Hard News: Awesome
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There was an interesting feature piece on Obama's economic perspective in the NY Times. Obama will have the Democratic policy establishment at his disposal, which will help to mitigate some of the valid concerns about his experience.
Well, at least Obama has a "perspective" (one I'm not uncritically supportive of, by the way) -- can anyone point me to anything where McCain is expressing any kind of coherent thinking around domestic/economic policy. As far as I'm concerned, both Clinton and McCain pandered away their economic credibility when they baited the gas tax holiday hook; then pissed on those pointy headed elitists who had the gall to call bullshit (i.e. every credible economist and energy policy expert from across the political spectrum who thinks about this shit for a living). And then McCain went to Saddleback Church and came up with this gem:
It was spending. Spending got completely out of control. We spent money in a way that mortgaged our kids' future. My friends, we spent $3 million of your money to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Now, I don't know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue. But the point is, it was $3 million of your money. …
Nice laugh line, but what exactly would a McCain White House do differently from the 21 years he didn't spend in a POW camp but on the floor of the Senate? Would President McCain (shock! horror!) stop name checking Reagan and act like him -- and veto a bill laden with 'out of control' ear-marks?
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Craig,
That is the one big thing McCain has going for him, the possibility that he will make a serious attempt to cut back out of control federal spending and corrupting earmarks (both of which have accelerated since the Dems won Congress in 2006). Obama most definately wont make any attempt to control spending, he will accelerate it further by pissing lots of someone elses money on every liberal itch in the universe. McCain's a crusty old bastard who doesn't mind in the least pissing people off, just what is needed for that particular task. How I would love to see him fighting the porkmeisters and spendaholics of Congress.Some interesting polling data. Not surprising really.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/109846/Conservative-Democrats-Peeling-Away-From-Obama.aspxAnd well done for pointing out the obvious that so many cant grasp or don't want to admit, that 8 years as a first lady does not qualify one for President.
RB, it is one thing to point out problems that you think need to be addressed in your country, but quite another to denouce your country as "down right mean" and many other such epithets. Especially when Americans, far from being mean are actually by far the most generous in the world by many measures, such as charitiable giving. And then in a big speech you say what a great country that "down right mean" country is and that you love it. Bullshit. In and of itself not a huge deal, but it is another data point that contradicts Obama's narrative.
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WH,
Craig and James - you are conservative - what do you think the Republicans should do on economic policy?
The NY Times article I linked to suggests that Obama's tax plan will actually provide bigger tax cuts for more Americans than McCain's, and will pay for it by raising taxes on the very wealthy (who have had disproportionately large increases in income over the last 30 years).
After the huge deficits created by the tax cuts and defence spending of Reagan and Bush II, and the budgetary and economic successes of Clinton, surely its hard to paint to paint the Republicans as the party of fiscal virtue.
The idea that its "pork" -
RB, it is one thing to point out problems that you think need to be addressed in your country, but quite another to denouce your country as "down right mean" and many other such epithets.
My God, James, I happen to be reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt -- who character flaws didn't include pulling any punches about those who didn't live up to his rather exacting standards of personal and political conduct. I don't know whether the GOP needs to start reading Roosevelt instead of just dropping him name, or whether it's the same old "smear your enemy as unpatriotic" balls given a PC top-spin.
The funny thing is, James, you get this bullshit trotted out over at the Standard. If you have the flaming cheek to criticise the Government you "hate New Zealand" or are "talking this country down". Says more about the grandiose delusions of the speaker than anything else.
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I have just watched Michelle Obama's speech (YouTube I love you) and I can see its political good sense but have a niggly sense of unease.
Yes I want Obama to win but wouldn't it be nice to have a speech that wasn't pandering to what Americans want - that doesn't have to tick the boxes, that could dare to be angry.
That "servicemen and women" bit gets me and the sentimental start and finish.
Imagine - if Helen Clark had kids - her daughter calling out to a video projection: "I love you Mommy!" Poor kids. If he wins, their life will never be the same again.
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Yes I want Obama to win but wouldn't it be nice to have a speech that wasn't pandering to what Americans want - that doesn't have to tick the boxes, that could dare to be angry.
But then all the right-wingers would say that you didn't love your country enough.
As James has noted many of Michelle's stump speeches were far more hard-nosed, and appealed to the economic grievances of (often) poor, black audiences.
