid details to come.

It is important to keep in mind that none of these things reflect on Palin's ability to govern, though how she handled them in the context of her official duties is relevant and will reveal a lot about her. Of these, the 'troopergate' episode is the most troubling.

Even if the suspicion that Palin pretended to be the mother of her daughter's child is true, it is not by itself a big negative, even though it means she lied to the public. Devoted parents are willing to do extraordinary things to protect their children from harm and it will not be the first time that such subterfuges have occurred and will not be the last. If true and it was at her daughter's request, it would suggest that Palin was willing to risk her own career to protect her daughter from public disapprobation, surely an act that one can understand and empathize with.

This kind of thing was perhaps inevitable with the choice of a relative newcomer like Sarah Palin for such a high profile role, although the sheer speed and number and scale of the revelations has taken me by surprise.

You can get away with nominating a newcomer if you or anyone you trust and respect happen to have had a long and personal relationship with them and can vouch strongly for them. But there is no indication that McCain knew her well at all since he met her for just the second time the day before he formally announced his pick. There is no indication that any of his staff knows her any better, and since they apparently limited the selection process to a very small group of people, the chances of getting input from people with deep personal knowledge of Palin became remote.

What amazes me is the claim of Palin's supporters that all revelations about her is positive news and a cause for celebration because it shows 'family values' and her strong opposition to abortion. As some conservatives have pointed out, it is not a good thing for high schoolers to have children and this should not be celebrated the way that the McCain/Palin camp is doing.

As Lawrence Auster says disgustedly, conservatism for some has become a caricature, a one-note song about abortion that drowns out everything else:

All that the evangelical and Catholic conservatives care about is opposition to abortion. All that's required for them to be happy is an illegitimate or defective pregnancy, followed by birth. They have no vision of social order, no vision of an overarching good, but have reduced all goods to the good of avoiding abortion. Which means that they embrace every kind of disorder, so long as rejection of abortion is thrown into the mix.

Jon Stewart finds example after example of this kind of unprincipled somersaulting.

This is not a new phenomenon. The Republicans are demanding that McCain's Vietnam experience be treated like a religious talisman that must be venerated by all. But recall that John Kerry's purple hearts received in Vietnam were attacked in 2004 and trivialized and ridiculed by Republican convention goers wearing band-aids with purple hearts drawn on them.

Similarly, Glenn Greenwald in his usual thorough way has documented how John Kerry was portrayed by right-wing media commentators as a gigolo because he married a rich woman, the heir to a ketchup fortune. And yet, this year those same people are not calling McCain a gigolo for marrying a rich heiress to a beer fortune, whose money and family connections he has used to advance his career.

I have been impressed by the ability of some of the Republican party and its conservative Christian base to pivot so quickly, suddenly celebrating things like teenage parenthood that they would have normally been swift to condemn as incontrovertible evidence of the increasing sinfulness of the nation as a result of taking prayer out of the school and teaching evolution (see this cartoon). Now because the person whom they like has these things going on in her family, we are hearing paeans for them as being 'real people', that such things show that the Palins represent 'heartland values'.

I suspect that had McCain nominated someone who later was revealed to be a serial killer but who said he loved Jesus, opposed abortion, and favored policies that favored the wealthy, these same people would suddenly say that 'real Americans' have prison records and the ability to kill without compunction is just the kind of toughness we need in a national leader in order to deal with terrorists. They would also decry as wimps the Democratic candidates because neither had the gumption to shoot a man, just to watch him die.

More problematic is whether the McCain campaign knew all these things about Palin in advance. If they didn't, that reflects badly on McCain and his campaign for being so sloppy in their vetting process, and on Palin's judgment in not being aware that she must come clean because these things don't stay hidden for long.

If McCain did know, then it becomes mystifying as to why they chose her despite these problems and why they did not reveal them right at the outset instead of being pressured to do so by rumors. Again, this is Palin's private life but in such high profile campaigns the private inevitably becomes public and the way to deal with it is to reveal things voluntarily without being seen as forced to do so.

The campaign is a bit vague on whether McCain knew about the pregnancy issue before her selection:

Although the McCain campaign said that Mr. McCain had known about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he asked her mother to join him on the ticket and that he did not consider it disqualifying, top aides were vague on Monday about how and when he had learned of the pregnancy, and from whom.

Another conservative Byron York of the National Review adds this perspective:

I don't usually engage in these scenarios, but I'll do it here. If the Obamas had a 17 year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if that they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.

When it comes to the kind of 'families practicing traditional values' normally loved and praised by evangelical Christians, the best example in the race is the Obama family. The only thing they are missing from being a Normal Rockwell painting is having a dog. The Obama children have been promised the latter after the election, whatever the result.

POST SCRIPT: Folsom Prison Blues

For those who might be a little puzzled by my allusion above to shooting a man just to watch him die, it was an excuse to give you the source of that famous line. You can never have too much of Johnny Cash.

September 05, 2008

The Palin choice-3: The danger of picking an unknown

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

One factor that the McCain camp may have used in selecting Palin may have been the sense that she was a fresh face that would generate interest in a way that a more familiar figure would not. The announcement of Palin certainly did that. It immediately shifted the discussion on Friday away from the hugely successful Democratic convention and Obama's excellent speech on Thursday to the topic of Palin. If that was a tactical goal of the McCain campaign, it succeeded.

But you live by the headline, you die by the headline, and the Palin announcement was itself almost immediately replaced by coverage of hurricane Gustav (hurricanes provide great visuals and human drama and will always trump political maneuvering) and the latter completely dominated news coverage over the Labor Day weekend. On my travels during those three days, whenever I briefly turned on the TV for news, they were having all hurricane all the time and no Palin. She did not even appear on the Sunday talk shows.

While fresh faces undoubtedly generate excitement, it is always dangerous to introduce an unknown figure into a major national campaign at such a late stage. The strong possibility exists that it will be followed by a string of embarrassing revelations about the person and family members, as has been the case here. This is not because she or her family is bad but because they are human.

All of us who have reached middle age, lived full lives, and have families have had things happen in the past that we might not think are big deals because we have lived through them, but if suddenly revealed to the world might prove embarrassing and have to be explained away. For almost all of us, what saves us is that nobody is interested in hearing about our past lives and no one is interested in finding out about them either.

But in the case of Palin, she is so new to the national scene that hordes of media are going to examine every tiny aspect of her past life to get a better idea of who she is. And they are going to find out things that she herself might have forgotten or wish would remain unknown. Palin and her family are going to be put under the microscope and I feel sorry for them because all kinds of information will come out now about them that will have to be explained away.

There will be well-meaning people who have known her in the past who will want to get their few moments of fame by recounting anecdotes about her, not realizing that these can be damaging. There may be people who dislike her for some reason or are jealous and have harbored grievances over things she did long ago, and will now relish the chance to get their revenge by revealing or even making stuff up. There will be those who will use her new high visibility to advance their own cause, like the Alaskan Independence Party (some of whose members want to put secession from the union to a vote) and to which Palin's husband once belonged and which she seems to have sympathies for.

Even if these stories turn out be false or malicious or exaggerated, fending them off is going to consume the energy of the McCain campaign. As these things come to light and have to be explained away, it will divert the campaign from its message.

The only way to avoid such embarrassments is to nominate an unmarried, childless, orphan who was an only child and preferably one whose hometown was obliterated by some natural disaster, taking with it almost everyone who knew the candidate in their formative years. The nominee should also preferably have in their adult years been a Trappist monk with its associated isolation and strong emphasis on being silent.

The advantage of having been in public life for a long time (like Joe Biden) is that although nobody gets really excited by the choice, almost all of your dirty linen has already been aired and you have survived, and people are likely to think that there is nothing new worth digging for in your distant past. Only deliberate leaks of new information by people seeking to scuttle your candidacy are likely to be damaging. If McCain had picked any of the well-known candidates in public life, there would have been far fewer problems.

For example, Rudy Giuliani has all kinds of things in his past like his extramarital affairs, his association with the corrupt Bernie Kerik, and even dressing in women's clothing. If he had been unknown and picked as the running mate and these things had then been revealed, he would likely have had to quit. But because these things were already well known before he ran for president, they would not have the same impact if he had been chosen as the running mate. His campaign for the presidency imploded because he was simply a terrible candidate.

