Are You Freaking Kidding Me?

So the majority of Republicans don't think Obama legitimately won the election and that somehow ACORN stole it. This is just completely idiotic and unhinged. But I also really do not believe that it is true. This is one of those questions that is so reliant upon party identification and sample size and . . . . but seriously -- are you fucking kidding me? How is it possible that a single human being could think something so monumentally stupid never mind even a poor and surely not representative sample? Even if the margin of error were 30% that would be batshit crazy.

Race and the Election

Naturally many of the questions that have emerged after Barack Obama's historic victory in the 2008 presidential election have related to the question of race and racism. What does Obama's victory tell us about racism in the United States today? Since he won, is it not clear that we are free of the burdens or fears of racism in contemporary politics? Are we really in a post-race era in the United States? What role will race play in Obama's policies as president?

There is much to celebrate, and there can be no doubting that the United States has made tremendous strides since the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. As veteran civil rights activist Charles McDew has often said, those who say things have not gotten any better were not there when things were bad. But improvement from a nadir is hardly sufficient to proclaim that we are past race. There is less racism in the United States than there once was. That hardly means that we are past racism. We just need to take a more nuanced perspective on the role that race plays in the United States, and we especially need to be aware that the black-white dynamic is no longer the sole, or even necessarily most important, dynamic when it comes to racial politics in the United States. Take a few minutes to listen to some of the more obnoxious statements from the anti-immigrant right and you might understand why it is not only black Americans who have a right to be skeptical that we have reached perfectibility on race relations in this country.

While race did not decide this election, that hardly means that race was not a factor in Obama's margin of victory, or that it did not play a role in specific states and localities or among particular demographic groups (including among those who supported him). But there is still much to celebrate, even if the rosiest pronouncements are pretty silly.

Race and racism will continue to have a place in the discussion. From concrete policies -- disproportionate sentencing, say, or affirmative action -- to those incidents, such as children blithely chanting "assassinate Obama" on a school bus in Idaho, we will have regular reminders that when it comes to racism, apologies to William Faulkner, the past is not necessarily past.

Conservatism Eats Its Own

At The Washington Post conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, hammered for her supposed apostasy by not towing a (losing, by the way) party line, responds to her critics. It is always amazing to me how thin skinned many conservatives, who otherwise prattle on about strength and deride perceived weakness in others, can be such thin-skinned, hypersensitive ninnies. Towing the party line has never been a trait of conservatism. It has, however, been a trait of authoritarianism.

And no, there is no parallel, and thus no hypocrisy, with the case of Joe Lieberman, who repeatedly broke from his party and said noxious -- and false -- things about the party nominee for the presidency. He, after all, broke from the party by becoming an Independent after losing a primary campaign, but wants to maintain the perquisites of being in the party caucus. Parker, an opinion writer, wrote an opinion column based on long-held principles that can still be seen as conservative. The difference is so huge as to be obvious, which does not mean that many will not find that difference elusive.

Whither Joe Lieberman

One of the little dramas that will play out among Democrats in the days, weeks, and months to come will revolve around a simple question: what to do with Joe Lieberman? Early indications are that Barack Obama is far more gracious than I, as he has indicated that he still wants the Connecticut turncoat to remain in the Democratic caucus even as many, myself included, advocate stripping Lieberman of his chair of the Homeland Security and Government Reform committee and his seniority on other committees, a move that Lieberman has promised would lead him to leave the party caucus. To which I respond: Good fucking riddance you traitorous weasel.

To my mind, the only thing that should save Lieberman would be a situation in which he is needed to invoke cloture. Since the Democrats are not going to have 59 or 60 seats, I say so long, Joe. Enjoy life in the minority party. Have fun filibustering for the next two years. But Obama is going to use Lieberman's case as an example of his new politics, even though Lieberman stabbed him square in the back throughout the campaign, including in his whorish little gig at the GOP convention. Lieberman is going to owe his status to the graciousness of Obama, who owes Lieberman nothing. I hope his colleagues remind him of that every single day in the Senate by shunning him as the pariah he deserves to be.

