Arianna Huffington is disappointed that the surge has worked well enough to give Americans the impressions that things have improved in Iraq [e.a.]:

John McCain, aided and abetted by his loving protectors in the media, is running a victory lap on Iraq. To hear them tell it, the surge has “worked” — indeed, it has been a huge success — and this, like a last second Hail Mary pass, has vindicated the entire disastrous Iraq misadventure.

Buoyed by a reduction in violence in Iraq, war supporters are crawling out from the shadows and beating their chests.

“I am proud of the decision of this administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein,” Condi Rice told Judy Woodruff last week. This echoed the comments of her boss, who crowed at a GOP awards dinner at the end of June: “The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision at the time, and it is the right decision today.” Bush even felt emboldened to dust off blast from the past and claim: “Democracy is taking root where a tyrant once ruled.”

And the media — and even a number of Democrats — are swallowing this triumphalist nonsense whole, and washing it down with a pitcher of revisionist Kool-Aid. The result: a collective case of political amnesia.

Arianna dear: most of us want to forget about Iraq. You’ll need to find another line of attack against McCain. Back to the drawing board for you.

There is a sickness afoot in the land when a popular non-political blogger makes note of a politician’s lowering of his own standards and his commenters attack him for speaking his mind.

Jeff Jarvis:

Whenever you want to show how soft big media are on Barack Obama, refer back to Howard Kurtz’ column on their coverage of the candidate’s hypocritical flip-flop on campaign financing. Chapter and verse.

Some comments [e.a.]:

Just drop it. It’s clear you were a Clinton supporter, but if you want a Democrat in the White House in 2009, the political reality is that attacking Obama is the same supporting McCain.

Jeff, would you consider some even handed-ness in your political posts ? It makes your position on press bias seem fairly hypocritical.

Jeff replies:

I am likely to be an Obama voter but that doesn’t mean I can’t hold him to high standards. I am not a member of his cult so I can disagree with him. It’s allowed out here. No, I won’t drop it.

Commenter:

Jeff, you’re entitled to “hold Obama to high standards,” just like the rest of us. And I realize, in a post like this, you’re trying to expose the inherent bias of the media, not bash Obama. But that’s what you’re indirectly doing.

I realize you’re trying to change the media, but please don’t (conciously or unconciously) swiftboat Obama in the process.

Commenter Steve:

So, if I support Senator Obama, I am a cultist?

Jeff responds:

No, Steve, but I’m being told I can’t criticize him and hold him to high standards. That’s a cultist talking.

Last word (not on Jeff’s blog but here on mine, where I’m the editor) goes to this commenter from Jeff’s blog:

Obama supporters panic whenever a story appears to question, criticize, or point out the hypocrisies of their candidate.

Indeed! and get a load of this attack, published at the HuffPo, on Jon Stewart for—gasp!—making fun of the Obama Messiah. Joseph Palermo builds his case by accusing Stewart of having been complicit in selling the war in Iraq to the American people:

Slamming the UN weapons inspectors as ineffectual twits dominated right-wing talk radio at the time and The Daily Show was in effect regurgitating the talking points of those who wanted to bring the country to war. Dissing the UN’s efforts on Comedy Central inadvertently helped make the case for war. It is kind of like when Dick Cheney pointed to the New York Times to buttress his warmongering saying: “Hey, even the liberals agree with us!”

Then Palermo goes on to warn Stewart to watch his mouth when he’s making fun of Obama:

When Jon Stewart seeks “balance” for his targets of satire he can end up reinforcing the false impressions that the Bush Republicans want people to have. It’s unfortunate because political humor is a powerful force that can sway some of those “low information” voters the pundits have been flogging lately.

So too was the case last night when Jon Stewart ran a bit about Barack Obama’s decision to eschew public financing. The Daily Show seized the issue as an opportunity to display “balance” and to poke fun at the Obama campaign. But not only did the bit fall flat it played right into the Republican line, which is full of half-truths and outright lies about Obama’s decision.

During the primaries, Keith Olbermann attacked Stewart just for mentioning Obama’s middle name.

Here’s what I think: this attempt by hyper-partisan ideological enforcers to shut down the debate among Democrats about Barack Obama will backfire. Badly.

Intimidating people who are on your own side (Jarvis and Stewart are both Democrats, from what I can tell) is never a good idea, especially here in America, where, as Jeff said, we don’t—and won’t—shut up.

Undoubtedly, those trying to shut down the debate are the product (or the masters) of our elite universities, where diversity is god but where diversity of opinion is unwelcome.

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective—they do believe that—contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten “minorities,” including women (the majority of students), about the “internalization” of their oppression (today’s equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

Disagreement is at the foundation of human existence, and American democracy is successful (among other reasons) because it takes this fundamental fact of human nature into account.

Plus: If Barack Obama cannot stomach, answer, and withstand criticisms from his own side, he is unlikely to be able to withstand criticism, or attacks, from his political opponents.

Robert Kaplan has good advice for Barack Obama:

[SecDef] Gates, who initially opposed the war, is fighting it with more gusto than his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who supported the invasion.

This is not uncommon. Army Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker were likely not avid supporters of the invasion either, but both are now working not just to get America out of Iraq with our honor intact, but to win there. Sen. John McCain, who was cool to both the insertion of forces in Bosnia and the war in Kosovo in the 1990s, was vigorously in favor of winning those conflicts once troops were committed on the ground.

There is a lesson here for Barack Obama.

Yes. It’s called How to Behave Like the Loyal Opposition . Hint: don’t talk like a retarded Kossack [e.a.].

