Don't It Always Seem to Go?

...you don't know what you've got 'til your faced with the possibility of a Democratic senate without a real Democrat. I feel numb.

Sweet Home Chicago

We're #1!
Everyone else is #2 or lower.

The Music Man

Adolph Reed's lastest gem on Barack Obama in this month's issue of The Progressive brought to mind Robert Preston in his finest role:

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.
...
Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

Once again, Professor Reed doesn't let us down. Not only does he speak truth to power, he's speaking truth to the bamboozled Left, lost in the afterglow of its collective Obasm.

I think its too late to prevent them from embarrassing themselves (I'm looking at you, editorial board of The Nation, Katha Pollitt, and for God's sake, Barbara Ehrenriech, who wrote, on Valentine's Day, no less, about being swayed by her "grown feminist daughter" weeping inconsolably when Obama lost NH. Sheesh!). We can only hope that, if Obama does win the nomination, the Democrats can pull themselves together and figure out how to build this deeply flawed candidate into someone who can win in November without compromising away all of the things that would make a victory matter in the first place.

And then, maybe, we can all march out of the high school gym to the strains of 76 Trombones.

Saturday Malamute Blogging

Squirrel watching. Or squirrel, watching.

Hateful Speech

Mike Huckabee has just moved to the top of the shit list. I'm not shy about making Obama the butt of a good joke, but this isn't funny:

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

And the audience laughed. Of course, he was giving a speech to the NRA in Kentucky. Check out the youtube video

Bill O'Reilly: The Remix

This just doesn't get old.

Thanks Felicia!

Friday Malamute Blogging

Have bone...

...will travel.

Hollow Man

Obamarama has come full circle as Barack's own private chickens are now coming home to roost: Alice Palmer is campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Indiana. Remember Alice Palmer? She was Barack's political mentor before he kicked her to the curb in '95, and then took her seat in the Illinois state senate, not by making his case to the voters, but by using tried-and-true hardball political tactics to knock her--and all his other rivals--off the ballot.

Palmer served the district in the Illinois Senate for much of the 1990s. Decades earlier, she was working as a community organizer in the area when Obama was growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia. She risked her safe seat to run for Congress and touted Obama as a suitable successor, according to news accounts and interviews.

But when Palmer got clobbered in that November 1995 special congressional race, her supporters asked Obama to fold his campaign so she could easily retain her state Senate seat.

Obama not only refused to step aside, he filed challenges that nullified Palmer's hastily gathered nominating petitions, forcing her to withdraw.

"I liked Alice Palmer a lot. I thought she was a good public servant," Obama said. "It was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."

His choice divided veteran Chicago political activists.

"There was friction about the decision he made," said City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus Timuel Black, who tried to negotiate with Obama on Palmer's behalf. "There were deep disagreements."

But, to be fair, this was before he took his all-inclusive Hope and Change/Dr. FeelGood roadshow to a town near you. So, at that time he clearly didn't have the smoke and mirrors to make the bitter masses swoon and all his enemies kneel before him. He had to rely on sketchy ballot signatures and unsealed depositions like everybody else.

And then there's Jeremiah Wright, who has now been thoroughly denounced by Obama for the umpteenth time. But I guess for Obama-tons (and by Obama-tons I mean the media) it always feels like the first time, so yesterday it was all-Barack and Jeremiah, all the time on cable news. The usual suspects were trotted out, again, to read the chicken entrails and rend their garments over the twenty-year pastor/poseur relationship, and pronounce Obama's campaign both dead and alive.

Barack Obama has built his appeal on the claim that he's different from the usual political player. How ironic, then, as recent events have shown, that he may be the biggest player of the them all. All of his campaign's problems have been there from the beginning. There have been no surprises. But to deal with them before his campaign got off the ground was to admit to the duplicity that has made Barack all things to all people. He played Alice Palmer to gain entry into Southside Chicago political circles, and for her blessing. He played Jeremiah Wright and Trinity church to establish bourgeois nationalist street cred. He played Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn for their white liberal, lapsed '60's radical, Hyde Park intellectual bona fides. By insisting that his faith was central to his politics he played his white, Christian supporters, for whom he figured one church would be as good as another.

