The Republic of Dissent

The limits of political magic

Ah!:

In truth Mr Obama’s problems extend well beyond the confines of the capital’s Beltway. The president’s headache is that his winning majority resembles the hamlet in “Brigadoon”. It exists all right, twice sending him to the White House. But, like that Highland village, it is hard to see or touch most of the time. (...) The magic at the heart of Mr Obama’s two victories was his ability to expand the electorate itself, mobilising sporadic voters who shun politics most of the time, notably the young and minorities. Now that he is no longer on the ballot, his loose coalition risks being no match for the intense ideologues who fight and oversee Washington’s partisan battles.

 

The American constitution as a toxin

The best sentence I read this week from Sandy Levinson over at Balkinization:

(...) the Constitution is evermore a clear and present danger to the health of the American Republic.

Summum malum

I agree with Corey Robin on this:

During the Vietnam era, liberals and leftists believed not only in social justice but also in mass protest. Whether the cause was democracy at home or liberation abroad, men and women afflicted by oppression had to organize themselves for freedom. Yes, some of yesterday’s activists were blind to coercion within these movements, and others joined elite cadres bombing their way to liberation. Still, the animating faith of the 1960s was in the democratic capacities of ordinary men and women, making it difficult for liberals and leftists to believe in conquering armies from abroad or shock troops from on high.

Many liberals, and some leftists, no longer hold these views. Their faith is guided not by the light of justice but by the darkness of evil: by the tyranny of dictators, the genocide of ethnic cleansers and the terrorism of Islamist radicals. Despite their differences—some of these liberals and leftists support the war in Iraq, others do not; some are partial to popular movements, particularly those opposing anti-American governments, while others favor constitutional regimes, particularly those supporting the United States—theirs is a liberalism, as the late Harvard scholar Judith Shklar put it in a pioneering essay in 1989, that seeks to ward off the “summum malum” (worst evil) rather than to install a “summum bonum” (highest good). Reversing Augustine’s dictum that there is no such thing as evil—evil being only the absence of good—today’s liberal believes there is only evil and progress is measured by the distance we put between ourselves and that evil.

Ah good intentions and the obsession with evil...

Expressive politics

I agree with Sandy Livinson on this:

What I want to do now, though, is simply to vent about the patent irresponsibility of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in appointing his friend Michael Cowan to replace John Kerry as senator, apparently for no other reason than his (Gov. Patrick's) desire to have an African-American Democratic senator for at least four monts or so, and regardless of the fact that there is no reason at all to believe that Sen. Cowan, as I presume he'll become tomorrow or very shortly thereafter, has any real knowledge about national political issues that may in fact come up in the next four months.  This is "expressive politics" at its absolute worst, and Gov. Patrick should be ashamed of himself.  Frankly, it is the kind of self-indulgent gesture by someone with power that gives "affirmative action" (which I support) a bad name with many Americans.  He has, in one instant, disserved his state, his party, and the nation (even if, as I presume, Sen. Cowan is an extremely fine and able person whom all of us would be proud to have as a friend or, if governor of Massachusetts, an aide, as he was.)  Nothing in my remarks should be read as casting aspersions on Mr. Cowan's personal character (other, frankly, than that he didn't have the personal self-discipline to exercise what Madison might have described as the "civic virtue" to tell the Governor that he is highly flattered but not really qualified for the job). 

All politics nowadays is expressive politics, which is almost always a potent and dangerous form of identity politics.

Deval Patrick is Obama 1.0, he hasn't yet updated his operating software to make his errors of judgment appear to be brilliant avant-gardism and awesomely historic.

Southern dignity

From Garry Wills:

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

It is easy, comforting, and convenient to blame American idiocy on the South, it fits perfectly in the dumb culture wars narrative.

Obama as a militaristic social democrat

I disagree partly with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Obviously, Obama is no socialist. But ask me if I think he's a (surprisingly militaristic) social democrat and you'll get an affirmative answer, which in my book makes him a lot more of a liberal on domestic issues than any other modern Democratic president.

I don't think Obama's militarism is surprising at all for it takes guts, audacity to be anything else these days in American presidential politics and Obama is only audacious in his speeches; furthermore Obama's liberalism is both a fantasy and an glitzy accessory used to keep him fashionable.

Cheap

Ah:

Though a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, several states retain trigger laws that would come into force if Roe v Wade were ever overturned (see map). Leaving them in place is a cheap way for politicians to place themselves on one side of a culture war without having to accept the consequences of their position.

Nowadays, in America and elsewhere, being successful in politics means being cheap!

Rien ne change

Obviously, I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

t is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus.