The Democrats may well be right that the invasion was a strategic mistake that cost us greatly both in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. But their dire predictions from two years ago don’t look very good in hindsight. And so they need to start thinking constructively about Iraq, not destructively. To wit, as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — another opponent of the war — has said, the United States will be known and remembered as much by how it got out of Iraq as by how it got in. Armitage is thinking constructively in a way that Obama and company need to.

It’s good advice. I seriously doubt that most Democratic politicians are thinking constructively about Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that Obama won’t … eventually. For now, though, as Jennifer Rubin points out, he just sounds confused.

If I were in the Obama camp, I would quit trying to sell the idea that the “change” he’s offering is generational, because, as I recently noted, the Clinton generation (of which I’m nominally a part) is not exactly ready to hand over the reins (and Obama’s tendency to talk like a punk doesn’t help matters).

But generational change is how some Dems are painting the “differences” between the Clinton and Obama camps—differences that are being elided as Obama “Moves to the Center,” claims Thomas Edsall in the HuffPo [e.a.]:

In the international relations policy arena, sources in and out of the Obama camp described a more subtle process taking place, as Obama is forced to decide which Clinton experts to add to the team, and at what level in the hierarchy.

“While there are exceptions on both sides, one of the key differences between the Clinton and Obama foreign policy gurus is generational. And this generational split has significant consequences,” one knowledgeable expert said, speaking on background. “In the main, the senior folks in the Clinton administration (1993-2001) went with Hillary, while many of the less senior people went with Obama.”

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy advisers came of political age during the Cold War, in many cases during in the Carter administration, and tend to see the world in terms of states and state conflicts, this source said. In addition, many of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers “spent eight years dealing with Saddam [Hussein's] intransigence in the 90s,” making them more receptive to the arguments for invading Iraq.

Conversely, this expert argued, many of the Obama advisers are post-Cold War theorists who tend to see the world in terms of failed states, the influence of technology, food crises, non-state actors like Osama bin Laden, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization.

Another way of seeing this “generational difference,” of course, is this: having experience (aka coming of political age is a form of experience, which the Clintonistas have) versus having smart-(ass) ideas (aka being post-Cold War “theorists”—which the Obamabots think they have).

Meanwhile, one prominent California family lives out a different kind of drama at home, where it’s not a left-sectarian fight but rather a GOP-vs-Dems debating (sorta) society:

Of all the supporters behind the two presumptive nominees for president this year, none are quite as intriguing as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has thrown his support behind Senator John McCain, and the governor’s wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat and vocal backer of Senator Barack Obama.

The lawn of their Brentwood home has dueling campaign signs. The breakfast table has become a casual debating society. Ms. Shriver is even threatening to bring a life-size cutout of her preferred candidate into the house, something the governor has seen her do in other elections. “When one of the candidates screws up,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said of the cutouts, “the kids carry them outside.”

And to my great relief, the Dem side in this battle is represented by a fair-minded person—a “little-d democrat” [e.a.]:

“I think there are great benefits to having kids grow up understanding that we do not live in a one-party system,” Ms. Shriver said. “That there are two ways at looking at an issue. To be patient, and to compromise, those are good lessons not just in politics but for life. I grew up believing there was only one way to think. There isn’t.”

All hail the friendly enmity between people with different politics!

A leopard never loses her spots.

Once she was a loudmouth authoritarian of the right and now she’s a loudmouth authoritarian of the left: Arianna Huffington jumps on the truth-and-reconciliation bandwagon (which I described here) [e.a.]:

It’s no coincidence that a war built on lies continues to be conducted using lies (”the surge is working”). Mark Green proposes a way to end the cycle of deception: create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “This worked in a very different historical situation of South Africa and can work here as well,” wrote Green on HuffPost. “South Africans who engaged in murder and violence were given amnesty if they confessed under oath to their crimes and knowledge — but would be prosecuted if they didn’t…. The largely successful effort led to both truth and reconciliation.”

Richard Clarke echoed Green’s proposal last week, and also suggested something each of us can do: “I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.”

If the leaders responsible for that suffering are not held accountable — both at the ballot box and by being shamed and shunned as Clarke suggests — we dishonor the sacrifices of the fallen, and make it likely that many more will endure a similar fate.

I can’t help but note that some of the most vocal Obama supporters in the blogosphere share these same revenge fantasies, and that their rhetoric runs strongly counter to what Barack Obama posited as a successful electoral strategy in an opinion posted on DailyKos in 2005. He was very clear back then that hyperpartisanship was not the way to win the White House [e.a.].

I don’t believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in “appeasing” the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don’t think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don’t think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.

Perhaps Obama has changed his mind since then. He certainly has changed his behavior and his rhetoric an awful lot since then. (Jennifer Rubin has been bird-dogging his flips and flops on just one issue.).

What he believes today and how he will behave tomorrow: those are the things that matter, and some of us feel quite insecure with an otherwise appealing candidate, because a) he has been thoroughly compromised by the PRopaganda^TM campaign that made him into a messiah with devotees who were urged to “come to Obama” and b) because even those of us who are ultra-tolerant and can understand on some level the pull of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Obama just can’t figure out where he stands.

And then there are the Clintons, who don’t care at all where Obama stands: they’re too busy keeping score. Don’t worry, though. Revenge has nothing to do with it, says Terry McAuliffe [e.a.]:

Mr. Band keeps close track of the past allies and beneficiaries of the Clintons who supported Mr. Obama’s campaign, three Clinton associates and campaign officials said. Indeed, he is widely known as a member of the Clinton inner circle whose memory is particularly acute on the matter of who has been there for the couple — and who has not.

“The Clintons get hundreds of requests for favors every week,” said Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. “Clearly, the people you’re going to do stuff for in the future are the people who have been there for you.”

