Matt Zeitlin

Clinton still, yet again, refuses to admit that her vote was a mistake.  She also acts like an abused spouse when she says that Bush “abused” the authority she supported.  She supported the war, thought it was a good idea, and when it was launched, she was on board.  The fact that she just can’t say this and explain why she was wrong (like John Edwards did) is a great indication that if you care at all about foreign policy, Obama is clearly the best candidate.

How exactly are we supposed to run against arch-war critic/superhawk when our candidate supported the war too? It’s also depressing that she implies that because of her GOP-life foreign policy past, she’s the best national security candidate.

I hate to say this, but Wolf is right.  When she explains why she voted for the war resolution, she literally just said that the White House told her that the authorization would be used to place weapons inspectors.  Clinton, if she really thought that Bush was so incompetent and dishonest, should have never given him authorization in the first place!  Sounds pretty naive to me…

Clinton just said that electing a woman would be a change “for the world.”  I’m sorry, it may be a slight change, but plenty of industrialized nations comparable to the US have had women in the highest governmental position.   For example, Germany and the UK both have had women in power, and it wasn’t much of a “change.”  But more importantly, a bunch of countries of had women take power in circumstances similar to Clinton.  By that I mean that their first woman leader was part of a prominent, powerful political family.   Countries to have female leadership under these circumstances include Argentina ,Pakistan, India, Philippines and Indonesia.  These are countries, to put it bluntly, don’t have the strongest political institutions, and their dynastic elections were not signs of gender egalitarianism, but instead were just symptoms of poorly functioning institutions.  Another good list to look at is the one of countries that have elected ethnic minorities upon whose enslavement the country was founded to the top political job.  This list has zero countries in it.

Who’s the historical candidate?

6:04 – My constitutional law teacher was berating me for belittling Clinton’s experience, and he was right, her early work in children’s law and the Legal Services Corporation is impressive.  But, it’s nothing to use as a bludgeon against Obama.  It seems roughly equivalent to Obama’s work as a community organizer and in the Senate.  Her work in the White House is nothing to write home about.  She rarely negotiated with public leaders, she never had a security clearance and her one major legislative project was a failure.  Her recounting of her record, I think, undermines her experience claims.  Sure, it’s impressive, but considering Clinton’s head start, it’s not like she’s unambiguously the candidate of experience.

I’ll say it again, but Obama refusing to blame issues in the labor market on illegal immigrants is really a brave, and correct, stand.  Clinton, though she doesn’t  advocate an awful plan, is really playing into fear of immigration by making it seem like illegals stealing our jobs are responsible for economic ills for those at the bottom of the labor market.  I think Obama should be able to win some Latino votes by emphasizing his refusal to scapegoat.  It would be nice if a politician got rewarded for using this type of positive rhetoric.

5:50 It’s a tad rich to see Clinton denounce “scapegoating” minutes after talking about immigrants taking low wage jobs…

PS – Drezner is also on board.

5:39 – This is just an awful question.  It’s no settled matter that the “flood of immigrant labor” is pushing down black wages.  The media, this entire campaign, has been trying to push immigration as the ultimate web issue.  But John McAmnesty is the prohibitive GOP nominee and all the Democrats, despite Mickey Kaus’ best efforts, are all soft on immigration.  Specifically, the trying to use black wages as a wedge with which to discuss immigration is the worse type of scapegoating and Obama is good to call out this e-mailer.  To say that immigration is responsible for stagnate wages and economic insecurity is a horrible distortion.

It’s really unfortunate, however, that no one talks about the gains to immigrants.  I understand that they don’t vote, but Mexican immigrants are people to…

5:43 – And, just in time, Hillary blames illegal immigrants for stealing American jobs.  This is some canny, yet depressing, positioning.