By contrast, when Geraldine Ferraro was picked as Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984, newly revealed allegations about her husband's shady business dealings suddenly came to light and dogged the campaign. The same thing happened when somebody from the past revealed Thomas Eagleton's hitherto unknown shock treatment for depression after he had been selected as George McGovern's running mate in 1972.

So unless they commit new transgressions (like Larry Craig or John Edwards or Mark Foley), long-time public figures are a safe choice. But with Palin, everything about her and her family's life will be new. I hope she and her family is braced for the kind of close scrutiny that none of us would enjoy.

Next: How well was she vetted before being nominated?

POST SCRIPT: An odd speech

Though the first draft of Sarah Palin's speech was written by others even before she was selected and had to be rapidly modified because it was "too masculine" (whatever that means), it was very well-delivered. She is clearly comfortable in the spotlight, articulate, and knows how to engage her audience. She reads from a teleprompter much better than John McCain, whose speech on Thursday was more stiff and awkward.

I was, however, startled by the content of Palin's speech and its relentlessly harsh, mocking, smug, sarcastic, and ridiculing tone and the blatant falsehoods it contained which, although the crowd seemed to love it, has the danger of coming back to haunt her. Since she immediately followed an equally long and harsh speech by Rudy Giuliani, the entire 75 minutes that began at 10:00 pm seemed to be relentless Obama bashing at a largely schoolyard-taunt level, and made her seem like some kind of pit-bull, although she clearly relishes creating a tough image of herself.

The demeaning of the work of community organizers by the evangelical governor of Alaska was curious in a country where that kind of local civic activity is valued as good citizenship. As some have been quick to point out, it was after all Pontius Pilate who was a governor and Jesus who was a community organizer.

I was chiefly puzzled by two things: There was no real introduction to tell us about her (after Giuliani ended his speech, he simply walked off and she simply walked on) and her speech seemed to be aimed at the rabid partisans in the convention hall who were already her ardent supporters, not at winning over those undecideds who might have tuned in to the speech looking for her to give them confidence in her ability to serve as president if needed. As one commentator said: "Whoever the speech writer was, it became apparent rather quickly they were going for zingers, barbs, and clever one-liners, and not really thinking much about how the non-bloodthirsty segment of the viewing audience would feel about it."

I now know what happened. Giuliani's speech was to have been followed by another speech (presumably a warm introduction of Palin by someone who knows her well) and then a four-minute soft-focus biographical video telling her life story and emphasizing her achievements and qualifications. That positive and uplifting tone would have at least provided a welcome change after Giuliani and softened her image.

But what happened was that the media-loving Giuliani so relished his time in the spotlight that he added ad-libbed ridicule-laden applause lines to his vetted speech, causing him to run well over his allotted time, resulting in the introduction and biopic getting pulled at the last minute. Despite that, Palin still ended 15 minutes over the scheduled end.

Lesson: Never put an egomaniac before your main speaker in a tightly scheduled program.

September 04, 2008

The Palin choice-2: The experience question

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

While the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate is a poor one, I don't think the problem is Palin the person or her knowledge and experience. For all I know about her, Palin may well make an excellent vice-president (and president, if necessary).

I have never understood why people and the media are so obsessed with the experience argument. If there is any job for which relevant experience is unobtainable, it is the presidency of a country simply because the job is unique. What you are called upon to do in that job is unlike any other job you will ever have. The only kind of experience that is directly relevant, but which you can never get, is first being the president of some other country.

Furthermore, as president, you don't actually run the government or even the White House in any practical sense. Other people do all that and you have at your beck and call all the people you want for advice and actual implementation. The concrete skills that you need are not for being president but for running for the office. That requires the ability to raise a lot of money, run a good campaign, deal with the media, and speak well in public. Having prior experience in those areas definitely comes in useful during elections.

Palin already has run for governor and won, so she has some experience in this area, even though Alaska is not a big state in terms of population, ranking #47 among states. But she is being selected for vice-president and will join an already existing campaign the running of which is out of her hands, so that should not be a major problem.

What I find very odd is that some of her supporters are chortling that her lack of experience and knowledge on national and international issues cannot be used against her because Obama is also allegedly inexperienced. This argument does not make any sense. It was the McCain camp that was banking heavily on using the inexperience argument against Obama. By choosing Palin, McCain has effectively taken that argument off the table. Obama wins because he now does not have to even defend himself on the inexperience charge. All he has to do is watch while the McCain camp make fools of themselves arguing that she is more experienced than him. It is strange for McCain supporters to claim a victory for unilaterally disarming themselves. (See this cartoon.)

While I don't think experience should be a big factor in judging whether someone could be a good president, this does not mean that certain qualities are not preferred and even essential. There are things that I think a good president should have but those qualities can be developed over most kinds of life experiences. The important question is to what extent has her past life and work reveals that she has those qualities.

The qualities that a good president needs (which are independent of any polices or ideology) are many: have a commitment to uphold the constitution in spirit and letter, should have a commitment to the national and global interest over petty parochialism, be able to use evidence and reason in arriving at thoughtful decisions, be a good judge of people and situations, have a curious mind and be a quick learner, be humble enough to be able to ask for and take advice, be aware of the impact that one's words carry and thus be prudent in what one says, be aware of the power that one has and be cautious in exercising it, and be able to take the long view and think strategically while being flexible enough to make tactical changes when the contingencies of events demand them

Photo courtesy of http://mudflats.wordpress.com

Whether she has had obtained enough experience, as the mayor of a tiny remote town of Wasilla (which, as humorist Dave Barry points out, has roughly the same number of houses as John McCain) and less than two years as governor of a state with a total population that is comparable to the city of Cleveland, to be able to step in and be president is somewhat irrelevant, except insofar as what her actions in the past reveal about the important qualities that are relevant to being president.

There is an interesting blog by someone living close to Wasilla that talks about life in that part of the word. This blog has suddenly shot up in popularity, becoming the go-to place to find out about Palin and her life. In one post the blogger describes the shock at hearing the news of Palin's selection and in another he describes the increasingly messy investigation into the abuse of power allegations against Palin.

In my opinion, there are hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of people around the country who have many if not most those qualities and would make wonderful presidents. That is why the discussion as to whether someone is the 'best' person for the presidency or vice presidency is absurd. There is never a 'best' person. There are only better or worse people in terms of meeting those standards. President Bush has clearly demonstrated that he does not have most of the required qualities but Palin might. The problem is that we simply do not know.

The questions about whether she has the desired qualities may be answered as her life comes under scrutiny, but as yet the answers are unknown. McCain's statement that she is clearly the best person for the job is laughable on its face, and a sign of desperation. The interesting question I want to examine is how McCain came to pick her and what the selection says about him with respect to his own possession of the above qualities, and how this might affect the campaign.

In subsequent posts, I will break down this question into the various considerations that McCain and his team may have taken into account and see how she stacks up.

POST SCRIPT: Sarah who?

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are taken by surprise.

September 03, 2008

The Palin choice-1: Why?

Like almost everyone, I was stunned by John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. And like them, I am wondering which of the two extreme views of her nomination is true: that she is a bold choice that will give McCain victory in November or that she is terrible pick that will end up being a millstone around his neck and send him spiraling down to a defeat of historic proportions.

There has, of course, been enormous attention to this story. While I don't usually pay too much attention to the personalities of politics, preferring to focus on a few issues that are important to me, the exceptional nature of the choice has sucked me into the discussion along with everyone else, mainly to try and figure out what this pick reveals about McCain.

Since I knew I would traveling over the Labor Day weekend and would not have my laptop or internet access, I wrote most of my coming posts last Friday, the day on which her selection was announced, and Saturday morning. While driving during the long weekend, I only heard news headlines about the progress of hurricane Gustav and nothing about Palin, so I have had to time to mull over my initial reactions to McCain's decision. And my initial reaction that this was a bad choice has solidified.