Mr. McAuliffe, who knows of Mr. Band’s diligent scorekeeping, emphasized that “revenge is not what the Clintons are about.” The accounting is more about being practical, he said, adding, “You have to keep track of this.”

I hate politics. But, even more than politics, I hate attack-dog authoritarians and demagogues and ideological purists—of both the right and the left.

Joseph Epstein was raised in blissful freedom in the Midwest, by parents who tended to their own lives—and to him and his brother—without making much of a fuss:

When I was a boy my parents might go off to New York or to Montreal (my father was born in Canada) for a week or so and leave my brother and me in the care of a woman in the neighborhood, a spinster named Charlotte Smucker–Mrs. Smucker to us–who was a professional childsitter. Sometimes an aunt, my mother’s sister who had no children, would stay with us. We seldom went on vacation as a family. When I was eight years old, my parents sent me off for an eight-week summer camp session in Eagle River, Wisconsin, where I learned all the dirty words if not their precise meanings. None of these things made me unhappy or in any way dampened my spirits. I cannot recall ever thinking of myself as an unhappy kid.

Not surprisingly, little Joseph became quite sturdy and self-sufficient:

After the age of ten, I made every decision about my education on my own. The one I didn’t make, at ten, was to go to Hebrew school in order to be bar-mitzvahed; this was a decision made for me and was nonnegotiable. But my parents felt no need to advise me on what foreign language to take in high school, where I ought to go to college–though my father paid every penny of my tuition and expenses–or what I ought to study once there. …

When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life. My father never explained about the birds and the bees to me; his entire advice on sex, as I clearly remember, was, “You want to be careful.” …

I did not seek my parents’ approval. All I wished was to avoid their–and particularly my father’s–disapproval, which would have cut into my freedom. Avoiding disapproval meant staying out of trouble, which for the most part I was able to do. Punishment would have meant losing the use of my mother’s car, or having my allowance reduced, or being made to stay home on school or weekend nights, and I cannot remember any of these things ever happening, a testament less to my adolescent virtue than to the generous slack my parents cut me.

Now, having retired from teaching at Northwestern University, Epstein reflects on the “Kindergarchy”—the well-meaning but toxic child-rearing style which has produced the many insufferable students he has known. His (tongue-in-cheek) conclusion? Too much love in the home:

As a teacher at Northwestern University (not long retired), I found the students in my classes in no serious way I could discern much improved for all the intensity of home and classroom attention most of them received under the Kindergarchy. A very small number, those who had somehow found passion for books and the life of the mind, were remarkable, a number proportionally probably little different than in any generation of students; the rest were like students everywhere and at all times: just wanting to get the damn thing called their education over with and get on with life with the best start possible.

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn’t become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint–and maybe a touch of the fear, too–that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were. [Could this account for the vociferous and influential Irish Catholic "mafia" in the MSM? Just wondering.---ed.]

So often in my literature classes students told me what they “felt” about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to–but did not–write: “D-, Too much love in the home.” I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality.

Then Epstein lowers the boom [e.a.]:

Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

Uncharitably, I can’t help but think that a lot of whippersnapping Obama lovers are going to learn that lesson in the coming months. And Paul Krugman, for one, isn’t above advising BHO on that score:

Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

We are tough, capable, high-achieving, well-adjusted, and secure baby boomers! Hear us roar!

The loonies at MSNBC are fantasizing about how to wreak vengeance on the warmongers:

Noting that “prominent Democrats” had ruled out impeachment, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on his show last night, what “remedy” there could be for the lies and misinformation highlighted in the new Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the Bush administration’s misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society …

Somehow I think we will avoid truth and reconciliation commissions here in the U.S. and A.—or at least so I hope! They’re getting pretty popular up in Canada!

But these revenge fantasies of Richard Clarke’s remind me of something Jared Diamond wrote in the New Yorker recently, in an essay about tribalism [e.a.]:

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend. …

But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful.

So, yes: Feelings of vengeance, like all other feelings, need to be addressed and processed so that people can move beyond them. But truth-and-reconciliaion councils are a vehicle for wallowing in those feelings, not for moving beyond them (just as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “liberation theology” nurtures the grievances of his congregation and ensures that their racial resentment will live on in future generations).

Well, let’s hope we don’t enter a new era of witch-hunting, which some Dems (the ones who want to “look into” the instances of “racism” and “sexism” in the primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) seem bent on.

On that score, there’s one small encouraging sign buried deep in the biography of a future President Obama. When Barack Obama was practicing what he learned from Saul Alinsky, he reputedly felt uncomfortable with some necessary parts of the process of community organizing.

But, although he was a first-class student of Alinsky’s method, Obama also saw its limits. It appealed to his head but not his heart. For instance, Alinsky relished baiting politicians or low-level bureaucrats into public meetings where they would be humiliated. Obama found these “accountability sessions” unsettling, even cruel. “Oftentimes, these elected officials didn’t have that much more power than the people they represented,” he told me.

At one meeting, where residents of an asbestos-laden housing project confronted their property manager about whether their homes had been tested, Obama suddenly had the urge to warn his target. “I wanted to somehow let Mr. Anderson know that I understood his dilemma,” Obama wrote in Dreams, with the kind of empathy that is the hallmark of his autobiography. He was sometimes more interested in connecting with folks on the South Side than organizing them. He studied the characters he encountered so closely that Kruglik says Obama turned his field reports into short stories about the hopes and struggles of the local pastors and congregants with whom he was trying to commune.

Let’s hope that a President Obama will prove to be a late-stage dissenter from the School of Alinsky.

update: Instalanche!  Thank you, Glenn Reynolds!

Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around. Mostly, I write about media culture (”They call it news. I call it infotainment.”) But even though I’m not a politico, like everyone else during this election season, I find myself writing a lot —way more than I’d like—about politics.

In case you haven’t thought of these yourself, the Politico offers 12 reasons to substantiate its claim that Obama’s Bitter Lesson in Political Etiquette will stick around to do a lot of damage.

1. It lets Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) off the mat

2. If you are going to say something that makes you sound like a clueless liberal, don’t say it in San Francisco.

3. Some people actually use guns to hunt

4. Some people cling to religion not because they are bitter but because they believe it, and because faith in God gives them purpose and comfort. [Plus: you claim you are a religious Christian; is that because you are bitter? ---ed.]

5. Some hard-working Americans find it insulting when rich elites explain away things dear to their hearts as desperation.

6. It provides a handy excuse for people who were looking for a reason not to vote for Obama but don’t want to think of themselves as bigoted. [I'd word that differently: "It provides a believable rationale for people who were anti-Obama before, because they disagreed with his stated policies and found his manner deeply irritating. But that would be me. ---ed.]

7. It gives the Clinton campaign new arguments for trying to recruit superdelegates,

8. It helps Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) frame a potential race against Obama,

9. The comments play directly into an already-established narrative about his candidacy … that Obama has limited appeal.

10. The timing is terrible. With the Pennsylvania primary nine days off, late-deciding voters are starting to tune in.

11. The story did not have its roots in right-wing or conservative circles. It was published — and aggressively promoted — by The Huffington Post, a liberally oriented organization …

12. It undermines Democratic congressional candidates who had thought that Obama would make a stronger top for the ticket than Clinton. Already, Republican House candidates are challenging their Democratic opponents to renounce or embrace Obama’s remarks.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Newsweek investigates Obama’s claim that his superior knowledge of the world will make him a better president than his rivals.

I find it hard to believe this, but Barack Obama has singlehandedly managed to make Hillary Clinton believable as a solid Middle American. But suddenly she has become their voice.

Ann Althouse takes us back 40 years to remember the last time our country, supposedly in the name of Middle America, rejected an antiwar elitist in favor of a shifty-eyed, mean-spirited liar.

1969
The Middle Americans
FROM THE TIME [magazine] ARCHIVE
Jan. 5, 1970
The Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed defiantly in a school on Netcong, N.J., reading the morning invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor. Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriots. Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.

The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over—the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.

Of course the Clintons, being dyed-in-the-wool Democrats of 2008, would never make the arguments that Time magazine made in 1970 about Middle America. Indeed, I don’t see anyone making such arguments with a straight face anymore about “Middle Americans” reclaiming their birthright.

But John Harris and Jim VandeHei at the Politico do—finally!—spell out why Hillary Clinton has stayed in the race. Even if she can’t spell it out, they can: because it’s not about the primary; rather, it’s all about the general election, which Obama can’t win.

Rip off the duct tape and here is what they would say: Obama has serious problems with Jewish voters (goodbye Florida), working-class whites (goodbye Ohio) and Hispanics (goodbye, New Mexico).

Republicans will also ruthlessly exploit openings that Clinton — in the genteel confines of an intraparty contest — never could. Top targets: Obama’s radioactive personal associations, his liberal ideology, his exotic life story, his coolly academic and elitist style.

This view has been an article of faith among Clinton advisers for months, but it got powerful new affirmation last week with Obama’s clumsy ruminations about why “bitter” small-town voters turn to guns and God.

There’s nothing to say that the Clintonites are right about Obama’s presumed vulnerabilities. But one argument seems indisputably true: Obama is on the brink of the Democratic nomination without having had to confront head-on the evidence about his general election challenges.

Most interestingly, Harris and VandeHei claim that Obama’s biggest vulnerabilities aren’t inherent to him (i.e., his “liberal ideology, exotic life story, …and elitist style”). Rather, they claim, he will become a victim of the same anti-liberal conspiracy that undid, via stealth, the previous two Democratic candidates for president [e.a.]:

Al Gore and John F. Kerry, were both military veterans, and both had been familiar, highly successful figures in national politics for more than two decades by the time they ran.

Both men lost control of their public images to the right-wing freak show — that network of operatives and commentators working mostly outside of the mainstream media — and ultimately lost their elections as many voters came to see them as elitist, out-of-touch, phony, and even unpatriotic.

Interesting. In this formulation, it’s a “right-wing freak show” that causes an otherwise “highly successful” Democratic figure to “lose control” of his (presumably positive) public image. There’s not even a hint of a suggestion that the “figure” him/herself is somehow inherently flawed as a candidate (and that his public image conceals more than it reveals—which is what I think is at the root of Obama’s problems).

Why don’t Democrats look inward? Why are they always pointing the finger of blame at others? Are they never in the wrong? Is there nothing they can do differently from last time, to ensure that they don’t lose again in 2008?

Michelle Obama strikes again:

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

(via Glenn Reynolds, who refers to this as “Obamanomics.”)

Using David Brooks’s heavy-handed Hillary Hit Job in today’s NYT (which I wrote about here) as a launching pad, Ann Althouse sketches out the contours of the Uncivil War Between the Supporters:

Brooks must have thought that last line was too clever not to use, but it’s actually only a childish flipping of a phrase to its opposite, and, worse, it’s not even true. She has the audacity of hope. By calling hope hopelessness, Brooks enables himself to ask why she goes on and to pretend there isn’t the obvious answer: she has hope of winning.

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish…?

How is what’s she’s doing any different from what every other candidate does as long as there’s a chance? To say it’s “selfish” or “narcissistic” to think you’re special is to criticize everyone who has what it takes to campaign for the presidency.

