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Go Home Making Obama Unelectable

THE PLANK MARCH 13, 2008

Making Obama Unelectable

BY JONATHAN CHAIT

Mark Penn declared today that Barack Obama "really can't win the general [election]." Of course, it's silly to say that Obama or Clinton "can't" win the general. There's not even good evidence to suggest that Obama is less likely than Clinton to win the general. Currently, the RCP poll average has both defeating John McCain by an average of 1.5%. Before the last couple weeks, when McCain and Clinton have both been making mutually-reinforcing attacks on Obama nearly every day, Obama was running well ahead of Clinton in those head-to-head matchups.

Both Obama and Clinton have significant drawbacks as general election candidates. I think Obama's potential -- that is, in situations when a high-profile Democrats is not reinforcing the GOP message every night -- is much greater than Clinton's The basic fundamentals are best captured by the Gallup Poll's favorable/unfavorable rating, which is the basic measure of a politician's popularity, for Clinton and Obama. Here's Clinton:

 

And here's Obama:

 

That's an enormous difference -- a thirty-point gap. Obama has plenty of flaws as a general election candidate, but they're not as deeply-rooted as Clinton's.

As I said, Obama was running well ahead of Clinton in head-to-head matchups a few weeks ago, and now they're tied. After several more weeks of Clinton reinforcing McCain's message against Obama, Clinton will probably be performing better than Obama against McCain. This is the point I made in my TRB column. She needs to convince the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to split for her by about a 2-to-1 margin. The only way she can get a split like that is if she can persuasively argue that Obama is unelectable. And the only way she can do that is to make him unelectable. Some people have treated this as an unfortunate byproduct of Clinton's decision to continue her campaign. It's actually a central element of the strategy. Penn is already saying he's unelectable. It's not true, but by the time the convention rolls around, it may well be.

--Jonathan Chait

 

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Does that mean 10% of those polled have never heard of Obama?  

- scottlooper

March 13, 2008 at 4:04pm

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Uh, gee whiz, do you think repeatedly and absurdly charging Clinton with racism just might damage her in the general election? Could the Obama strategy, including things like Orlando Patterson's disgraceful diatribe in the Times (which Obama has not yet rejected or denounced), be to make Clinton unacceptable to the Democratic party because she would be unacceptable to African-Americans? Given the historical relationship of Clinton to African-Americans, could anything be more unfair and cynical?

Could Obama's campaign, while he mouths the high road, be trying to destroy Clinton as a viable candidate?

- Eos

March 13, 2008 at 4:11pm

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What more is there to be said about the Clinton campaign?  (Barring, of course, that they find some new depth to plumb.)  How sad that they have taken the affection in which they were held by so many loyal Democrats, curdled it, and dared us to consider voting for anyone else.  How clearly they are banking on being the least unpalatable option, and how assiduously they prune the poppies that have dared to grow taller than them.

Regrettable.  Tiring.  Sad.

- drdannyu

March 13, 2008 at 4:17pm

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pccostello, how is the weather on the alternate plane in the universe on which you obviously reside?

- mpintar2

March 13, 2008 at 4:21pm

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pccostello ,

You are correct, Obama very successful strategy from the very beginning was to make HRC unelectable, too divisive, polarizing, not trustworthy and so on.  He was able to drive her favorable rating down. Now she is returning  favors.

- jacobt1

March 13, 2008 at 4:23pm

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Every day, Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates make it more difficult for me to be able to vote for her in a general election.  I say this as a lifelong Democrat who would've done anything to vote for Bill.  

I might just stay home on election day than vote for Hillary.  

- kerouac9

March 13, 2008 at 4:23pm

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PC- she's doing the racist stuff or conscioning it, all on her own. No one held a gun to White Rage Ferraro's head and made her put her foot in her mouth, swallow, then put the other foot in.

No one made Clinton call for Samantha Powers' firing for a far less offense then drag her feet about the aforementioned Angry White Woman.

No one made Clinton set the bar (vis-a-vis) Farrakhan at "reject and denounce" and then fail to meet that bar with Ferraro.

And your whole piece is premised on the bizarre notion that African Americans are mindless and will believe any and all claims that someone is racist. It can't possibly be that they themselves are looking at the conduct of the Clinton campaign and coming to that conclusion themselves. Black republicans, for years, have accused the Dems of racism. No one believed them. Black people didn't flock in droves to the GOP just because someone made the accusation. Rather, they, like most people, look at what happens, and draw their own conclusions.

And how in the hell is Obama to be responsible for what Orlando Patterson says? He's not on the Obama campaign. And contrary to what you may think, he doesn't have mind control powers over other, random Black people.

- miceelf

March 13, 2008 at 4:30pm

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Obama is certainly not responsible for the musings of Orlando Patterson.  As for the rantings of the man who officiated at his wedding and whom he calls his "moral compass"--that's going to be a little trickier.

- Maksutov66

March 13, 2008 at 4:40pm

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miceelf--

your argument is too weak and uninformed to merit a detailed response. The obama campaign called a conference call with the press to draw attention to the Ferraro statements, over which Clinton had no control. Axelrod called attention the statement as Missisippi voted. Obama mothed the high road. Doing one thing and saying another--it's the Obama way. And he started doing it with race-baiting about MLK_LBJ just after he lost in New Hampshire and was headed for Sout Carolina--when the polls still had Hillary drawing major support among blacks in South Carolina. Obama and Clyburn mangaed to change that fast.

Do you really think black politicians don't know how to play this issue when they want to?

- Eos

March 13, 2008 at 4:40pm

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The missing 10% would be people with no opinion either way or no opinion they want to state. One thing you can say for Clinton - everyone has an opinion of her, and they're not bashful about stating it.

As for the mindless rant, Clinton is fully capable of destroying herself. And based on the evidence of this primary campaign, the Clintons come to mind as easily able to be more unfair and cynical.

- hrlngrv

March 13, 2008 at 4:43pm

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"that is, in situations when a high-profile Democrats is not reinforcing the GOP message every night."  So essentially, Obama's attacking Hillary on her general election weakness from day 1 (honesty, character, divisiveness), is cool.  Hillary attacking Obama on his general election weakness is not cool.  That's totally fair, right?

- sprechs

March 13, 2008 at 5:06pm

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jcobtl said: "You are correct, Obama very successful strategy from the very beginning was to make HRC unelectable, too divisive, polarizing, not trustworthy and so on.  He was able to drive her favorable rating down. Now she is returning  favors."

It may be true that Obama has pursued such a strategy, but I think it's a stretch that is poorly supported by the evidence.  Hillary Clinton was roundly disliked by a majority of independents, and a large fraction of the Democratic party, before Obama ever appeared to be a viable candidate.  I lived through the Iowa blitz - months of advertising from all 6 or 7 candidates, and personal appearances by all of them as well.  Obama did not mention Clinton's electability, and sure as the devil did not run her down in any way.

Since Iowa, until at least after Ohio and Texas, I saw little change in his basic tactics.  Of course he presents himself as more electable than her - no candidate could possibly do otherwise and have any credibility ("The other guy is more likely to get elected than me, but vote for me anyway" - I don't think so), but drive her favorables down?  Looked at the record - she's had high unfavorables across the country for years.  And she's increasing them by HER actions all by herself.   I know many people who have gone from supporting someone other than Clinton, but considering a candidate they could get behind in the general election, to seriously considering sitting the election out, or voting for McCain, and it's because of Hillary and Bill Clinton's actions, not because of anything Obama or his minions have said about her.

- sdemuth

March 13, 2008 at 5:06pm

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On what planet is Obama the more electable candidate? He hasn't convinced more than 30-40% of white and Hispanic Democrats to vote for him. I realize TNR writers are in the tank for the guy, but don't they have any sense of reality?

If he can demonstrate an ability to win these populations--without any independents or Republicans crowding the vote on either side--then great. He's got a good chance in the general. But to pretend that the caucus vote totals in Nebraska and Kansas are somehow dispositive in the face of strong rejection among two of the three critical Democratic demographics is absurd.

- jmkerr

March 13, 2008 at 5:09pm

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Excellent point, Jon.  It really has become a fascinating primary.  

Most political campaigns are geared toward winning the votes of citizen voters, but at this point Hillary's goal is only remotely related to that purpose.  The press is covering the primary like a normal election ("a neck-and-neck race!"), but it's not.  Hilllary is playing only to the superdelegates.  Her only hope is to create a certain impression (better electability) in the minds of that small group; winning primaries and pledged delegates are only means to the end of demonstating her superior electability.  

Problem is, most voters already see Hillary as electable.  Therefore, she can get very little benefit from building herself up: "I'm so wonderfully electable."  The only effective (for her) strategy is to tear Obama down.  It's the most efficient means to her end (no pun intended).

- cnalls

March 13, 2008 at 5:10pm

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As I've said here before, I am somewhat frustrated by the fact that this election is still a question mark - it should be a done deal.

But perhaps it still is. I think we're at the beginning of the worst economy since 1981-82. By June, it will be clear that we're in a full-blown recession.  Unemployment will likely hit 6% by November.  Inflation is at its highest level in 25 years.  If voters drive past gas stations with signs reading $3.50 or higher on their way to the polls on November 2, given all of this other economic news it's hard to see how any Democrat loses to McCain. And the economy is only one of several structural advantages that the Democratic candidate will enjoy this year.

I thus think electability arguments on both sides are pretty weak.  So long as the Democratic candidate doesn't run an awful campaign (which, given what we've seen from Clinton so far, remains a possibility), make some huge error or get caught up in a major scandal, I just don't see how he or she loses this year. I know that sounds overly confident, but I really don't think it's misplaced.

- bhunziker

March 13, 2008 at 5:11pm

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pc - laughable.  And what of the Clinton conference calls with regard to the "monster" comment?  And the immediate Obama response?

Because the Ferraro comments involved Obama's skin color, it makes it very easy to throw the racism line around.  Unfortunately, for that line to be thrown, there has to be a starting point.

What was that starting point again?  Oh yeah, Ferraro.  What did Obama specifically say about the comment?  Oh yeah, he said it wasn't racist, just ridiculous.

Keep running your 1992 campaign, and Obama will keep running a 2008 version.  The simple point remains that it is impossible for Obama to be responding to McCain and Clinton at the same time, while at the same time being patently ridiculous.  This "Democrat on Democrat" action is something we've come to expect from a GOP primary, and is embarrassing.

- dirkleisure

March 13, 2008 at 5:44pm

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While the polls put both candidates at barely beating McCain, they also put Democrats vs Republicans at 50% vs 37%  (Other at 4%, Unsure at 9%).  

I think either candidate is going to have a hard time, mostly because of their negatives.  

Nobody's yet mention the VP.  How the the right/wrong VP change things?

- jts44

March 13, 2008 at 5:57pm

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Agreed Jon.  As I said the other day, if they keep saying it and saying in and saying it...it won't matter if it's true, voters, delegates will start believing there's something to it.

- jet

March 13, 2008 at 6:07pm

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jmkerr chiming in on how much better Hillary Mondale is because we all know just how successful that candidate who claimed the Dem base was (and he was less divisive) Obama is Hart, only brighter, more charismatic, and no nookie issue. Hillary is Mondale, only far more grating, even less charismatic, and has a husband with a nookie issue. Hey, yeah, lets nominate her because she is even worse than Mondale. It is truly funny to watch. Hillary has managed the impossible, turning even large segments of the Democratic party against her. Can she beat Mondales vote total? Such suspense.

bhunziker, I heard the same arguments from Mondale, only then the unemployment rate was even higher. Hillary is useless in the general. And by the time Dems are done half of them will detest the other half. And it will be all due to Hillary, without a doubt.

Debating with Hillary supporters here is like reasoning with 3 year olds, it can be utterly amusing (for me anyway, since I don't live in the states) as to the young, and blacks, and people tired of the same old same old, screw you because the Clintons deserve another chance, this time with the wife, who next Chelsea?

- blackton

March 13, 2008 at 6:12pm

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I am what's called a SuperVoter. Having been born in Boston, I learned to "Vote Early and Vote Often."  That is, I vote in every primary, local election, etc. I have voted for no one but Democrats for at least thirty years--I believe that we are a wealthy enough nation to be compassionate. I have been involved in politics for much of that time, including stints as a lobbiest(non-profit) and high-level appointment of two governors, not having campaigned for or against either of them. I have been in the room plenty of times watching the sausage get made that is getting elected and then governing. Though I supported her for all of 07 and into Jaunary of 08, I have never witnessed a lower Democratic campaigner than Hillary Clinton. It's ugly and its not coming from both campaigns equally, but from hers primarily. Very ugly. Very unfortunate. And, I'm sorry, but let me say it again: Very ugly.

- sabatia

March 13, 2008 at 6:28pm

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How about renaming The Plank to "Stupid Shit Mark Penn Says"?

- guyminuslife

March 13, 2008 at 6:30pm

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dirk--

try and follow the conversation and not just post a message. the issue is whether obama has been playing the race card through his camoaign while mouthing sweet nothings in public. the fat that his camoaign went all out to call the presses attention it Ferraro, while he publicly said it was not important is just another instance of his "say one thing and do another" strategy.

this all has nothing to do with the monster comment--which had noithing to do with race.