(As is my usual style, whenever I feel that I need multiple posts to cover a topic, in order to create a coherent narrative, I first write out a skeletal outline of the entire series, which is then fleshed out, updated, polished, and edited before each daily posting. I now wonder if Palin might withdraw from the race even before my series ends next week, so I am preempting the completion of my series on the politics of food until the Palin series is over. That is how bad I think this development is for the Republican ticket.)

There are definitely many positives to her choice. But the problem is that each of those positives, aimed at achieving a particular result, are more than cancelled out by huge negatives that will prevent that result being achieved. The calculations involved are fairly obvious. So the question of interest is how McCain and his team did the same sums that I did and came out with a much different answer. What did they think was so positive about her that would compensate for these negatives?

Palin's name was not unknown to me. I had heard of her before this and had also heard the chatter that she was on his short list of candidates. But I had not given much credence to those reports because I first learned of her some time ago in the context of articles on the investigations into charges of corruption and abuse of power in Alaskan politics, highlighting senator Ted Stevens but also others including her. I knew that she and her husband were in the midst of a situation in which she was alleged as governor of the state to have exerted undue influence to get her brother-in-law (who was mired in a messy custody battle with her sister) fired from his job as a state trooper, going to the extent even of firing her Public Safety Commissioner because he did not carry out her wishes. Josh Marshall has an excellent synopsis of what has become called, inevitably, 'troopergate'.

There are reports that she is to be deposed in that court case soon and that she has claimed executive privilege to not release certain records to investigators and may face subpoenas as a result. She has hired a private lawyer to look after her interests, a sign that she may fear prosecution for actions that fall outside her official prerogatives.

Because of all this, I did not take her chances seriously. And this was even before I returned home on Tuesday morning, checked the news, and discovered that the whole thing had blown up into a full-throated soap opera. I thought that she was put on the list of candidates for the same reason that many such names are usually leaked, to satisfy narrow constituencies that their interests are being considered. I figured that McCain would be foolish to pick someone slap in the middle of being investigated for abuse of power. Why take on that aggravation when there are so many other people who won't come with all that baggage?

Someone once said that the most common last words expressed by reckless men before they do something stupid is: "Hey guys, watch this!" The McCain decision strikes me as exactly one of those ideas, something that looks bold and daring and exciting in the heat of a brainstorming session where a few people are trying to "think outside box" and make a stunning impression, but where all the negatives only show up in the cold light of day. It is then that you realize that there is a very thin line separating 'thinking outside the box' from 'being out of your mind'.

I think that this decision is going to haunt McCain. His and her ardent supporters are trying to put on a good face and saying that this move is a 'game changer'. I think they are right but not in a good way for him. It risks changing a narrow race into a blowout victory for Obama.

Next: The experience question

POST SCRIPT: Political humor

Sarah Palin has her own blog!

September 02, 2008

Understanding polls

Before he moved over to his new home at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum revisited a topic at his old Washington Monthly blog that I too have raised before, to criticize reporters who say that there is "statistical dead heat" whenever the polls show the difference between voters preferences for two candidates fall within the margin of error.

In other words, if the polls show 46% for Obama and 43% for McCain with a 3% margin of error, then the race is reported as a "statistical tie" or some such thing, giving the impression that it is a toss-up as to who is ahead. This is simply not true.

Drum has consulted with two professors pf mathematics and statistics at California State University, Chico and they have provided the formulas that enabled him to prepare a handy little chart to tell you the actual chance that some one is ahead, even though the preferences fall within the margin of error.

	Percentage Lead
Margin of Error	1%	2%	3%	4%	5%	6%
2%	69%	84%	93%	98%	99%	100%
3%	63%	74%	84%	90%	95%	98%
4%	60%	69%	77%	84%	89%	93%
5%	58%	65%	72%	78%	84%	88%

So if a candidate has a 3% lead with a 3% margin of error, far from being a dead heat, it is highly likely (84% chance) that the candidate is actually ahead. Even if the candidate has only a slim 1% lead and the margin of error is a whopping 5%, it is still not a 'dead heat'. The candidate still has a 58% chance of winning.

Like Drum, I do not have much hope that reporters will ever change their misleading reporting because they have a vested interest in continuing to talk this way. Races that are close generate more interest and thus more viewers and readers, so reporters will always try to make them seem closer than they are.

Talking of polls, there seems to have been an explosion in the number of polling organizations out there, and their results differ. This can cause some confusion in the public mind. When one polls gives one result one day and the next day the media report another poll with quite different results, this might give people the impression that the race is highly volatile or that some polling organizations are biased in favor of one or another candidate.

But that need not be true. There is something called the 'house effect' that can skew the results in particular ways without any intention of misleading. Charles Franklin over at Pollster.com explains what is going on:

Who does the poll affects the results. Some. These are called "house effects" because they are systematic effects due to survey "house" or polling organization. It is perhaps easy to think of these effects as "bias" but that is misleading. The differences are due to a variety of factors that represent reasonable differences in practice from one organization to another.

For example, how you phrase a question can affect the results, and an organization usually asks the question the same way in all their surveys. This creates a house effect. Another source is how the organization treats "don't know" or "undecided" responses. Some push hard for a position even if the respondent is reluctant to give one. Other pollsters take "undecided" at face value and don't push. The latter get higher rates of undecided, but more important they get lower levels of support for both candidates as a result of not pushing for how respondents lean. And organizations differ in whether they typically interview adults, registered voters or likely voters. The differences across those three groups produce differences in results. Which is right? It depends on what you are trying to estimate - opinion of the population, of people who can easily vote if the choose to do so or of the probable electorate. Not to mention the vagaries of identifying who is really likely to vote. Finally, survey mode may matter. Is the survey conducted by random digit dialing (RDD) with live interviewers, by RDD with recorded interviews ("interactive voice response" or IVR), or by internet using panels of volunteers who are statistically adjusted in some way to make inferences about the population.

Given all these and many other possible sources of house effects, it is perhaps surprising the net effects are as small as they are. They are often statistically significant, but rarely are they notably large.

One way to avoid mistaking inter-poll variability for voter volatility is to track the results of just one poll. In other words, only compare the results of one poll with the earlier results of the same poll conducted using the same methods and questions.

Another way is to do what the outfit Real Clear Politics does. It tries to take some of the inter-poll variability out by giving the averages of the major polls as a function of time.

To paraphrase Jon Stewart, elections are god's way of teaching Americans statistics.

POST SCRIPT: Mike Huckabee on Colbert Report

It was refreshing to listen to Mike Huckabee being interviewed on the Colbert Report about his reaction (after just the first two days) to the Democratic Convention. Huckabee was one of the most interesting primary candidates on the Republican side but the attacks on him from the Republican Party establishment were quite vicious.

Although I disagree with many of his views, there was something engaging and honest about him that I found likeable. He also has a sense of humor. All these positive characteristics are reflected in the interview. His closing comments on Obama and the role of race in America seemed genuine and heartfelt.

August 29, 2008

Hope and cynicism and Barack Obama

As readers of this blog know, I tend to follow politics fairly closely. I have done so for as long as I can remember. In Sri Lanka, politics was our national pastime and you could always strike up a good political discussion almost anywhere, and it was easy to become a political junkie.

As I have got older, my feelings about politics have become more ambivalent, a mixture of hope and cynicism. My hope has arisen from my increased awareness that most people seek justice and fairness at a very fundamental level and so I have always been in favor of efforts to increase participation. The more that ordinary people get involved in politics, the broader the participation, the more likely we are to have good results in the long run.

This does not mean that in the short run people will not make terrible decisions. We are, after all, the products of our history and upbringing and carry with us all kinds of relics of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other prejudices that will influence people in negative ways. Those factors can subvert the underlying drive for fairness.

While my sense of hope springs from a belief in the essential desire for fairness that people have, my cynicism comes from awareness that the structures of politics are designed to shut ordinary people out from any meaningful decision-making, reserving it for an elite and wealthy group that will serve its own interests, while preserving merely the façade of democracy. The way that is being done in the US is by making the election process so complicated and expensive, and the decision-making processes so obscure and arcane, that only those who have deep financial resources can hope to devote the time and energy to influence policies. These elite groups want to make change hard to achieve unless it serves their own interests, and they have largely succeeded.