And the real issue:

Brooks challenges her to step outside her own machine and stop it, to “surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice.” Why? Why should she behave differently from every other politician?

Indeed—especially since she is the kind of politician from whom we expect exactly this kind of grit, which is why some of us like her (I don’t actually like her, but I do like her in a match-up against the messianic-narcissistic holier-than-thou commie-lite Obama, whose proposed policies sound to me like the road to perdition, and I do like her in a match-up against McCain, because she can match her competency to his competency).

At TNR, Michael Crowley is less passionate than Althouse, but he also sees through Brooks’s “logic” and answers the question easily:

I think it’s quite possible that Hillary simply doesn’t think Obama is electable. (See Bill and “all that other stuff.”) *** Now that may be a delusion. But if you believed it to be true, you would soldier ahead. She also does have quite a lot of passionate supporters cheering her on, and is roughly tied with Obama in national polls; that’s not easy to ignore.

Once more I issue the caveat that I’m not a politico, but I’ve long been of the opinion that the Clintons don’t believe that Obama is electable (or, rather, they believe that he is unelectable). And I agree with them: he’s waaaaaay too much to the left, and he gives no indication of even wanting to do the necessary pivot, as Kaus pointed out recently.

But “progressives” seem to want to convince themselves (not to mention the rest of us) that Obama’s the one. And former conservatives have been converted (see Andrew Sullivan’s entire blog of the last few months; here’s one of today’s encomia.

Whatever. It’s their party!

And they’re welcome to it, says Kaus today, because an Obama win sounds like four years of insufferable pedagogic condescension.

After last Tuesday, I’m not sure I want to be instructed and elevated any more by Prof. Obama. I’d kind of like to rearrange his mental furniture on welfare and affirmative action, where his vagueness suggests incoherence more than brilliance.

Yep. And the Obama critics on the Dem side haven’t even begun to address the fatuous foreign-policy gobbledy-gook of the forthcoming “Obama Doctrine,” which features something called “dignity promotion”:

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. “I don’t think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. “Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity.”

The Doctrine is sliced and diced by Dean Barnett today in the Weekly Standard. Barnett is not a Democrat, I suppose, but at least he is a rational observer of reality, unlike the dreamers on Team Obama [e.a.]:

If the Obama Doctrine held that President Obama would send a fleet of Navy vessels to the shores of every country where dignity wasn’t being adequately promoted, that would at least be a Doctrine worthy of the name. It would be a stupid Doctrine, but at least for once Obama would be matching his rhetoric with a plan for action. As it is, the Obama Doctrine is of a piece with the rest of his campaign. It’s an attractively outlined set of worthy goals unsupported by any apparent plan of action to realize those goals.

The Obama Doctrine dovetails nicely with Obama’s promise to begin an aggressive round of–what else?–talking with all our enemies. Once again, no clearly expressed goals preceded Obama’s promise to talk. Almost needless to say, Obama has offered no elaboration on how the talking will advance specifically defined American interests. The talking is itself the point.

These are just a few of the reasons why Obama Dissenters see him as unelectable: he’s full of hot air.

Meanwhile, while I was composing this post, Hillary has decided to go nuclear on Obama, via Wright:

Clinton: Wright ‘would not have been my pastor’

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.
“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin deduces why Hillary launched this attack:

This also tells us two things: that Clinton believes the media could not continue to run with this story without some added fuel from her and that she thinks this issue is a winner.

And one of her commenters describes the box Obama is in now:

Hillary is smart enough not to touch the Reverend, unless it is Obama getting burned. Obama camp is helpless. To engage in the ‘debate’ would continue to prop the story up.

Isn’t this fun?

————
*** the link is to the MSNBC site First Read:

*** “All this other stuff…”

Bill Clinton’s Friday afternoon comments about why he thinks a Clinton-McCain contest will be better for the country has been viewed by Obama supporters has an attack on the candidate’s patriotism. But be sure to focus on this phrase, “all this other stuff” intruding on the campaign and less on the “loves America” line. Wasn’t Clinton sending another message to the crowd of older, white male voters? (Remember, he was at a VFW and there was barely a member of the audience under 60, according to our reporter in the field)? The message: That if you don’t want to talk about race, then Clinton’s the candidate; if you do want race intruding into the campaign, then support Obama. There are many older, white voters, while sympathetic to Obama’s message on race, don’t want to be reminded to take their medicine and the subtle message Clinton may actually have been sending was just that, support Clinton and avoid taking your race medicine.

I saw Chuck Todd float this theory on Hardball last night, although he didn’t mention anything about “race medicine.”

The conventional wisdom of the media elite, crystallized today by David Brooks, says that Hillary Clinton cannot possibly win.

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

It would be way too tiresome to provide the dozens of links that support Brooks’s point of view. It’s much more interesting to link to the news side of things at the New York Times, where someone is (finally) asking the important question: can a “progressive” win the White House?

Of course the NYT doesn’t frame the question quite like that. Instead, the sly headline writer asks: “Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?”[ e.a.]:

the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.

Mr. Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on a different bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Mr. Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and seven-plus years of President Bush, and that it has become open to a new progressive majority.

Further down, we hear once more this claim about a new political climate that is favorable to Obama:

[M]any of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

That’s an interesting assumption, but I fear it’s not rooted in fact. Indeed, the NYT quotes TNR in a most interesting way:

As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

If skepticism is Clintonian, call me a Clintonite. A latent ideological majority? In what universe?

Currently, despite the party establishment’s wanting to give her (and the centrist voters who are loyal to her) the bum’s rush, she is neck and neck in votes with her messianic Democratic opponent. Call me skepetical, but I say this more or less ensures that in a general election, Obama will be buried in a match-up with McCain. And that when the voting is finally over, the dreamers’ “latent ideological ‘majority’ ” will represent an even smaller but more hysterically vocal minority.