- Eos

March 13, 2008 at 7:05pm

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The Democrats may be in real trouble now. If the superdelegates award Clinton with the nomination over and above the popular vote and delegates elected through the caucuses and primaries the Democrats will lose young and independent voters.

Plus, the mask is off of the facade of politics-of-identity feminists. They have demonstrated that they can race-bait as well as the Dixiecrats of the Old South. They look much different than they did a few months ago.

- matthawk

March 13, 2008 at 7:49pm

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The Clinton campaign has very skillfully shifted the focus of this campaign from "change" to "race." This was their intention. It is the only hope they have in order to win. The problem is that by doing this the Clintons will further divide the Democratic Party and the nation.

- matthawk

March 13, 2008 at 7:50pm

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Ferraro says she stepped down because she wanted to "get this off the news," but she was the one who put it there.

She spent 48 hours on nearly every news outlet making inflammatory statements. She put this issue on the news and kept it there for more than 48 painful hours.

Even now, she keeps the issue on the news. The Clinton campaign doesn't want to talk about issues like Iraq; they want to talk about race so they can sink Obama.

- matthawk

March 13, 2008 at 7:51pm

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One of the 'grassroots' or 'netroots' groups like MoveOn should launch a campaign for people to declare that they will not vote for the Democratic nominee if that nominee is not the winner of a majority of pledged delegates. Since Hillary can only win by stealing this race using superdelegates, this pretty much means her.

If millions or even hundreds of thousands of Democrats essentially pledged not to vote for Hillary in November, that would destroy her chances. Since the MoveOn types are the ones who phonebank and do get-out-the-vote work, their not supporting the Dem nominee in November would have a doubly negative effect. The superdelegates would see that they have no choice but to vote for the actual winner, Obama. They may also step in early and tell Hillary to stop trying to destroy Obama and ruin his chances in November.

Asking the superdelegates not to interfere, as MoveOn did a few weeks ago, has no effect. The superdelegates have to see that there will be serious consequences if they rob Obama of the nomination.

- dechanta

March 13, 2008 at 8:12pm

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One of the odder things Ferraro said to gathered reporters in an impromptu hallway exchange (in response to nothing any of the reporters had asked about) was, "No, I don't plan on resigning from [Clinton's] campaign but if Axelrod says I have to." "Axelrod" had at that time said nothing about her resigning, nor had anyone with the Obama campaign.

Gerry Ferraro was and remains today a feisty Italian American from Queens, known for popping off lines just like this. On occasion she embarrassed the Mondale campaign repeatedly with her zingers.

- tomeg

March 13, 2008 at 8:53pm

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jmkerr asks, "On what planet is Obama the more electable candidate?"

Earth.

SurveyUSA has Obama beating McCain in November by 18 electoral votes and Hillary beating McCain by 14 electoral votes.  Head-to-head matchups consistently have Obama doing better than Hillary against McCain in the popular vote, even after Texas and Ohio, and even during a period when Hillary is going hard after Obama on precisely the things that McCain will go after him on -- experience, readiness, etc.  Meanwhile, the polling in Pennsylvania (and in other states) destroys the idea that primary preference translates into general election preference, which is the whole, and entirely false, premise of Hillary's electability argument.

Moreover, consider that Obama has *not* attacked Hillary as she will be attacked in the general, for two reasons:  (1) He's not a disloyal douchebag, and (2) those arguments aren't as available to him.  Indeed, you can expect that McCain will deploy the same arguments against Clinton that Clinton is using against Obama *plus* tap into that vast well of disfavorable opinion regarding her character.  She hasn't been tested, in other words, on what could take her down.  McCain will have plenty of help, even if he takes a higher road.  Professional conservative bloviators are savoring a possible Hillary victory -- going so far as to urge strategic voting in Democratic contests -- not only because they believe she can be more easily destroyed, but because they'll be the ones doing the destroying.  In short, we haven't seen what they'll do to Clinton yet, and it won't be pretty.

Besides, McCain is enjoying a honeymoon right now.  We can argue about whether that's a bad thing for Democrats, but the point is that his support is soft.  It's based on impressions that haven't been tested at all in a seriously contested campaign of any kind.  My hunch is that McCain's numbers will go down among swing voters.  He's the Republicans' best candidate by far but he isn't a very good one.  As of today, Obama picks up a lot of those swing voters.  Hillary picks up somewhat less from different sources.  Either way, we can expect a competitive election with either candidate, unless Hillary determines to destroy the Democratic drive to win with an increasingly fratricidal and selfish campaign.

Of course there are risks with either candidate.  The risk of losing is unavoidable with any candidate.  Democrats aren't facing a meager organization or a meritless opponent.  But the notion that Obama is "unelectable" is a joke.  It's not supported by any evidence.

- jhildner

March 13, 2008 at 9:34pm

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I caught myself in a thoughtless moment. I meant to say "Gerry Ferraro was and remains today  the stereotypical feisty Italian American from Queens of my generation (and hers), known for popping off lines just like this.

Apologies to whomever.

- tomeg

March 13, 2008 at 10:18pm

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Never mind all the bullshit, could this kind of analysis make him unlelectable?

RE-RETHINKING IRAQ:

Obama's War

Peter Wehner From issue: April 2008

Throughout his dramatic campaign to win his party’s nomination for the presidency, Senator Barack Obama has tended to ignore the specifics of policy in favor of the generalities of emotion, centering his appeal to voters on vague promises of “change” and “unity.” But on one issue, above all others, Obama has remained fixated from the campaign’s first moment, and that is the war in Iraq. By Obama’s own account, the consistency of his stand on this war demonstrates more than anything else that he, a one-term United States Senator who arrived in Washington in 2005 with no foreign-policy experience, after an uneventful eight-year stint in the Illinois state senate, possesses the wisdom, the clear-sightedness, and the judgment to assume the responsibilities of the nation’s commander-in-chief.

Obama calls Iraq “the most important foreign-policy decision in a generation.” By the word “decision,” presumably, he means to refer at once to President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, Congress’s decision to authorize that policy, and his own early decision to oppose any such action.

Indeed, Obama was not yet in the Senate, and the Senate had not yet voted to authorize the war, when, in a speech delivered in Chicago on October 2, 2002, he announced his view of the matter. Granting forthrightly that the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein had “repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity,” and that he “butchers his own people,” Obama nevertheless held that, despite all these well-proven crimes, Saddam posed no “imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors.” What is more, he added, “I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

Nine days later, the Senate passed its resolution granting George Bush the authority to use force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In the Senate that day were four of Obama’s rivals in this year’s Democratic contest for the presidency—Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd, and Joseph Biden—and all four voted in favor.1 A fifth rival, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, also spoke out in support of the war.

Alone among this year’s major Democratic candidates, then, Obama can claim an unspotted record of opposition to American involvement in Iraq and even a kind of prescience as to the subsequent course of events there. In any account of his electoral success so far, this factor must weigh as heavily as his natural eloquence and his ingratiating personality.

But Obama’s thoughts on the war in Iraq did not begin and end with that one speech in October 2002. In fact, an examination of both his statements and his Senate votes over the intervening years demonstrates something very different from the consistency that he and his supporters have claimed for him. It demonstrates instead a record of problematically ad-hoc judgments at best, calculatingly cynical judgments at worst. Even if, for the sake of argument, one were to stipulate that Barack Obama was right in 2002, what does this subsequent record say about his fitness to serve?

_____________

Almost as soon as the war began in March 2003, Obama had second thoughts about his opposition to it. Watching the dramatic footage of the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, and then the President’s speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, “I began to suspect,” he would write later in his autobiographical The Audacity of Hope (2006), “that I might have been wrong.” And these second thoughts seem to have stayed with him throughout the entire first phase of the occupation following our initial combat victory. As he told the Chicago Tribune in July 2004, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.”

This is hardly to say that he had suddenly metamorphosed into a hawk, let alone a supporter of the President’s broader freedom agenda. Indeed, one would search long and hard for any words from this apostle of hope and change about the palpable benefits that democracy might bring to the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East. Rather, he seems to have sensed a political weakness in his blanket opposition to a venture still enjoying broad support in the country, and one in which tens of thousands of American soldiers were risking their lives.

And so, in September 2004, in the heat of his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama said (according to an AP report) that even though Bush had “bungled his handling of the war,” simply pulling out of Iraq “would make things worse.” Therefore, he himself

would be willing to send more soldiers to Iraq if it is part of a strategy that the President and military leaders believe will stabilize the country and eventually allow America to withdraw.

“If that strategy made sense and would lead ultimately to the pullout of U.S. troops but in the short term required additional troop strength to protect those who are already on the ground, then that’s something I would support,” said Obama.

In November, having won election to the U.S. Senate, Obama once again confirmed his determination to stay the course in Iraq in an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose. “Once we go in, then we’re committed,” he said, adding:

[O]nce the decision was made, then we’ve got to do everything we can to stabilize the country, to make it successful, because we’ll have too much at stake in the Middle East. And that’s the position that I continue to take.

Indeed it was—for about a year. During that time, Obama delivered only one major speech on Iraq, in November 2005. At that point the situation on the ground was still very rocky and showing few if any signs of material improvement, and there was much talk of “exit strategies” in the air. But most liberal critics of the war (outside the rabid Left) were still not quite ready to cut and run. Accordingly, while reiterating that he had strongly opposed the Iraq war before it began, Obama also re-stated his belief that, having gone in, we had an obligation to “manage our exit in a responsible way—with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future, but at the very least taking care not to plunge the country into an even deeper and, perhaps, irreparable crisis.”

How were we to accomplish that? The answer was: slowly but surely. In the months to come, Obama said, “we need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq. Notice that I say ‘reduce,’ and not ‘fully withdraw.’” With a hint of greater specificity, he elaborated in January 2006 that “we have a role to play in stabilizing the country as Iraqis are getting their act together.”

Presumably what Obama was referring to here was the strategy of training indigenous Iraqi forces to “stand up” so that we could “stand down.”

This was the same view of the military situation held by other critics of the Bush administration—and by the administration itself, which was in the process of trying to implement just that strategy.2 But as conditions in Iraq worsened over the course of 2006 and polls registered lower and lower levels of support for the President and the war—and as he himself was nearing a decision to run for the presidency—Obama’s position shifted again, markedly so.

On October 22, 2006, Obama proclaimed the urgent necessity for “all the leadership in Washington to execute a serious change of course in Iraq.” That change was decidedly not in the direction of stepping up our war effort by sending additional troops—a shift advocated by some conservative critics of administration policy and at that point being seriously considered by the White House and the Pentagon. Quite the contrary: the change Obama had in mind was to initiate, as quickly as possible, a “phased withdrawal” from Iraq. There was to be no more talk from him about leaving a “stabilized” situation. Nor, for Obama, was the issue debatable. His latest predictive judgment was that “We cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve.”

On January 10, 2007, Bush announced the administration’s change in strategy in Iraq, popularly dubbed the “surge.” That very night, Obama declared he saw nothing in the plan that would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there.” A week later, he repeated the point emphatically: the surge strategy would “not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly.” Later in the same month, he summed up in these words his impression of the hearings on the new strategy held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “What was striking to me, in listening to all the testimony that was provided, was the almost near-unanimity that the President’s strategy will not work.”

Whatever he was listening to, it could not have been “all the testimony.” But the main point is that, within a mere matter of weeks, Obama had moved to align himself with the most extreme critics of the war. This re-positioning coincided with the announcement of his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007. “It’s time to start bringing our troops home,” Obama said forcefully as he launched his run. “That’s why I have a plan that will bring our combat troops home by March of 2008.”

In May 2007, Obama did something he had never done previously: he voted in the Senate against funding for combat operations, claiming as a reason the fact that the bill included no timeline for troop withdrawal. As the campaign season intensified, his position hardened still more. In September, a mere three months after the final elements of the 30,000-strong surge forces had landed in Iraq, he declared that the moment had arrived to remove all of our combat troops “immediately.” “Not in six months or one year—now.”

By then, though, a fairly substantial drop in violence was already discernible in Iraq. Without exactly denying this fact, Obama insisted that it had nothing to do with the surge, a point he repeated incessantly during the early months of 2008. In a presidential debate in January, for example, he claimed the reduction in violence was due not to increased American military action but to the attention paid by Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists to the results of America’s midterm elections in November 2006, when control of Congress passed to the Democrats:

Much of that violence has been reduced because there was an agreement with tribes in Anbar province, Sunni tribes, who started to see, after the Democrats were elected in 2006, you know what?—the Americans may be leaving soon. And we are going to be left very vulnerable to the Shiites. We should start negotiating now.

This was an astonishing statement on several counts. For one thing, the “Anbar Awakening”—in which Sunni tribes formerly allied with al Qaeda in Iraq turned on the foreign terrorists who had been making their lives a repressive hell—preceded the midterm election by several months. It had no connection with American electoral cycles and every connection with the brutality of al Qaeda (as internal al-Qaeda communications frankly conceded).

For another thing, the prospect of a precipitous American retreat, far from helping along the chances of a negotiated political settlement between warring Iraqi factions, would almost certainly have created the opposite effect, reinvigorating the murderous hopes of the terrorist forces lately on the run and thereby undoing the Awakening altogether. Nor, incidentally, have those forces ever troubled themselves to discriminate between Sunni and Shiite in their frenzied determination to seize control. Finally, the sheikhs of Anbar have themselves testified to the crucially fortifying effect of the U.S. offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq, and there is no reason to doubt their word.