He waltzed with all of them but had no intention of taking any of them down the aisle.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Wake me up when the election is over.

You Don't Need a Weatherman . . .

Going through old papers this weekend I found a Harper's Magazine from May 2006 with a piece by Michael Hudson on the upcoming crisis in real estate debt, titled The New Road to Serfdom. Writes Mr. Hudson:

Most everyone involved in the real estate bubble thus far has made at least a few dollars. But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find out what they really signed up for was the hard servitude of debt serfdom.

Hudson adds:

But homeowners are not the only ones who will pay. The overall economy likely will shrink as well. That $200 billion that flowed into the "real" economy in 2004 is already spent, with no future capital gains in the works to fuel more such easy money. Rising debt-service payments will further divert income from new consumer spending. Taken together, these factors will further shrink the "real" economy, drive down those already declining real wages, and push our debt-ridden economy into Japan-style stagnation or worse.

It's instructive, isn't it, to find that our current economic woes were not only predictable but predicted? Along with Hudson, the redoubtable Paul Krugman was also one of those sounding the alarm, while most of the political and economic media continued to do what it always does, namely, conspire to render the obvious invisible--invisible, that is, until it becomes impossible to ignore. Then, of course, a phalanx of blowhard analysts gets marched out to prattle on endlessly about why no one saw this coming.

Likewise on the campaign trail, Obama supporters have been sent reeling by news that a 1995 fundraiser at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (a meeting mentioned three years ago on this blog) has now become a "thorn in the side" of the Obama campaign. The rightwing, with assists from Ben Smith over at Politico.com (whom we warned about the left-baiting course of his reporting on this) and George Stephanopolous at last week's debate, have sought to make Obama's supposed radical ties something he needs to answer for, when the real question all along has been why have progressive elements both inside and outside the Democratic party insisted that we rally around the centrist junior senator from Illinois? Like every Democratic presidential candidate in recent memory, Obama's claim to fitness for the highest office in the land rests on his presenting himself as a different sort of Democrat, one willing to question central tenets of Democratic party principles. In essence, he has presented himself as someone willing to embrace Republican talking points on healthcare, social security, and putative self-destructive behavior of the black poor, thus distancing himself from the commitments that distinguish the party from its opposition.

But this merely gives the Republicans the formula for attacking him: Play up his ties to the left. Undercut his claims to being something different by linking him with liberals and lefties (links which will inevitably be there even if one happens to be a weasel like Joe Lieberman), then present him to the public as a two-faced liar. For this purpose, an association with Ayers serves quite nicely, but even a fine policy distinction like insisting on restricted healthcare mandates for parents, would be enough for the Republicans to find duplicity in Obama's "I'm not your daddy's Democrat" sales pitch.

Of course, the only way for a Democratic candidate to avoid getting "exposed" as being more to the left than s/he purports to be is to actually run on the left, that is, to embrace proudly egalitarian and redistributive politics and then demonstrate why a Democratic party that upholds these values is the best party for the nation. And isn't it funny, that the Democratic party had such a candidate in John Edwards, but the party leadership couldn't quite get itself together to back him? Instead we're likely to have in November a candidate who is vulnerable, as so many of his predecessors have been vulnerable, to the same old same old from the Right.

40 Years Later

In marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., I went back 41 years to April 4, 1967, and reread his speech "Beyond Vietnam."

...I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Read the entire speech and the obvious parallels to Iraq, not to mention some statements of Jeremiah Wright's, just jump right out at you.

After 40 years of beatifying King, it's easy to forget that his "colorblind" anti-poverty and anti-war statements were not fashionable or well-received even among his colleagues within the Civil Rights movement. It's easy to forget that it is possible to have a movement that goes beyond one's own popularity and celebrity.

...speaking of the Edwards's...

I'm not surprised.