Quelle surprise!

Newtown and Nakedness

Best thing I read about the Newtown tragedy so far from Bill Benzon:

Remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? The Emperor parades before the town proudly display his costly and gorgeous new outfit, NOT! For, as everyone sees, he's naked. But no one says anything for fear of displeasing the Emperor. And then one little boy blurts out "he's bloody naked!" and the whole delusion collapses.

Everyone saw what the boy saw, but no one knew that their neighbor saw the same thing. Everyone was quaking in their boots in fear that they, and they alone, couldn't see the Emperor's fine raiment. Therefore, there must be something terribly wrong with them. But there wasn't. Their eyesight was fine. The little boy's cry showed them that.

These terrible gun tragedies are like the little boy's cry. Now we all can see IT. But what is this IT that we can see, and why do we so quickly forget that we saw it? Why does seeing IT seem to make this failure of vision even worse? For that's what it does: "But after moments of healing, the partisan divide in attitudes toward guns has seemed only to accelerate after similar past events, as in Columbine, Colo." Just what is it that's been polarizing the American body politic over the last forty years?

The American infatuation with innocence

I agree strongly with Corey Robin on this:

Only a country steeped in myths of innocence would find the most conventional and boring kind of realism about politics to be the trumpet blast of Truth, Brave Truth.

We see these quicksilver shifts, from innocence to cynicism or realism, in the culture all the time, especially its more elite sectors—though sometimes they go in the reverse direction. Think of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, how the wise-cracking cynic Jean Arthur becomes a true believer. Or Dave, where the Sigourney Weaver character makes the same pilgrimage. (Interestingly, in both cases it’s a woman who loses her cynicism and discovers her innocence via falling in love with a man.)

But whether it’s the cynic discovering or recovering her innocence, or the innocent losing his innocence, the story of politics among cultural and political elites in this country is always the same, toggling back and forth between two positions that are little more than the competing wisdom of juveniles.

Oh America, I have news for you even innocence can be sinful dirty complicated. As a matter of fact, in America, innocence is a way to fight the terrifying realization that purity in the modern world is impossible.

All this reminds me of the awfully good movie Agnes of God with Jane Fonda in which a young and yes innocent nun gets pregnant and there is throughout the strong suggestion that she had sex with God, which makes it more than ok, not an exploitation, not a perverted act or a worse not one of a sexual discovery and empowerment but a religiously wonderful occurrence for the Mother Superior (Anne Bancroft )  declares solemnly and fanatically in the end of the movie that to be innocent is to be god's victim.

The ignorance of voters

From the great Ilya Somin's comment on Citizens United or rather to a comment by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni in Slate on that infamous case:

The problem with modern voters is not that they are selfish, but that they are often ignorant and irrational. That problem cannot be solved by restricting corporate and union-funded political speech. Obviously, corporate and union-funded speech sometimes seeks to exploit political ignorance. But the same is true of speech funded by the media, political parties, activist groups, and others. In a political environment where the electorate is often ignorant, whoever is allowed to engage in electoral speech has a strong incentive to take advantage of that ignorance.

I agree with Somin even though I am trouble by the elitism (but right) of our shared viewpoint. However, my discomfort is soothed by the realization that America and Americans don't want an educated citizenry because of the belief, that politics is about identity and that illusory thing called culture. In other words, people should always vote who they are and never what they know.

In Obama's America it isn't knowledge that is power, but identity.

Convinced of their own goodness

From Glenn Greenwald:

Political leaders and political movements convinced of their own Goodness are usually those who need greater, not fewer, constraints in the exercise of power. That's because - like religious True Believers - those who are convinced of their inherent moral superiority can find all manner to justify even the most corrupted acts on the ground that they are justified by the noble ends to which they are put, or are cleansed by the nobility of those perpetrating those acts.

Political factions driven by self-flattering convictions of their own moral superiority - along with their leaders - are the ones most likely to abuse power. Anyone who ever listened to Bush era conservatives knows that this conviction drove them at their core ("you are with us or with the Terrorists"), and it is just as true of Obama-era progressives who genuinely see the political landscape as an overarching battle between forces of Good (Democrats: i.e., themselves) and forces of Evil (Republicans).

Well, four more years...Bush + Obama = ?

Dixie

This from John Quiggin disturbs me:

It strikes me that the best way to understand the distinctive characteristics of US voting patterns is to to treat “Southern White ” as an ethnicity, like Hispanic. With that classification each of the major parties becomes an coalition between a solid bloc vote from an ethnic minority and around half the votes of the “non-Southern white” ethnic majority, which is more likely to vote on class lines. The question then is which ethnic/class coalition is bigger. As in other countries, voting for the more rightwing party is correlated, though not perfectly with higher incomes and (conditional on income) lower education, and to shift according to broader ideological movements.