Only by then, they will have (conveniently for their enemies) labeled themselves as a proudly out-of-the-mainstream political party. A neat trick, that.

Ann Althouse analyzes a Rasmussen poll:

Poll results:

“How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?”

30% Excellent
21% Good
26% Fair
21% Poor
1% Not sure

Althouse [e.a.]:

The important break in the numbers is between “excellent” and the rest, and 70% said the speech fell short of “excellent.” This is, I think, disastrous for Obama. …

Asked whether the speech was “racially divisive, unifying, or neither,” only 30% — 30% again — thought the speech was “unifying,” which is what Obama intended it and his entire campaign to be.

Obama’s popularity has been built on unifying us and transcending race. If only 30% of us heard unification in that speech, then the speech and the connection to Wright have been massively destructive to what is the chief substance of his reputation.

 No kidding.

But Althouse gets the last word, because she’s got the best metaphor:

Obama told white people to feel guilty about race just when they’d been so happy thinking that loving him, just him, was the answer to racial problems. When we saw him consorting with someone who seemed to hate us, we needed reassurance that Obama loves us, and loving Obama was enough. But he didn’t say that, and now we’re confused. Our boyfriend was telling us he needs to see other people, and we don’t understand the relationship anymore.

I think we can safely declare that Obama-mania is over.

Christopher Hitchens offers a pretty persuasive explanation of alpha-male Eliot Spitzer’s “puzzling” behavior:

[H]e was a bright dude.

So what in the wide world was Eliot Spitzer thinking?

“Oh, that’s easy,” Christopher Hitchens said from his Washington apartment last week, as word of Spitzer’s morning resignation buzz-sawed through the Beltway.

Hitchens—a former contributor to the Voice—has written the obituaries of more than a few political careers, and he has a theory about the ones with poor coital judgment: They just don’t see illicit sex as an obvious threat to their political survival. In fact, they see it as a primary reason to seek higher office in the first place.

“You wouldn’t be doing any of this if one of the objectives was not to increase the amount of pussy that was available to you. That is what you do,” Hitch says. “You don’t do it to be, ah, the most approval-rated governor of New York, for fuck’s sake.”

Hitchens is a little harsh, but we all know that power goes to your head.
We do know that, don’t we?
Spitzer’s behavior isn’t really “puzzling,” is it?

Hitches, no stranger to powerful men, claims that this is what alpha males say with their alpha-male behavior:

‘I do this to get laid.’

Could be!

Via Ann Althouse, who, having more visitors than I and being more careful of her visitors’ possible sensitivities, provided only the link. Her commenters have some interesting insights, however:

My wife was a lovely young woman with an amazing head of light golden blond hair and an advanced degree in international law from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She’s been saying what Hitch just wrote here since I met her.

A stint in the service of Your Federal Government, including contact with plenty of elected officials, convinced her that politicians and alpha male types in government generally, have a “high sex drive,” as she puts it charitably. Sometimes she isn’t so charitable. In any event, she didn’t lack attention from the high and mighty, although it didn’t seem to have much to do with the quality of her latest legal analysis of issues surrounding hydro power export from Québec.

An old friend from Fletcher is even more bitter about the international diplomats at the U.N. for whom she worked.

One commenter clues me in to news I haven’t been following for 24 hours—and look what happens!

George said…
[Brand-new New York Governor David] Paterson needs to go, too. Multiple affairs, procuring a job for at least one mistress, tape recordings, possible use of state funds…

9:23 AM

Yikes! The Dems’ heads are going to explode after all of this exposure of their peccadilloes.

Peter Brown, writing at Real Clear Politics, fills in some details of an emerging picture:

Any realistic scenario in which Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the Democratic presidential nomination assumes that the party bosses will have both the will and the power to stop Sen. Barack Obama’s nomination.

But there is one good reason why they might not try, even if she is able to string together a series of primary and caucus victories: Call it liberal guilt, or call it fear of reprisal from the party’s powerful black base.

He also clarifies the sharp leftward turn of the Democrats:

The once moderate-conservative wing of the party has virtually disappeared, with millions following Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party or, these days, given the disillusionment with President Bush, calling themselves independents.

Today’s Democratic leaders are the reformers who seized control of the party decades ago — and their ideological children. … [I]f too young to have been part of the civil rights movement, [they] embrace it as one of the Democratic Party’s crowning achievements. They see enhancing the rights and opportunities of minority Americans as an integral part of their role in government, even though only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, among Democratic presidential candidates since Franklin Roosevelt, has carried the majority of white voters.

Being part of an effort to deny Obama, who has a white mother and an African father, the nomination makes them very uneasy, especially when to do so they will have to overrule the verdict of the primaries and caucuses.

Remember, these superdelegates are elected officials and members of the Democratic National Committee — people invested in their own political future and that of the Democratic Party.

The threat of a revolt among African-Americans, not to mention among young voters of all races, if Obama is denied the nomination by the superdelegates might be enough to discourage even those who see Clinton as the better general election candidate.

You don’t hear this kind of controversial analysis on television, and it goes much further than Geraldine Ferraro went.

Will Olbermann demand that Brown renounce his opinion, too?

Where will the demand for renunciation stop?

The headline says it all:

Geraldine Ferraro: Don’t call me a racist, you racist!!

What a bunch of jerks they all are—the campaigns, the advocates, the supporters, the talking heads, the whole lot of them. This is devolving into something very nasty, and a lot of people are getting hurt. It goes way beyond the usual circular firing squad behavior of the Democrats. I mean, they’ve all forgotten about how much they hate Bush and they are intent on destroying one another.