Obama’s corkscrew logic would take an even more bizarre twist in February of this year when Tim Russert of NBC News asked him if, as President, he would reserve the right to go back into Iraq with sizable forces if the American withdrawal he advocated should end by introducing even greater mayhem. Previously Obama had asserted categorically that, on his watch, no permanent American bases would be left in Iraq and that the few American troops remaining there would have only a very limited mission: to protect our embassy and our diplomatic corps and to engage in counterterrorism. But in his answer to Russert he now broadened his options:

As commander-in-chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad.

To wonted illogic this added both ignorance and disingenuousness. By his statement Obama may have intended to project a certain tough-mindedness in dealing with new threats, but as Senator John McCain pointed out in a devastating riposte, al Qaeda is already in Iraq. That is why its forces there are called “al Qaeda in Iraq” (or, to use the terrorist organization’s own nomenclature, “al Qaeda in Meso-potamia”). What is more, if Obama had had his way in 2007, our troops would have been out of Iraq by March of this year, leaving it naked to its enemies. If we were to withdraw them in the early months of an Obama presidency, al Qaeda in Iraq could be counted on not only to form “a base” but to take over large swaths of the country. Having overseen such a withdrawal, and having thereby unraveled all the gains of the surge, Obama would face the prospect of ordering them to return under far more treacherous conditions of his own making.

To say that Senator Obama has not thought through the implications of his vertiginously shifting positions is to err on the side of charity; in fact they give every appearance of having been adopted without any systematic thought whatsoever. The same, unfortunately, can be said for the other main pillar of his position on Iraq. This is that the way to bring stability to that country is not by winning the war in the first place but rather by striking a “new compact in the region”—one that will include all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Syria and Iran. Such a compact, he says, will “secure Iraq’s borders, keep neighbors from meddling, isolate al Qaeda, and support Iraq’s unity.”

Never mind that Syria and Iran have spent the past years doing everything in their power to violate Iraq’s borders, meddle in its affairs, arm and support the factions that have been killing Iraqis and American troops alike, and fracture its unity. To Obama, all this murderous activity is but the understandable reaction of frustrated governments to the policies of George Bush (and, although he does not say so, every single one of his predecessors going back decades). By contrast, if he himself were elected President, both Iran and Syria would utterly reverse direction.

Obama’s unlimited faith in diplomacy as a means of resolving deep-seated differences among nation-states is not exclusive to the Middle East. When asked if, during the first year of his presidency, he would meet individually and without precondition with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, he replied: “I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them . . . is ridiculous.” So enamored is he of this pledge that he has re-stated it regularly in the course of the campaign. Whenever he is asked how he would address a thorny foreign-policy issue, he invokes the need for diplomacy—first, last, and always.

The columnist Charles Krauthammer once characterized this disposition as the “broken-telephone theory of international conflict”—i.e., the belief that if nations fail to get along, the fault is to be found in some misunderstanding, some misperception, some problem of communication that can be cleared up by “talking.” In Obama’s case, the syndrome is compounded by unfeigned confidence in the power of his own personal charm to bridge whatever differences may separate us from those who hate us.

Thus, when it comes specifically to Iraq and its implacably hostile neighbors, he refuses even to entertain the possibility that diplomacy might fail, or to consider what steps would be necessary should that in fact happen. Nor has he deigned to credit or even to notice the strenuous diplomatic efforts undertaken over the last eight years by the allegedly trigger-happy Bush administration to negotiate with Iran, North Korea, and others. Nor, finally, has he absorbed any useful lesson from the disillusioning outcomes of these efforts—let alone other, even more emollient efforts by our European allies and the United Nations. Such willful innocence, in a President, can be lethal.

It is perfectly legitimate to argue, as Senator Obama does, that the war to liberate Iraq was ill-conceived and has cost us much more than it has been worth. It is also perfectly legitimate to argue, as Senator McCain does, that the war was eminently worth waging but that the Bush administration massively mishandled the phase following the ousting of the Baathist regime.

It is another matter entirely to argue that because the decision to go to war was wrong, we should now simply withdraw and wash our hands of Iraq in hopes of starting over. There is no starting over in world affairs. We are where we are, and the next President will have to play, one can only hope wisely, the hand he will have been dealt. But by the same token, there is also no way of establishing that, had the decision in 2002 gone the other way—that is, Obama’s way—today’s security situation would be better for us than it has actually turned out to be, mistakes and all. Especially now, when our prospects in Iraq have greatly improved, indulging in such exercises of revisionist history is wholly fatuous.

In this connection, though, it is also no wonder that Obama describes the war in Iraq as “the most important foreign-policy decision in a generation.” His formulation neatly focuses on the moment before American and allied troops went into battle in March 2003—a moment when Obama can claim to have seen, with perfect clarity, the entire subsequent unfolding of history. But quite aside from the fact that that moment came and went five years ago, the real question has to do with his vision in the meantime concerning the most important foreign-policy issue in our generation.

Unlike his presidential rival John McCain, an early and vocal and truly consistent critic of the Bush administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq,

Obama, as we have seen, was opposed to doing anything about Iraq even when, like everyone else, he believed Saddam Hussein was a menace who was likely armed with weapons of mass destruction; became a supporter of the war after the fact and remained one even as things were going poorly; and morphed into an aggressive opponent again just as the prospects of an American victory began to brighten. If there is a consistency here, it would appear to be the consistency of one consistently divorced from the facts on the ground and, lately, almost hermetically sealed off from even the possibility of good news. In a politician admired for his supposed open-mindedness and his ready willingness to consider new evidence, this is, to say the least, striking.

But perhaps a different kind of consistency is to be discerned in this maze. When Obama opposed the war in 2002, it was clearly in his political interest to do so; according to Dan Shomon, his campaign manager at the time, the key to Obama’s chances in the Democratic race for the Senate nomination lay in his ability to rally the Left to his side.4 Then, in 2004, when the war was still supported by most Americans, he associated himself with the Bush occupation strategy. In 2005, as Iraq was becoming increasingly unpopular, he temporized by joining those saying we had to reduce but not withdraw our troop presence. By 2006, with the war’s unpopularity deepening, he embraced a policy of full-scale withdrawal.

Having hitched his fortunes to this last position—i.e., that the war is lost and it is time for us to leave—he is in something of a predicament, having either to deny the clear evidence of progress in Iraq or to rewrite and revise his personal history. On the latter front, indeed, he has recently gone so far as to claim that when the surge was announced, he had “no doubt” that “if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence.” In fact, as we have seen, he volubly argued just the opposite.

Like the rest of the story rehearsed here, what all this suggests is that Barack Obama does not represent an authentic new “brand” in American politics; rather, he has shown himself to be an exceptionally adept political animal who can adjust to the prevailing political winds with seamless ease. As the election season progresses, it remains to be seen what tortuously defended new positions will be embraced by this consistently political politician, and what price they will exact in his reputation as a principled and courageous new voice.

- basman

March 14, 2008 at 12:41am

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Clinton will never reject and denounce Geraldine Ferraro because she is too busy trying to put other people on the spot to do those things.

Hillary does not live in a world of principle and consistency; in her world (Hillary's world) everything is politics.

I can tell you for sure (because this is where I live) the Clinton-Ferraro remarks are having the desired effect in Pennsylvania, a state which James Carville himself described as being Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other and Alabama in between.

Hillary is going after the votes of working class over 40 year olds with limited exposure and limited education. This describes much of Pennsylvania perfectly

It also describes much of Ohio, which opposed NAFTA for destroying their jobs – 80% saying it was their greatest concern – but voted for the wife of the man who moved the treaty from concept to reality in 1993 because the could not bring themselves to vote for an African American.

There is a lot of resentment among this group this group, that I know all too well, toward upwardly mobile blacks and anyone who seems like a "foreigner."

Our governor, Ed Rendell, said “regrettably many Pennsylvanians simply will not vote for a black candidate,” so he’s a Hillary supporter. How’s that for moral leadership?

So, you get a sense of the Clinton strategy for Pennsylvania and Indiana, and it aint pretty.

- matthawk

March 14, 2008 at 2:41am

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Blackton,

The economy was not in a recession in 1984, unemployment was sinking rapidly (still  7.2%, but the trend was downward) and inflation and gas prices falling, Reagan was a fairly popular incumbent (58% approval in November 1984), there was no major war, and things were looking up overall.  There really is no comparison between 1984 and 2008.

I don't know why everyone thinks Clinton is a sure loser against McCain.  I support Obama, but could easily pull the lever for Clinton.  Anyone who would vote for Obama but not Clinton in my opinion doesn't care about actual policy.

- bhunziker

March 14, 2008 at 6:51am

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baseman,

I think the point, really, is that articles like this SHOULD make Obama unelectable. Wehner's article is the only full account of Obama's "vertiginously shifting" positions on Iraq that I have seen. It also gives the details on why many of us find Obama to be repeatedly disingenuous and to hold positions that are brand new and that do not have the depth and suppleness that comes from actual experience in politics and government.

- Eos

March 14, 2008 at 8:48am

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You crack me up pc, you really do.  "Depth and suppleness?"  You talking about Bush, McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton?  Not one of them does much more than pander about anything and everything.  Non-stop.

I will give McCain this much, at one point he seemed to have some depth, but it was over-come by his supple ability to suck-up to whatever right-wing constituency was deserting him at the moment.

The fact is that Hillary is unelectable against almost any Republican, including McCain.  If you had the depth and suppleness pc that comes from actually running, winning, and losing political campaigns, you would know that her high negatives are political death.  No one gets past those high negatives, even someone with very strong positives which she does not have.

basman,

No analysis of that kind is going to affect anything in a political campaign, but the piece you so admire absolutely reeks of apologia for Bush's war in Iraq.  Progress?  Because the violence is only down to irreducible background level?  And has any of these clowns come up with a clue of an idea how to exit. or is Wehner's idea just to stay there forever policing, dying, and spending 100s of billions.  What a load or ridiculous horseshit.  Has any of these bozos figured how to prevent Iraq from slipping neatly into the orbit of Iran as soon as we, somehow, manage to depart?  

I'll say one thing for the right-wing.  They have a never-ending ability to create the worst imaginable nightmares and then to insist with a straight face that they have been right all along.  Delusional nutcases one and all.  Progress my ass.

Vertiginous pc?  Imagine, a human being in a position of responsibility who is actually capable of thinking to himself that he might have been wrong.  

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 9:49am

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Ferraro remains not a feisty Italian American from Queens, but a feisty asshole from Queens.  Nothing against Queens, of course.  I was born there.

If she were a man, she would have completely disappeared from the public mind a generation ago.  Quick, who was Truman's VP in 1948?  See what I mean.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 9:53am

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No question that Clinton, that narcissistic piece of crap, is trying her best to make Obama unelectable so that she can argue that only she is electable.  She has absolutely no other possible route for stealing the nomination.  But it is not going to work because the voters say it isn't so.  They will continue to give him victories right up until the end.  He will arrive at the convention with more delegates and more popular votes than she.  The polls will continue to show him doing better against McCain than she and that, unlike Hillary, his positives are much bigger than his negatives.  The super-delegates, professional pols almost all, want to win in November.  It will be perfectly obvious to one and all that you don't win by choosing a proven loser like Hillary Clinton over a stunning winner like Obama.

Just that simple.  Hillary's moment is done.  But she will drag it out so that she can go to sleep at night telling herself that there is still a chance, that it still might happen, that is, so that she can live in her delusion of importance for a little while longer.  In 15 more years, the only way Hillary Clinton will get 48 hours of TV time is to do a Gerry Ferraro -- make some racist remarks that, for a few moments, make her the object of weird fascination and horror.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 10:03am

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pcostello, HRC has made herself unelectable to many of us.  I don't need to list her faults here because they've already been discussed, and everyone knows them except her Orwellian followers.  By the way, is there a large two-way television in your room that tells you that black is white and 2+2=3.  Or maybe Clinton followers are just proving string theory.  We are living in different universes and they intersect at TNR talkback.

- crumtd

March 14, 2008 at 10:21am

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I believe that either a Hillary or an Obama presidency will be a disaster.

But, it's pretty clear to me that it is Hillary who is unelectable in a general election and that Obama could well win the general.

My main support for this is not my own personal animus towards Hillary (considerable and longstanding) but the fact that so many of HER OWN PARTY despise this woman.

I don't believe any major candidate from either party has, at least in modern American history, been as divisive in their own party.  Even Nixon, much reviled, was not was not as controversial as she, even on the other side.  (JFK and Nixon got along well personally.)

And, it's certainly clear that no candidate, widely despised by their own party has ever won in the general.  

Hubert Humphrey, previously always engendering affection, came to be held in contempt by many Democrats because of his association with Johnson.  And we saw what happened to him.

The best argument the Pro-Hillaryites have for her in the general is her gender.  And the argument that Boomer women from both parties and from independent ranks will rally around a middle-aged white woman in solidarity with their sex.  

That may have been true in some states among female Democrats during the primary.  I don't think it will hold up that way in the general election.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 10:22am

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roi--

clinton is a "narcissistic piece of crap"? nice argument.