As far as I can tell, the "downright mean" line doesn't come from an actual transcript, but from this New Yorker profile, whose author followed her around the campaign trail. The author makes this observation:
Of Michelle Obama’s husband succeeds in garnering the Democratic nomination and then in winning the general election in November, she will be not only the first black First Lady of the United States but also one of the youngest since Jackie Kennedy. Yet, for a potential revolutionary, Michelle Obama is deeply conventional. She exudes a nostalgia, invoking the innocence and order of the past, as much as her husband beckons to a liberating future. Listening to her speeches, with their longing for a lost, spit-shine world, one could sometimes mistake her, were it not for the emphasis on social justice, for a law-and-order Republican.
It's a mature analysis of who she might be, as apposed to the infantile "she hates her country!" characterisation of the winger commentators who have done so much to infantalise political thought in America in the past couple of decades.
She also says:
“It’s not just about politics; it’s TV,” she says, of our collective decay. And, wistfully: “The life I had growing up seems so much more simple.”
Also, her favourite music is Steve Wonder (which explains the playout music) and the Brady Bunch crack wasn't just for laughs. Apparently she actually does have a think for vintage family sitcoms.
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But can we trust the polls? I fear The Bradley Effect.
And I am quietly confident about the Yeldarb effect.
Kos had a table with all the polls done in the primaries and proved that the vast majority of them underestimated Obama's actual vote on election day, but I'm buggered if I can find the link. There is a study linked to by Poblano here which also suggests a reverse Bradley effect.
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Especially when Americans, far from being mean are actually by far the most generous in the world by many measures, such as charitiable giving.
A lot of Americans seem to believe this. Often the same ones that believe the US has the best health care in the world.
Ultimately it comes down to which numbers you're looking at - and the one Americans "win" on is private giving, internal to the US. Which includes things like
- education (about 1/7 of all donations). A lot of this is massive donations by rich people who want tax breaks and buildings with their names on.
- religions (about 1/3 of all donations).
Letting people take deductions for donations like these undermine the tax base, and in a massively undemocratic way. Are they even charities? Debatable, if you ask me.
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Giovanni, you have jinxed him. I just know it. :)
I have just requested an absentee ballot. It is absurdly complicated (like all American paperwork). I get a distinct feeling they don't want me to vote...
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That is the one big thing McCain has going for him, the possibility that he will make a serious attempt to cut back out of control federal spending and corrupting earmarks (both of which have accelerated since the Dems won Congress in 2006).
I guess everyone entitled to faith, but I'm fairly sure the facts don't support the claim of earmarks exploding since 2006. They certainly increased during the period of Republican control of Congress -- from 4000 annually to 15,000.
But while the same offenders on both sides of the House continue to work the system, this NYT story said that the Democrat House last year reduced the number of earmarks by 50% and cut the total cost of pork. The whole system still seems lunatic and borderline corrupt to me.
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Letting people take deductions for donations like these undermine the tax base, and in a massively undemocratic way. Are they even charities? Debatable, if you ask me.
We have that here too. Bob McCoskrie insists that Family First is a charity, not a political pressure group. I for one, do not believe him.
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But while the same offenders on both sides of the House continue to work the system, this NYT story said that the Democrat House last year reduced the number of earmarks by 50% and cut the total cost of pork. The whole system still seems lunatic and borderline corrupt to me.
Indeed - and to be fair I'm seeing encouraging signs that there are more people like Rep, Jeff Flake (R) who said in the story you linked to:
“It would be wonderful if this was a partisan issue, with Republicans on the right side, but it is really not. Many of these companies use money appropriated through earmarks to turn around and lobby for more money. Some of them are just there to receive earmarks.”
In the end, some people might be getting that Congress (as a whole) gets worse job approval ratings in polls than the President for a reason.
Listening to her speeches, with their longing for a lost, spit-shine world, one could sometimes mistake her, were it not for the emphasis on social justice, for a law-and-order Republican.
You mean an Obama Administration won't see the First Lady showing up to state dinners wearing nothing but an Angela Davis afro wig and a pimped out bling-bling encrusted AK-47? Bugger...
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TPM reproduced this Andrew Sullivan post in full, so I might as well too:
The op-ed in today's WSJ by the McCain duo of Lieberman and Graham is far more important for this election, it seems to me, than parsing the dynamics of the Clinton-Obama marriage. What they are laying out in very clear terms is the agenda of a McCain presidency. The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan. I'm sure McCain would like to have his Russian cooperation, while demonizing and attacking them on the world stage, but in the actual world, he cannot. Putin and Medvedev are not agreeable figures, and I do not mean in any way to excuse their bullying. But this is global politics, guys, and these are the cold, hard choices facing American policy makers.