But despite the odds, significant changes do occur and have occurred. We have seen the end of slavery, increasing rights for women, and major civil rights victories. We have seen the elimination of child labor, the right to unionize, the introduction of the 40-hour week, and more protections for the health and safety of workers. All these were important.

There are three major areas where I think we are on the verge of major changes for the better, although there are still obstacles facing us. These changes will come about irrespective of who gets elected to what position, though those elections can affect the speed of developments.

One is the fight for universal, single-payer health care. (For my previous posts on this, see here.) This will definitely come about fairly soon, though I do not know exactly when. The present system is too unfair, wasteful, corrupt, inefficient, exasperating, and infuriating to not collapse under its own contradictions. What both candidates are currently proposing are like plugging holes in a dike, short-term fixes to preserve the unseemly profits of the health insurance companies, pharmaceutical industry, and some health professionals. It will not last.

The second is equal rights for gays. This, I believe, will come very soon. The now routine and bland acceptance of gay people in most communities, the lack of controversy about gay marriage in Massachusetts, and the likely defeat of the anti-gay marriage referendum in California, are all signals that we are seeing the final gasp of homophobia.

The third is greater concern for the global environment and health. Those who think that we can treat our environment and ecosystem cavalierly are increasingly being seen as religious or free-market extremists.

Why do I think these things will happen, even though they are all currently opposed by entrenched influential and powerful groups? Because those issues are on the right side of history and such issues always win in the end.

As readers know, I do not expect much from Barack Obama as president. I expect him to be a cautious and centrist leader, careful not to rock the boat, someone who will follow the largely pro-war, pro-business agenda adopted by the current one-party/two-factions system. This is not necessarily a reflection on his personal beliefs. People from under-represented groups (such as women or minorities) who are the first to achieve prominent positions always carry the extra burden of having to prove their competence. Failure will not be interpreted as an individual thing (as is the case with that of a member from the majority group) but as their entire group members being incapable of the task. In order to not ruin things for those who follow them, such people become conventional, ultra-cautious, and risk-averse.

But at the same time, I expect Obama to be thoughtful and informed and intelligent in his decision-making, and much better than John McCain, who strikes me as a reckless and hot-headed warmonger in the Bush mold, completely under the baleful influence of the neoconservatives. Somehow I cannot see Obama doing anything rash or stupid or dangerous, the way McCain might. In fact, it will be a real relief to have a president who will act with the dignity that the office deserves.

The absurd charge that the Republicans are trying to make that Obama is 'elitist' is really a charge that he is too cerebral, and that what we need is someone who talks tough and makes decisions based on his 'gut', like the present incumbent, the worst president ever. We need to educate the public that it is not a weakness to take the advice of Carl Sagan who said, "I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in."

Although I rarely watch highly scripted political events, I made it a point to watch Barack Obama's acceptance speech. It was a powerful one, extremely well delivered. I could appreciate the excellent craftsmanship that went into it and his rhetorical skill even as I disagreed with some points, especially concerning foreign policy.

There is no denying that in seeing a black person accepting the presidential nomination of a major party, something very significant was happening, a pivotal moment, and one that I am glad to have witnessed personally.

It aroused in me strong emotions similar to the ones I felt when Nelson Mandela was released from his South African prison in 1990, a sense that I was witnessing an important and uplifting moment in history. At that time, I had my daughters (then just 6 and 3 years old) sit on the sofa and watch with me, telling them I wanted them to be able to say later that they saw it, even though they did not understand the significance then.

All the major positive changes I described above had to be fought for and obtained against strong vested interests. But once achieved, such changes are irreversible. And Obama's nomination and, I hope, victory in November will be another major irreversible step in America putting behind its ugly racial history.

Come November I will be voting for Barack Obama but not because he is black. I will be voting for him because he is by far the better candidate of the two major parties.

But I will be taking extra pride in that vote because I will feel that I am contributing to a positive and irreversible change in history.

POST SCRIPT: Race in American politics

There is no doubt in my mind that this presidential campaign is going to be ugly with race forming an unpleasant subtext. Yesterday Terry Gross of Fresh Air had an excellent and thoughtful discussion with political scientist and author Mark Q. Sawyer who runs the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics at UCLA, on the role of race in American politics with reference to Barack Obama's candidacy and what a tightrope he has to walk.

It is well worth listening to.

August 19, 2008

The South Ossetia/Kosovo parallel

The more accurate parallel for what is happening in South Ossetia is not Iraq but Kosovo.

But mention of Kosovo is largely absent from the current discussions because the parallel between what happened there and what is happening in South Ossetia undercuts the basis for the west's anger at Russia. So Kosovo must be made to disappear. As Aldous Huxley said, "Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations." Justin Raimondo, in an essay that traces the origins and resurgence of Russophobia says that "Official censorship simply isn't necessary in the West, because everyone knows what to say – and, more importantly, what not to say.

John Pilger looks back at the propaganda that was used to justify the military action against Serbia by NATO forces.

Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to dominate its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, a secret deal had been struck; Germany recognized Croatia, and Yugoslavia was doomed. In Washington, the U.S. ensured that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans and the defunct NATO was reinvented as an enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in France, the Serbs were told to accept occupation by NATO forces and a market economy, or be bombed into submission. It was the perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The warmongers in the Clinton administration (many of whom are now resurfacing in the Obama campaign and Democratic leadership and trying to pretend they are antiwar) were the ones who, along with NATO and the European Union, destroyed Yugoslavia with a merciless bombing campaign that killed and displaced thousands of people and led to the carving out of Kosovo as a separate state.

George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, a private intelligence company, explains on NPR why Russia's use of force to separate South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia can be justified by them using the same arguments used by NATO to separate the province of Kosovo from Serbia, which was trumpeted by then President Clinton and the western media as the moral thing to do.

In February 2008 George Szamuely described in detail the way that Kosovo was carved out as a separate state, and said that Russia had warned where this was leading.

Unlike 2003, however, the Russians this time have a card up their sleeves. If Kosovo is to be permitted to secede, the Russians have argued, then why not other nationalities or ethnic groups living as minorities within someone else's state? As examples, President Vladimir Putin pointed to South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria. But he could have mentioned innumerable others: the Hungarians in Slovakia and Rumania, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, Corsicans in France, the Flemish in Belgium, Russians in Estonia and Latvia, the Turkish Cypriots.
. . .
The West's entire approach to Kosovo has been marked by sordid dishonesty and bad faith, supporting national self-determination and the right to secession in one place and territorial integrity in another, cheering on ethnic cleansing by one ethnic group and demanding war crimes trials for another, trumpeting the virtues of majority rule when it's convenient to do so and threatening to impose sanctions and penalties on majorities when that's convenient.

Paul Craig Roberts argues that the warmongers in the US are urging that the US make a strong response to Russia's actions (i.e., use force) although it is obvious to the rest of the world that the US simply no longer has the military, diplomatic, economic, or moral power to do any such thing. All it can do is bluster.

(As a digression, I came across the truly excellent news website Antiwar.com, an indispensable source for world news and analysis, during the campaign for the NATO war against Serbia. I was disgusted with the cheerleading for that war and tried to find more balanced news sources and came across the site which was started in 1995 to oppose that Clinton war. Since then, Antiwar.com has been consistently trying to expose the propaganda of both Democratic and Republican warmongers. The people behind the site can briefly be described as principled libertarian-paleoconservatives and they are refreshingly open to a spectrum of views across the ideological spectrum. The site is currently holding a fundraiser. Please donate something if you can.)

POST SCRIPT: Escape clauses

It is left to the comedy shows to highlight the verbal contortions currently on display in the US response to the conflict in South Ossetia as a result of trying to find an argument that condemns the Russian action while not automatically condemning similar US actions.

The Daily Show has a clip of US Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad trying to dance the dance. He says that "The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe, those days are gone."

So that's why the invasion of Iraq by the US is good and the invasion of Georgia by Russia is bad. It depends on where it happens.

But then what about Kosovo? That was in Europe. But since that was in the 1990s, a formula has been found: What is wrong is invading other countries in Europe in the 21st century. Yes, that it.

But John McCain, gung-ho supporter of the Iraq invasion, tends to get confused and forgot to add the vital in Europe clause, saying stupidly that "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations."