BTW, it is Obama who is trying to make Clinton unelectable.

- Eos

March 14, 2008 at 10:28am

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basman,

The Washington Post picked up the article by Wehner, providing a concise summary in the voice of Michael Gerson.

www.realclearpolitics.com/.../obama_and_iraq.html

- Eos

March 14, 2008 at 10:30am

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bhunziker, you write, "Anyone who would vote for Obama but not Clinton in my opinion doesn't care about actual policy."

You're absolutely right.  And guess what.  Most people don't vote for "actual policy".  They vote for an "actual person".

Voters choose the candidate who their intellect and their gut (gut being more important) tell them in combination is the most worthy and trustworthy.

And, that instinct is not wrong.  Policies change.  But, people of presidential age, do not.  Or rarely do.  Certainly their fundamental characters do not.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 10:31am

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Alben Barkley.

HRC can't beat Johnny Mac, Obama can.  It's really as simple as that, but y'all need to flail around for 5 more months to figure it out.  Man, it's great theater.

- butchie b

March 14, 2008 at 11:26am

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Which superior Clinton policy preferences, bhunziker?

The policy of giving Bush free rein in Iran?  The policy of not bothering to read the N.I.E. for Iraq? Flag burning?  The "bankrupcy" bill?  

Basic Bush Bootlick 101 is not scintillating policy stuff that's too deep to be grasped.  You're free to buy Hillary's marketing shtick for herself, that she's a policy Einstein to top all those before her, I certainly don't.  

Even if I did buy her self-characterization, I don't care about her memorization ability (I'd hope she knows a thing or two after her supposed 35 years rattling around on the edges of her husband's career), as much as I care about her character, which is so manifestly awful I cannot overlook it. 50% of us out agree.

If Hillary wants to hide this loathing for her behind her gender (millions of us are all woman haters, huh?), she is free to do so and people are free to buy it.  It's a bunch of hooey, but if it makes her and you feel better - have at it.  

- Wandreycer1

March 14, 2008 at 11:36am

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Butchie, this is when I wish I could be a Republican - if this is not the quintessential Democractic Party mess, I do not know what is: stuck in a quicksand of tedious rules, squabbling lawyers, unintelligable election arcana, war zone identity politics - check, it's all there.  

- Wandreycer1

March 14, 2008 at 11:43am

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Basman:  Your article confuses views regarding the invasion and views regarding what to do about it.  He has consistently said that it was wrong to go in but that we have to be careful about getting out.  I think that's the only sensible position.  It's cute that his frank acknowledgement of second thoughts -- a sharp contrast with Hillary -- is used against him, as if a politician is never permitted to question his stances or positions.  Bottom line, though, is that he *has* been consistent, and is the only candidate who opposed the invasion from the beginning.  To accuse Obama of cynicism against a backdrop of Republicans and Democrats clamoring to support Bush's war for political reasons shows how twisted this analysis is.  Is Obama's record a perfect profile in courage?  No.  He's not perfect; he's never claimed to be perfect.  But he made a choice -- a considered choice -- to consistently and vocally oppose an invasion he did not think had been sufficiently justified to the public, despite its general popularity, and he was right to do so.  Neither of the other candidates can make that claim.

If you want to talk about flip-flopping, Obama is, by far, the least guilty of the three candidates running.  Hillary was for the war before she was against it, and her cynical vote to authorize (when, she says now, *she* would never have invaded Iraq as commander in chief) is not explained away by her patently disingenuous explanations that she was voting for aggressive diplomacy.  With another administration not clearly hellbent on the course taken, maybe.  Not this one.  Meanwhile, McCain has transformed himself repeatedly.  He was against the Bush tax cuts -- in kind of a bitchy "how dare you" way -- before he was for them.  He was against "agents of intolerance" on the right before he needed them.

- jhildner

March 14, 2008 at 12:03pm

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roidu, I love you like a cyber brother, and you can cry right wing venom all you want. But the pasted peice defintively roasts Obama as the ordinary calculating opportunistic triangulating politician he is--another mug in the mugs' game--despite all the new agey, high blown rhetoric. Sorry--not really-- to have helped blow his cover.

- basman

March 14, 2008 at 12:17pm

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Wandreycer1, the reason this is a "quintessential Democractic Party mess" is because the Democratic Party for a full forty years now has been a dysfunctional coalition.

What is being exposed here is that there isn't truly much in common among all the Dem pieces and splinters:  the blue collar, the poor, Latinos, blacks, elite intellectuals of media and academia, Wall streeters who are simply cultural Democrats, and finally, Feminists or older Boomer ladies who are inculcated with leftover Feminist agitprop from the 60s & 70s.

This is not a coalition of interests.  This is a grab-bag of people who just don't see themselves as Republicans so they're Democrats.  An undigested salad of people who carry in their heads the imprint of the old glorious righteous Democratic party of FDR through JFK.

But, that party died in Chicago in 1968.  It has never come back.  You are all holding onto a chimera.  I understand why.  I can see why culturally you couldn't be under the GOP tent (It's not all to my taste either.)  

But, the sad, sad truth is, most Democrats today are people without a country.  Refugees in a diaspora left after the fall of the late, great true Democratic Party.

Major reinvention and a new alignment of the coalition is in order.  

The center of the Democratic Party will not hold.  And hasn't for a long, long time, guys.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 12:30pm

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jhildner: jh: hildie

As you like it:

As you know, the fight for truth, justice and costs eternally persists, but when a moment of respite falls my way I will plead back to your Claim.

- basman

March 14, 2008 at 12:38pm

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chanrobt--

I fear that what you say is true.

- Eos

March 14, 2008 at 12:49pm

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Clinton can't beat McCain, she can only make it harder for Obama to do so. Rush Limbaugh supposedly wants a Clinton win this year so the "real" GOP can sweep back in and rescue us from her in 2012. Is Clinton following a similar (but reversed) strategy?

- dcoleski

March 14, 2008 at 1:26pm

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pc, no one, least of all Obama, has to "make Clinton unelectable."  She has taken care of that quite nicely.  Before this campaign got going in earnest, I disliked her (having at one time been happy to vote for her), but had no doubt that I would vote for her over any Republican, even if I had to grit my teeth to do it.  Now I despise her.  I said somewhere that she would be on my list right behind Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld.  That's the case.  I'm a local Democratic party leader and I would never again pull a lever for Hillary.  Whether I could go over to the dark side and actually vote against her is something I ponder.

The ways in which Hillary Clinton offends me are literally too numerous to mention here.  But "narcissistic piece of crap" is not an argument.  It is a conclusion, my conclusion, about someone who, to my eye, has been willing to sell out pretty much every principle upon which I voted for her in order to advance her own personal ambition.  She is a senator from New York.  Based on her voting record, she might as well be a senator from Idaho.  It is downhill from there.

Chan,

You remind me of Karl Marx, not much of an economic prophet, but a trenchant critic of capitalism.  Your analysis of the woes of the Democratic party has a great deal of truth to it.  I am, however, not so pessimistic about the prospects because there really is no alternative to the Democratic party when it comes to governing the country.  When Bush was elected, a friend of mine was in despair.  I said to her that she should not worry.  In short order, the Republicans, through greed and incompetence, would overreach and mismanage and it would quickly be obvious, again, that they only useful function they can serve is as critics of governing Democrats.  The only question, said I, was how much damage the could do before they were thrown out of office again for a generation.  I never imagined in my wildest nightmares that the scope of the damage, to our economy, to our foreign policy, to our strength and standing in the world, could approach even a fraction of what has occurred.

Once the Republicans have been dispatched, I hope that the many serious Democrats who are not stuck in a time-warp circa 1968 (and I know there are still lots of those too, and its not as though I am not old enough to remember 1968 well) will get to work on the nation's business.  I have hope.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 2:57pm

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Channy - I'm afraid it's you that is holding on to the past.  1968?  Don't you realize how ridiculous you sound to anyone under 40?

There are millions of people in this country who do not care a whit about 1968 and are actively, desperately trying to claw us away form this airless, dippy boomer dialouge and the people so addicted to it. Our poltical culture, our planet, our economy have all been almost destroyed by this mentality and frankly, the people perpetuating it.  

Sometimes I think the only time this generation will think about somoene besides themselves and their silly, ancient gripes against each other is when they die off - good riddance I'm sorry to say.

- Wandreycer1

March 14, 2008 at 3:01pm

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wandreycer,

I think you and chan are actually in agreement here, that too much of the Democratic party is still in the grip of 1968 and its aftermath and ancient political battles and nostalgia therefor.  While that is certainly not the case for the "rank and file," for demographic reasons alone, I believe, from direct experience, that amongst those who are active in party affairs and politics this remains so to a very unhealthy extent.  I have had to wrestle with a Democratic committee of aging ex-whatevers (my own lower end of the boomer generation or a bit older) to bring them into the reality of the 21st century,  It isn't easy, and try as we might it is damned hard to find younger people willing to participate.  The boomers got political religion.  Many of those who followed in the Democratic party don't have it. Or at least not until now.  If Obama can bring a new generation into active participation in the Democratic party, I think we have a good future.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 3:28pm

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roid, thanks for the (far) left handed compliment.  I probably don't disagree with it.

Did not Marx say something like "Capitalism will fall of its own contradictions?"

That's the problem with the Democratic Party.  Republicans have their share of doctrine and dogma.  But not anywhere near the amount the Democrats (post-Leftist takeover) now have.

The problem is, so much of Dem dogma is at odds with true human nature.  Not as bad as, but much in the same vein as, Communism.

At some point (I always say 1968), Democrats crossed the line of well meaning decency and defensible reason into the land of the logical extreme.

It doesn't help anybody to take your ideals so far from the land of "what if" that you end up in the land of "NFW".  

Democrats went from being a coalition of people who wanted to make attainable things happen by harnessing the power of the central government, to a coalition of people (gays, Feminists, displaced workers, well educated idealists, putative reformers and progressives) who have nothing in common except that they have grievances.

I agree with you that a lot of people are Democrats because they don't see themselves as having anyplace else to go.  But, that does not a party make.  Not for the long term.

I agree with you that people with no place else to go can elect a president.  But, then on what basis does that president govern?

Meanwhile, as to the supposed total disaster you say Bush is, everyone seems to ignore that he had an unprecedented kind of war thrust upon him.

If Gore had been sitting in the same chair on 11 September, I think he would have acted less decisively.  And he would have been a less inspiring and convincing leader.  But, he would have been forced to act.

And, Gore, too would have had to go to war.  And if he had eschewed going into Iraq, while going into Afghanistan solely, Saddam would have continued as a provocation.  He would have continued to posture as if he had WMDs (to scare other Arabs).  

Under the circumstances, it would have proved politically untenable for Gore to ignore a provocative Saddam, apparently or maybe having WMDs in a world where we fear suicide bombers with nukes.

Gore, to would have been immersed in an expensive war with no clear end.  And we, one way or the other, would be dealing now with some of the consequences of such a war.

I don't know where Obama, or any of the other millions of ahistorical Democrats who want to stop the world and get off, think they get to get off to.

We have unprecedented enemies.  They have not been totally vanquished.  They are like cancer or herpes.  Very difficult to eradicate, even with all our science.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 3:28pm

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wandrey, I'm with you.  I've never much loved my fellow Boomers as a group.  And it will be good for the country when many of their attitudes, assumptions, presumptions, and vanities disappear.  With them if must be.

And, you're right, someone under 40, who because he either hasn't studied it or did not witness it, cannot follow the pattern and the clear straight line from 1968 to today.

But, everything that is stupid and dysfunctional about the Democratic Party, it's siloed collection of aggrieved groups, its seeking of solutions to every possible or imagined grievance through central government fiat-- all this stuff is leftover from the stupidities of the 60s and 70s.

I agree with you wandrey, it ought to have gone away by now.  But the issues of this campaign did not spring up in the 80's or 90's.  Nor are the Democrats offering new solutions that have emerged in the 00s.

Senator Obama has invented new and better rhetoric.  He has purged 60s-speak from the way he speaks.  But I do not see yet where he has invented fresh solutions.

Obama, in fact, reminds me very much of that Robert Redford movie from the 60s, THE CANDIDATE.  

Once that handsome, fresh, charismatic guy won his senate seat, do you remember what he says to his campaign staff?  

"Now what do we do?"

Should Obama win the White House, he'll be asking the same.  But with a lot more question marks at the end of the sentence.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 3:37pm

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Sorry, chan, I don't buy it.

The war IS unprecedented (because of technology, not for any other reason) and has to be fought, but invading Iraq was a case of fighting terrorism with stupidity. There were enough people around who understood this at the time, including Obama, that I highly doubt whether Gore would have been moved, let alone compelled, to do what Bush did.  Nor can I imagine that either the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq would have been fought as thoroughly incompetently if someone other than the faith-based Bush had been president.

Here on earth, rather than in the movies, those decisions made "with your gut" accompanied by a lot of bellicose bluster don't actually work out.  It takes real thought and planning of the George Marshall variety to fight modern wars, not the sort of taking it out of your pants and smacking it on the table that ChimpyBush and his merry band of fools engage in.  Just one more case in which Republicans prove themselves totally incompetent.  Except, now we are not so overwhelmingly powerful and wealthy that we can afford such incompetence.  That's really what has changed.

