On Wednesday, Matt wrote a diary, "Obama's Consolidation of the Party", that got quite a bit of notice, not just here, but elsewhere across the blogosphere. Mike and Chris both weighed in to compliment Matt and add a few thoughts of their own.
But I called it "A Rather Strange Post", and the time has come to elaborate further on why I said that--not so much focused on what Matt said, but on what he's describing, and the challenge of making sense of it.
Matt set up his post by saying:
Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.
He went on to talk about "Voter Registration," "Obama Organizing Fellows," "Money: MyBarackObama.com," "Field: MyBarackObama.com," and "Message and Politics: MyBarackObama.com." A recurrent them throughout the post was how Obama had managed to centralize power, while largely ignoring and/or marginalizing (other?) progressive groups and constituencies.
I only took on part of my concerns in my comment, the heart of which was questioning Obama's non-partisan schtick:
Like it or not, the aspiration to create a non-partisan politics is at odds with the very structure of our political institutions, from the winner-take-all single-member districts that define most of the legislative bodies in the country, to the electoral college. Also, like it or not, where one party systems do exist, the result is invariably tyranny.
There are, of course, powerful yearnings to be free of partisan strife. There are also powerful yearnings to eat so much ice cream that your [sic] burst.
I got deeper into historical specifics in responding to Chris's post when I wrote:
A Return to the Failed Policies of the Early 1900s
As I wrote several months ago--Obama is an early-20th Centrury progressive, not a post-Vietnam one. The former focused a great deal on process, and trusted that substantive equity would naturally follow. The downside of this is that these policies have already been shown to fail.
I'm not saying that they didn't do anything good. But I am saying that they were inadequate to the scope of the problems they faced, which meant that they failed in the long run--if not sooner.
Time to flesh this all out, in hopes of encouraging a more enlightened debate.
- Amanda Marcotte hosts Jeffrey Feldman at FDL, to discuss the outright barbarous language that the hardly-ever-Right uses to poison US politics. In comments, David Neiwert recommends Altemeyer's work on authoritarianism as helpful background; the full book is available to download in pdf format at the link.
First the Republicans began losing voters, then, only quite recently the Democrats began gaining them. Although the magnitude is less than that shown in a recent Pew Poll, the broad storyline is the same. Indeed, within the last month, the Rasmussen figures have suddenly jumped into the same range that Pew gave:
While the nomination campaign might very well be effectively over, especially given the vast, pro-Obama superdelegate movement over the past week, it remains possible that at some point between now and June 3rd, the Clinton campaign will argue that it leads in the popular vote. It needs to be pointed out now that in the broadest possible count of the popular vote, the count that includes all people who participated in the nomination process, that such a claim will simply be false. As I argued back on April 23rd:
In keeping with the principle of one person, one vote, the only good metrics to use are the ones with the broadest popular participation. As such, when measuring the popular vote, it is best to throw the widest possible net. This means to include Florida. It also means to include the estimates from caucus states that did not release popular totals, which stand at Obama 334,084--223,862 Clinton. Finally, it means to include Michigan, but also to allocate Obama 72.91%, or 173,368 of the uncommitted vote. This number is derived by dividing Obama's exit poll support in Michigan by the combined exit poll support of Obama, Edwards and Richardson, and then multiplying that number with the total uncommitted vote.
A second look at the official Michigan results indicates that the Obama uncommitted vote estimation should actually be 173,664. My earlier estimation was slightly lower because it did not use the official Michigan results.
Second, the Obama campaign's allies in Michigan organized an effort to get people in Michigan to vote for "uncommitted" in the Democratic primary, helping to bring the uncommitted share of vote to 40 percent. So the Obama camp can't reasonably argue supporters participated in the GOP primary and didn't vote in the Democratic contest.
Either some of those uncommitted votes were for Obama, or none of them were. In this passage, the Clinton campaign states that at least some of the uncommitted votes were for for Obama. To then argue that Obama gets zero votes in a popular vote count that includes Michigan just isn't "reasonable," in the Clinton campasign's own phrasing.
At the same time, it would be inaccurate to re-allocate the entire Michigan vote based on exit polls, since it retroactively takes votes that were in fact cast for Clinton and shifts them to other candidates. The only fair and democratic way is to give Clinton all of her Michigan votes, and then to allocate the uncommitted votes based on exit polls of Obama, Edwards and Richardson support, as those were the three candidates who removed their names from the ballot. So, 173,664 is the total for Obama from Michigan.