The fact that Bush, Rice, McCain, and the neoconservative and other warmongers are not ridiculed for these obviously contradictory and self-serving justifications is a telling indication of the subservience of the mainstream media to the government line.

August 18, 2008

The conflict in South Ossetia

The coverage of the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the region known as South Ossetia reveals once again the reflexive adoption by the US media of the perspective of the US government and its pro-war supporters in its reporting of the events.

Having completely abandoned any semblance of allegiance to principles of international law and morality in its invasion of Iraq, the US government is now scrambling to find a basis to condemn Russia's military actions while excusing its own similar actions. In this they are aided by the collective and convenient amnesia of reporters who obligingly don't ask awkward questions about obvious historic parallels.

It is not necessarily the case that journalists are deliberately and knowingly distorting the facts, although some do. What is the case is that they have internalized the tacit understanding that all foreign policy issues have to be understood in such a way that the US government's actions are viewed as good and those of the enemy country are bad. Once you have accepted that framing, it requires you to view the US government as at most guilty of 'mistakes' or 'bad tactics' or even incompetence, but never of bad intentions. Bad intentions are the exclusive domain of whoever the enemy du jour is. To think and say otherwise is to commit career suicide, as far as the mainstream media goes. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The task of exposing this hypocrisy is left largely to the alternative media and comedians. As Robert Parry points out:

Apparently, context is everything. So, the United States attacking Grenada or Nicaragua or Panama or Iraq or Serbia is justified even if the reasons sometimes don't hold water or don't hold up before the United Nations, The Hague or other institutions of international law.

However, when Russia attacks Georgia in a border dispute over Georgia's determination to throttle secession movements in two semi-autonomous regions, everyone must agree that Georgia's sovereignty is sacrosanct and Russia must be condemned.

U.S. newspapers, such as the New York Times, see nothing risible about publishing a statement from President George W. Bush declaring that "Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected."

No one points out that Bush should have zero standing enunciating such a principle. Iraq also was a sovereign nation, but Bush invaded it under false pretenses, demolished its army, overthrew its government and then conducted a lengthy military occupation resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
. . .
On Monday, the Washington Post's neoconservative editorial writers published their own editorial excoriating Russia, along with two op-eds, one by neocon theorist Robert Kagan and another co-authored by Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke.

All three – the Post editorial board, Kagan and Holbrooke – were gung-ho for invading Iraq, but now find the idea of Russia attacking the sovereign nation of Georgia inexcusable, even if Georgia's leaders in Tblisi may have provoked the conflict with an offensive against separatists in South Ossetia along the Russian border.

"Whatever mistakes Tblisi has made, they cannot justify Russia's actions," Holbrooke and his co-author Ronald D. Asmus wrote. "Moscow has invaded a neighbor, an illegal act of aggression that violates the U.N. Charter and fundamental principles of cooperation and security in Europe."

As far as most of the world is concerned, the US has lost all credibility when it comes to appealing to international law. They have not forgotten all the lies that have justified past US military invasions. In fact, those policies have encouraged the emergence of a lawless world in which any regional power can feel comfortable asserting its will militarily over its neighbors.

This article that appeared in the Russian newspaper Pravda illustrates the contempt in which Bush is held. It repeatedly tells Bush to 'shut up', language which the US media gleefully approved of when Spain's King Juan Carlos used it against current US enemy Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. The article justifies the Russian actions in South Ossetia using almost the exact words used to justify the US invasion of Iraq:

Do you really think anyone gives any importance whatsoever to your words after 8 years of your criminal and murderous regime and policies? Do you really believe you have any moral ground whatsoever and do you really imagine there is a single human being anywhere on this planet who does not stick up his middle finger every time you appear on a TV screen?
. . .
Do you really believe you have the right to give any opinion or advice after Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens? After the torture by CIA operatives?
. . .
Suppose Russia for instance declares that Georgia has weapons of mass destruction? And that Russia knows where these WMD are, namely in Tblisi and Poti and north, south, east and west of there? And that it must be true because there is "magnificent foreign intelligence" such as satellite photos of milk powder factories and baby cereals producing chemical weapons and which are currently being "driven around the country in vehicles"? Suppose Russia declares for instance that "Saakashvili stiffed the world" and it is "time for regime change"?

This is what we can expect to see in the future – the US government's own words and actions flung back at it by every country that decides to take military action against another or abuses its prisoners or kills civilians.

Next: The South Ossetia/Kosovo parallel

POST SCRIPT: Al Jazeera coverage of South Ossetia

Al Jazeera has a interview with Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvli that lasts for 15 minutes followed by four minutes of good analysis by their correspondent in Tblisi

August 08, 2008

Changing the political calendar

(The series on the ethics of food will continue next week.)

If you are at all like me, you are probably already sick of the presidential election and simply want to get it over with. We are currently in that part of the political season where nothing of significance is happening and yet there is a lot of time to fill, so we have a relentless focus on trivialities and an endless obsession with polls, trying to make sense of their ups and downs in relation to news events.

Take for example the absurd fuss over tire pressure:

Then we have the nonsense about celebrities, triggered by this ad from the McCain camp suggesting that Obama was a frivolous airhead:

The only noteworthy thing to emerge from this latter non-issue is the Paris Hilton counter-ad poking fun at McCain. It cannot be a good sign for McCain that she is a better speaker than him.

While I enjoy silliness as much as the next person, these things indicate to me that the campaign has already gone on too long and the candidates have far too much time on their hands. It is time to change the American political calendar.

Here is my plan, for what it is worth, based on the belief that voters can be divided into two groups: those who decide early and those who decide at the last minute.

The early deciders are either those who follow politics closely and already have all the information they need to make a decision, or those who make their decision based on party affiliation, specific single-issues, or candidate characteristics that are known early. There is very little that could happen between now and the election to make these early deciders change their minds, though their level of enthusiasm for their candidate could wax and wane. For example, almost all the people I talk to have already decided, like me, who they are going to vote for and it is hard to see them switch.

The voters who decide at the last minute are either those who don't care much about politics but have a vague sense of civic duty that they must vote and will go with their 'gut' when it comes time to pull the lever, or are simply chronic procrastinators who will wait until the last minute to find out what the candidates are all about. For such people, it does not matter whether they have another hour, week, month, or year to make their decision. They will do so at the last minute, whenever that minute is.

My theory about why the polls fluctuate during this time is not because people are changing their minds as a result of any news event (speculating about this is purely a game that keeps the pundits employed) but that this second group of voters gives more or less random answers to the question of who they are likely to vote for, coupled with sampling biases.

So why must we have this Sargasso Sea of dead time between when the nominees have been decided and the election held? What purpose is served by this other than requiring an enormous amount of money to raised and spent by the candidates on advertising, traveling around the country and the world, and for the media to follow them?

Here's a much better calendar. The date of the election is fixed in the US constitution to be early November and cannot be changed. [Update: Jim Eastman has pointed out in the comments that this is incorrect, that the date is set by statute.] Similarly the idea of having primaries is a good one in that it gives the public at least some semblance of participation in the choice in the nominee, even if just barely, so it should be retained.

So why not schedule the primaries in the months of July, August, September, have the party conventions at the end of September or beginning of October, and then run an intensive presidential campaign for just three to four weeks (like other countries do) before the elections at the beginning of November?

All that this would require is for the two parties to agree to this primary and convention schedule. Since both would benefit equally by not wasting so much time, there seems to be no reason why it could not happen.

Of course, individual candidates could still start as early as they want to to lay the groundwork to run for office but at least we would not have to pay any attention until June or so and thus not be subjected to an interminably drawn out election schedule. Also, candidates and voters would be most involved in the summer months, allowing more students to be involved in the process without taking time off from school, and we would be spared the dreary spectacle of people trudging around in the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire in the dead of winter.

POST SCRIPT: On not watching the Olympics

It seems like just yesterday that I was not watching the 2004 Olympics (wherever it was held) and now it is already time to ignore the current one, whose opening ceremonies are today.

I long ago got sick of the coverage, with its relentless commercials, the almost exclusive coverage of only the events that US athletes were taking part in, the jingoism, grandstanding, and flag-waving on display by athletes of all countries, the cheating, and the sappy biographical stories of athletes I had never heard of before and would never hear of again.