Post-Election Analysis Roundup: Recrimination Edition

Much of the post-election inquisition comes from pundits wondering what will happen to the Republicans. The Washington Post asked a host of analysts where the GOP went wrong. Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics wonders if the election represents a political realignment. At The New York Times Stanley Greenberg asserts that the Reagan Democrats are no more. George Will wonders what Barry Goldwater would do. Defeat even brought out the rarely-seen sane version of Victor Davis Hanson.

Dumb Conservatism Watch

This Charles Krauthammer op-ed is vaguely incoherent and kind of dumb (in other words it is a typical Charles Krauthammer column). But I'd like to take issue with this especially dumb assertion, tagged on at the end of his column as if most people do not read to the very last paragraph of his silliness: "He [John McCain] will be -- he should be -- remembered as the most worthy presidential nominee ever to be denied the prize."

This is a categorically fucking inane thing to write. More worthy than John Kerry? Why, exactly? More worthy than Al Gore, who spent eight years as the Vice President (and served in Vietnam)? Why, exactly? Conservatives in the United States have become the masters of assertion without evidence, but why should we give MORE credit to a man who held the United States in such low esteem that he felt that the unvetted candidacy of Sarah Palin represented a legitimate leadership opportunity for this country he so purported to love?

We Hold These Truths . . .

[Tom Toles, Washington Post, 5 Nov. 2008]

President Elect Barack Obama

I am still coming to grips with the momentous, humbling events of the night. There will be time for nitpicking (really, there are those who still want to assert that the country leans center-right?) and recriminations (Republicans, start your engines!) and worrying (be careful what you wish for, Democrats). Barack Obama has won a historic victory that a generation ago would have been nearly unimaginable and five years ago would have seemed merely utterly implausible. An American man of African descent has pulled together a vast coalition in an election with massive turnout to gain election to the Presidency. This, for now, is commentary enough.

Yes we can. Yes we have. Yes we will.

The Vet Who Did Not Vet

Heh.

Elections Past and Present

MSNBC has a worthwhile online feature called "Turning Points," which takes an in-depth focus on a series of elections. Start with the 1980 election and then follow the links to other series. This should keep you busy for a while.

Then, when you're prepared to return to 2008, which will be the subject of its own inevitable features in years to come, you may want to look at the series of essays in The Washington Monthly on this year's election. The Stakes 2008 includes essays by eight prominent writers, including Jonathan Alter, Kevin Drum, Gregg Easterbrook, James Fallows, Nicholas Lemann, Stephanie Mencimer, Timothy Noah, and Nicholas Thompson.

Race Rears its Head

The Republican party is not a racist party. But American conservatism is the ideological home of racism, and most racists are conservatives, even if most conservatives, as with most members of the GOP, are not racists. And today the vast majority of American conservatives are Republicans. Just as the Democratic party has a racist history to bear (and to a far greater extent and depth than the Republicans could ever dream of at that), so too does today's Republican party, built at least in part on a Southern base of whites disaffected by the national Democratic party's attention to civil rights in the postwar era. This is a complex issue, of course, immune to reductionism, but the broad contours as I have laid them out hold.

Race has come to the fore in the 2008 campaign in the way that most of us could have expected. The racial attacks have not been frontal, and their racial nature has at least been couched in deniable manifestations. But racial, and oftentimes racist, they have been. John McCain is not a racist, but he has aligned with racists because, as McCain has shown, winning now trumps honor and it certainly trumps whatever true beliefs he once held.

Thus Charles Krauthammer's fatuous article accusing Obama of playing the race card (and that's what he does even though all of his examples are of others, many unaffiliated with Obama, alleging racializing the campaign) is particularly rich, but not especially surprising. Conservatives have managed to create a moral relativism whereby accusing someone of racism is a breach of decorum every bit as bad as racism itself and is thus itself subject to condemnation. This is actually a pretty clever gambit intended to enable certain kinds of words and behavior while at the same time chilling criticism. It is also demogaguery of the rankest sort.