Overall, this means the best one-person, one-vote popular vote total is the bottom most total from Real Clear Politics, plus 173,664 for Obama. This leads to the following current, grand totals:
Obama: 17,087,483
Clinton: 16,690,099
This gives Obama a current margin of 397,384, which Clinton is very unlikely to erase during the final six contests. There is talk of up to two million people voting in the Puerto Rico primary, considering that there was 80% turnout in their last gubernatorial election. However, that was a general election, not a primary. Also, the local gubernatorial election is bound to draw way more voters than a Democratic primary, given the lower level of campaigning that has taken place and the more indirect impact it will have on Puerto Rican affairs.
It is now virtually guaranteed that Obama will win a narrow plurality of the popular vote / participation in the Democratic nomination campaign. Neither candidate will have won a majority, but the "will of the electorate" will still have been served by the outcome. That is a very good thing, since I know that I would not have been the only person extremely uncomfortable with nominating a candidate who did not receive the most popular support in the process. The day we nominate a candidate who did not receive the most popular support / participation will be a dark day for the party.
In 1995, Jerry Falwell was on the brink of financial ruin, $73 million in debt, when he was saved by the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon. The transaction was hidden from sight, as Moon and Falwell used a pair of Virginia businessmen as cut-outs.
Moon has been a major player on the right since at least 1982, when he established the Washington Times, which he has subsidized to the tune of $3 billion over the years, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry, who was the leading journalist uncovering the Iran/Contra affair in the 1980s, and who has an extensive series on Moon at his website, Consortiumnews.com.
Until the emergence of Fox News in the late 1990s, the Washington Timeswas unquestionably the leading national news/propaganda organ of the right, and thus none of the movement higher-ups questioned him or his organization. (Even today, it remains a vital hub of the rightwing noise machine.) But Moon's theology and practices were so clearly heretical that appearances required significantly soft-peddling his enduring role and influence. It's impossible to fully grasp the hypocrisy and projection involved in rightwing politics without a consideration of the role of Sun Myung Moon.
For example, Moon claims to be the Second Coming--but he also claims to be better than Jesus, saying that Jesus failed in his mission, because he didn't procreat. Moon, in contrast, has been married three times, had various affairs, and numerous children. He has never disclosed where his money comes from, but Parry cites substantial evidence that much of it comes from underworld figures in Asia and Latin America. He served 18 months for filing false tax returns and conspiracy in the early 1980s.
It's very clear that his organization functions as an authoritarian cult, and Moon is deeply hostile to the United States. He also has clearly visible ties to Bush Sr. So, naturally--based on the principle I'm writing about here-- the money he funnelled to Falwell helped Falwell to project all these negatives onto a shadow liberal elite. And so he did, devoting enormous amounts of attention to peddling The Clinton Chronicles, a pseudo-documentary film that attempted to paint President Clinton as the mastermind of a vast criminal enterprise.
Falwell not only peddled the film on his TV program, he appeared in it, and later admitted he had no idea if any of it was true. Apparently, the commandment against bearing false witness didn't make it into Falwell's Bible.
This is the flip side of the manufactured hate-fest directed at Jeremiah Wright. Figures like Moon and Falwell break every Commandment in the Book, but are regarded as revered pillars of the conservative establishment. The more they sin, the more they have to savagely attack someone else. On the flip, we'll look at just a few of the things Sun Mung Moon has done that no liberal could possibly get away with.
We've seen a number of surprising events in this nomination battle. Hillary beat polling expectations substantially in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Obama did so in Iowa, Nevada, Texas and North Carolina. Hillary has several times seemed to be facing the collapse of her campaign, under rumours of serious financial problems and facing an ever more insurmountable climb to an absolute delegate win, however calculated. Yet she has persisted in the race, and not seen (up to this week at least) her race take on that quixotic half-joke status in the media that Huckabee's campaign did. Much of our analysis of that has revolved around the media, and their evident desire to see a horserace, keep high ratings or perhaps more nefariously serve the interests of the giant corporations that own them and damage the Democratic chances in a banner Democratic year.
I'm not satisfied with the "blame the media" approach though. I certainly think there are elements of that in play, but the media alone cannot create a competitive Hillary campaign if the voters were not up for it. They certainly did prop up John McCain in 2007 when he in no way deserved it, and he certainly should account the media near the top of his list of supporters when he accepts the Republican nomination formally. That said, on the Republican side, McCain faced a set of seriously damaged opponents and if the media being in the tank was enough to put you over the top, McCain would likely have been the 2000 nominee. The difference in 2000 was that his opponent was a stronger candidate (from a delirious Republican perspective anyway).
Back to Hillary, it is clear to me that there is more going on than the media egging on a race where none would otherwise exist. I see two major factors that in conjunction help explain what has happened:
1) Banner Democratic year. Simply, there hasn't been a stronger chance for a Democratic presidential win since perhaps 1976 or even 1964. It is arguable that the Democratic primary is, in fact, the meaningful portion of the Presidential election.