According to a Democratic strategist unaligned with any campaign but with knowledge of the situation gleaned from all three camps, the answer is simple: Obama blew it. Speaking to Edwards on the day he exited the race, Obama came across as glib and aloof. His response to Edwards’s imprecations that he make poverty a central part of his agenda was shallow, perfunctory, pat. Clinton, by contrast, engaged Edwards in a lengthy policy discussion. Her affect was solicitous and respectful. When Clinton met Edwards face-to-face in North Carolina ten days later, her approach continued to impress; she even made headway with Elizabeth. Whereas in his Edwards sit-down, Obama dug himself in deeper, getting into a fight with Elizabeth about health care, insisting that his plan is universal (a position she considers a crock), high-handedly criticizing Clinton’s plan (and by extension Edwards’s) for its insurance mandate.

Glib, aloof, shallow, perfunctory, and pat; insisting his position is something it isn't. That sounds like Obama to me.

HT to Mr. Krugman

Elizabeth Edwards Hits the Right Target

Elizabeth Edwards brings the fight to John McCain.

I freely admit that I am confused about the role of overnight funding in repurchase markets in the collapse of Bear Stearns. What I am not confused about is John McCain’s health care proposal. Apparently Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor to McCain, thinks I do “not understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s proposal.” The problem, Douglas, is that, despite fuzzy language and feel-good lines in the Senator’s proposal, I do understand exactly how devastating it will be to people who have the health conditions with which the Senator and I are confronted (melanoma for him, breast cancer for me) but do not have the financial resources we have. In very unconfusing language: they are left outside the clinic doors.

Despite what some readers might think, we've not lost sight of the correct target this election year. It would be a lot easier if I didn't have to continually remind myself that McCain's shit stinks more than the Democrats.

thanks to Mr. Wolcott for the link

While We Were Hunting Eggs

4,000.

By the time Specialist Jerry Ryen King decided to write about his experiences in Iraq, the teen-age paratrooper had more to share than most soldiers.

In two operations to clear the outskirts of the village of Turki in the deadly Diyala Province, Specialist King and the rest of the Fifth Squadron faced days of firefights, grenade attacks and land mines. Well-trained insurgents had burrowed deep into muddy canals, a throwback to the trenches of World War I. As the fighting wore on, B-1 bombers and F-16s were called in to drop a series of powerful bombs.

Once the area was clear of insurgents, the squadron, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, uncovered hidden caches with thousands of weapons.

Two months later, Specialist King, a handsome former honors student and double-sport athlete from Georgia, sat down at his computer. In informal but powerful prose, he began a journal.

After 232 long, desolate, morose, but somewhat days of tranquility into deployment, I’ve decided that I should start writing some of the things I experienced here in Iraq. I have to say that the events that I have encountered here have changed my outlook on life...

The most recent mission started out as a 24-36 hour air-assault sniper mission in a known al-Qaida stronghold just north of Baghdad. We landed a few hours before daybreak and as soon as I got off the helicopter my night vision broke, I was surrounded by the sound of artillery rounds, people screaming in Arabic, automatic weapons, and the terrain didn’t look anything like what we were briefed. I knew it was going to be a bad day and a half.

Jerry Ryen King, journal entry, March 7, 2007

A month later, Specialist King was sitting inside his combat outpost, an abandoned school in Sadah, when suicide bombers exploded two dump trucks just outside the building. The school collapsed, killing Specialist King on April 23, 2007, along with eight other soldiers, and making the blast one of the most lethal for Americans fighting in Iraq.

In that instant, Specialist King became one of 4,000 service members and Defense Department civilians to die in the Iraq war — a milestone that was reached late Sunday, five years since the war began in March 2003. The last four members of that group, like the majority of the most recent 1,000 to die, were killed by an improvised explosive device. They died at 10 p.m. Sunday on a patrol in Baghdad, military officials said; their names have not yet been released.

Who's Afraid of an Angry Black Man?

Almost two decades ago Barack Obama chose Trinity United Church of Christ and Jeremiah Wright. Lest anyone mistake this choice for racial passion, belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was part of establishing a bourgeois nationalist street cred. He was still proud of Jeremiah a year ago, warts and all. But last week he tossed the reverend overboard.