I cannot help but wonder what Krauthammer thinks about GOP fundraisers joking about Obama's assassination or Republican officials in California distributing what I am certain they believed to be hilarious postcards depicting Obama on a food stamp voucher surrounded by foodstuffs such as fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and Kool Aid. But of course this has nothing at all to do with racial stereotypes! How stupid do they think we are?

But the height of hypocrisy on the issue of racism comes in the wake of Colin Powell's epochal endorsement of Obama, which naturally led to Rush Limbaugh accusing Powell of racism. This yet again reveals an amazing amount of relativism that is all too common in the playbook of some conservatives. They are quite willing to claim moral equivalency between white racism, built on a historical foundation of white supremacy, and alleged assertions of "black racism," which is nowhere to be found in Powell's endorsement, even if that does not prevent the Limbaughs of this world from spinning their vitriol.

Of course there is another way to think of these matters. My tendency is to become enraged. But at The Atlantic, Matthew Quirk welcomes GOP race-baiting. It reveals the other side for what it is, after all, and when "That One" wins, it will be fun to see the response.

in the midst of all of this comes John McWhorter's piece in The New Republic in which he discourages readers from blaming racism if Obama loses. Matthew Yglesias quite effectively pillories McWhorter's peculiar preemptive strike on an issue that surely will account for some tiny slice of the opposition to Obama, whether it proves decisive or not.

Ironically enough, some of the same conservatives tapdancing around the race issue will be the first to use an Obama victory to claim that we are past race and racism. Having lived, traveled and worked in South Africa during the Mandela and Mbeki years I can assure you that a comparable assertion about racism being over because the country has black leadership would be laughable were it not both demonstrably false and blithely offensive.

On W

In case you were wondering (and I know you were not) I have zero interest in seeing this. I do not even have the energy to bury or praise Oliver Stone, though as Tootle always rightly says, historians have every right to resent Stone simply for the time we have to take to correct him. Let's just say that Stone's claims to be a "historian" are laughable.

Stone and I are on the same side of the aisle in that we will both be voting Democrat in this election, and in all of them. But you do not necessarily have to waste time on everyone on your side of the aisle. I'll simply nod in recognition and move on to more important things. (Though it does seem that no one will go to this movie who is not already convinced of its premises. And it might breed some resentment among not only the doubters, who are unlikely to vote for Obama anyway, but also from those cherished independent voters. This leads me to see a whole lot of solipsism in this movie's pre-election release date. Ultimately W seems to be as much about Oliver Stone as about its putative subject. In other words: It's a typical Oliver Stone movie!)

The Peril of Anecdotes

OK, let us see: Joe the plumber and independent voter wants to buy the plumbing company he works for, which earns $250,000+ a year, and he is concerned about the tax burden for which he will be responsible.

Shall we deconstruct the sentence?

"Joe" - His name is Sam (But ok, given what follows I'll assume that he might be known as Joe, as that seems to be his middle name).

"the independent" - He is a registered Republican.

"plumber" - He is unlicensed.

"wants to buy the plumbing company he works for" -- But which is not apparently for sale, which Joe is not actually trying to buy, and which Joe could not afford to buy on his $40,000 income. Oh, and that damned licensing issue again.

"which earns $250,000+ a year" - Actually it's about $100,000, which is important given the supposed magic number of $250,000 based on Obama's tax plan.

"and he is concerned about the tax burden for which he will be responsible." - Obviously (well, maybe not so - people usually are unclear on the arcane tax code) any rate hike for those incomes above $250,000 would only count against the money earned above $250,000. But beyond that, my favorite part of all of this is that Joe has a tax lien against him. So he is not paying his taxes now.

So here is what is accurate in the sentence:

"Voter plumbing company he works for, and he is concerned." Actually, I think Sarah Palin uttered that exact sentence in her debate in response to a question about foreign policy.