2) Historic candidates. Two large US demographics that have never seen a candidate representing them with a real shot of victory and which have been fighting for their rights (or dignity) for a very long time. Both constituencies would rightly feel putting one of their own into the White House to be a substantial symbolic victory which would have many salutary effects for them, almost independent of policy concerns.
McCain taps former lobbyist for Burmese dictatorship to run GOP convention.
(ed.note: For longtime TPMers, also note that Doug Goodyear is CEO of the DCI Group, the pioneering GOP astro-turf organizing outfit.)
--Josh Marshall
At 8:35 Josh posts:
05.10.08 -- 8:35PM // link |
THAT DIDN'T TAKE LONG
McCain's convention chair gets tossed after Newsweek reported that he'd lobbied for the Burmese dictatorship.
McCain's pretty tight with a lot of lobbyists, isn't he?
--Josh Marshall
So, what's most embarrasing about this?
Is it:
(A) The bloodthirsty dictatorship thing?
(B) The lobbyist thing?
(C) The utter incompetence thing?
(D) The bad timing with the typhoon thing?
(E) The flippy-floppy thing?
(F) The "so what's new about this?" thing?
(G) The press will smooth it over in no time thing?
(H) The "NOTHING can possibly embarras McSame" thing?
(I) The fact that the GOP can still manage to field a nominee after 8 years of Bush.
(J) Nothing. Nothing at all.
(K) The fact that some people would try to make a story out of this.
Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens
By Dana Milbank
Friday, May 9, 2008; A03
It was already shaping up to be a difficult year for congressional Republicans. Now, on the cusp of Mother's Day, comes this: A majority of the House GOP has voted against motherhood.
On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, "Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother's Day," when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.
"Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote," he announced.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt's request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.
It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.
Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: "Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother's Day."
By voting against it?
If Boehner's explanation doesn't make much sense, he's been under a great deal of stress lately.
OMG! Can you imagine if Democrats did that?
First vote here; second vote here. (Click on party name to see invividual members).
If you think he's been under a lot of stress, you ain't seen nothin' yet!
Voting against motherhood!
Well, I'll give them this: at least they were honest for once.
And yes, since one of those voting against was Dana ("Taliban") Rohrabacher, a small portion of whose district falls into the Random Lengths News circulation area, I do feel honor bound to see that this runs in our paper. His district is R+6, and Debbie Cook is gunning for him.
... Ekman, Friesen, and another colleague, Robert Levenson ... decided to try to document this effect. They gathered a group of volunteers and hooked them up to monitors measuring their heart rate and body temperature - the physiological signals of such emotions as anger, sadness, and fear. Half or the volunteers were told to try to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half were simply shown how to create, on their faces, the expressions that corresponded to stressful emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. The second group, the people who were acting, showed the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature, as the first group. ...
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, (2005) by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point
Totally guilting you out about how much good reading you've been missing ...
- Both the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business & Media Institutes are spending money and time lying to people about global warming, in an ongoing effort to make sure that there's neither the money nor time to deal with climate change.
It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group.
In that diary, I talked about the conservatives' creation of the truest form of shadow elite-the non-existent "Bavarian Illuminati" who had been disbanded a decade prior to the French Revolution they were accused of master-minding. In this diary set, I want to talk about shadow elites and religion-a topic which necessarily evokes a much earlier point in time, peg some further observation look much farther back in time, to the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337), the first Christian Roman Emperor.
The changes that took place in Christianity as a result gave rise to or intensified contradictions that are with us still, as a pacifistic religion of the downtrodden and peripheral was transformed into an imperial religion. Although tremendous intellect was devoted over the ages to attempting to perfect this transformation, it was, at bottom, an impossible task. This partly explains the distinctive nature of America's Black Church, since its practitioners are in the same position as the early Christians and their Hebrew forbearers-a fact which Black Christians seemed to have grasped almost immediately, though it seems to have entirely escaped the understanding of their slavemasters.
White Christians, OTOH, are all too vulnerable to sliding into Crusade mode, as this new release from Brave New Films-highlighting John McCain's excessive praise for holy war enthusiast Rod Parsley--reminds us:
[More on Parsley below the fold]
In the heat of a presidential campaign, it is perhaps understandable that Reverend Jeremiah Wright should be castigated for causing trouble for Barack Obama, yet, whatever one thinks of his actions, he does have a point: He is acting out a traditional Christian role, and he is correct when he claims to be articulating Biblical principles. He seems a cantankerous outsider, and so he is. So were all the Hebrew prophets, so was John the Baptist, and so, too, was Jesus, as were his followers for generations, up until the time of Constantine.
In contrast, the Christian elite, from at least Constantine onward, has struggled with the contradictions of its own existence, and often, in doing so, has resorted to projecting its own contradictions, its own hypocrisy, its own confusion onto others, including, of course, its shadow elites, and rival religious traditions.