Abe Greenwald has an odd definition of what it means to defeat — and be defeated by terrorists.  He seems to think that we show our resolve by being in constant fear, constantly using 9/11 to promote all sorts of unsound policies and constantly living like there’s another attack just around the corner:

It shouldn’t be so hard to see that six years into this ongoing war “9/11 fatigue” is a luxury beyond our means. But Americans must always live beyond their means, so now we’re tired of having to worry about the armies sworn to kill us. Could this possibly be what Osama bin Laden was driving at when he said the Russians were hard to defeat but the Americans, because they’re decadent, will be a piece of cake?

Wouldn’t the ease of defeat run the opposite way?  The point of terrorism is to strike fear into the population one attacks and to generally make their lives miserable out of proportion to the actual threat.  Isn’t it our “decadence” of not living in the shadow of 9/11 — despite Giuiliani and Abe Greenwald’s exhortations — that makes America more difficult to defeat?

Shouldn’t the fact that we’re different from the Russians, we’re willing to be “decadent” in the face of danger, be a source of national pride?  But I guess it’s hard to mobilize the nation for endless war if you’re optimistic about our ability to cope with danger…

Turns out Jon Swift was hot to Kennedy’s more subterranean reasons for endorsing Obama when the actual endorsement happened:

“It is not just that Obama reminds them of Kennedy, it is also that the Clintons remind them of Lyndon Johnson. And if there is anything that the Kennedys don’t like, it’s a bunch of hillbillies in the White House….When Hillary Clinton pointed out that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights bill passed, she was not only insulting Martin Luther King but also JFK, who did all the hard work of asking southern Democrats very politely to please vote for the Civil Rights bill, which they might have done some time in future as soon as they looked into their consciences and realized it was the right thing to do.”

Prescient.

I was all excited about the Kennedy endorsement, and I still am, but it was apparantly motivated by Clinton’s dissing…not of MLK, but of JFK:

Sources say Kennedy was privately furious at Clinton for her praise of President Lyndon Baines Johnson for getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act accomplished. Jealously guarding the legacy of the Kennedy family dynasty, Senator Kennedy felt Clinton’s LBJ comments were an implicit slight of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who first proposed the landmark civil rights initiative in a famous televised civil rights address in June 1963.

One anonymous source described Kennedy as having a “meltdown” in reaction to Clinton’s comments. Another source close to the Kennedy family says Senator Kennedy was upset about two instances that occurred on a single day of campaigning in New Hampshire on Jan. 7, a day before the state’s primary.

I know that as a Democrat, I’m supposed to worship at the shire of Kennedy, but Clinton was right when she pointed out that LBJ was the one who was willing to make the political sacrifices to get Civil Rights passed.  Of course, we can’t know what JFK would have done had he survived, but there’s no special reason to think that we would have bucked the Dixiecrats, considering his past fealty to them.  JFK just wasn’t a very politically daring guy – Teddy probably has more liberal accomplishments to his name.

The nature of the endorsement does, however, call into question just how sincere Kennedy was when he said that Obama had all this great legislative acumen and was “ready on day one.”  How much of that evaluation was shaped by anger at the Clintons?

Jake Tapper’s “scoop” that Obama, in 2001, said Rumsfeld was in “the mainstream of American political life” is unspeakably lame. Not only is there no news, but if you look at the quote, you’ll see that Obama is disagreeing with Rumsfeld on policy – “I for example do not agree with a missile defense system, but I dont think that soon-to-be-Secretary Rumsfeld is in any way out of the mainstream of American political life.”

Sure, I dislike Rumsfeld as much as the next guy, but he was a pretty reasonable pick for Defense Secretary and not particularly out of the mainstream for GOP defense guy. In fact, no one in the Senate really opposed or questioned him intensely, so it’s not like Obama was bucking his party. Tapper tries to stir something up by pointing to a small newspaper editorial opposing Rumsfeld and the president of the Council for a Livable World opposing the nomination (The CLW has since commended Obama’s no nuclear weapons pledge). Too bad these were just about the only voices who even really cared about Rumsfeld — at the time, Democrats were concerned with Ashcroft.