It makes it very easy for me to appreciate David Mamet when he writes:

Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal‘

Allow me to quote:

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

——————-
Wanna know how pigs fight?

To understand why potbellied pigs become aggressive, we need to understand their herd instincts. In the wild, pigs travel in herds. Wihin this herd structure, there is a very defined heirarchy, similar to a pecking order in chickens. When two pigs meet for the first time, they fight — often viciously. This fighting may include posturing and frothing at the mouth; the hair on the back of the neck may stand up and the tail may point straight out and wag. A fighting pig will position him or herself so that his head aligns with the other pig’s shoulder. The pigs will slam their heads into each other’s shoulders, cutting with their tusks and wiping the foam from their mouths onto the other pig. This foam contains the pig’s scent, and marks the other pig with the smell. The fighting will continue until one pig admits defeat and runs away. A pig fight to establish dominance in the herd heirarchy can take hours.

Pigs appear to have very little concept of size. An adult pig will fight with a piglet a tenth his size, or with a farm pig ten times his size. Smaller pigs are frequently more agile and it can be difficult for larger pigs to catch them.

We have also observed behaviors such as tail biting, leg biting and ear biting. Although we know of only one pig who has ever lost a tail during a fight, it is common for major damage to occur to the ears. During a fight, pigs’ ears can be split in two or a portion may be completely ripped off. When this type of injury occurs, the hurt pig will immediately submit to the dominant pig and search out mud with which to coat his injury. By covering the injury in mud, the pig prevents insects from accessing the wound.

What a difference 12 hours makes. This morning, Candy Crowley was downplaying the significance of the NAFTA story. Now, 12 hours later, she’s talking about the “incoming” that Obama is getting, and they’re playing video of a very hostile “press avail” held by the Candidate this afternoon.

In the worst single day of his campaign—a day on which all the goodwill toward him in the media simply vanished—whoooosh!—Obama was raked over the coals all day long on CNN—I saw it on the 8 o’clock hour with Campbell Brown; then on the 9 o’clock hour with Larry King. The Obama supporters who only a few days ago had proudly been flying their colors looked shell-shocked. Now the melancholy tune continues on Anderson Cooper’s show.

Transcripts aren’t yet available, but the reporters or anchors have now mentioned every negative thing bubbling under the surface about Obama—some of which should have been expected (Rezko, Farrakhan, Wright, non-oversight of Senate committee); some of which the Obama team never should have allowed to develop (Canada/NAFTA, Farrakhan); and some of the downright creepy stuff that’s out there (is Obama a Muslim?—the CNN crew is obsessed with showing a piece from 60 Minutes where Steve Croft insistently asks Clinton the question a second time: are you sure he’s not a Muslim? is what he implies).

Earlier today, I see from the available transcripts, Wolf Blitzer pulled no punches in his language:

BLITZER: What do you make of this embarrassment, this memo that has now been released from the Canadian Consulate in Chicago to the Canadian government in Ottawa, saying they did meet with a top economic adviser to Obama who basically said to them, don’t pay attention to what Barack Obama tells the voters in Ohio on NAFTA, he really doesn’t mean it, it’s only politics? This is potentially a significant embarrassment to your candidate.

Now, as I write, hours later, Cooper is conducting a segment on “media bias.” He says he takes the subject very seriously.

He’s so sincere-sounding that I almost believe him.

Until I hear him invoke “the best political team on television.”

Which reminds me: read Christopher Hitchens on the vast emptiness of our discourse.

Take “Yes We Can,” for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.

Wait! That’s not all!

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators.

If there was a more callous remark than this thrown out into the blogosphere today, I’d like to hear it:

Joe Klein:

if Obama–or Clinton–can change the focus of the debate to the question of strategy–the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption and broader foreign policy priorities (real Al Qaeda v. Al Qaeda in Iraq), McCain has a far more diffiult hill to climb.

I guess those people who got blown up today in Baghdad in a gruesome and heartbreaking mass murder don’t matter, because they’re not “ours.”

The U.S. military, which gave a lower death toll, said both attacks were caused by female suicide bombers and blamed al Qaeda. An Iraqi military official said the two women were mentally handicapped and the bombs detonated by remote control.

I guess what happend today is okay—because it was done “only” by Al Qaeda in Iraq, not by the “real” Al Qaeda.

Does Joe Klein consider this a serious argument?
Does he ever consider the full implications of the things that come out of his mouth?
How many more morons like him are out there?

And does he really think that Democrats can win on national security with arguments like this?

I can’t help it if I’m a close reader, okay? So after I read Matthew Yglesias’s disapproving post about Hillary rushing to her feet at the SOTU to applaud Bush’s line about the terrorists knowing that the surge had worked, I went and clicked on the link he provided and read the whole piece.

And, lo and behold, what did I find? That Yglesias’s man Barack Obama went wild at the SOTU last night when Bush put Iran on notice:

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

I long ago stopped trying to post any responses over at Yglesias’s place, because if he reads them, he gives no indication of having done so and rarely, if ever, responds—not very blogger-like. But I note that others continue the effort to address Yglesias’s points, as if they are worth discussion.

One commenter brought my point to his attention [e.a.]:

I agree with Steven this is pretty clear evidence HRC is just hawkish by nature, and that’s a good enough reason to not give your vote to her.

But can someone tell me what to make of this?

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.

Wouldn’t Obama’s criticism of the Kyl-Leiberman bill mean he shouldn’t stand up here? And didn’t he give that vote a pass in any case? Does not compute.