In this diary set, I want to focus on a four main contradictions underlying imperialist Christianity, as a cultural mainstream, and the religious right as it has specifically articulated itself since the 1970s....
Speculating over prospective vice-presidential running mate choices is undoubtedly one of the baser forms of pundit wankery. Basically, it is the sort of discussion that just kills time rather than providing any actual insight or moving toward any actual goal. However, due to the importance the VP choice will have on the current and future direction of the election, next administration, and indeed the Democratic Party itself, it is still something I would like to talk about and, hopefully, influence in the two or three months before the decision is made.
As such, this afternoon I would like to continue the vice-presidential discussion simply by listening to you. In order to have any influence on this choice, it seems important to find out where the section of the political community I interact with on a regular basis currently stands in this discussion. So, over at DemoChoice, I have set up a Vice-Presidential straw poll that lists 15 potential running mates for Barack Obama. They are the 15 candidates for whom I have seen the most online support at Open Left and Daily Kos. The list does not include John Edwards, because he flatly said that he will not be the VP this time. Bloomberg is not included because he is not a Democrat. Also, Al Gore is not included just because he isn't. Over the last eighteen months, I have discovered that including Al Gore in online polls ruins those polls, doesn't make any sense, and also that arguing with Al Gore supporters over this is impossible.
The goal of this straw poll is simply to get an idea of who the most popular and acceptable choices are right now. Only rank the candidates you find acceptable. If, for whatever reason, you do not consider any of the fifteen to be an acceptable VP choice, then don't include those candidates in your preference rankings.
For some time now, I've been writing about the Gramscian concept of "hegemony" and a "war of position"/"culture war" to control the cultural institutions that in turn shape our "common sense" understanding of things. It's my contention that for the 30-40 years, extreme cultural conservatives have been waging a one-sided culture war of precisely this sort-a culture war to control cultural institutions. And in response, moderates, liberals, even progrerssives have basically been asleep at the switch. I've also argued that while all the extreme conservatives' plans have produced impressive institutional successes, the realworld results have been utterly disasterous, which puts us on the cusp of a potentially historic realigning election.
A large part of my disappointment with Barack Obama stems from his unwillingness to confront the conservative establishment. But it's more than that: Obama is genuinely hostile to the notion of others engaging in such confrontation. He insists that the problem is partisanship per se-on both sides. This simply is not so. Logically, of course, it could be so, if the left had been fighting the same sort of well-coordinated culture war that the right is figthing. But historically, this simply did not happen.
Comes now the British newspaper, The Telegraph to provide dramatic truth that the culture war has been one-sided-and to remind us of why Obama dares not tell the truth about this. The Telegraph has produced a list of "the 50 most influential political pundits" who "help drive the national conversation and shape public opinion."
It is not a perfect list, by any means. Any number of influential people have been left off the list, while some who are on it seem rather over-rated, even from the perspective of simply having influence for whatever reason. Still, it seems generally accurate in terms of the distribution of influence across the political spectrum, and in that regard, it is quite telling. Here is the list, without the accompanying explanations:
1. Karl Rove
2. Chris Matthews
3. Sean Hannity
4. Rush Limbaugh
5. John Harris And Jim Vandehei
6. Matt Drudge
7. Tim Russert
8. Jon Stewart
9. David Brooks
10. Mark Halperin
11. Stephen Colbert
12. Bill O'Reilly
13. Keith Olbermann
14. Chuck Todd
15. Bill Maher
16. Glenn Beck
17. Andrew Sullivan
18. Frank Luntz
19. Donna Brazile
20. Joe Klein
21. David Gergen
22. Dick Morris
23. Mike Allen
24. Laura Ingraham
25. Michael Savage
26. Arianna Huffington
27. Pat Buchanan
28. James Carville
29. Ron Fournier
30. Peggy Noonan
31. Juan Williams
32. William Kristol
33. Roland Martin
34. Howard Kurtz
35. Joe Trippi
36. Newt Gingrich
37. Eugene Robinson
38. Michael Barone
39. Dee Dee Myers
40. Tony Snow
41. Mark Shields
42. Bill Bennett
43. Paul Begala
44. Jeffrey Toobin
45. Fred Barnes
46. Mark Levin
47. JC Watts
48. Paul Krugman
49. Mary Matalin
50. Rachel Maddow
It's worth noting that three of the top four voices from the left side of the spectrum are comedians. The fourth is a career sports commentator, whose show includes a fair amount of what can only be called "cultural fluff." Then again, perhaps that's all to the good, since the only other entries from the Democratic side of things in the top 20 are Donna Brazile and Joe Klein, taking up the last two slots. This is indicative of how thoroughly liberal and progressive voices are excluded from positions of media influence.
