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?

The Vet Who Did Not Vet

Heh.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Corner on Palin

I just checked what the folks at The National Review's Corner where the commentary is, natch, supportive of the Palin pick. Lots of boilerplate, but let me make one point: Anyone who thinks that being governor of Alaska is comparable in status or accomplishment with being a United States Senator from Illinois is a fucking moron. (Further, anyone who claims that being mayor of an Alaska suburb is comparable to being a state legislator in Illinois is also, well, you get the point.)

One Heartbeat Away . . .

Sarah Palin? Really? I'll let Andrew Sullivan articulate what many will feel:

The Palin pick sure will win headlines. It wasn't competely out of the blue, but it's a little mystifying for one obvious reason. If McCain's entire argument so far has been that Obama is too untested to be president, then how can he pick a 44-year-old first-term governor of a state with 600,000 people with no foreign policy experience whatsoever?

What this means, it seems to me, is that McCain has decided he cannot win without Clinton Democrats, and this is his attempt to win them over. He has decided that he cannot win on the experience card, so he is trying to pick the change card. Palin's record on climate change is certainly impressive - and she seems a charming, capable person. She is certainly a different kind of pick for a Southern-based GOP. But McCain will be the oldest first term president in history with a history of health concerns. If America is concerned that Obama isn't ready, how could anyone say Palin is?

I am giddy.

Happy 72nd birthday, John McCain.

The Dems Bring It

I had found the Democratic National Convention up to last night to be something of a desultory affair. Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama were great the first night but the rest of the day seemed to lack much in terms of either buzz or substance. The second night was the same, though Hillary did what she needed to do. Any of her so-called supporters (there is growing speculation that a number of the PUMAs may well be McCain plants) who still won't line up, and who honestly claim to care about women's issues but support McCain are idiots and the party does not need them.

So the first two nights played a like a warmup act that went on a bit too long. But last night more than made up for it. Though it was a bit overwrought and byzantine, the Hillary appearance to call for the nomination by acclimation actually was a great touch. It further solidified Hillary's bona fides both as a major player and as an Obama supporter. The big three speakers did what they needed to do and more. In baseball terms Cinton and Kerry hit home runs into the upper deck while Biden hit a solid double. In grading terms we had two A's and a B+. Two nines and a seven. Three thumbs up. Etc. And the Obama appearance at the end, the second night in which he has slid into the proceedings, seemed to go over well. there are those who will gripe about tradition or overexposure, but that's a silly argument. The idea that the candidate should appear as if conjured for the cameras on Thursday night is a silly remnant of the days when parties did not necessarily know going into the convention who would win. As for overexposure, well, that trolley left the stop for both parties sometime back in the middle of 2007 and the start of the interminable election cycle.

I've no idea what sort of bounce to expect. The weirdly truncated VP naming/convention season makes little sense to me, so my guess is that neither party may get the boost that traditionally has come from such an affair. McCain is expected to announce his VP pick tomorrow, a savvy move that will draw him much more attention than a candidate would normally get the day after the other party's convention folds its tent. Then the GOP kicks in to its love fest next week. I would not eb at all surprised to see status quo ante reign in the polls, with each party's bounce canceling out the other's and a virtual dead heat ruling the day in the national polls with a reversion to last week's polling data or thereabouts come the second week of September.

McCain's Energy Follies

In recent weeks John McCain has been misrepresenting and obfuscating both his and Barack Obama's record and views on energy policy. Newsweek and Factcheck.org are on the case.

Obama and the "Far Left"

Here is Andrew Sullivan's take on what will certainly be the key argument that the Republicans make this fall (because it is the key argument that Republicans make every election year):

That's the exhausted meme that Bill Bennett tries to aim at Obama. It is the meme the old right need to force this election back into the red-blue post-Vietnam boomer rubric which is all Bennett understands. But let's be clear. "Far left" means to the right of Clinton in healthcare, right? "Far left" means tax rates broadly within the post-Reagan parameters and certainly far to the right of, say, Richard Nixon. "Far left" means retaining the right to bomb Pakistan if al Qaeda is deemed a threat there. "Far left" means a policy of withdrawal from Iraq that, as Bill Kristol observes, is increasingly close to McCain's. "Far left" means a man that Joe Lieberman was thrilled to get to support his last Senate campaign. "Far left" means a "cap-and-trade" position on climate change very close to John McCain's. "Far left" means well to the racial right of Jesse Jackson. "Far left" means opposition to same-sex marriage and to a federal constitutional amendment (very close to John McCain). "Far left" means a policy on torture embraced by the Republican nominee and endorsed by every American president apart from George W. Bush.

This "far left" meme is meaningless. It says everything about the intellectual bankruptcy of the talk radio right and nothing about the substantive polices and challenges of a president Obama.

Of course it is meaningless, indeed stupid, to call Obama, or really any other Democrat in the primary campaigns who had even a theoretical shot of being successful, an extremist. That will be the accusation, and it may or may not persuade those people too dumb to know the difference not to vote for him. the good thing is that most of the people who believe Obama to be too conservative are, almost by ontological definition, not in line to be persuaded.

John McCain can take comfort in the fact that the equally empty accusations that he is an extreme conservative will not work in any meaningful way. Do I think McCain is too conservative? He is for me. But more importantly, I think he is wrong. More importantly, I think he is more wrong than he was in 2000, because he has shifted rightward on a whole lot of policies. So not only is he more wrong, he is also less principled. Which is a bit of a tough pill to swallow in light of the fact that his principles are what made him most appealing across the aisle.