What makes this even sillier was that, at the time, Rumsfeld wasn’t associated with Iraq (obviously) but instead with trying to transform the military into a smaller, leaner, more hi-tech operation. Of course, his plans got screwed by Iraq and his own wasting of support, but Rumsfeld’s vision at the time wasn’t particularly conservative or partisan and so he was very much in the mainstream.

If we want to talk about kind words towards military advisers and strategists, isn’t Hillary’s friendship with retired General Jack Keane, one of the chief architects of the surge, just a wee bit more relevant?

J-Pod mocks Romney for talking about his running the Salt Lake Olympics right after McCain reminiscing about the Hanoi Hilton.  I guess I’m different from most voters (shocking, I know), but Romney’s executive experience seems much more relevant than McCain’s “war heroism.”  McCain’s experience in Hanoi is supposed to be stand-in for his straight-talk and integrity. But McCain’s been in public life for more than 20 years, so we can probably look to his actual record, rather than Vietnam experiences to see if straight-talk and integrity really mean anything.  And, in my estimation, it seems like the only thing McCain “straight talks” about is his desire to continue and start more foreign wars.  On other issues — regulation, taxes, social issues — he wildly oscillates around, without any political grounding except the adoration of the press and his own pursuit of power.

The only area where McCain’s experience as a POW seems to have a substantial influence on anything besides burnishing  his media-image is his opposition to torture.  Incidentally, J-Pod and much of Commentary isn’t on the same page.

Gideon Rachman links to a Newsweek story claiming that UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalizhad “is seriously considering running for Karzai’s seat himself when the next elections are held in 2009.”  Khalizhad is one of the few Bush administration figures whose reputation has been enhanced during his tenure, and he was generally agreed to be a breath of fresh air as ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq, but this is just ridiculous.  Rachman put it best: ” gives a whole new spin to the idea of American imperialism.”  It’s true that figures like Khalizhad and Petraeus have much more power than a normal General or Ambassador, but for Zal to actually run for president just seems deluded.  I think we already have enough influence over Afghanistan’s government, with the military presence there and everything…

cross-posted at campusprogress.org/blog 

Turns out Ed Kilgoreagrees with me about the limits of Edwards’ approach:

- His message was a remarkably faithful and wholesale adoption of the Crashing the Gates-style netroots analysis of the parties, of Washington, of the Clintonian Democratic tradition, and of galvanizing value of “fighting populist” rhetoric. It was crafted with the help of the maestro of this approach, Joe Trippi. Yet it did not rouse much in the way of support from its intended audiences. In the end, most of the Deanian excitement in the campaign flowed to Obama, who consistently deployed a rhetoric of post-partisanship that is anathema to the point of view advanced by Edwards, as Edwards himself suggested on many occasions. It’s telling that Edwards lost his critical contest, Iowa, where he had every advantage at the beginning, after hoping for a low turnout dominated by older voters and previous caucus participants.

The weird thing about Edwards was how well he did in head-to-head match-ups with Republican candidates.  This was supposed to be a vindication of his confrontational, populist strategy — maybe it turned out America really was just one big DailyKos thread.  But, why then, couldn’t he catch on with actual Democrats?  Probably because his strength in national head-to-head matchups had more to do with him being a known quantity, who due to this whiteness and drawl, was able to trick people into thinking that he was actually a moderate, Southern Democrat.  His supporters, like Neil, pointed to his ability to say far-left things in a right-wing accent as his greatest strength.

But it was silly to think that eventually the public wouldn’t find out how far to the left he was.  I hope that with Edwards dropping out and most netroot support turning to Obama , there’s some reconsideration of how viable an electoral strategy massive confrontation with corporate interests and Republicans is. Because of his moderate looking skin and moderate sounding voice, people were able to trick themselves into thinking that being farthest to the left would make a candidate the most popular.  Too bad it isn’t true.