Posted by plum | January 29, 2008 10:01 AM

A couple of points: Mr. Obama’s fans don’t seem to care much about what he stands for—even if it includes a strong and aggressive national defense—as long as he doesn’t make much noise about it or as long as he doesn’t use threatening language or as long as he doesn’t seem (on the surface) to relish combat the way Hillary Clinton does.

I find that weird, but maybe not so weird. (More about this social/societal/cultural phenomenon another time.)

The other point that becomes obvious when you read the Hill piece that Yglesias linked to is that there is a huge dividing line among the Democrats—a fight for the soul of the Democratic party, is how Ron Silver put it long ago—between mostly young militant peaceniks and battle-hardened and beaten-up-by-reality liberals.

But it also seems to be about those who accept reality and those who are wary of Wag the Dog scenarios and Gulf of Tonkin lies, as this commenter at Yglesias’s place suggests [e.a.]:

The difference [between Hillary and Obama] is between those who have been tricked into thinking that Iraq has something to do with terrorism and those who understand that Iraq is an allegory for the American domestic factional struggle.

DIVIDED WE FALL.

Posted by Frank Wilhoit | January 29, 2008 9:26 AM

That makes both this election and what comes afterward very, very interesting—to me at least: the culture war (which is what we argue over when we argue over the Iraq war) is still on. Full force. It certainly won’t end with Bush, or with Clinton, or with McCain.

Nor would it end with Obama, however. But I’ll let the dreamers dream.

Hillary met privately with John Edwards after the debate, according to CNNPolitics.com [e.a.].

Hmm. I was particularly struck by this exchange at the debate last night, when Edwards went out of his way to pile on to Obama just after Hillary had accused Obama of voting “present” too many times in the Illinois State Senate:

EDWARDS: …I mentioned this about Senator Clinton earlier, to be fair, about Social Security. I do think it’s important whether you are willing to take hard positions.

I mean, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who are sitting in front of me right know they have to go to the floor of the House every day and vote on hard issues. And they have to vote up or down or not show up to vote — one of those three choices. What I didn’t hear was an explanation for why over 100 times you voted present instead of yes or no when you had a choice to vote up or down.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: I’ll be happy to answer it. Because in Illinois — in Illinois, oftentimes you vote present in order to indicate that you had problems with a bill that otherwise you might be willing to vote for. And oftentimes you would have a strategy that would help move the thing forward.

Keep in mind, John, I voted for 4,000 bills. And if you want to know whether or not I worked on tough stuff, I passed the first racial…

EDWARDS: I don’t question whether you worked on tough stuff.

OBAMA: No, no, no. Hold on a second.

EDWARDS: I don’t question whether you worked on tough stuff.

OBAMA: No, no. But you…

EDWARDS: The question is, why would you over 100 times vote present? I mean, every one of us — every one — you’ve criticized Hillary. You’ve criticized me for our votes.

OBAMA: Right.

EDWARDS: We’ve cast hundreds and hundreds of votes. What you’re criticizing her for, by the way, you’ve done to us, which is you pick this vote and that vote out of the hundreds that we’ve cast.
(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: No.

EDWARDS: And what — all I’m saying is, what’s fair is fair. You have every right to defend any vote. You do.

OBAMA: Right.

EDWARDS: And I respect your right to do that on any — on any substantive issue. It does not make sense to me — and what if I had just not shown up…

OBAMA: John — John, Illinois…

EDWARDS: Wait, wait, wait. Wait, let me finish.

OBAMA: Hold on a second.

EDWARDS: What if I had just not shown up to vote on things that really mattered to this country? It would have been safe for me politically. It would have been the careful and cautious thing to do, but I have a responsibility to take a position…

OBAMA: John, you…

EDWARDS: … even when it has political consequences for me.

(APPLAUSE) consequences. This — most of these were technical problems with a piece of legislation that ended up getting modified.

But let’s talk about taking on tough votes. I mean, I am somebody who led on reforming a death penalty system that was broken in Illinois, that nobody thought was good politics, but was the right thing to do.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: I opposed legislation that now is being used against me politically to make sure that juveniles were not put in the criminal justice system as adults, even though it was not the smart thing to do politically. It was not smart for me to oppose the war at the start of this war, but I did so because it was the right thing to do.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: So I understand that Illinois has a different system than Congress, and that it is fine to try to use that politically. But don’t question, John, the fact that on issue after issue that is important to the American people, I haven’t simply followed, I have led.

Shrewd move from Counselor Edwards, who, I believe, just raised his had for the vice presidency. Now, that’s a Democratic ticket to contend with. (Unless something unforeseen should crop up.)

Have you ever noticed that Barack Obama constantly has to take on both of them?

Well, apparently, he’s getting sick of it:

In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts to air Monday on “Good Morning America,” Obama, D-Ill., directly engages Bill Clinton on a series of issues.

“You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Obama said. “He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts — whether it’s about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas. This has become a habit, and one of the things that we’re gonna have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he’s making statements that are not factually accurate.”

Good luck with that!

[[ updated and reposted due to technical difficulties encountered while posting "campaign fever," which got cut off halfway. This is the entire post I intended for publication yesterday, January 18.]]

I’m starting to see signs that certain not-starry-eyed Democratic partisans do indeed see the forest for the trees. But first, let me set this up with an observation from Mr. Hitchens about the fog of excitement that prevents a lot of observers who should know better from seeing reality during this exciting but also totally over-hyped run-up to the election:

I remember going to several of the mass events generated by Colin Powell’s memoirs a few years ago, and being very touched by the eagerness with which young and old “white” people hoped he would give them the chance to elect (what would in fact have been) our first West Indian president. It was all book-tour hype as it turned out — I could have told you that then — but now it has resurfaced in a similarly naÔve way. Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single