It is true that the Democrats have difficulty governing because they have never enjoyed the party discipline that the Republicans do (stands to reason because the Republicans are all paying one another off -- that helps discipline a lot).  But the answer to a party that has difficulty governing is not a party, the Republicans, that have no interest in governing -- only in stealing -- and absolutely no ability to govern if they did.  Indeed, it is hard to decide what is a greater threat to the nation, incompetent Republicans or competent Republicans.

What the Democrats need is another generation that does not carry the grievances of their parents and can take a fresh look, and what the nation needs is for Republicanism, with its race-baiting and fantasism, to recede sufficiently so that the Democrats can govern without constantly having to defend themselves against the political equivalent of terrorist attacks.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 3:54pm

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"Now what do we do?"

Maybe.  I doubt it, but even so, a helluva lot better than Bush arriving, turning to his staff and asking, "Uh, where are we?"

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 3:56pm

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Oddly enough chan, while I agree with you about the historical roots of the Democratic party's problems, I disagree about the nature of the disease.  Governing effectively is principally a matter of politics, not policy.  They boomer generation has been so enamored of policy, technocracy, educational credentials, that it has lost touch with the sort of cigar-chomping, Democratic club politics that actually made things work.  The Republicans are at the other extreme, all politics, no interest in workable policy.  Like a sociopath, they believe that if you can convince people of something on a given day -- that the earth is flat let's say -- that it is effectively the truth.  No, it isn't.

As between the Republicans discovering an interest in reality or the Democrats rediscovering an interest in politics, primarily as the working out of human conflict, not as the design of effective policy, I think the latter is more likely.  The Democrats want to succeed.  The people who run the Republican party are only interested in trashing the Democrats sufficiently to get another stint in power to steal and loot.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 4:02pm

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pccostello:  I completely agree with most of your posts.  I think its hypocritical and stupid to accuse Hillary of trying to damage her own party by "reinforcing the GOP message"  - while stubbornly ignoring the way Obama's been doing the same thing for months.  Both sides are trying to win and there's no way you can logically argue that one side is only trying to make the case that they're a better candidate, while the other side is viciously trying to make thier opponent "unelectable."

But don't be like the Obamaphiles.  Argue that Hillary would make a better president, is more electable, or whatever it is you think, but don't try to impugn Obama's character based on shifting opinions about the war.  Most intelligent people have had shifting opinions on the war.   If you want to argue that his evolving positions have been bad ones, that's fine, but I just don't think Democrats should be in the habit of implying that to change one's mind, or have complex positions, is to show bad character.   I think Democrats should be in the habit of smacking that ridiculous idea down.

- newdex

March 14, 2008 at 4:03pm

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No, the Democrats' penchant for circular firing squads manned by identity politicians is making both Clinton and Obama unelectable.

The only pleasure I have gotten out of this election cycle is watching the you Democrats self-destruct and hearing Clinton and Obama surrogates raise ALL the arguments against the Motor-Voter "reforms" normally raised by serious Republicans and denounced by you left-wing bigots as "voter suppression" deployed against Democratic candidates. Have at it, children! You're making McCain's chances better and better.

- corlyssd

March 14, 2008 at 4:16pm

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newdex,

Thank you, and I take your points. I must confess my frustration and anger, though, at the degree to which Obama has ridden the horse of his 2002 speech--made at an anti-war rally as a state legislator in an extremely liberal district--as a warrant of his superior judgment compared to Hillary. When one actually looks at the details of Obama's position, it become clear that Bill Clinton's description of this warrant as a fairy tale is accurate. I do not begrudge him a shifting position on the war. It is more that he claims prescience and that his opinions have never wavered and that this presecience and steadiness distinguish him from Clinton.

On the issue of the charge that Clinton is bashing Obama, I also find the media's and Obama's supporters' "stubbornly ignoring the way Obama's been doing the same thing for months" hard to take.

But thank you for your points.

- Eos

March 14, 2008 at 4:33pm

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roid, your critique of policy Democrats as opposed to old fashioned practical Democrats meshes with my dislike of modern journalists, academics, MBAs, etc.

I believe we've had two generations of people who are long on "education" but very short on wisdom.  Or much understanding or interest in life and people as they actually are.

The value of a college education, at least as actually manifested for a long time as a ticket stamping operation, is highly overrated.  (Yes I know it has proveable value in earnings, but I wonder about effectiveness.)

We have two generations of hot house people in this country and probably throughout the West.  Maybe that's why it feels like in many spheres, less is getting done than was achieved by previous generations.

And I suspect the notion of an "information economy".  Is a nation of lawyers and programmers and entertainers really viable without a balancing quotient of plumbers, car builders, and steel makers?

I guess as long as the world is more or less getting along, which we are more or less doing now, despite the M.E. problems, it all works.  

But, what happens if China has all the factories, and we have all the law firms?

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 4:35pm

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newdex,

one more thought. I think the reason I raise so many argument against obama is because he seems to have a teflon coat, at least in these primaries. Or actually, it that he is wearing the emperor's new clothes. There seems such a resistance to see him as anything other than a mythic figure possessed of personal greatness. We should see his feet of clay before the general, or we will have a McGovern phenomenon all over again.

- Eos

March 14, 2008 at 4:38pm

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Bill and Hillary Clinton are the quintessential baby boomers. They are so narcissistic and self-absorbed that they will stop at nothing to meet their insatiable needs. They will destroy the Democratic Party. They will destroy the nation. They will destroy their own legacy and our once fond memories of the Clinton administration of the 1990s. They know no limits when it comes to self-gratification. This what is happening as we watch the Democratic Party disintegrate before our eyes.

- matthawk

March 14, 2008 at 4:48pm

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pc, newdex, Hillary came out for the Iraq war, not because she believed in it or didn't believe in (likely the former) but because she was planning to run for president.

At the time, voting seemed the only way to remain "viable".

Obama came out against the war a) because he was against it.  And b) because at the time, he had absolutely nothing to lose.  I'm sure he was not envisioning a run for the White House six years hence.

Now, lucky for him and too bad for her, being for the war is not the best position amongst the Democratic constituency.  We'll see what it turns out to be among the wider electorate.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 4:51pm

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1968 and identity politics have nothing to do with it.  Race and Gender haven't even been issues in this campaign aside from the particular race and gender of the candidates and how this effects thier respective media coverage.  

We have two strong candidates with very similar positions but differing styles and personas.   Only the media and political geeks see stirrings of 1968 culture wars in the campaign.  In the real world, the public is simply divided over who they think would be best one to nominate.  Whoever wins will recieve the support of the vast majority of Democrats and stand a decent shot of possibly maybe winning in November.   Unless the press succeeds in egging them on to destroy one another.  But if that happens, its not an effect of 1968 so much as an effect of 1994.

- newdex

March 14, 2008 at 4:52pm

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pc:

"the reason I raise so many argument against obama is because he seems to have a teflon coat, at least in these primaries"

I feel your pain, truly.  

- newdex

March 14, 2008 at 4:55pm

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ChanRobt, I completely agree with your post about two generations of credentialing without substance and of an economic premise that is based on short-term speculation and retail rather than long-term investment and tangible productions (I know you didn't exactly put it in those terms but I think this is consistent with what you were saying).

And you are right that the party cannot go on forever. We are living off of financial bubbles and an overly-inflated dollar. Well, the air is going out of dollar-illusion and the real estate bubble (latest in a series of such financial bubbles) is collapsing. What comes next may be a real education in both politics and economics for two generations that have been escaping from reality.

- matthawk

March 14, 2008 at 4:56pm

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CORRECTO

I meant to say:  "pc, newdex, Hillary came out for the Iraq war, not because she believed in it or didn't believe in (likely the LATTER) but because she was planning to run for president."

I don't think Hillary believe in the war, but was willing to vote against her "principles" inasmuch as she has any, to maintain her "viability".

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 5:20pm

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mmathawk, your summation or paraphrase of my position is completely accurate.

And, I hope we don't have to pay for our follies appocalyptically.

The info economy or service economy only works if you believe totally in globalism.  But events can divide the globe, and then you're screwed if you've lost your self-sufficiency in vital and critical sectors.  Like actually making stuff.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 5:26pm

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roi, chan - always so wise.

yes, I am, in fact, going mad at being stuck in a fugue state with these people for a seeming eternity. Even a glimpse of another possibility has made it impossible for me to quietly tolerate another second.  I think generational warefare is more than fair at this point.

- Wandreycer1

March 14, 2008 at 5:38pm

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great post newdex.

- Wandreycer1

March 14, 2008 at 5:43pm

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Hillary's vote on the war has never been one of my problems with her.

- Wandreycer1

March 14, 2008 at 5:44pm

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Well, chan, another point of agreement, I think.

The Thomas Friedman thesis that somehow everyone else in the world is going to make all the stuff and do all the scut work while we have all the high margin intellectual work has always seemed absurd to me, for two reasons.  We have to have decent employment for a lot of people who are not going to become doctors, lawyers, or accountants, and there is nothing to prevent the Chinese and the Indians in competing directly with us for the high margin jobs.  Even Thomas Friedman has lately woken up and concluded that things may be more complicated than he thought.

Someone up there dissed the notion that 2008 is somehow a return to 1968.  Not at all, but it is the identity/grievance politics of 1968 that tore apart the Roosevelt coalition by pitting the interests of identity groups against those of blue collar workers.  Fortunately, the Republicans are only skilled at rhetorically stoking those divisions.  The are congenitally incapable of actually doing anything for the benefit of anyone other than the rich.  The Roosevelt coalition can be reassembled, and I think Obama has a shot at doing it.  By his responses to provocation to take up the cudgels of 1968, and his refusal to do so, he tells me that he understands the stakes.  He is not a pacifist.  He is not an "angry black man."  He is not bewildered in the face of feminism.  And, above all, he has demonstrated, to me at least, the he understands the calling of politics, not policy, even though he is plenty smart enough to navigate the latter as well.  Hillary has lately shown us that she too can be a politician, but only of the Karl Rove/Republican variety.  She should change parties.  Her brand of politics is not going to succeed in the Democratic party.  

I can only repeat what someone else said above, which is that it is a shame that the Clintons are trashing their own legacy in a vain attempt at another sojourn in the White House that is not to be.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 6:09pm

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wandrey, I don't have a problem with Hillary's vote for the Iraq War authorization.  Because, I agree with it.

I have a problem with her casting what I always suspected and still do believe was a cynical vote.  And that she only cast it as she did for selfish political reasons.

Now we all understand that every legislator casts many votes for other than true belief.  We can tolerate that in the appreciation of logrolling and necessary political compromise.

I don't, however, think that it is forgivable to vote against your beliefs but for your advancement on a matter so profound as taking our nation to war.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 7:24pm

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I don't know if I just sent this already on accident or not:

ChanRobt: "pc, newdex, Hillary came out for the Iraq war, not because she believed in it or didn't believe in (likely the LATTER) but because she was planning to run for president."

How do you know this?  Can you prove it, or does it come from your gut?

Wandreycer: thanks for the compliment.  I have to say that I agree with your perspectives more often than not, which is why watching you descend into Hillary-hatred of late has been especially upsetting.  

- newdex

March 14, 2008 at 7:34pm

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"I don't, however, think that it is forgivable to vote against your beliefs but for your advancement on a matter so profound as taking our nation to war."  Well said Chan!  And I agree, that is what she did; advanced her career.  It would have too, had it not been for a superior candidate like Obama!  Of course your usually so wrong (snark), but on this point, I agree completely!  Nice to see you back around here, too!

- rishy

March 14, 2008 at 7:48pm

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Thanks, roid.  We are in agreement on the core point that there is a very direct and straight line between what's happening in the Dem primary today and the events of '68.

And, in fact, the issues, outcomes, and mindsets evident every four years on the Democratic side is a product mainly of '68, not '32.

I'll tell you what is really interesting in this one.  It is almost literary, what a watershed this is in having the feminist issue and the racial issue come to a head and in competition at the same time.

Most fascinating to me is how much recent events support a core Conservative critique of Liberalism and the Left. Namely that Liberals-- some consciously, some unconsciously, some in denial-- that Liberals are racist paternalists cloaked in kindness and disingenuous concern.

This is manifested in the underlying assumption of Liberalism, that blacks (and other ethnicities that are seemingly permanent members of the underclass) can't actually take care of themselves and need the government as their eternal benefactors.  

And that this racism is also manifested in an arrogance that takes the black vote for granted.  

Should that vote ever be withheld (or should a prominent black man, Clarence Thomas say, put himself in the other camp) then the furies will come down on the black person who dared to be so ungrateful.

So now we see Bill and Hillary (first black president and his wife/successor) having been challenged by a black man, seeming to prove the Right's critique to be correct.  

Bill himself, prominent people within the Clinton campaign, and Hillary herself, are pulling off racially tinged tricks that are much balder than anything the Right has been accused of since Willie Horton.

I think the only event that can undo this damage to the Democratic Party is if Obama goes all the way to the White House.  Otherwise, I wonder if the Democrats will ever again enjoy the unquestioning, solid black bloc they've had since 1964.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 7:57pm

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NudeX--C'mon!  Of course she was planning on running, and needed some hawk-like credentials.  I gotta say, I agree with Chan-the-man, however wrong he usually is.