It's no surprise that Obama's attempt to stand everywhere means he ends up standing nowhere at all. Still, one would have expected a better show from him on behalf of his pastor. No, he didn't have to agree with everything Wright said, or perhaps even most of it. But the least he could have done was to validate the anger that prompted Wright's words. Let's face it, the anger of the excluded has played a big role in shaping the Democratic race this year. Edwards, the most progressive of the viable candidates, was unable to gain any traction largely because many of those who have felt excluded from the nation's political life were tired of the assumption that their standard bearer should be another white male. With the possibility of electing a woman or a black man in view, many voters have apparently decided that their hopes could be best realized by someone who presumably knows from experience what it's like to be treated badly because of one's sex or skin color. Of course, Hillary or Barack could have resolved this tension by moving emphatically left, but both have been magnetized by the center/right. Still, with Hillary at least we have someone who knows it's about fighting for something. Barack, by contrast, seems to view anger as a thing of the past. Brad Hicks and Jonathan David Farley both have interesting takes on this.

And just fyi, the reverend's statements about the World Trade Center attack that Barack has denounced are virtually the same as the views of Michael Eric Dyson, whose endorsement of Obama is glowingly featured on the Obama08 web site.

Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall, among others, have apparently accused the Clinton campaign of circulating to the media the video of the controversial pastor. They offer nothing to back up this accusation and eriposte at The Left Coaster rightfully calls the accusation a smear. Josh Marshall writes the following:

...the political relevance is to show Wright as angry black man; and to tie him to Obama...

Clinton's campaign and her surrogates have injected the subject of Obama's race into this campaign too many times now for it to be credible to believe that it is anything but a conscious strategy.

Let's review: Obama has belonged to his church for nearly twenty years and has called Wright his spiritual mentor. He even derived the central theme of his campaign from one of Wright's sermons. But it's the Clinton campaign trying to tie an "angry black man" to Obama?

Somebody please break it to Josh that the subject of race has been in this campaign since the day Obama announced he was in it. And in urging everyone to vote for this "historic campaign" Obama's operatives are actively injecting race into the campaign. And that shouldn't be a problem.

Isn't it strange that the only people who seem to have problems with the fact that Obama is a black man are the white people who support him?

Reverend Wright's anger didn't bother Alex Beam when he wrote a column about him in The Boston Globe at the end of January.

For obvious reasons, Obama has had to put some distance between himself and his pastor. But to his credit, he has not severed his ties with Wright, and there is no indication that he will. To her credit, Hillary Clinton, who paints herself as a church-attending, Chicago-area Christian Protestant when it suits her, has not dragged Wright and Trinity into her anti-Obama smear campaign. Yet.

Maybe Clinton is too smart to take on Wright, who possesses not only great rhetorical gifts but a ferocious sense of humor. Earlier this month, he addressed the Clinton-Obama battle head on, telling his congregation that many feel African-Americans should vote for Mrs. Clinton "because her husband was good to us." But "that's not true," Wright proclaimed. "He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."

Beam apparently didn't get this information from the Clinton campaign and he quotes verbatim from the video sermon making the rounds last week. I guess Josh and Ezra missed it. Never mind that the NY Times wrote about some of his controversial statements almost a year ago. And never mind that the sermons of the Rev. Wright have been available online for more than a year. He's appeared as a guest on Hannity and Colmes program in March 2007 and they've been talking about him ever since.

with the professor

thanks to Alex for the link to Brad Hicks
and eriposte at The Left Coaster

Sauce for the Goose?

Having cried "foul" at the canard about Hilary's promoting McCain over Obama in the general election, will the Obamites now turn on one of their own for saying straightforwardly that should Clinton win the nomination it would be better if she lost the White House to McCain? Professor Lawrence Bobo in The Root has recently asserted:

Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro have gone too far. Should Clinton somehow steal the nomination from Barack Obama as a result of the fear-mongering, racial politics she has decided to play, then 2008 will be the first year I do not vote for the Democratic presidential nominee.

Bobo goes on to say that while he used to believe that one most vote for the Democratic nominee no matter what, "from the 'fairy tale,' to the 'red phone,' and now to Ferraro's bitterly divisive remarks, a line has been crossed for me, and I suspect others like me."