Is it legitimate to treat Southern Whites as a separate ethnic group? Certainly, plenty of Southerners thought so at the time of the Civil War. Since then, Southern whites have made strong claims to a separate cultural heritage, defined in opposition both to blacks (and also through historic and recent conflicts with Hispanics) and to Northern Whites.

(...) To the extent that white Southerners vote on ethnic lines, hostile to key Democratic ideas, it makes little sense to try for a class-based message that panders to (for example) Confederate nostalgia. Rather, the best hope is that younger generations will cease identifying with the South and regard themselves just as Americans or even (Utopianism alert) just as human beings.

Really does ethnicity make one more likely to be stupid and to vote a certain way? It does in America because ethnicity is treated as a religion.  Quiggin's point just illustrates what is wrong with the America's view of ethnicity and race for they are used to legitimate identical illusions and ignorance. 

Come on now, whether one is a 'Southern White' or whatever else, in America, the fact remains that it is much easier and even comfortable to justify the unjustifiable by using ethnicity, culture, and identity as excuses for one's biases and irrationality and that is a problem for no matter what their heritage, people chose who/what to be.

An excuse not to think about war

From a fascinating BBC article on the American cult of the General by Daniel Nasaw:

With Gen Petraeus' public downfall, the American public can begin to grapple with why after 11 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan "we haven't won anything", [Andrew] Bacevich says.

The consequences of the myth of "the great heroic general" have been dire, he says.

"It's an excuse to not think seriously about war and to avoid examining the actual consequences of wars that we have chosen to engage."

Andrew Bacevich is too optimistic. The American public doesn't want to think seriously about war or about politics, economics, race, gender, sex for that matter.

Political dumbness

Sugar excerpt of the day from Bret Stephens (hat tip: Professor Bainbridge):

Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it's lawful and consensual and doesn't impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often, unwittingly revealing.

Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it's a credit to our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is the tapped foot and the wide stance.

Also, please tone down the abortion extremism. Supporting so-called partial-birth abortions, as too many liberals do, is abortion extremism. But so is opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest, to say nothing of the life of the mother. Democrats did better with a president who wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"; Republicans would have done better by adopting outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels's call for a "truce" on social issues.

By the way, what's so awful about Spanish? It's a fine European language with an outstanding literary tradition—Cervantes, Borges, Paz, Vargas Llosa—and it would do you no harm to learn it. Bilingualism is an intellectual virtue, not a deviant sexual practice.

Which reminds me: Can we, as the GOP base, demand an IQ exam as well as a test of basic knowledge from our congressional and presidential candidates? This is not a flippant suggestion: There were at least five Senate seats in this election cycle that might have been occupied by a Republican come January had not the invincible stupidity of the candidate stood in the way.

Stupid question: does it pay to be smart and to act smart in American politics?  I don't think that it does for the ultimate test remains likeness and the willingness to refuse to listen to reason because of Americanness/manliness.

Lucky not good

From Paul Krugman:

The modern GOP is very much into denial of inconvenient truths, whether those inconvenient truths involve climate change or macroeconomics. Why shouldn’t we expect a party that still believes in supply-side economics after the Clinton boom and the Bush bust to engage in voodoo polling too?

And yet Republicans retained for a long time a fearsome reputation for political prowess. How can these be reconciled?

I know that I’m not alone in believing that a large part of the answer is that they were never actually that good; they were just lucky.

Both American political parties are in denial, one just happens to have been able to make its denial more attractive and more 'hopeful' with the use of magical thinking and marketing .

Mainstream

Sugary excerpt from Philip Delves Broughton:

Perhaps the greatest shock of his second term will be the hardening realisation that Obama’s reality is not his rhetoric. He is a very mainstream, and not uncommonly partisan Democratic haggler, who will become more so the longer he stays in office.

I have to admit that it is hard to accept the fact that America doesn't like reality.  Sometimes, I wish that Amerians were more French than they are and can probably ever be.

Throwing away the bible

I wish this were true:

Though it may be painful, though it may be costly at the polls in the short run, Republicans don't have a future unless they break up with the religious right and the gay-bashing, Bible-thumping fringe that gives the party such a bad rap with every young voter. By fighting to legally ban abortion, the party undercuts the potential to paint itself as a rebel against the governmental-control machine.

It is impossible for the Republicans to break up with the religious right, the best thing to hope for is an open relationship. 