- rishy

March 14, 2008 at 7:57pm

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newdex, I can't know, of course, what is in Hillary's heart.  But based on all her previous utterances of the nearly fifteen years before the Iraq vote, it is my strong hunch that she did not support the Iraq war.  But voted for it to protect her presidential aspirations.

A majority of Democrats didn't even support the first G. Bush on pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait.  And, Bill fled Somalia after a warlord killed a few of our troops, not even stopping to bring retribution on the warlord.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 8:02pm

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roidubouloi:

You say Obama "has a shot" at rebuilding the Roosevelt coalition which was "torn apart" by the  "identity/grievance politics of 1968."   I say that Bush - and the fact that America has actually for the most part moved on - is the reason we have a shot of "rebuilding" some kind of winning coalition.  (Probably not exactly the Roosevelt coalition - the south is pretty far gone.)

You believe Obama has a shot because "his responses to provocation to take up the cudgels of 1968, and his refusal to do so, he tells me that he understands the stakes."  

How is he different from Hillary in this?  Neither side has made race or gender a central part of thier campaign.  If Hillary supporters occasionally cry sexism at her press coverage is that far worse than Obama supporters crying racism over a few ambiguous offhand comments?  

You say Hillary has shown us that she is a politician "of the Karl Rove/Republican variety."  

There are several tactics I think of when I think of "Rovian" politics.  The most obnoxious of these, in my opinion, is to relentlessly impugn the moral character of the other candidate, painting her as deceitful, or morally repugnant, or willing to destroy anyone or anything that gets in her way, for example.  

- newdex

March 14, 2008 at 8:09pm

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roid, anyone who wants to build back something akin to the FDR Coalition has to eschew all the identity politics.

The Democratic Party ought to be build on a much bigger Jeffersonian type platform, essentially the Rights of Man.

These rights need to be painted in broad strokes, and meant to be understood as rights for all people against oppression and promoting the general welfare.

Throw over all the special pleadings, affirmative actions by race, gender, sexual proclivities.  All that narrow, non-universal crap.  Look at how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are written.  With some exceptions within the Constitution, the core concepts of each document are anything but narrow and parochial.

If the Democrats said, "what's good for human beings is good for all of us together" then it wouldn't need to constantly view everything through the prism of black/brown/female/gay/transgendered.  All embarrassing, narrow stuff.

then you would have a tent that could easily encompass the original core of regular working people and put its arms around everyone else who feel they need their rights represented against the monied and powerful.

The Democrats have to drop all the 60s Lefty paraphernalia they picked up back then, and start fresh.

Obama often seems to do that.  But, for starters, Mrs. Obama often doesnt.

- ChanRobt

March 14, 2008 at 8:35pm

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Chanrobt and Rishy: Hillary has explained her vote very clearly.  Without going into details, she was never "for the war" as Bush fought it, but she was always willing to use force in Iraq - if it became necessary.  You may not agree with her conclusions, or even her premises, but her explanation is perfectly logical and totally consistent with her position since.  Not only is her explanation reasonable, its entirely in keeping with the kind of values she claims to embrace.    

I wouldn't try to argue that political calculation had absolutely no role in her decision-making.  I'm sure it was a part of every Senator's considerations - including the ones that haven't run for president.  But there's no reason not to take her for her word when she says she thinks she made the best decision under the circumstances and that the fualt lies with Bush.

- newdex

March 14, 2008 at 10:24pm

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I don't know, Chanrobt - it seems to me that it's the Republican side that obsesses about isses of black/brown/female/gay/transgendered.  Take gay issues: sure there are gay men and women out there pushing for the right to get married, but its not like the Democratic party has ever really taken up the issue.  Its the Right that's pushed it with thier efforts to "preserve the institution of marriage."

What "special pleadings, affirmative actions by race, gender, sexual proclivities" are you talking about exactly?  Because from where I sit, there hasn't been much of anything like that for a long time, let alone in this campaign.  It seems to me that the Democrats ARE the ones saying "what's good for human beings is good for all of us together."  

- newdex

March 14, 2008 at 10:46pm

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Well newdex,

To say that Hillary has not made gender politics a central part of her campaign seems to me to be stretching  reality to the point of breaking.  

I am not running Obama's campaign or speaking publicly on his behalf. One of the reasons that I participate in these blogs is that, in real life, I do have to speak publicly on behalf of (local) Democrats and I have to confront the typical relentless smear campaigns and fabrications of the Republicans.  And, believe me, when you are in public life you have to watch every word that comes out of your mouth.  It can be exhausting constantly to have to think ahead to how others can twist something you say or misuse it.  So, it is a nice relief to be able to say what is on my mind politically that cannot be said publicly.  If you are actually working and speaking publicly, you have a different set of responsibilities, particularly in a primary where the party you impugn may be your party's nominee.

Obama does not impugn Hillary's character.  She constantly impugns his character, his ability, you name it,  and makes up all kinds of nonsense to do it ("I have crossed the commander in chief threshold.  Senator McCain has crossed the commander in chief threshold.  Senator Obama made a speech.")  I don't know that Hillary put Ferraro up to making those obviously racist remarks, but when they were made I have no doubt that Hillary understood the value of stoking race anger in PA and was happy to have Ferraro running around on talk shows repeating the same crap.  If she hadn't been happy to have Ferraro repeating herself while bearing the imprimatur of the Clinton campaign, it would have been a very simply matter to cut her off quickly.

I don't see too many politicians as unprincipled as Hillary appears to me.  There does not seem to be any political principle on which she stands firmly -- although you can rationalize her voting record to your heart's delight. And there does not seem to be any tactic that she considers beneath her, including a little nudge, nudge, wink, wink racism.  I have no qualms in this context, as just one voter, in expressing my disgust with her, her character, and her behavior.

- roidubouloi

March 14, 2008 at 11:57pm

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dex, I think the fault lies with the authorization itself and the process.  It was hasty, and ill-conceived.  Maybe Clinton and those that voted for it thought it was the best they could get; that seems to be the line you are touting, along with the Clinton campaign; I get it.  It even can be considered understandable, given the 911 craziness.  But there were cooler heads who voted no, and she didn't.  She trusted Bush, and some didn't.  I just don't think hers is a good enough excuse.

And chan...what dex just said.

- rishy

March 15, 2008 at 12:03am

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Chan,

I don' think that merely espousing some generalized philosophical principles is going to rebuild the Democratic coalition, although avoiding open identity politics is a part of the equation.  Note, newdex, this is precisely where Hillary and Obama take different paths.  He talks about what an achievement it is, given our history, for a black man to be running for president.  He never expresses the idea that he is running so that African Americans can get what is owed to them.

Hillary is just to the contrary.  She constantly expresses that her candidacy is about women getting what is owed to them -- and clearly about her getting what she thinks is owed to her -- and boomer women above 50 respond in kind.  I had one of them yelling at me in a restaurant that I had to support Hillary because I have two daughters and assuring them equal opportunity to be president is the only think that matters.  She runs political rallies with everyone yelling "We need a woman in the White House."  Obama does not claim or run rallies on the theme that "We need a black man in the White House."

Chan, the key to rebuilding the Democratic coalition is spreading the wealth, "an economy where people who are willing and able to work hard and do can all achieve "the American dream," regardless of color, gender, religion, or any other status.  This requires sound stewardship of the economy, the environment, and a resolute and smart defense.  Stewardship of our shared inheritance, what has been given to us by our American forbears, the pioneers who built this country and then made it great and powerful.  Stewardship, so that we can pass this inheritance on to our children and our children's children in better condition than we received it."  That is an idea about which the Democratic coalition can be rebuilt.  

- roidubouloi

March 15, 2008 at 12:10am

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rishy, thanks for the welcome back and the good conversation with it.

roid, I meant that the Democratic Party had to return to a central, unifying, and universal principal that harks back to its Jeffersonian origins.

Then build back from there, and eschew all the highly parochial and peculiar barnacles of highly bizarre particularness, right down to the "transgendered".  

And the key to rebuilding the coalition ought not be spreading the wealth, it ought to be spreading the opportunity to earn the wealth on a level field of merit.

Wealth cannot be spread until it has first been produced.  At that point, of course, the state can confiscate some or all of it.

The Democrats ought to be about providing all people with as equal as possible opportunity to an education.  Which will teach them how to create value (wealth).

Remember, Jefferson wrote that all men were created equal, and that they had been endowed by their creator with  the right to pursue happiness.  

Which I interpret to mean, a right to pursue your fortune, unimpeded by strictures of class, or franchises given to the privileged by the state.

There is a great philosophical gap between spreading the wealth and spreading the opportunity.  And I think it is the fallacy that you can spread wealth before you've created it that is the failure of the modern Democratic party.

- ChanRobt

March 15, 2008 at 2:23am

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"an economy where people who are willing and able to work hard and do can all achieve "the American dream," regardless of color, gender, religion, or any other status"

Doesn't need any amplification.

- roidubouloi

March 15, 2008 at 11:07am

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roidubouloi:

Of course Obama never says he's running so that African Americans can "get what is owed them."  If he did, he'd scare the piss out of white America.  And I also don't think that's his take on it at all.  But you can't deny that the sentiment is a factor in his support - a big part of why he gets the African American vote.  He's smart enough to cultivate the sentiment where its appropriate without embracing it outright.  There's nothing wrong with that.  It's perfectly natural, I think, just like the sentiment of women getting whats "owed" them is undoubtedly a big part of Hillary's support from women.  Its just not as politically dangerous to express the sentiment regarding women as it is with African Americans, for obvious reasons.  But even so - even if Hillary herself does occasionally make a reference to breaking the glass ceiling, etc. - "gender politics" is not a central part of her campaign.  Its not like Hillary plans to enact sweeping feminist legislation any more than Obama plans on vigorously extending affirmative action.  

As far as the impugning of character:  I disagree with Hillary's experience comments.  I don't like that that line of attack at all - but saying someone is not experienced enough is not impugning thier character.  However, saying that someone is lacking in principles, will do or say anything - including racist things - to gain power, or arrogantly thinks she is "owed" the presidency, etc - these things are all attacks on HIllary's character.  And these are things that Obama himself frequently and clearly implies, let alone his "ministers" and surrogates.   Of course, you've partaken of the Anti-Hillary drug, so to you those things are all just manifestly true about Hillary.  To a lot of Hillary supporters, however, the "fact" that Obama won't be able to stand against McCain in terms of experience, or that there's not enough "substance" to him or whatever else is equally manifestly true.  

- newdex

March 15, 2008 at 4:29pm

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I think you understate the extent to which Hillary's campaign is overtly feminist in its message and orientation.  She can get away with it because that is indeed far more politically acceptable than the equivalent line for blacks, probably for the simple reason that it is less "us" and "them" -- we all have mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters.  Women may be mysterious, but they are not part of a still largely separate community.  That doesn't make it admirable on Hillary's part (boy would I love to vote for a woman with a post-feminist message akin to Obama's).

You also fail to distinguish rather completely between what is said by pundits and the voters from what is said by the campaigns.  We can say whatever the hell we damn please about the candidates.  The campaigns have very different and public responsibilities.  I absolutely disagree with your claim that Obama or his campaign ever say or implying such things about Hillary publicly.  When anyone steps out of line in that respect, they are promptly dumped from the campaign, not sent on a tour of TV talk shows like Geraldine Ferraro.  He may well think them -- most people I know do even it they are Hillary supporters -- but he never even hints at them.  Unless you think that his taking note of the fact that she is throwing the kitchen sink at him when she is throwing the kitchen sink at him is attacking her.  For my money, I can hardly bear his forbearance.  He's almost a saint on this score.  She's working the shiv and he's trying to rise above it.  I wish he would find some surrogates who would start sticking some knives in her.  That might make her think twice about it.  

She is a dirty pol with a very dirty history that she continues to hide, a fabulist who concocts her resume out of nothing and, when challenged, makes up fibs about her role in this or that international event to compensate.  If it were anyone but a Clinton, and if Obama weren't the prime target at the moment, she would be laughed off stage.  I don't have to imagine Hillary's race-baiting.  It is open and obvious.

Yes, there is no question that Obama has less experience than McCain, but what the Hillaristas are unable to accept is that Hillary has even less political experience than Obama, and almost all of it is negative, a display of one poor political judgment after another.  She cannot point to any significant accomplishment in her life for which she herself can take credit. That makes Hillary by far the worse candidate because she is running on a faux claim of experience that she has to bolster with ludicrous fibs,  Obama treats that with kid gloves.  McCain and the Republicans would eviscerate her.  

Obama is running on a different tack that McCain has trouble responding to.  That gives him a distinctly better shot.  The question is whether McCain's experience will trump Obama's forward-looking politics.  That's an open question.  What is not an open question is that McCain's experience -- tested by a North Vietnamese prison camp rather than by her husband's public sexual escapades -- would make Hillary's look like a Lucy sitcom by comparison.  That is a losing hand.

- roidubouloi

March 15, 2008 at 6:02pm

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Jhildner, as you may imagine, I regard you highly as a poster hereabouts, even as a poster boy for posters, but lately in dealing with issues Obamian I see you suffering from roidu (also an excellent poster) syndrome: the symptom consists of starting with the bed of your predilection and then, regardless of anything, bending everything to fit procrustean-like into it. The article, on my reading confuses nothing. You, tactically, want to say it confuses things so that you have a polemical, and sneering as against the article, jumping off point.