Go to the Polls

Hands down the best polling aggregating website out there is the data-rich Fivethirtyeight, the brainchild of, among others, Nate Silver (also a founder of the incomparable Baseball Prospectus -- and Silver is only thirty). Prospects look very good for Barack Obama right now. The GOP will convince themselves that McCain hit the ball out of the park. He didn't. Nor did Barack Obama. But Obama's up by several runs in the late innings. A tie in a debate like this is no good for the team down big, and none of the polling data indicates that this was a tie, McCain-supporter spin notwithstanding.

Sleeper 1 Brooks 0

Over at Talking Points Memo Cafe Jim Sleeper puts the smack down on David Brooks. A sample:

He pirouettes like this constantly to maintain some intellectual self-respect, on the one hand, and to hold onto his market niche as a conservative Republican apologist, on the other. He has tried to square this circle with forced geniality throughout Republicans' Iraq War lying, torture and warrantless surveillance, borrow-and-borrow, spend-and-spend fiscal policy, bottomless corruption, and, lately, national socialism. But John McCain is stopping Brooks' game.

Ever since it has become clear that McCain is unstable and incompetent as commander-in-chief of his own campaign, not least by choosing his horror show of a running mate, Brooks has been squirming and stumbling furiously toward a reckoning that should be of some interest to every Times reader and would-be public intellectual.

This time, the choice facing Brooks is too stark and time-bound for his usual gyrations. He can maintain his intellectual self-respect only by breaking openly with McCain/Palin in the next couple of weeks.

It comes as no shock that David Brooks has little intellectual core. But as we watch him and other conservative columnists squirm as they wrestle with their intellectual barrenness, let us keep in mind that there are three weeks left in this campaign.

I would thus encourage my fellow Democrats not to be too effusive yet and not to start the touchdown celebration before we reach the goal line. Our party has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory before. The polling data looks good for Obama supporters, but I would be willing to bet that those numbers tighten, that the gap closes, in the next three weeks.

Were the election to be held tomorrow, Obama would win handily, quite possibly in a landslide. But election cycles have their own nearly-organic development, and when hubris begins to build I try to remind myself of the 1948 election, when all polling data indicated that New York Governor Thomas Dewey was bound to win handily, a sentiment that prevailed until election night, when the pollsters were humiliated. Polling is methodologically better today and we have much more data to work with, especially for those of us who like to look at aggregates rather than place our faith in any single poll. But now is not the time to be planning victory dances for an endzone we have not yet reached and it certainly is not the time for complacency to prevail.

Debating Whether Sarah Palin is Fucking Retarded or Just a Moron is Not Cost Effective

I have hit this mark before and I will hit it again now: We keep hearing about the so-called Independents in this election. Yet some one has to say it: What kind of utter fucking retard does not know where he or she stands at this point in the election cycle?

Look, John McCain is a mendacious opportunist who, in choosing Sarah Palin, utterly abandoned everything he once claimed to care about. Foreign affairs? Off the table. Nor can any serious case can be made for Sarah Palin giving a shit about anything related to policy within the United States. Why are we catering to these utter fucking morons? Why has the GOP become the party of not only stupidity (the last eight years have made that clear) but of willful ignorance?

I seriously challenge any conservative to explain to me this race, McCain's approach, the Sarah Palin phenomenon, or simply a rationale for a victory that, at least for now, seems elusive. Obama is smarter than McCain. But we've long known that. Would that we had the McCain from 2000. Instead, we have a McCain who loathes himself from eight years ago.

One might ask the obvious question: Why would anyone want to be president now? Other than so that Sarah Palin, Pied Piper of the fuckwit brigade, cannot be?

Remember when Republicans had integrity? OK, me neither. But remember when they pretended to? Vaguely? Me too.

Oh -- and if you actually know how to get Osama bin Laden, how exactly is it putting country before self not to, you know, make that plan clear? Granted: President Bush could fuck up adding the chocolate chunks to a chocolate chunk cookie recipe. Still: If you know how to solve the problem, shouldn't you either share the solution or recognize and acknowledge that the current regime always finds banana peels on which to slip?