And in this telling op-ed Lieberman and Graham simply do not even confront them. It's all about a moral posture, with no practical grappling with the consequences. It's the mindset that gave you the Iraq war - but multiplied.
John McCain is making it quite clear what his foreign policy will be like: tilting sharply away from the greater realism of Bush's second term toward the abstract moralism, fear-mongering and aggression of the first. Not just four more years - but four more years like Bush's first term. If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose. If Americans decide they want a president who will be more aggressive and less diplomatic than the current one, then they should at least brace for the consequences - for their economy and their security.
In my view, the fear card has only one truly compelling target in this election: McCain.
He has a way with words.
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It is one thing to point out problems that you think need to be addressed in your country, but quite another to denounce your country as "down right mean" and many other such epithets. Especially when Americans, far from being mean are actually by far the most generous in the world by many measures.
Yes, and let's not forget the incredible generosity of Americans in inviting so many African people to come and work in their country. Why, some were even allowed inside! How dare Michele Obama be so ungrateful for all that's been done for her people?
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They're voting now on the convention floor, and I must say it's the most exciting spectacle I've seen since that 2-hour Xerox documentary on the right way to replace a toner.
They're dragging this thing on (California passed) in order to get more air time? I'm picking every second spent is a vote lost.
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I have just requested an absentee ballot. It is absurdly complicated (like all American paperwork). I get a distinct feeling they don't want me to vote...
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The last two elections have made me extremely cynical, to the point that I'm now rather torn between the "please don't fuck this up (again)" camp, and the "I don't give a fuck" camp.
I'm in both. The depth of feeling is proportional to the chance of any change that will be meaningful to me or anyone I know, which puts it in the "don't give a fuck" camp. But it is still certainly and decisively a "not republican again please".
That Obama is who he is will make American political news more interesting than it has been for my whole life, but regardless of who is surfing the democratic landslide, it's still the same mountain of the same old democrats underneath, all the same institutions in place carrying on policy that has been decided outside of public scrutiny for the longest time.
There will still be a military industrial complex waging some strange war in the Middle East, American goods will still be overpriced and they will still have high tariffs to protect that fact locking us out of their markets. America will still have veto power in the UN and will still use it against any steps towards world peace made by any or all of the other nations. They will still have the monopoly on violence and will continue to use that fact to dominate all of their foreign policy. They will still not give a damn what anyone else thinks about it.
Of course many Americans will experience real change. For their sakes I wish they come to their senses. Personally I don't know any, and I do actually know a lot of Americans. The ones I do know will be mostly unaffected except that they will have a new government to complain about.
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They will still have the monopoly on violence and will continue to use that fact to dominate all of their foreign policy. They will still not give a damn what anyone else thinks about it.
But I think you need to add another factor into the mix, that of Imperial collision with both Russia and China. This president is the one who is going to have to come to terms with the USA reaching the limits of it's power and the reaction to that is going to be one of the more worrying things about the next few years. Sitting outside America I'd much rather have a slightly more rational and considered Obama than a hot head like "Bomb-Bomb-Bomb-Iran" McCain.
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I would too. But only slightly. Imperial collision with America is not a new phenomenon either, and the same comment about the power of existing institutions and their plans still holds. I would expect that no matter which president is in, if China rises to near-US levels of military power, then the playbook of the Cold War will be pulled off the shelf and dusted, and the terrorism one will slip under a pile of old Time magazines.
But I would be less afraid if it was Obama doing the talking on the TV at the time. Unless he does a Tony Blair, always a possibility. Power has swelled the most level heads, and POTUS carries the feeling of ultimate power (if not the reality).
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On the DNC, Bill Clinton just filled the one gap that some commentators noted in Hillary's speech; Obama's readiness. He was repeatedly unequivocal. Of course that's not enough to stop McCain's attacks on his experience, it's clearly a valid criticism, but it does put to bed the position of the Clintons. Bill Clinton even clearly equated his own election in '92 with that of Obama's. And on this, if nothing, else, you've got to give them credit (plus acknowledge that Hillary's clearly got her eyes on the future).
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Imperial collision with America is not a new phenomenon either, and the same comment about the power of existing institutions and their plans still holds.
Yes and no. For the past two decades the US has had the world pretty much to itself. It was, more or less the only Imperial power (although it could be argued that both Russia and China are since both occupy a space roughly equivalent to the great empires of Peter The Great (less Ukraine) and the Ch'ing). Before that both the Soviet Union and the US, whilst they may have been at war, made a conscious decision to keep out of each other's back yards which played a huge part in avoiding a hot war (the biggest exception being the Cuba / Turkey standoff and look where that almost went).