But Wehner is careful to distinguish between getting into Iraq—and agrees that reasonable people can disagree about that—and, as you segment it, what to do about Iraq—and agrees that about that too, reasonable people can disagree. He is not overweening in the assertion of any particular view about those two separate aspects of the debate on Iraq and it is not his purpose to argue for any particular view. Nor does he disallow for, or discount, the agonizing or (even not agonizing but still) good faith rethinking of positions. And he contrasts all of that with what he argues for, and tries to demonstrate, is, in precise contrast to all of the above, Obama’s bad faith, because opportunistic, dipsy doodling on these issues.

Wehner argues, and I say shows, that rather than your, I say respectfully, polemical ascription of changes of stance to thinking through complicated and vexing issues, that Obama stuck out his finger at varying times to test the weather of political advantage and modified his position accordingly.

I will agree with your own self-undercutting concession, namely: “Is Obama's record a perfect profile in courage?  No…” Perfection aside, another tactical feint because no one is arguing from perfection, it is, I suggest, the force and weight of the evidence that the article accumulates as it rolls along that moves you here, however slightly against yourself. (If I was deconstructing your post—a mode of analysis I don’t much like—I’d say your give away is an aporia revelatory of the inner and subtextual conflicts in your own position.).

It is old hat to say he made a “choice when no one else did” and on and on. But that argument has become qualified by the often observed reality that he was not sitting in the Senate at the time, had not read the briefing reports, estimates and all what else that the affirmatively voting senators had, and it has been qualified by his own musings and querying, which are well known and which Wehner reprises, about how differently he might have voted had he been in the Senate, reviewed all that material and had to answer politically for te consequences of his choice as a Senator and not as a state legislator representing a highly liberal Chicago district.

Like with the argument that “right wing evangelical types do it likewise”in answer to fair concerns about Obama and his past pastor, it is not helpful to your case against the article to contrast Obama’s positional steadfastness with his opponents. Wehner was not writing about them, he was writing about Obama. Wehner did not use them as a bench mark by which to judge Obama. Rather he uses both Obama’s claims for himself and common sense standards of good faith intellectual and political honesty. And in that regard if the best you can do is assert, in the punch line of the old Yiddish shtetl joke, “his brother was worse”, then, I think, you are making Wehner’s case.

I could have gone on at greater length and with more specificity, but the costs portion of the truth, justice and costs triad is now quite demandingly beckoning me.

Over and out.

- basman

March 16, 2008 at 1:16pm

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roidubloi, I don't know if you'l read this but I think your wrong.  I do know the difference between what candidates say and what pundits say.  I also know that Obama spends a lot of time talking about how Hillary doesn't really mean anything she says, only wants power for its own sake and will do or say anything to get it.  He doesn't need to hammer it too explicitly, because he knows as well as you or I that the press will do 2/3 of the work but he definitely says it, and encourages it.  Thats a smear, just like saying she "played the race card" even though thats  based only on your very unobjective interpretation of a few out of context comments is a smear.  Or, for that matter, referring to the so-called "kitchen sink" strategy - which consists of what?  Increased focus on Obama's "lack of experience" and futile attempts to point out how Obama has been "going negative" for months?  

Ultimately, I agree that the experience argument is a very week argument for Hillary.  But then, having really very little to argue about policy-wise and faced with a candidate far more charismatic and "inspiring" than she is, what else can she argue?  By the same token, as much as I'm sure Obama would prefer to rely only on his inspirational visions, he obviously realized, late last year, that he needed something more substantial to differentiate himself.  What could be easier and more obvious than to fan the flames of Hillary hatred just dying to break out in the media?

- newdex

March 16, 2008 at 3:56pm

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newdex,

If you can point to anything at all specific that Obama is doing to "fan the flames of Hillary hatred," I'm all ears.  Keeping your mouth shut and letting the media do your work for you is hardly that.  It is not his job to defend Hillary when she catches flack from the pundits and the public for her positions, her behavior, whatever.  

Yes, Hillary has some serious problems.  She based her whole campaign on "inevitability" covered with a political figleaf, "I am experienced, tested, vetted, ready day one, have crossed the commander in chief threshold."  While this might have been fine in the absence of competition, I find it incredible that her campaign seems never to have thought that this would be seriously challenged, by the media or anyone else, let alone by the Republicans, and figured out move two (on day two), i.e., what they were going to do when it became clear that these claims were only so many words that could barely endure scrutiny?  Now she is forced to tell ridiculous fibs about her role in international affairs or in passing legislation, and every time she does someone who was there pops up to say Hilllary had nothing to do with it.  Maybe if she had cruised to the Democratic nomination and the Republican nominee had been anyone other than McCain, she might have been able to pull this off, but it was kind of a hail-Mary pass strategy, not very robust.  

Unfortunately for Hillary, she wasted her time in the senate.  As a high-profile celebrity, she could have been a leader, could have been the "fighter" she claims to be.  But she wasn't.  She was so busy triangulating her moves with the presidency in mind that she forgot to represent the people who sent her.  She has her admirers in NY, mostly women, but lots of people resent being used by her in this way.  When it came down to critical votes, she voted like a Republican, or, as I like to say, as the senator from Idaho.  When she wasn't voting Republican on big issues, she was pandering to the right by co-sponsoring obnoxious right-wing initiatives such as her anti-flag burning bill.  Thus, she pretty well failed to establish any ideological credentials, other than her association with Bill, that would have enabled her to make a big theme pitch like Obama's with any credibility.  She reduced herself to having to tell us how she would make widgets and reliance on the Clinton nostalgia.  That is a very weak, timid approach, typical of someone who assumes they are safely ahead and is simply playing not to lose.  I think she backed herself into a corner, but I don't see that she has done herself any credit with her responses to the problems she created for herself.  

Yes, Obama has played out the vague, inspirational string just about as far as it can go, which will have been enough to win the Democratic nomination.  That was incredibly shrewd.  It's the big thing I like about the guy.  He is a great politician, knows how to talk to people.  He will win the nomination without having said anything he needs to regret.  He will not have trashed the other candidate.  He will have a clean slate upon which to design his campaign against McCain.  I think it has been a brilliant piece of work.  I personally am thrilled to have such a talent working for my team.  I have no concern that he is not able to deal with the substance as well or better than Hillary or McCain.  

- roidubouloi

March 16, 2008 at 5:28pm

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Basman,

I shall have to pay closer attention to a free thinker such as yourself and see if I cannot detach myself from my procrustean bed.

I have reasons for not wanting Hillary to be president.  The two chief reasons are first that I do not see that she is a genuine progressive.  From my observation of what she actually does when voting, I think she is either still a Republican at heart or else politically unprincipled, willing to sell out the people who elected her any time that she has perceived an advantage to her presidential ambitions.  I gave her the benefit of the doubt until her anti-flag burning legislation.  Then I gave up completely.  Second, I observe that her political skills are meager at best.  I have had several opportunities to hear her speak from just a few feet away, even before I parted company with her ideologically.  I have always found her grating.  Further, the ways in which she has chosen to present herself strike me as inept.  In her public dealings, she has never had the courage to attempt much of anything since the health care debacle, and that was a debacle.  Nothing that I see of her history suggests to me any political talent whatsoever.  She has had the benefit of starpower by virtue of Bill and has used it for nothing.

I have quite separate reasons for thinking that she cannot be elected president.  The first are her very high negatives.  Everything in my political experience, actually running local political campaigns quite successfully, tells me that those are impossible to overcome.  Second, her lack of political skills.  Third, her incredibly brittle campaign, structured on the basis of claims ("I am experienced, tested, vetted, ready day one," blah, blah) that simply cannot withstand scrutiny.  She has no more experience than Obama.  Indeed, as a politician, he has more experience than she does.  He has the good sense not to claim experience he doesn't have.  She is now reduced to making up ridiculous fibs about having done things she hasn't done now that her claims are being questioned.  Fourth, by any standard she is a poor match-up with McCain because, on all the things she claims for herself, he trumps her.

When I look at Hillary, I am unable to find a single good reason to want her to receive the nomination.  In contrast, when I look at Obama, I see undeniable political talent and charisma coupled with a bona fide, and as yet un-compromised progressive point of view and more than enough brains for the job.  I don't think Obama is "the Answer that we have been waiting for."  I think he possesses the tools that make it possible for him to win and possible for him to govern.  I know WHY I would be casting a vote for Obama other than that the alternative is worse.  I cannot say the same for Hillary.

Despite that, I have a much lower expectation of politicians then you seem to.  Hence, I am both unsurprised and not at all disappointed that someone who has a high-profile public office has made statements at various times that do not seem 1) to be statements of pure principle without regard to the currents of public opinion or 2) are absolutely intellectually consistent.  That is not how political life works.  I do not expect politicians to maintain academic standards of rigor in their claims or public statements.  Any politician who did that wouldn't be worth his salt and wouldn't last very long if indeed he or she could ever get elected to anything.  

I find very little in the Wehner piece that seems out of bounds in terms of Obama's political behavior.  At the same time, I don't agree with your view that the piece is non-polemical.  It seems to me to be a fairly thinly disguised apology for Bush's war, as if all of these things were terribly obscure questions on which people of intelligence who paid attention could disagree.  No, people who were politically cowardly were willing to spend American and Iraqi lives rather than state openly that Bush was  touting evidence for WMDs that had already been thoroughly discounted within the government. That makes Wehner a polemicist, not some neutral observer.

You can make all the caveats about who was in what position, blah, blah, blah.  The naked fact is that Obama called it, in advance, dead on balls right.  Neither Hillary nor McCain did so.  That hardly seems like a good argument on either of their behalfs.  What's more, although I suspect that McCain really believed Bush, because of his own predisposition toward Bush's position, I rather doubt that Hillary did.  I think she made the calculation that if she voted with the majority and the war were a failure she would have plenty of political cover, but if she voted against and the war were a success, her presidential chances would be doomed.  And she voted accordingly.  For throwing away young lives for purely political purposes, I cast her into the same ring of political hell as Bush himself.  To me, they are two peas in the same pod.

- roidubouloi

March 16, 2008 at 6:34pm

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roidu:

A few brief comments.

Firstly, I hope you did not take offence at my mention of "roidu syndrome".  You must obviously know, and Jhildner too, that I greatly admire both your postings on these cyber pages, no less than when I disagree with you, and I do not hold myself out as any great paragon of unalloyed objectivity. Which is not to say that I do not find you on occasion sort of polemical to a fault, if I can put it that way.

Secondly, my response to Jhildner's take on Wehner's piece was not motivated by my desire to make a case for Hillary, even though I prefer her to Obama. I was simply to argue for Wehner make a good argument of Obama's opportunism--like the rest of the mugs--in his various psotures on Iraq. So your reprise of your agrument against Hillary, which I am familiar with, is somewhat astirde my point.

Thirdly,  the nugget of our issue here, as I see it, is our diagreement as to whether Obama, as depicted by Wehner, falls short of his claims for himself and and falls short of reasonable good faith standards of intellectual and political consistency. If you say that Obama like most politicians "has made statements at various times that do not seem 1) to be statements of pure principle without regard to the currents of public opinion or 2) are absolutely intellectually consistent", I certainly agree with that. And I'd readily say that he is no certainly no worse than the most poliiticians in that regard. But I never demanded, as you say, that Obama, who is undeniably gifted,  maintain "academic standards of rigor in..."  his .".. claims or public statements." If Wehner has convinced you that Obama, undeniably gifted, is, in the articulation and taking of positions, assimilable to the other mugs, because that's what it means to be a politician, then he has made at least half his case.

One last point: I don't think I argued, in protesting polemical defences of Obama, that Wehner is a neutral observer or that he does has no axe to grind. Any such suggestiion by me is beside my point and irrelevant to my argument. Wehner clearly has an anti-Obama axe to grind--no question. The issue is how well has he ground it.

And finally,  since I am the last word on the objective assesment of these things, as you readily concede, I decree that he has ground it exceedingly sharply. (I'm joshing a bit here, I feel I have need of saying.)

- basman

March 16, 2008 at 7:45pm

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Ah, no problem.  But I never took Obama to be something greater than a politician.  I just take him to be exceptionally talented at politics.  

"Granting forthrightly that the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein had “repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity,” and that he “butchers his own people,” Obama nevertheless held that, despite all these well-proven crimes, Saddam posed no “imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors.” What is more, he added, “I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”"

That is from Wehner's article.  Seems spot on to me, because I do not believe for one shred of an instant that the US would have invaded Iraq, that the public would have stood for it or the Congress would have backed it in the face of public opposition BUT FOR the public and a good part of the Congress being persuaded by Bush that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States either because he possessed, or imminently would be in possession of, nuclear weapons -- not bio, not chemical, although those were also mooted, but nuclear.  Obama's statement seems pretty darned perspicacious to me, and the fact that he was not in the Senate yet, or may not have taken a lot of political risk to say it, does not change the fact that he was right.

Having re-read the rest of the article, I find most of it to be, quite simply, trash.  He quotes Obama saying things that are really quite unexceptional and then grossly mischaracterizes them to make his polemical point.  Frankly, basman, I am honestly surprised that you consider Wehner's piece to be well argued or thought out.  