 

Citizens United right

From Gerard Magliocca:

I think the critics of Citizens United should admit that their doomsday predictions about what the decision would mean for substantive political outcomes were wrong.  Tons of money were spent to little effect.  Now this may not be the best campaign system, but in the end people listened to the speech being offered and made up their own minds.  As it should be. 

I disagree. An exception doesn't make the rule or rather Magliocca infer the wrong conclusion from what he believes to be the right outcome of Tuesday's election without taking into consideration that especially in financial matters, spending gazilion amounts of dollars dumbly and ineffectively is almost always fatal.

Theater

Great questions about the coverage of the American political election  from Charlie Beckett via the London School Economics's Polis blog:

(...)Why do political journalists still treat campaigns like theatre or sport when it is now maths? (cf Nate Silver) (...) Was the election really so close, or does the news media need a tight finish to justify their investment and boost ratings? (...) Did editors think electoral college system was too complicated/obscure to bother explaining it fully, sooner? Because citing only a national poll and saying it’s “too close to call” was not really the most accurate account(...) Is media obsession with process (tactics/strategy) getting in the way of meaningful debate on issues e.g level of debt? [I would answer yes, but it's mainly because politicians don't want to debate Big Issues and the public can't be bothered to read the reams of policy detail that was actually put out by both candidates].

 

Falling back on identity

From Sean Collins at Spiked:

In a campaign devoid of ideas, people fell back on identity. Obama’s victory was a victory for the Democrats’ strategy of winning on social values and cohering support among women and minorities, an approach which was very pronounced at their national convention in September.

Identity politics is very much the present and the future of not only American politics, but of world politics. That said, I think Obama's victory was impressive!

The new normal

From llya Somin:

Obama’s reelection victory cements the idea that having an African-American president is normal.

Ah America and its love of symbols to avoid hard work and harsh/difficult questions!

Blood and memory

Sugary excerpt of the day from Lynn Parramore :

Cultural memory and prejudice form strange currents in the Southern mind. The power of the fear and antipathy of the black man has been diluted, but it’s still there, and it's easily stoked by unscrupulous politicians. But it’s easy to just stop there, and you won't have a clear picture if you do.

If you look closer, there’s something else. The Harley Davidson guys and their Southern brethren who put rebel flag stickers on their rides are signaling that they still strongly identify with a war in which their ancestors found themselves on the wrong side of history and fought a losing battle. White men in other regions of the country don’t really get what it feels like to know that your people were defeated in a war by their own countrymen. There’s a feeling that they lost so much for this Union to stay together that they’ll be damned if they are going to admit another defeat by recognizing that America is currently in decline. That is too much for the heart to bear.

Aah, I have to admit this type of analysis just drives me bonkers for it evokes the despairing consensus in America that identity and culture are solely about collective memory and history.  I resent that idea because it takes me back to the Fascist dictum that people think with their blood.

Silver linings or not...

Best stuff I read all weekend on Nate Silver's assertion that there is a 80.9% chance that Obama will win Tuesday's election and is thus, the favorite, from Justin Fox :

Silver has repeatedly, and not very convincingly, tried to explain his percentage forecasts in the context of a football game: Romney is behind, but could still win with a last-minute touchdown. The problem with this metaphor — as, of course, Silver has acknowledged — is that we don't actually know the score of the game. We're standing outside the stadium and guessing the score based on crowd noise. So the source of uncertainty resides at least as much in the potential for mismeasurement as in the potential for last-minute game changers.

What Silver's 80.9% forecast technically means is that, if the Obama-Romney 2012 election were contested 1000 times, he thinks Obama would win 809 of them. This is a way of thinking derived from games of chance, which is where modern ideas about probability originated. In poker or blackjack or roulette or craps, you can (until you run out of money) repeat many iterations of the same gamble. But this particular election is only being contested once. So the closest approximation to the games-of-chance approach would be to expect that, if Silver forecasts four-fifths odds of victory in five different elections, he should correctly pick the winner four times. That's a ridiculously tiny sample size, though. You'd really want to look at dozens or hundreds of elections to judge Silver's reliability. Maybe, if he keeps doing this for another couple of decades, we'll be able to judge him by that standard. In the meantime, it's Silver's reasoning that probably offers the best clues to whether his forecasts are credible.

I agree with both Silver and Fox.

Obama, failed progressive

From Clive Crook:  

(...) if Obama loses this election, it won't be for what many will say are the obvious reasons -- because the economy is weak and Obama's an African-American. It'll be because he ran as a failed progressive rather than a successful centrist.

I don't even think that Obama is a successful centrist, although he is for sure not a progressive...