Promising that marquee events are 'Just ahead' when the announcers had no plans on showing it for at least an hour (to be filled with commercials), had to be one of the most annoying parts of the coverage.

Here are some suggestions to improve the Olympics and its coverage.

1. Only play the Olympic anthem at all medal ceremonies, not the national anthem of the gold medal winner's country. If the Olympics don't have an anthem, use the theme from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It is short and bouncy and sounds anthem-like with all those tubas.
2. Any athlete who indulges in excessive boasting or 'I'm number 1' finger-pointing or taunting of other athletes or in ostentatious flag waving victory laps after winning an event gets hit with a rubber chicken.
3. Eliminate all events where the results are determined by judges scoring on 'artistic merit' or aesthetics. This means that gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and diving must go.
4. Get rid of all the horse events. It seems like the horses are doing all the work at an event meant to showcase human athletic achievement. If horse events are to be included, then why not NASCAR?
5. Get rid of beach volleyball. How did this casual summer pastime come to be in the Olympics? What next – a 'dog catching a Frisbee' event?

Thank you. End of rant.

August 05, 2008

The anthrax case-2: The scandalous behavior of ABC News

(The series on the ethics of food will continue later.)

The way the anthrax scare was used to panic the public in the wake of 9/11 and create a rush to war was one of the many low points in recent media history.

The way they did that was by presenting totally false information that the anthrax contained traces of materials that could only come from Iraq, charges that were widely disseminated by, among others, the notorious neoconservative Laurie Mylroie, one of the major cheerleaders for invading Iraq.

Who is this Mylroie? Peter Bergen wrote a profile of her in the Washington Monthly in December 2003:

In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every antiAmerican terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America.

Glenn Greenwald describes the disgraceful role played by the media, especially ABC News, in using this false information to shift the focus away from a domestic criminal probe of the anthrax attacks to one that excited public terror and drove the mad rush to war with Iraq.

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax – tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

We are now told that right from the beginning, the FBI was convinced that the anthrax came from the Fort Detrick facility. So who was lying then?

Greenwald continues:

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.

The willingness of the media to accept at face value the claims of the government is the real problem. On NPR yesterday, Renee Montagne, the host of Morning Edition, said things like the FBI is due to release this week some the evidence it has "amassed" against Ivins, giving the impression that the FBI actually has huge amounts of such evidence. She said that the evidence seems "compelling" and referred to the "genetic fingerprints" of the anthrax (based on apparently 'new science 'developed by the FBI) that somehow pointed to Ivins' lab, and a psychologist's description of him as a "threat". It is important to realize that she had no idea if any of these statement were true. She just passed them on as fact because the government had told her, and thus they become part of the official story.

It is a very dangerous thing when the news media and the government collude to disseminate false information. ABC News has a lot of explaining to do. It should start by revealing who were these four "well placed" people who were spreading the dangerously false information that helped drive the country to war with Iraq.

Justin Raimondo has been tracking the anthrax story from the very beginning and his most recent analysis is well worth reading.

Glenn Greenwald has a follow-up posting that asks some very important questions.

POST SCRIPT: The perfect country and western song

Listen to the last verse, which puts it over the top.

August 04, 2008

The anthrax case-1: The collusion of the FBI and the media

(The series on the ethics of food will continue later this week.)

The death of Bruce E. Ivins, an anthrax researcher at Fort Detrick, Md has suddenly thrust the ignored anthrax story back into the news.

The fact that Ivins apparently killed himself just when he was about to be indicted by the FBI is being taken as a tacit admission of his guilt. I am not convinced that the case has been made. After all, the FBI previously relentlessly hounded another scientist Steven J. Hatfill with leaks to the media for the same case, so that he lost his job and could not get others. Hatfill fought back and sued the government and they were forced to settle with him in June for $5.8 million. It seems strange that the attention shifted to Ivins just after the collapse of their case against Hatfill.

The FBI and the media (especially NBC, CNN, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution) also hounded another innocent person Richard Jewell for the Olympic bombing, again based on FBI and Justice Department leaks. Eventually NBC and CNN were forced to settle with him.

A similar situation occurred with Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee where a series of FBI leaks passed through the New York Times and Washington Post destroyed his career. He also sued and eventually the government and the media were forced to pay him $1.8 million.

When the government sets its mind to it, it can use its powers to torment people indefinitely to try and break them. As Alexander Cockburn says in the similar persecution of Sami al-Arian, a professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida.

There are few prospects in the justice system so grimly awful as when the feds decide never to let go. Rebuffed in their persecutions of some target by juries, or by contrary judges, they shift ground, betray solemn agreements, dream up new stratagems to exhaust their victims, drive them into bankruptcy, despair and even suicide. They have all the money and all the time in the world.

This is why the deep politicization of the US Justice Department by the Bush Administration, placing partisan political hacks in positions that should be staffed by career professionals, is so disturbing. Unlike most other government agencies, the Justice Department has the power to target individuals and make their lives hell even if they are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

Since Ivins knew that the focus had shifted to him and that he would receive the same trial-and-conviction-in-the-public-eye-by-leaks-to-the-media method favored by the government that had destroyed the lives and careers of so many before him, he may well have decided that he did not have the stomach to deal with it, even if he was innocent. The indications are that he was a nerdy, nervous type, not someone with the kind of determination that Hatfill had for being under constant surveillance.

It is reported that cars with detectives were ostentatiously parked in front of his house, thus letting the whole neighborhood know that they had a suspicious person in their midst. Colleagues and friends were repeatedly questioned about him in ways that suggested that the authorities were trying to alienate them from him . He and his whole family were questioned by the FBI, and his family was told that Ivins was the anthrax murderer.

Over the past two years, many who knew him saw the effects of accumulating pressure as the anthrax investigation veered toward him. "He would tell stories about how he would come home and everything he owned would be in piles," said a Fort Detrick employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because workers there had been instructed not to talk with reporters. The employee said his files, lab samples and equipment were frequently seized by authorities.

Within the last few months, Ivins seemed to have gone into a mental tailspin that required psychiatric treatment. He could well have decided that he could not take it anymore. The main charges that he might be dangerous come from his estranged brother who had not spoken to him since 1985, and a social worker who said he had threatened her while she was treating him during his recent illness. His brother clearly hated him, telling NPR that he could not think of a single nice thing about him and that he was glad that he was dead.

But while Ivins seems to have been somewhat unorthodox in his work habits and a little eccentric in his personal behavior, they were not in ways that indicated that he was a cold-blooded killer who would also write letters seeking to lay the blame for the anthrax attacks on Muslims. They seemed to be the kinds of idiosyncracies that one often finds amongst researchers, especially scientists. Take this description:

Ivins could frequently be seen walking around his neighborhood for exercise. He volunteered with the American Red Cross of Frederick County, and he played keyboard and helped clean up after Masses at St. John's the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, where a dozen parishioners gathered Friday after morning Mass to pray for him.

The Rev. Richard Murphy called Ivins "a quiet man ... always very helpful and pleasant."

An avid juggler, Ivins gave juggling demonstrations around Frederick in the 1980s.

"One time, he demonstrated his juggling skills by lying on his back in the department and juggling with his hands," said Byrne, who described Ivins as "eccentric."

Whenever a colleague would leave the bacteriology division, Ivins would write a song or poem for that person and perform it, accompanying himself on keyboard, Byrne said.

Ivins had several letters to the editor published in The Frederick News-Post over the last decade. He denounced taxpayer funding for assisted suicide, pointed readers to a study that suggested a genetic component for homosexuality and said he had stopped listening to local radio station WFMD because he was offended by the language and racially charged commentary of its hosts.

He also commented on the growing political influence of conservative Christians, and he was willing to criticize his church.

"The Roman Catholic Church should learn from other equally worthy Christian denominations and eagerly welcome female clergy as well as married clergy," Ivins wrote.

Byrne said Ivins appeared to be at peace and that he expressed no interest in the anthrax mailings, even after some letters were sent to Fort Detrick for analysis.

"There are people who you just know are ticking bombs," Byrne said. "He was not one of them."