As one small example, I don't think that the surge has changed the dynamics of Iraq's sectarian conflict in any way.  The improvement in Anbar was an unexpected windfall that came, not from the surge, but from something officially verboten under official US policy -- giving arms to a sectarian group.  This is really Biden's strategy for de facto partition, not Bush's strategy for the surge.  The only purpose of the surge is to surpress the newsworthy violence for long enough to get through the 2008 election.  Bush and company have no more idea how to extract our troops after that than they did before, and McCain frankly says they can stay the next 100 years.

If you ask me, I would take only minor issue with a very few of Obama's statements quoted in that article.  Wehner basically takes issue with Obama's refusal to say, stupidly, as Wehner would wish him to, that he would do they very same thing in all circumstances regardless of the consequences.  According to Wehner, that constitutes "vertiginous changes" of opinion.  Bullshit.  That's just common senses.  Wehner's real gripe is that he wants Obama to sound like some 1968 anti-war hippy and Obama just won't.

This is trash, basman.  Wehner is first and foremost a Bush apologist who is trying tries to make points by acting as though his Bush apologia is so self-evident (requiring no support) that anyone who disagrees with it is an idiot.  I think Wehner is almost as big an idiot as Bush if he believes the things he says he does.

There, does that meet your polemical expectations?

- roidubouloi

March 16, 2008 at 10:56pm

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By the way, basman, my point in reiterating the case against Hillary was only to make clear that I do distinguish between arguments based on my own political and policy views in comparison to what a second President Clinton would do in office and my analysis of her electoral prospects or of her impact on the party.  Most of the things that I take sharp issue with on these blogs are what I regard as weak political analysis of where things stand or what she is doing or what he is doing.  I am not much interested in moving people here to my own political persuasion because I don't think that is possible. If Obama cannot persuade them to support Obama, I sure as hell am not going to.  I do see some point in sticking pins in bogus analyses.  And I do also take issue when people make what I think are absurd claims either for Hillary or against Obama.  That's not quite as polemical as you might imagine if the distinctions are observed.

- roidubouloi

March 16, 2008 at 11:04pm

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Roidu:

1. I give Obama his props for initially opposing the war. I have already, in responding to jhildner, repeated the usual ways in which his initial call can be qualified. But, understanding them, let me not be niggardly and I, as just said, give the man his due.

2. I am not going to go through Wehner’s essay to justify it as against your sweeping castigation of it as “quite, simply trash”—are your over-polemics showing—but I will, hereafter, deal with any specifics you raise, including any examples you give of Obama being quoted out of context and those quotes being mischaracterized.  And I won’t deal with your soft ad hominem—encased, you sly fox, in an implicit compliment— that you are surprised that I think the essay is well argued or thought out.

3. I fail to see how your view of the inefficacy of the surge—which is a hotly debated issue, which has a lot of pro serge analysis—justifies calling Wehner’s essay, “quite simply, trash”.  There are a number of problems with your reasoning on this point. Firstly, as just noted, the success of the surge is a controversial issue. For you to have a strong view on it does not constitute the last word. Secondly, compounding the first problem, you reason as though your view is an indisputable last word and on that basis go no to trash Wehner’s essay. Thirdly, compounding your first two errors, the burden of Wehner’s essay was not to argue for a correct or absolutist view of Iraq—not the getting in, the being in, or the getting out. So on the basis of your misplaced confidence on a non essential issue, you reason—on the basis of this particular logic—to an insupportable conclusion about the essay as a whole. (Btw: as pure sidebar, what gives America any authority to promote tripartite partition of a sovereign country as an answer to that country’s problems?)

4. Here is what your essential argument comes down to after all your dramatic and general complaint that Obama has been quoted out of context and his quotes mischaracterized—of which complaint, now looking at your post again, you have in fact provided no specific example—“Wehner basically takes issue with Obama's refusal to say, stupidly, as Wehner would wish him to, that he would do they very same thing in all circumstances regardless of the consequences.” Where exactly does Wehner do that? Quickly Wehner’s case is that:

a. Obama originally, as noted and duly applauded, opposed the war;

b. Wehner’s claim is that Obama  since 2002 made ad hoc *judgments*/statements that were more opportunistic than principled. And I note that Wehner for the purposes of his argument stipulates that Obama’s initial call was correct;

c. Wehner first notes that on the heels of early American military success, Obama allowed himself to muse that he his own initial call may have been wrong. That then politically helpful second guessing, Wehner notes, stayed with Obama through the initial phase of American  occupation;

d. In July 2004, Obama is quoted as saying that his position and Bush’s position were vitually twins “at this stage”. Wehner’s take on this twinning is that Obama was looking for some political cover;

e.  Wehner notes that in September 2004 during his U.S. Senate campaign Obama favoured sending in more troops to to stabilize Iraq and eventually allow America to leave;

f. Once elected Obama’s position continued to be doing what was necessary—including more troops if necessary—to stabilize Iraq;

g. In November 2005, when, Wehner says, things on the ground were “rocky”, showing no signs of improvement, and amidst a lot of talk about exit strategies, but most liberal hawks were still in the air, not ready to leave, Obama made a major speech wherein he said: 1. being in, America had to exit responsibly, 2. America’s hope had to be leaving a stable foundation for the future; 3. at a minimum America had to ensure Iraq would not be  plunged into a deep and irreparable crisis; 4. America’s means to this end was slow but sure reduction of troops;

h. In January 2006, Obama said America has a role to play in stabilizing Iraq as it helps itself –stand Iraq up so America could stand down—the administration’s position;

i. But throughout 2006, Iraq worsened; polls reflected that worsening; Bush’s approval was sinking like a stone; readied himself to run. In October 2006 he called for a serious change of course in Iraq—this time not to send in more troops,  but, rather, as quickly as possible, a “phased withdrawal. He dropped the tropes about stabilizing Iraq or leaving a stabilized Iraq. His position became that putting in more troops or even leaving the same numbers of troops in place would accomplish nothing;

j. in January 2007, Bush against all mainstream advice, the polls, and the I.S.G., decided on and announced the surge. Obama said that nothing in that plan would dent sectarian violence and he repeated that critique often;

k. so, Wehner argues, within a mere mater of weeks, Obama aligned himself with the more extreme crtics of the war,m which realignment coincided with his candidacy, announced on February 10, 2007 with the proclamation that “it’s time to start bringing our troops home”;

l. in May 2007 Obama for the first time voted against funding combat operations on the theory that the bill had no withdrawal timelines and his position continued to harden and intensify;

m. in September 2007, when the first 30,000 surge troops landed, Obama’s position was, by Wehner’s account, that troops had to be removed “immediately” “Not in six months or one year—now”;

n. then when it appeared that the sectarian violence’s decline in Iraq seemed notable  Obama’s argument became that that decline—there was no counter-arguing the decline—had *nothing* to do with the surge, and in one utterance claimed that it was due to the insurgents and al Qeada noting the American November 2006 mid term elections, when control in Congress passed to the Democrats. (There then follows a gleeful dismantling by Wehner of what he calls Obama’s “astonishing statement”);

o. in February 2008, Obama answering a question by Tim Russert, said as president he would reserve the right to go back into Iraq with sizable forces if the withdrawal would lead to greater mayhem. Whereas he before had stated, according to Wehner, that on his watch no permanent bases would be left in Iraq and the few troops let behind would have a narrow raison d’etre ( I am French speaking Canadian)—embassy and diplomat protection and counter terrorism. In answering Russert, Obama said, I paraphrase, “if al-Qaeda forms a base in Iraq then America will need to act to secure its interests at home and abroad

p. (And again Wehner has some fun taking this position apart.To wit: 1. al-Qaeda is already in Iraq; 2. if Obama had had his way in 2007 American troops would have been out by march 2008, leaving it “naked to its enemies”; 3. if they were withdrawn in the early months of an Obama presidency al Qaeda would surely try to form a base and, more,, take over large swathes of the country—which would then lead president Obama, by virtue of his own words, to order in large scale troops under more treacherous conditions of his own making).

5. The balance of the essay is Wehner’s critique of Obama’s foreign policy positions generally insofar as his views on Iraq typify them. But the foregoing is the support for Wehner’s main argument. Nothing in that supports your general charge that “Wehner's real gripe is that he wants Obama to sound like some 1968 anti-war hippy and Obama just won't.”

6. That is, respectfully, a willful misreading of Wehner’s essay. It does not help your argument to call Wehner an idiot or generally to declaim against his essay short of a specific and substantive analysis with examples. This Wehner has done, whether or not you agree with him. This you, albeit in a shortish post, you have not.

You ask, “There, does that meet your polemical expectations?” No. If I said “yes”, I’d be insulting you.

This took more time than I have, but the spirit me and the flesh was willing.

Now back to some civil litigation.

Over and out.

- basman

March 17, 2008 at 12:59pm

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Here is Wehner's thesis:

"In fact, an examination of both his statements and his Senate votes over the intervening years demonstrates something very different from the consistency that he and his supporters have claimed for him. It demonstrates instead a record of problematically ad-hoc judgments at best, calculatingly cynical judgments at worst. Even if, for the sake of argument, one were to stipulate that Barack Obama was right in 2002, what does this subsequent record say about his fitness to serve?"

He proves absolutely none of it and barely provides evidence for any of it.  For example:

"Watching the dramatic footage of the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, and then the President’s speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, “I began to suspect,” he would write later in his autobiographical The Audacity of Hope (2006), “that I might have been wrong.”

Upon which basis, with no further support whatsoever, Wehner concludes that,  "[H]e seems to have sensed a political weakness in his blanket opposition to a venture still enjoying broad support in the country, and one in which tens of thousands of American soldiers were risking their lives."

Now how exactly does Wehner know this?  What evidence does he cite for this interpretation of Obama's motivation for reconsideration?  None.  Not a word.  Nothing.  That's what makes this article such a wretched disgraceful piece of shit, basman.  It is pure smear, all the way.

On the merits, ought we in fact prefer a leader, like Bush, who makes colossal blunders and then continues to believe in the very teeth of the disaster that has followed his blunder that he was right all along?  That's one definition of insanity.  How exactly in your learned opinion does the willingness to say, "Perhaps I was wrong," become the equivalent of "sensing political weakness?"  What decent person, even if absolutely opposed to the war, would not have been moved by the toppling of the monster, Hussein?  And to say so makes one a hypocrite for opposing the war?  That's disgusting.  Despite Obama's ruminations with the fall of Hussein, subsequent events proved that Obama's initial misgivings about the unknowable costs and consequences of the war were exactly right, wise and perspicacious.  How many Americans, if they had known that there were no WMD's, would have been willing to pay what this war has ended up costing us in lives lost, lives blighted, and in treasure poured out in order to topple Hussein?  Not more than a handful.  Maybe only Bush and his coterie.  And you it seems.

Wehner goes on:

"And so, in September 2004, in the heat of his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama said (according to an AP report) that even though Bush had “bungled his handling of the war,” simply pulling out of Iraq “would make things worse.” Therefore, he himself

'would be willing to send more soldiers to Iraq if it is part of a strategy that the President and military leaders believe will stabilize the country and eventually allow America to withdraw.

“If that strategy made sense and would lead ultimately to the pullout of U.S. troops but in the short term required additional troop strength to protect those who are already on the ground, then that’s something I would support,” said Obama."

What about that, basman, represents a change in Obama's views?  He opposed invading Iraq, but we did.  Would he be a better, more intellectually honest individual if he said, let's now just leave as fast as we possibly can and pretend the invasion never happened, to hell with the cost to anyone?  That would make him just like the monster, Bush.

Obama's statement here is in fact almost banal -- "If we need more troops temporarily to stabilize the situation so that we can leave as soon as possible AND THE STRATEGY MAKES SENSE, I would support it."  This is supposed to be evidence of Obama opportunistically and hypocritically changing his position for political reasons?

Basically basman, Wehner's point, and yours apparently, is that ANYONE WHO IS NOT AS BIG A FUCKING STUPID IDIOT AND SAVAGE WASTER OF LIVES AND SHEDDER OF BLOOD AS GEORGE W BUSH, anyone who is willing to consider what present circumstances require for the good of our country despite their own past statements, is a hypocrite and opportunist.  

You wanted examples of Wehner's intellectual bankruptcy?  You have them.  indeed, every single paragraph of Wehner's article provides another because the statements of Obama's that he quotes NEVER bear any logical or plausible relationship to the conclusions Wehner draws. A typical Wehnerism would read like this:

"Thus, in the summer of 2007, we see Obama taking his family out for ice cream."  Clearly, Obama knew by then that he had painted himself into a political corner and his positions would compromise his run for the presidency."  

What Wehner actually says is barely distinguishable from this.

Like I said the first time, basman, this is complete and utter trash, politically, factually, intellectually, morally.  It is almost a caricature of right-wing propaganda it is so bad. There is simply nothing in it, not one word, that proves, and precious little that even supports, Wehner's stated thesis.  

If you buy Wehner's article, if you think Wehner has even supported his claim let alone proven if, you had better go pinch yourself very hard, man, take a long look in the mirror, and ask yourself why and how you have suddenly become so credulous.

- roidubouloi

March 18, 2008 at 12:03am

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