 

Liberal Decline

I agree with Walter Mead on this:

American liberalism today is in an advanced stage of intellectual decline. Cynical and short sighted interests wrap themselves in the increasingly tattered mantles of sacred ideas. Liberals are right to feel that social justice matters, that the poor should have greater opportunity and that government in a democratic society cannot remain indifferent to the existence of great social evils. (...)The French say that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. But it is also true to say that behind every great failure lies a great blunder. Late 20th century American liberalism is wrong about the way the world works. It doesn’t understand cause and effect very well. It cannot feed itself. Given full power it cannot design and implement policies that advance the causes it honors. Modern American liberalism can only win Pyrrhic victories, because liberals in power take steps that advance their decline.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, American Liberalism is like a box of chocolate, whatever you get from it might make you feel good by providing a quick sugar rush, but it will never really feel you up and will always ruin your teeth. 

A benefit of this election

From Sandy Levinson:

One "benefit" of this election is that it demonstrates so many things that are wrong with our basic constitutional structures, but, insofar as the worst part of the Constitution is Article 5, I suspect that we will all continue to deny that the Constitution has anything to do with why most Americans, across party lines, have increasing contempt for their government.

In short, America is stuck because of its unchangeable and yet so imperfect Constitution.

There is no moderate position on Abortion

I take issue with this from Amy Davidson via the New Yorker:

Romney has said that he does support exceptions to an abortion ban for victims of rape and incest, but, as I’ve written before, that does not make him a moderate. Who would a woman have to appeal to to prove that she had been raped in order to be allowed to end her pregnancy? How long would that take, how vulnerable would she have to make herself to legal machinations, further exposure to her rapist, or the condescending disdain of men like Mourdock? Or is that what he supposes he is sparing survivors of rape by taking the whole question of access for them off the table? How, for that matter, would Richard Mourdock and his cohort want her to prove that she might die if she saw the pregnancy through? Would a small but significant risk be enough? If she was denied access and did die, or was left disabled, where would God’s intention be?

There isn't such a thing as a moderate position on Abortion and people who argue that there is are usually trying to make another point and in this case, Davidson's point  is that Romney is an extremist.  She should just say it instead of using abortion to prove what is for her, obviously, a res ipsa loquitur literally.

It is alarming to assert but in America and elsewhere, there is only a right and a wrong position on Abortion, which means that there is no middle ground for it is impossible to be a little pregnant. For that reason, Abortion is no longer in my opinion a political issue, but solely one of human rights. 

The resiliency of neocons

From Stephen Walt:

(...) the unsinkable resiliency of the neoconservative movement remains impressive. Indeed, there is a certain genius to neoconservatism, which one must grant a certain grudging respect. Unlike their liberal interventionist counterparts, who are always looking for consensus and eager to compromise, the neocons are both remarkably uncompromising and notoriously unrepentant. They don't look back, if only because staring at their record of consistent failure would be depressing. So they always look forward, confident that their fellow citizens won't remember the past and can be bamboozled into heeding their advice once again.(...)neoconservatives are like someone who is constantly telling you to jump off a twenty story building, and promising that if you do, you'll fly. If you decide to be prudent and jump from the 10^th floor instead, and find yourself plummeting toward earth, they'll just say you failed because you didn't follow their advice to the letter. 

To put it simply, Neocons have a lot in common with the Obamabots/Obamaniacs! 

Idiocy rules

Sugary excerpt of the day from Roger Ebert:

I saw an article the other day saying that most Americans don't much follow politics. That is a tragedy. Democracy is like a lot of things: If you don't use it, you lose it. I suspect that many Americans who are absolutely positive who they will vote for in the next election would not be particularly articulate in explaining why. This is partly the fault of the superficial nature of our media, where idiocy rules television. You can more easily find the reasons why viewers support the competitors on the dominant television genre. (That genre, of course, was founded decades ago as "The Original Amateur Hour," although its descendants are neither original or amateurs.)

International law and the American presidential campaign

Sentence du jour from Peter Spiro :

(...) the decline of IL as campaign-trail whipping post bodes well either way.

If only it were true, however,  to the contrary, it is this is the proof that two terms of Bush and yes, one term of Obama have made international law irrelevant in American politics for the consensus is that the POTUS has the right to supersede it when he believes it to be in the name of American national interest without much fuss domestically. 

Format or formatted

I disagree with Jonathan Adler on this:

Presidential debates don’t much resemble actual debates, in that they are generally moderated by questioners who have an exaggerated sense of their importance in these events and tend to limit the extent of any actual back-and-forth between the candidates. Insofar as Jim Lehrer did not so much direct the discussion as bring up general areas for the candidates to address, it was a small step in the right direction. It would be even better to allow some time for the candidates to ask each other questions. We don’t need Lincoln-Douglas, but an actual debate would be nice.