In 2008/9 we now have a US increasingly hemmed on several sides..by an empowered China and a re-empowered Russia which has a US on it's doorstep flouting the rule which helped save the world from oblivion in the cold war. All this is accentuated by eight years of foreign policy mis-management and a population freaking out over a perceived energy crisis (which has already engendered an irrational, panicky drill drill drill response).
I don't think Obama is the saviour and I'm not sure we will even see him in the White House but give me him over a cornered, only vaguely internationally literate McCain. Both have to face the institutions and the military complex but one can only hope that Obama will be slightly more willing to confront or at least question them rather than quickly acquiesce.
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I don't think Obama is the saviour and I'm not sure we will even see him in the White House but give me him over a cornered, only vaguely internationally literate McCain. Both have to face the institutions and the military complex but one can only hope that Obama will be slightly more willing to confront or at least question them rather than quickly acquiesce.
I guess I've got higher expectations than this, but if this is the least he might achieve as President, that'll do. I've been impressed by his approach to foreign policy; it's less dogmatic, less influenced by Cold War thinking and more pragmatic in its recognition of the role other powers than McCain's. It was this piece by Slate's John Dickerson and his comments in the YouTube debates that defined the difference best IMHO.
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I guess I've got higher expectations than this, but if this is the least he might achieve as President, that'll do. I've been impressed by his approach to foreign policy; it's less dogmatic, less influenced by Cold War thinking and more pragmatic in its recognition of the role other powers than McCain's
Oh, I agree, it's whether he is allowed the legs he needs to play it through. For all this talk of experience, his understanding of international relationships and the realities of the 21st Century dwarfs McCain's, whose mindset sits in a century passed and not one that even then he really grasped. But he (McCain) also represents a large part of the electorate who are unable to deal with that change.
For me, as I've mentioned before, one of the moments that defined the differences for me were the candidates' thoughts on China, found in Singapore's Straits Times a few months back which had McCain unable to move away from containment and Carriers, whilst Obama recognised the reality of engagement on a rough level of parity.
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Yes and no. For the past two decades the US has had the world pretty much to itself.
They seem to think so anyway. But things continued as they had before the fall of the Soviet Union, with terrorism substituted for communism as the great threat. Yes, the US has whaled with impunity on what they could, as they always did. But 'what they could' turns out to be surprisingly limited. Their whalings are no more impressive except in their financial cost than the whalings of other superpowers on their local whipping boys.
What has changed, I think, is that the Chinese saw the wisdom of the Japanese idea that if you can't have the most guns then having the most money is almost as good. This is the challenge that the US has no answer for, that their projection of military might is hideously expensive, and now the other superpowers have decided not to bother with it. The exact strategy they used against the Soviet Union is now castrating their own economy, by their own choice. The longer they insist on being powerful beyond all conceivable need, the quicker they will find themselves second richest, and then I guess it's likely that second most powerful will follow.
Can Obama change any of this? A little, I'm sure. It would be good if he did. Good for people who aren't me or anyone I know, mostly.
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Craig Ranapia:
Rex: And once more, I'm going to ask exactly what you call 'necessary experience'. As I've said before, Lincoln's sole experience of federal government before becoming President was two remarkably undistinguished years in Congress. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, has served in every Republican administration for the last four decades - and spent a decade as a Congressman.
I think I'd choose judgement over experience in this match up, if you don't mind.
Sorry, been at a funeral all day (and a wake for much of this evening, so the following may not make much sense).
Yes, Lincoln rose well above his experience and Cheney... well I still think he's an evil bloodless automaton so human experience doesn't really apply :-)
But pointing to extremes at either end of the spectrum doesn't alter the fact that the <i>probability</i> of someone who's done not much at all in Congress for a short while is more likely to flounder when parachuted into Executive Office than someone who's more seasoned in a role more akin to President, such as, say, Governor of a large state.
Okay, now I just know you're gonna mention Dubya. But that comes under the Cheney exclusion - genetic throwbacks with vast war chests from daddy's friends can also be exceptions that prove the rule.
And finally, and utterly irrationally, after years and years and years of observing politicians running for everything from a US city school board to PM of NZ, I just don't get the feeling of gravitas from Obama that I'd like to get from a guy with his finger on the button.
Which doesn't, by a long shot, suggest he's the worst choice Americans could make. But to me, it just suggests that, somewhere, there must have been a better option.
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