Obama > McCain. But then sentient people have known that for a while.

Lies, Damned Lies, and the GOP

Now that the convention is over and McCain has his bounce, he can return to the deeply, profoundly, nakedly dishonest campaign that has become a GOP hallmark since 2000 or so. We expect spin, fudging, and a certain level of manipulation from our candidates. But McCain's campaign is presenting outright lies without the slightest bit of pause.

Bad Ideas: Equal Time Edition

Foreign Policy has a rundown of Obama's ten worst ideas and McCain's ten worst ideas. I'm not certain that FP makes the case in every instance -- the devil is, after all in the details. Depending on those details, I could support versions of several of these supposedly bad ideas. Even two of the "bad" McCain ideas make sense to me, the League of Democracies and a willingness more aggressively to pursue nuclear power. And depending on those devilish details, I could get on board with even more of Obama's.

Political Self Reflection

I've been politicked out lately. Recently I was asked to contribute a regular feature at Ephblog called "Ephpundit," whereby I will provide commentary on the presidential campaign (at least for the next two months - we'll see if it goes on from there). My first post is here. And that post sums up some of my feelings: I am not tired of policy or issues, or even the horse race. But I am tired of the rationalization and justification on both sides. I'm tired about my thin skin about Obama, the candidate I have supported with more personal fervor than any in my lifetime. I am tired of Republican and conservative friends defending Sarah Palin, defending her as the GOP nominee as they must but in ways that make them unfamiliar to me politically and ideologically. I am tired of the way this makes me respond to them and them to me. I'm not proud of some of my behavior as a result but I am also not proud of theirs.

So I wanted to think more about John McCain's speech the other night before posting. Because my utter (and I believe justified) disdain for his selection of Palin, and my disdain for what he has become in terms of policy has frankly blinded me to the man, who is pretty fucking amazing. Yes, I wish that Republicans had granted John Kerry, whose record of service is every bit as honorable as McCain's, the same sort of respect, but that sort of tit-for-tat is what got many of us into this mess to begin with.

So I went to Daniel Drezner, who is not only a Williams alum, but is a center-right guy whose views I respect a great deal even if I do not always agree with them. And I especially took note of this post in which he assessed McCain's speech. because while I thought it was pretty bad as far as speeches went, I also recognize that one of the critiques of Obama is that he is all speeches (I disagree profoundly, but politics ain't always about reality) and to be fair, my critique of Palin's speech is that it was a great speech-qua-speeches, but that it sucked in content.

And the thing is, I sort of came to like McCain again. I think he is wrong on just about everything (though Drezner's assertion that McCain is worlds better on global economic policy is one I take seriously, mostly because I'm not intellectually equipped to disagree, by which I mean, I don't know enough) but that is to be expected. And I think that is what I too often forget about when it comes to my conservative friends. I think they are wrong about everything. And maybe even more pliable than I am when it comes to rationalizing faults in their party. But like John McCain, they come by their politics, right or wrong, honestly. And even when the arguments become dishonest, on my part and theirs, it is informed by an honest belief in ideas, ideology, and politics. And that is something. In the end, it might be everything.

The Gustav Effect

So, what impact will Hurricane Gustav have on the presidential race? The answer is that I hope it has no impact whatsoever.

I honestly believe that John McCain and the GOP leadership has been put in a very difficult position in which no matter what they do they run the risk of facing accusations of politicizing the storm.

Now do not get me wrong -- I believe that national Republicans deserve to pay the price for their negligence on Katrina. But my sincere hope is that Gustav has little effect one way or the other on the race. Obama and Biden have dropped out of their expected campaign appearances today and the Republicans have truncated their convention, which was probably the smart choice, but will rightfully be a disappointment for many Republicans who see this as their quadrennial party celebration, and rightfully so.

What I worry about is that both parties will try to position themselves to take advantage of the situation in the Gulf, and worse, to point fingers at the other party whatever they do. Ideally the two candidates would talk and work out a way to put forward a bipartisan face on what we all hope is not a repeat of the Katrina fiasco.