Maybe Ivins was very good at maintaining a façade of normalcy and is the person behind the anthrax attacks. But we should be careful of maligning a man now incapable of defending himself. Now that he is dead one can expect a barrage of unsubstantiated allegations from the FBI, passed on uncritically by the media, aimed at painting him as some kind of homicidal maniac.

While the guilt of Ivins is by no means clear as yet, the media is undoubtedly guilty of misdirecting the public about the anthrax scare and using it to whip up war hysteria against Iraq. The case against the media will be examined tomorrow.

POST SCRIPT: Teach your children

One of the best songs to emerge from the 1960s, sung by Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

July 04, 2008

Independence day thoughts

(For this holiday, I am reposting an amalgam of two posts from two years ago.)

Today, being independence day in the US, will see a huge outpouring of patriotic fervor, with parades and bands and flag waving. I thought it might be appropriate to read one of Mark Twain's lesser known works. I came across it during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was surprised by the fact that I had never even heard of it before, even though I have read quite a lot of Twain's work and about Twain himself.

Sometimes great writers reveal truths that are hidden. At other times they reveal truths that are squarely in front of our eyes but which we do not see because we have not asked the right question. Mark Twain's story The War Prayer fits into the latter category, where he explores the dark underside of the seemingly innocuous act of praying for something.

The idea of the intercessory prayer, where one asks for a favor or blessing for oneself or for a designated group of people, is such a familiar staple of religious life that its wholesomeness is unquestioned. But Twain points out what should have been obvious if we had only thought it through.

The War Prayer Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spreads of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their faces alight with material dreams – visions of a stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! – then home from the war, bronzed heros, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation – "God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there, waiting.

With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal," Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside – which the startled minister did – and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said

"I come from the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd and grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import – that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of – except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of His Who hearth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this – keep it in mind. If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer – the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it – that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts, fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause)

"Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Twain accurately points out that intercessory prayers that ask for seemingly unimpeachable favors always carry with them a dark underside. Prayers that ask for victory in war always carry with them the wish that god will destroy the other side. The losing side in a war must necessarily suffer massive death and destruction but prayers never explicitly ask god to do this. That would be seen as too crass. But Twain says that whether we put those sentiments into words or not, that appeal is always present.

Twain carries this argument even further and says that even appeals for seemingly benign help for one person (such as rain for his crops) may prove to be a curse for someone else.

Any prayer that seeks special benefits for any one group is also a request to deny that same benefit to those who do not belong to that group. When people pray asking god's help to help find a cure for cancer, aren't they implicitly also asking him/her to not assist in finding a cure for AIDS or Alzheimers or any other of the countless diseases that afflict living things?

And what about the phrase "God bless America" that is now such a staple of political life that politicians routinely end their speeches with it? Fourth of July speeches are full of such appeals. What exactly is being asked for here? That god look out for the interests of Americans and withhold similar blessings from the people of other countries? What would justify such a request? Do people really believe that God prefers Americans to other people? Is God like an immigration officer who checks out the nationality of people before responding to prayers?

All intercessory prayers are premised on an authoritarian/subservient model, with god as a kind of despot who has limited rewards at his/her disposal, and whose favors have to be curried by making special appeals, the more groveling the better, in the manner of kindergarteners with their teacher. Since most religious people also believe in a god who omnipotent and has the capacity to answer any intercessory prayer, and even knows the prayers before they are prayed, it does not even make sense to ask for limited rewards benefiting a restricted subset of people. But this obvious contradiction is not perceived because of the blindness that religion cultivates in its followers. It requires an astute observer like Twain to point it out.

Perhaps the only intercessory prayer that can be justified is the one I saw on a bumper sticker that said "God bless the whole world. No exceptions."

It is noteworthy that Mark Twain knew that he was asking for trouble with this story, writing it as he did during a major war, when strong and unthinking appeals to patriotism are used to brush aside any opposition, just as was done in during the preparations for the attack on Iraq.

Twain wrote The War Prayer during the Spanish-American War. It was submitted for publication, but on March 22, 1905, Harper's Bazaar rejected it as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish "The War Prayer" elsewhere and it remained unpublished until 1923.

Mark Twain seems to have had a healthy skepticism towards religion that was not shared by his family and those who were charged with executing his estate.

In later years, Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was not published until 1962. The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916, although there is some scholarly debate as to whether Twain actually wrote the most familiar version of this story.

Given that Mark Twain had achieved iconic status in his own lifetime and was so well-known and liked, his own apprehensions about whether this story could be published is indicative of how powerful a hold this combination of religion and patriotism has on people. Challenge those twin pillars of dogma and you become an outcast fast.

June 06, 2008

Tuesday night election afterthoughts

The Daily Show provides a wrap up of the events of Tuesday night, comparing the speech of Barack Obama with the non-concession, self-absorbed speech of Clinton and the disaster that was McCain's presentation (that was supposed to upstage Obama's night) that was panned even by the Fox News punditocracy.

The Daily Show is one of the very few that actually digs up at the archives of what people said in the past and contrasts it with the present, and shows how the talking heads usually have nothing useful to say. Note how in the clip the media pundits assumed in 2006 and 2007 that the nomination was simply Hillary Clinton's for the taking and that it was futile for anyone to even challenge her. It was only around March 2008, after she stumbled in Iowa and lost a string of eleven straight primaries to Obama that the media narrative switched and people decided she was unlikely to win.

Contrast the predictions of the TV pundits that of blogger Markos Moulitsas who said way back in December 2006 that if Obama ran, he would win, and carefully explained why.

I want to emphasize that it is not that Moulitsas was right in his prediction and the media pundits wrong that makes me compare them. Long-term predictions in politics are tricky and one can easily be wrong because there are so many contingent factors at play, any one of which can cause fortunes to fluctuate wildly. (I am almost always wrong in my own election predictions.) The reason the media pundits are so useless is because there is no depth to their analysis, no sense that they have taken into account the complexity of the process. They focus on one or two factors (gender, race, demographics) or some trivial issues of style and then draw sweeping conclusions and make flat declarative predictions. And then they move on to the next topic, never acknowledging that they were not only wrong, they did not even know what they were talking about. This kind of hit-and-run punditry is a waste of time.

Moulitsas, by contrast, takes into account the various factors involved and tries to weigh them appropriately. He may have been lucky in his prediction but his approach was correct.

In some ways, this difference in approach to punditry was replicated in the way the Clinton and Obama campaigns were run. Clinton based hers on sweeping but shallow generalizations, while Obama's looked at the nitty-gritty details carefully. Clinton adopted the standard Democratic Party strategy of focusing on those large states where the Democrats are strong and trying to run up the vote count there and spending little time on the smaller states that are often Republican. But Obama's people studied the rules and realized that by carefully targeting congressional districts across the country in all the states, and keeping the margins close in the traditional Democratic strongholds, they could win the delegate battle.

There is an important consequence of the Obama strategy. As a result of it, many voters sympathetic to Democrats but living in Republican states suddenly found themselves being wooed after being ignored for so long, which has boosted the chances of Democrats around the country. Obama's strategy paralleled that of the Democratic National Party chair Howard Dean who after taking that position announced a 50-state strategy where the Democrats would not concede any state to the Republicans. Traditional Democratic insiders ridiculed the fact that he put party organizers in every state as a waste of time and money, but it laid the groundwork on which the Obama candidacy could build.

It is significant that Obama has announced that he wants Dean to continue as chair of the party. It signals that they are going to jointly pursue a strategy of campaigning everywhere, for all positions, forcing McCain and the Republican Party to defend themselves in states which Republicans have taken for granted in the past. As a result, the 2008 election may have a record-breaking turnout.

And Stephen Colbert adds his thoughts on the events of Tuesday night.

POST SCRIPT: Baxter again

Probably wondering why I keep taking pictures of him. . .

June 05, 2008

Some thoughts on the presidential race

The Democratic Party primary process has finally come to an end with Barack Obama having secured the party nomination by virtue of having acquired the majority of delegates.

In many ways it has been a remarkable process. A system that had seemed for so long to belong to just white men found two candidates not fitting that mold fighting it out to the finish. While I knew that the barriers of race and gender would eventually be overcome, I had thought that it would be first breached by a woman before a minority, simply because the numbers were in favor of women.