Te formats of the debates are not the issue for not matter how they are formatted, candidates will always be over-rehearsed and find ways to avoid saying anything of substance to avoid having the media and others focus on their gaffes thus making them their policies.

The point is that the debates are just a reflection of  the state of American politics and the format are a symptom of its vacuity and its focus on flash and hot air. 

Protracted wars

From Glenn Greenwald:

One of the primary reasons war - especially protracted war - is so destructive is not merely that it kills the populations at whom it is aimed, but it also radically degrades the character of the citizenry that wages it. That's what enables one of America's most celebrated pundits to go on the most mainstream of TV programs and coldly justify the killing of 4-year-olds, without so much as batting an eyelash or even paying lip service to the heinous tragedy of that, and have it be barely noticed. Joe Klein is the face not only of the Obama legacy, but also mainstream US political culture.

I'm not sure this is just an American 'thing' for it has to do with power and the  complacency that comes with a sense of entitlement.

Drones and the final debate

I agree totally with Tony Junod on this:

We have been told, many times, that each killing carried out by the administration is accompanied by vigorous and even agonized debate about its legality, advisability, efficacy, and morality. That debate, however has remained staunchly internal — has remained secret — and it has become clear that the only way to find out what our two presidential candidates think about the implications of the Lethal Presidency is to ask them, tonight, at the debate in Florida. President Obama has limited his comments to all but the most self-serving circumstance, and Governor Romney has spoken only through inference and through the often confounding comments of his foreign-policy surrogates. Bob Schieffer should know that if he does not ask a question about targeted killing tonight, he is — we are — unlikely to get another chance.

Unfortunately,the main concern of most journalists and of most Americans is to protect America by whichever means necessary. Thus, until Americans feel secure, they are going to be willing to let the president do whatever it takes to keep them safe even if they sense that the means used are wrong and will mean apologizing and regretting them in the future. 

Token hires

Interesting stuff from Jennifer Vanasco: 

Most every story covering the debate mentioned how Romney’s “binders full of women” instantly became a social media meme, including a snarky Tumblr, an anti-Romney Facebook page, a website bought by a Democratic group, and a proliferation of original songs or mashups on YouTube.

Some good reporting from the Associated Press revealed that Romney actually didn’t ask for those resumes - instead, he was approached by the Massachusetts Government Appointments Project, a coalition of women’s groups that had requested and culled them because they were trying to boost “the number of women in top state government jobs.” However, a terrific Washington Post opinion piece explored why, even if Romney had requested the binders, the fact that he didn’t know any qualified women offhand from his days at Bain Capital suggests that he thinks of women as token hires. Writer Jena McGregor says that his answer during the debate gave the impression “that he thinks such groups [as MassGAP] hold the keys to special ‘binders full of women’ who can’t otherwise be found through normal human-resources channels such as leadership development programs, succession plans, and internal and external recruiting.’”

My only question about the issue is whether acknowledging the problem isn't as important as trying to fix it.  The question is in my view critical because I believe that both parties treat women as children who can vote and who will always value candy (pun intended) over anything else

. It may be small of me, but I don't believe that just because Obama is pro-choice and pro-equal pa he is more pro-women (what does that mean?) than Romney.

Frog pajamas

From Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash:

Today Obama follows Clinton's path as another useful idiot of Wall Street, relying on their stoolie Tim Geithner for his hands-off policies towards the big banks. 

So where is the real progressive alternative to Obama's GOP-lite policies?

I like to repeat a little too much my contenton that Obama represents Clintonism with a black  multiracial face and that the problem with that is that we are not in 1992 and that he hasn't learned from the failures of Clintonism because he doesn't have to...

Tyranny of the lowest common denominator

Professor Bainbridge doesn't understand why the French president, François Hollande's, focus on small things such as homework and writes:

The tyranny of the lowest common denominator. The very definition of the Left.

I disagree for what Bainbridge denounces isn't an ill that plagues just the left, but all  the political spectrum. Politics, which has become about small things or impossible dreams (hope and change) for two reasons. The first is that the electorate doesn't want to hear the truth and the second is that politicians are convinced that it cannot handle it.

Binders full of women

Sugary excerpt of the day from Joey Fishkin:

Publicly, we are told that Clarence Thomas, for instance, was chosen simply because he was the best jurist for the job, and without any consideration at all of the optics of replacing Thurgood Marshall with an all-white court.  Publicly, we are told that Sarah Palin was simply the most meritorious candidate for the job of Vice President, for reasons that had no connection to any efforts to diversify the Republican ticket.  I find these assertions silly—and I say that as someone with tremendous respect for Justice Thomas, who (contrary to ill-informed liberal stereotype) has turned out to be a powerful and important voice on the Court.