So how will Obama's supporters react? Judging from the responses to Mr. Bobo's article, he's in no danger of being thrown under the bus. The commentary is solidly on his side, suggesting that party loyalty counts only when the beneficiary is Senator Obama.

Of course the claim will be that it's foolish to talk about Party loyalty in the midst of this alleged racism and race-baiting. But if so, where is outrage at Obama's dissing of the black poor as irresponsible, chicken-eating parents? Or as he so memorably put it in a speech given in Texas

I've got to talk about us a little bit . . . We can't keep on feeding our children junk all day long giving them no exercise. They are overweight by the time they are 4 or 5 years old, and then we are surprised when they get sick.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Y'all have Popeyes out in Beaumont? I know some of y'all got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast. I know. That's why y'all laughing . . . You can't do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how the learn in school.

Ok, so this is victim-blaming and stereotyping--not fear-mongering. But the Obamites apparently see no problem here.

Words and Images

Though I have no love for Hillary Clinton, I've been somewhat amused at the way that some of her critics (read, Obama's supporters) have gone about characterizing her motives and tactics. First, there's the much ballyhooed Daily Kos charge that a commercial released by Hillary's campaign revealed "a concerted effort by Clinton's ad people to make Obama look darker, more sinister, and with a wider nose." I confess that my first reaction to reading this was, "So, it's okay for Obama to "blacken" his voice, but sinister racism for a Clinton ad to darken his face?" While my second reaction was, "Hey, I'm darker than Obama and my nose is wider, does that make me more sinister?) And yes, I know the history of media representations of black people, but it does begin to sound like the hidden message of the Obama campaign is: "Vote for Obama: A (not very dark) black guy who doesn't scare white people!"

And then there are the "interpretations" of Hillary's observations about McCain's foreign policy experience relative to Obama's. Again according to the Daily Kos one can't miss the "disturbing fact that Clinton is praising the presumptive Republican nominee while simultaneously attacking the Democrat who very well may be his opponent." The same complaint was voiced by Bob Herbert in the New York Times, who opined:

More serious was Senator Clinton’s assertion that she was qualified to be commander in chief, and that John McCain had also “certainly” crossed that “threshold,” but that the jury was still out on Mr. Obama.

In other words, if a choice on national security had to be made today between Senators Obama and McCain, voters — according to Mrs. Clinton’s logic — should choose Senator McCain.

Well, that was not Mrs. Clinton's logic. What she was saying is that those voters in the general election who make national security their priority will be more likely to vote for Hillary over McCain than they would for Barack over McCain. This may or may not be true, but it's hardly an endorsement of McCain over Obama. To claim that as a candidate you're likely to match up better, in the eyes of some voters, to the Republican nominee than does your Democratic rival is not underhanded politics--just politics. And from where I sit, Obama's people seem to be giving as good as they're getting.

Saturday Morning Malamute Blogging

Snow bunny?

Pat Buchanan: Offended White Man

Poor, poor Pat Buchanan. When it comes to the glorious events in American history where bravery, intelligence, strength of mind and body are called for and achieved, he's like Stephen Colbert—he doesn't see skin color. And like a bisexual narcissist, he doesn't see gender.

"[W]hat did white males do? OK, they were the only guys signing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, all the dead at Gettysburg, all the dead at Normandy."

OK, I'll give him the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence but Gettysburg and Normandy? Not so much. Media Matters has the exchange up and it's a must read.

At one point Tucker Carlson steps out of his role as "white male" to make a stab at sincerity:

CARLSON: Let me just say this. I think -- and I'm not just -- you know, people say, "Oh, you're a white man. That's why you're defending white men." Actually, I'm being sincere. I'm defending this purely on principle. I don't think that you ought to cavalierly attack people based on their race or gender.

But back to Buchanan, who had the following exchange with Bill Press:

PRESS: ...- when you look at the floor of the Democratic convention and look at the great diversity on the floor, in terms of men and women and people of color, and then you look at the floor of the Republican convention, and it looks like the, you know --

BUCHANAN: What's wrong with that?

And in the same hyperventilated discussion he says:

I would remind you, every single president has been a white male. Is that something wrong with America?

Not for long, Pat.

Happy Leaping!