But politics is not just mathematics and statistics. It does have an element of contingency and it turned out that this year the particular candidate who happened to be a minority appealed more to Democratic Party members than the candidate who happened to be a woman.

So now it will be Obama versus John McCain who are both, to a lesser and greater extent, establishment politicians, supported by Wall Street and the business sector and the Villagers, so whoever becomes president we should not expect major shifts in policy, especially on the domestic front. I do not expect to see single-payer, universal health care being even considered by either of them. I do not expect to see a fairer and more progressive tax system or more oversight of the corporate and financial sector.

On foreign affairs, I see both Obama and McCain continuing the imperialistic tendencies that have dominated American foreign policy for so long. What I do hope for is marginal improvements, that an Obama presidency will not launch military attacks on other countries and will seek to engage in dialogue with countries that have long been labeled as enemies. Not talking with those whom with one disagrees has always struck me as an insane policy. McCain strikes me as another reckless, dangerous, non-negotiating warmonger in the Bush tradition.

The Hillary Clinton candidacy has been painful to watch and not because she insisted on staying in the race. That was perfectly justifiable and even a good thing because people in every state should have the chance to vote their preferences. In fact, I would have liked all the candidates in both parties to stay to the end so that people have a real chance to vote for the people and policies they favor. I was annoyed that by the time that the Ohio primaries came around on March 4, the only choices I had were Obama and Clinton, although they were #4 and #7 on my preference list from the eight Democratic candidates who started out. The way the system works now, it is the amount of money that a candidate can raise early in the process that determines who stays in and who drops out.

I have written before (see here and here) that both Clintons are ruthlessly ambitious people who seem like they will do anything to achieve personal power. It was not the fact that Clinton stayed to the end that surprised me but the way she ran. I am not naïve. Politicians have to be ambitious and even ruthless but they usually have the good taste to reveal only their ambitions for the attainment of public policies, and keep their personal ambitions under wraps. The Clintons are startling in the way their drive for personal power is so naked and transparent. It seems like there is nothing they will not say or do to win, even if it means dividing their party and the country along lines that are difficult to subsequently heal. Dividing and ruling the poor and powerless by setting them against each other is a tried-and-true, but despicable, tactic of ruling class politicians and yet she seemed to be doing just that, pitting working class and less-educated whites against similar minorities.

A Saturday Night Live sketch from May 10 gave a harsh but also disturbingly perceptive caricature of her campaign's tactics. In it, a Clinton-like character gives three reasons why the party should choose her as the nominee over Obama, and none of them reflect well on her.

The cliché that politics makes strange bedfellows was illustrated dramatically when the very people whom the Clintons once considered their enemies (the 'vast right wing conspiracy' led by people like Richard Mellon Scaife, Fox News, and others) became her supporters against Obama, and she in return has embraced them. It is extraordinary that the very people who had a such visceral dislike for the Clintons that it bordered on the insane, and threw their energies behind the Monica Lewinsky affair, Whitewater, and Vince Foster's death to try and bring them down through impeachment, are now the very people who are urging her on.

She and Bill Clinton have done another surprising thing and that is openly campaign for the vice-presidency once her chances of winning the nomination receded. Traditionally it has been the case that people have campaigned for that slot very discreetly, while publicly disavowing any interest. The Clintons have turned that on its head and are publicly demanding that her strong showing practically requires that Obama give her the position.

Frankly, I do not see that happening. Obama would find himself hemmed in by two (Hillary and Bill) power-hungry, ambitious, ruthless, limelight-seeking people. Furthermore, her speech on Tuesday night when Obama's victory was sealed was, as Greg Saunders remarks, remarkable for its gracelessness and self-centeredness, in startling contrast to the warm praise Obama gave her in his own speech.

Actually, I think Hillary Clinton would be more compatible as John McCain's running mate. McCain has started saying very nice things about her, perhaps hoping to appeal to those Clinton supporters who have been goaded to fury by the Clinton campaign's extraordinary and repeated claim that she has been singled out and treated unfairly by her party, even though the process was carried out according to the rules established by the party and agreed to by her at the beginning. As this Washington Post article points out, Obama's strategists studied the rules carefully and devised a plan that they could use to win the majority of delegates even while losing the popular vote in some of the big states. This enabled them to overcome Clinton's enormous early advantage in name recognition.

The Obama phenomenon is something that scholars will analyze for many years, whether he wins the presidency or not. If you had told me in late 2001, when America was angry and lashing out at the world and entering a period of extreme nationalism and xenophobia following the attacks on the World Trade Center, that in just seven years there would be a good chance that the country would elect as president a man born of an African father, with a foreign-sounding last name that was just one letter away from that of the hated author of those attacks, and whose middle name had Muslim roots and was the same as the last name of the foreign leader that the Bush administration was goading the public into a frenzy against, I would have said you were crazy.

And yet here we are with a candidate whose seems to have so fired the imagination of so many people that all these factors, though not ignored or insignificant, have ceased to be of overriding concern.

What is the source of Obama'a appeal?

He has been vague on specifics and what he has said about policy seems very traditional and mainstream, so it cannot be any new ideas that are drawing people in.

Perhaps it is because people really are looking for change and that it is the very fact that he is so obviously different from every serious candidate of the past that makes him attractive, a symbol for a nation that really wants to show that it has broken from some of the ugliest aspects of its past. As Ezra Klein wrote after Obama's victory speech on Tuesday night:

Obama's speech tonight was powerful, but then, most all of his speeches are. This address stood out less than I expected. It took me an hour to realize how extraordinary that was. I had just watched an African-American capture the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America, and it felt . . . normal. Almost predictable. 50 years ago, African Americans often couldn't vote, and dozens died in the fight to ensure them the franchise. African-Americans couldn't use the same water fountains or rest rooms as white Americans. Black children often couldn't attend the same schools as white children. Employers could discriminate based on race. 50 years ago, African Americans occupied, in effect, a second, and lesser, country. Today, an African-American man may well become the president of the whole country, and it feels almost normal.

Some of Clinton's supporters claim that Obama benefited unfairly simply from being black and Klein's comment may seem to provide support for that view. That would be an error. The prejudices against black people run deep and Obama's candidacy will generate considerable unease. Many people will not vote for him purely because of his skin color, making laughable the suggestion that he is benefiting from being black. But that negative may be at least partially compensated by others who, while voting for him because of the hope he has inspired in them, will also take pride and pleasure in making a symbolic gesture towards creating a post-racial America. This makes John McCain's tactic of claiming to be the more experienced candidate somewhat dicey, since it also makes it easy to paint him as representing the past and the status quo, a perception that kept dogging Clinton as well.

At least we can be reassured that Obama will carry himself with the kind of dignity that one expects from a national leader. One cannot see him doing cringe-inducing chest-bumps and other adolescent acts with Air Force Academy graduates as Bush did last week. Obama will not be an embarrassment.

Obama also seems like a person who thinks things through and does not make rash and ill-considered decisions and that will no doubt come as a relief to all those people who have been on edge as to what crazy plan Bush will sign on to next because his gut (or, equivalently, his god) tells him it is the right thing to do.

I don't think many Americans quite understand how despised and disliked America and Americans are in the world right now, thanks to the arrogance, incompetence, and insensitivity that the Bush administration has displayed over the last seven years that have made Bush, even within this country, reach such low approval ratings that, combined with his disastrous performance in office, guarantees that he is going down in history as the worst president ever.

Whoever the next president is will have a very difficult time lifting the country out of the economic, political, and military dumpster that this administration has tossed it into, but one can be sure that Obama will start off with much greater feelings of goodwill around the world than McCain. When I was in Sri Lanka in January and April, I was amazed at how excited everyone I met was at the prospect of an Obama presidency. I did not meet a single person who expressed a preference for any of the large number of candidates of either party then running

Although I do not expect too much from Obama, I hope he wins. I am a hopeful optimist by nature and maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised by him.

POST SCRIPT: Sicko now online

Michael Moore's film on the scandal that is the US health care system is now online courtesy of Machines Like Us and you can see it here.

If you haven't seen it already, you really should.