And so I appreciate that Governor Romney has come out and said that he practiced affirmative action.  Perhaps it is an easier thing for him to say in the case of sex than race, I do not know.  But he said it, and that’s important.

It's hard to disagree with Fishkin, I'm tyring to, but his conclusion is on point.

NYPD

From Ullrich Fichtner via Spiegel:

The NYPD developed a worldwide reputation for its "zero tolerance" policy and its great successes in the 1990s. The city was on the brink in the 1980s, with New York's image shaped by pictures of burning garbage cans in the Bronx. That changed with the arrival of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who would soon become famous, and his equally well-known police chief, Bill Bratton. They substantially beefed up the police force and organized it like a business, with strict quality control procedures, applying statistical methods and considerable pressure to succeed. New York became safer and cleaner.

But scandals also became more and more common around the turn of the millennium. Police brutality became an issue, as did the NYPD's blind severity and intimidating presence. The debate over these concerns would undoubtedly have continued if Sept. 11 hadn't permanently changed everything. All of a sudden the NYPD, which until then had regularly faced sharp criticism from citizens' advocacy groups, politicians and the media for every misstep, became an untouchable force made up of heroes. It was no longer kosher to criticize the police, and anyone who did was seen as behaving in a somehow un-American way.

It's always interesting to see New York from the eyes of an 'outsider' and of 'foreigner.'

The sad thing here is that the city is, I believed, frozen because its politicians are more interested in being national celebrities than in local management.  Thus, the New York political class are un-New York for they lack the guts to have a ballsy and worldly vision for the ex greatest city in the world.  

Guess who's back?

What about the second debate? Well before its start, I wrote:

Obama will be proclaimed just seconds after the end of the debate, the comeback kid unless the sky falls over or Derek Jeter miraculously recovers and leads the Yankees to a win over the Tigers.

I was right, but the most disturbing aspect of it all is the predictability of the post-debate commentary, which just drowns out the already meager substance of the process. I hated the format and the fact that the candidates were debating in New York instead of a swing state. But at least, Robert Wright is happy.

So? Obama still has a slight edge for until Romney proves that he can win Ohio, he will just have to accept that he is going to lose a close race.     

 

Losing the vision thing

I agree with John Holbo on this:

[Ezra] Klein asks: when did Obama lose ‘the vision thing’? He thinks Obama had it in 2008, but it’s worth considering the counter-hypothesis that it was lost long before. Free and Cantril documented loss of liberal mojo in their 1967 book, based on survey data from the 1964 election. ‘Americans are philosophical conservatives but operational liberals.’ If that’s how it goes in 2012, that just goes to show how it goes, for the past half century.

 

Debate, second round

Robert Wrght on what Obama needs to do tonight:

So Obama has to do two things on Tuesday: (1) convert the new "smooth, sure footed Mitt" meme into the "suspiciously slick Mitt" meme--get Romney's energetic, articulate self-assurance, which so wowed people in the first debate, to start creeping them out; and (2) drive home the "heartless plutocrat" meme in spades.

Honestly, I think that Obama is going to be great tonight, but I think that what matters is how good or bad Romney will/appear to be comparing to him.  If the question after the debate is about Romney's inability to relate then he 'lost' the debate, but if it is about the fact that  he didn't cede any ground to the Potus, then he will be fine until he loses barely on election night.

My prediction: Obama will be proclaimed just seconds after the end of the debate, the comeback kid unless the sky falls over or Derek Jeter miraculously recovers and leads the Yankees to a win over the Tigers.     

The Benghazi political grenade

From Blake Hounshell on Hillary Clinton taking responsibility for the increasingly Benghazi political hot potato:

(...)Clinton's comments are obviously going to get wide play and will of course be instantly politicized -- regardless of whether she's merely doing the right thing, or whether she's actually just shielding Obama from scrutiny ahead of Tuesday night's debate, as some are already suggesting, or whether, as the conspiracy-minded would have it, she's pulling some Machiavellian maneuver to appear like she's taking responsibility only to make the president look bad and set herself up for 2016. (Clinton may have unintentionally set Obama up to be more directly attacked, by the way: Three Repubublican senators already have issued a press release saying that the president himself needs to take responsibility.)