McCain's Little Deal

According to The Washington Post:

Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest [in Arizona] for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers

The last few months have utterly shredded the lie of the liberal media given that the coverage McCain has received could not have been more cuddly had it been swathed in fleece blankets and surrounded by teddy bears. It looks like maybe the campaign has begun in earnest. In case you're wondering: Yeah, this should be a bigger story than the Jeremiah Wright silliness by a factor of about a hundred. Whether it will be remains to be seen. I tend to doubt that it will.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

The New Republic has pulled together its archive of articles on John McCain and, tipping their hand for what they will believe will be the outcome of the Democratic contest, Barack Obama. You also might want to check out this blistering George Will column on Hillary Clinton, titled, to my delight, "Go Home Yankee Fan."

Preacher Problems Abound

Let's not forget, amidst the hubbub surrounding Jeremiah Wright, that John McCain actively sought and embraced the endorsement of John Hagee and Jerry Falwell. It would be nice if we could get past the various candidates' so-called "preacher problems" and return a modicum of substance into the discussion. But that is not in the interest of the media, and it is not, apparently, in the interest of Hillary Clinton, and it is not in the interest of the attack machine that seems to so control American political life. And to think, it will only get worse between now and November. [Sigh.]

Increased Democratic Turnout = ???

Voters are registering in record numbers and participation has been at historic highs in the primaries in 2008. The question both parties must wrestle with is what, if anything, this means for November. Does the record turnout and the new registrants represent a turning tide in American electoral politics? Does it mean that people want to be part of what they perceive as a historic primary fight? Does it mean that Democrats in these latter primary states finally see their participation mattering? Does it represent crossover votes from Republicans, whether disenchanted with their own party or interested in shaping the opposition for the fall?

Obviously we do not know the answers to these questions. It seems evident that the historic, perhaps transformative, nature of the Democratic race plays the biggest role in all of this, but my guess is that once the party's candidate is chosen a lot of these newly registered folks will be in play for the general election. McCain is a formidable opponent and will be a popular one as well. What he does not enjoy in support from parts of the base he may well make up for among the so-called Reagan or Swing Democrats, not to mention among those for whom an Obama or Clinton candidacy is problematic.

What is also likely is the the Democrats have an opportunity. By mobilizing so many voters the party has the chance to bring about a sea change along the lines of 1994's midterm elections which shaped the American political landscape for a decade and more. I do wonder if wholesale realignment along the lines of 1932 will ever again be possible in what seems to be such a closely divided electorate and instead if tectonic shifts in the future will be less of the earthquake variety and more akin to temblors.

What's Good for the Goose

So -- can I get this straight? When John Kerry ran in 2004 and placed Vietnam as a central theme in his record, Republicans went after him for doing so, arguing essentially that that biography was either not relevant or somehow was an attempt to avoid discussing the issues. So now here we have John McCain, whose entire premise is that he is on a biography tour. Where is that same criticism? Os is it a matter of Republicans only embracing biography when their side's biographical records are under discussion?

Is McCain a Lightweight?

A pretty reasonable case can be made that John McCain is something of a lightweight on domestic policies. But, we're told, that does not matter because he is strong on foreign policy. And Republicans want to convince us that we'll finally get the leadership that we need in Iraq. But not so fast says Steve Chapman at Real Clear Politics.

McCain is getting the kid glove treatment from the media because, well, he won the GOP nomination while the Democrats seem to be in some sort of cage match. But there is a long time yet to go, and McCain will get his chance to face scrutiny. Don't be surprised to discover that beneath the gravitas there is not too much policy substance. And that may be ok -- McCain is a good and honorable man and would almost certainly be better than what preceded him as president (yeah, I know, 'soft bigotry of low expectations"). But in a campaign that will be based on judgment and experience I think we have a right to ask about the judgments he made and what he has done with that experience.

Post-Nouveau Super Tuesday Assessments

Well, yesterday's primaries threw yet another wrench in what is turning out to be a remarkable election. Hillary emerges as the big winner if you, like me, agree that McCain's victories were a foregone conclusion.

Nonetheless, Hillary still faces some harsh realities when it comes to the arithmetic of the primaries. The reality is that Obama's lead is not likely to fade easily if at all, and Hillary will almost certainly have to rely on this year's kingmakers (queenmakers?) the mysterious and powerful superdelegates.

Meanwhile the analysis comes fast and furious. At Slate Jeff Greenfield compares the Democratic candidates to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. At The New Republic Eric Rauchway tells Democrats to look to the 1912 election (while TNR's Plank has its usual blast-fax coverage). And of course there is going to be no paucity of Democrats Divided talk (dramatically overstated, I think) and parsing the race v. gender fracture (which I weighed in on last month.

What we actually know is this: The Democratic race will continue, Obama is in the lead, and all of these discussions will move forward as well. Yes, John McCain can now campaign against the Democrats, but all of the attention will still be on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And any advantage McCain might get in terms of the ability to knock down his opponents will long since be neutralized by the time the summer rolls around. besides, turnout in the primaries has consistently favored the Democrats. If whoever emerges as the frontrunner can rally that turnout, the interest in the primaries may well redound to the benefit of the Democratic nominee. In a sense, then, all yesterday did was allow for a maintenance of the status quo ante.

On to Pennsylvania.