I never  thought that the way the Obama administration handled the 9/11 Benghazi attack was a political issue until it started reacting too defensively against Republicans' attacks as if it didn't have the excuse of known unknowns and unknown knows as Rumsfeld would said.  That said, Clinton's latest statement now makes it a symbolic political issue at least in one way (which may be insignificant for more people than not may be happy to see her political wounded): how are Clintonites going to react if Obama doesn't at the very come to her bed side now that she has fallen on her sword? How much does Bill still enthusiastically help the One? 

Cockroaches and other pests

Another proof that Frank Rich (hat tip: professor Bainbridge) is the Tom Friedman of American political commentary, that is he presents his biases as irrefutable facts because he just believes he knows best:

(...)conservatives are the cockroaches of the American body politic, poised to outlast us all.

I stopped reading Rich in 2008 when it became evident that he was just too enamored with himself or rather with his certainties to look beyond the looking glass.

 

Moderation and the national common good

Best line from The Economist 's Democracy in America blog post on the passing of Arlen Specter:

(...)who serves the national common good best: Arlen Specter or Michele Bachmann?

The American surveillance state

From Glenn Greenwald:

(...) the fact that the US government keeps files on people who have never been charged with any crimes, let alone convicted of them, and then deems some of them to have "derogatory national-security records" is creepy indeed. Governments should not be surveilling and storing massive amounts of information about law-abiding citizens, and in free countries, by definition, they do not. But that is exactly what a surveillance state entails.

I would love to see a debate between Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman because the more I read them, the more I wonder what is the point of Obama's presidency? The answer to that question can't just be the other side is evil especially when the 'good guys' are doing  abominable things!

Class !

From a comment on the live blogging of the Vice residential debate oer the Economist's Democracy in America blog:

[Paul] Ryan got "legitimately raped" tonight

4 ans de plus...

From Lexington, a scene at an Obama Rally:

Just before the president spoke, a hip-hop singer and producer, will.i.am, popped up on a small podium to the side of the main stage, nattily turned out in a velvet smoking jacket, pale bowtie, tight jeans and tartan, crested slippers.

It requires a certain swagger to pull off such a look in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of 15,000 people who mostly came to hear a political speech, but he pulled it off, mixing very loud dance tracks with calls to re-elect the president and suggestions that America should invest in education in order to gain market share in high-tech manufacturing. “I want my iPhone made in the USA, I want my computer made in the USA,” he chanted. “I want my education made in the USA.” At this point, sensing a muted reaction from the crowd, he stopped the music, and challenged his audience. You don’t want your education made in the USA, he demanded to know? Here of all places? (...)At the grassy oval of OSU in Columbus, the musician was encountering a different reaction. “Four more, four more, four more years,” called the singer from his podium, urging the crowd to chant and raise their hands. Only scattered hands rose. Many more remained stolidly watchful. Only a few children danced with abandon to the music, scampering around a fenced-off lawn. Four more years is a less stirring rallying cry that “yes we can”, especially after a first term in which even staunch Obama partisans have learned that, in the real world, their idol often cannot.

The saddest thing about it all is that America remains the land where people seriously and faithfully believe that a billionaire can marry a hooker and live happily ever after or  that a politician can magically transform a country without citizens doing any of the hard work.

An ode to parliamentary democracy

 

Man (pun intended), Australia must be a fun country! I have to learn a lot more about what the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is talking about to comment substantively, but I must admit that I love parliamentary democracies. I do for  at least one reason: debate, political leaders, whether they are in power or not, have to face others and answer questions and  learn how to rumble no matter how powerful and entitled they become.

After what we saw last weekend in the US , it is hard not agree that power isolates  and moreover makes one lose touch with reality because it, almost never,  has to answer tough questions until debates in an election year; even then the answers are never persuasive and satisfying.

Spoiled brats!

Ian Leslie demonstrates that Obamabots and Obamaniacs are mostly spoiled brats who can't stand disappointment and failure:

It must have been hard for the people who have been busting guts to get him reelected, and who have done such an exceptional job to get him into pole position, to watch their candidate step in and screw it up all by himself. It must be depressing for all the volunteers in swing states who have been knocking on doors and throwing themselves into a cause for which they feel, in their heart of hearts, less enthusiastic than they did last time - because it turns out the man on whose behalf they're working appears even less enthusiastic than they are.

An Obama email to supporters this week was entitled "I can't do this on my own". To which Andrew Sullivan, one of the president's most influential and passionate supporters in the media, replied, "Oh, yes you can, Mr President. You just did. All by yourself. And we watched you live."

Come on! Obama is neither perfect nor exceptional! Get over already it and accept his faults! Give the guy a break, he is just another bad president not Michael Jordan refusing to play basketball to be a baseball player!