Last night, I got really worried that Max Baucus was going to push through a stimulus bill that gave checks to high  income people (75K for individuals, 150K for families).  This would, of course, be really stupid, as rich people are unlikely to spend their stimulus checks, thus increasing the deficit without getting a bump in consumer spending.  This wouldn’t have been the first time Baucus betrayed core Democratic ideals — he voted for the Bush tax cuts and the Bankruptcy Bill.  But, luckily, Harry Reid found his spine and, according to the Politico, is “confident the caps will be there.”  So while this stimulus bill maybe ill-timed and likely ineffective, at least we won’t be sending rich people checks.

So John Edwards dropped out.  This makes sense: he was getting no support and his influence was no longer needed.  It’s obvious that his health care, global warming and poverty plans pushed Clinton and Obama to the left, but one way in which he didn’t really succeed was changing the tone.   I know this is a much-derided MSM archetype, but he really was an angry, confrontational populist.  While Clinton could excite people with wonky detail and Obama could uplift, Edwards speeches were a dreary, endless catalogue of horrors perpetrated by insurance companies, greedy corporations and their political pawns.  It was, in many ways, the type of manichean , take no prisoners message that many progressive activists wanted to hear, but it’s not clear if anyone else did.  It turns out that no one has ever won the White House, with the possible exception of FDR,  by running a pure populist campaign.  There was no good reason to think Edwards would be able to do so.

Because, sometimes, the best way to explain why certain strains of conservatism are stupid is to use interior design analogies. It seems like Julian Sanchez already beat me to this post, but please, by all means, read Will Wilkinson’s post on National Greatness Conservatism. Here’s a taste:

I sometimes think that liberal individualism is something like the intellectual and moral equivalent of the best modernist design — spare, elegant, functional — but hard to grasp or truly appreciate without a cultivated sense of style, without a little discerning maturity. National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much the kind of thing you get at the Committee on Social Thought. If you declaim the importance of virtue loudly enough, you don’t have to actually think.

READ READ READ! Also, the point he makes about “reading Aristotle in Greek” really captures how the U-Chicago strain of virtue/Aristotelian conservatism is pretty weak tea.

PS – Sorry about being absent from blog-o-world, the combination of being really sick and being at a debate tournament makes blogging rather difficult.

David Boaz makes an odd argument that because Hillary was exceptionally involved in her husband’s White House, her being elected would be a violation in spirit of the 22nd amendment.  Also, we’re lead to assume, would Bill being “co-president” for another eight years.  The argument is most obviously flawed because it turns out that Hillary didn’t do all that much while in the White House.  She had no security clearance, didn’t participate in NSC meetings and even HillaryCare was originally formulated by Bill.  But even assuming Boaz is right to say that “she can claim to be the best-prepared presidential candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940: she spent eight years in the White House, seeing the way politics and policies work from the eye of the storm. I accept that, more than any other First Lady, she was heavily involved in both policy and politics” his point makes little sense for a very simple reason: when vice-president’s run for office, no one gets all hot and bothered.

Dick Cheney isn’t running, but let’s say he was, he really would have been the most prepared presidential candidate ever. He was Chief of Staff for Ford, HW’s Secretary of Defense and the most powerful Vice President ever.  He directed detainee policy, war preparations and Iran policy – much more than what Clinton can claim.  Yet his election, while certainly a chilling prospect, would not be looked at by Boaz or anyone else as some sort of violation of the 22nd amendment.

So, the Democratic congress is probably going to cooperate with the president and enact their ill timed, ill targeted and likely ineffective stimulus package.  I feel like this should be a good example of how bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is not a good thing.  The David Broders of the world would tell you that we would be able to solve all these problems if both sides could just put down partisan objectives, roll up their sleeves and really think of some solutions that work.  But this isn’t how the real world works, instead, the only time both sides get together is when the action would benefit all of them politically.  This mostly manifests itself in increasing pointless spending like buying more submarines and airplanes or, literally, just sending people checks.

It’s not a coincidence that nothing noteworthy happens when there’s certain legislation or spending that suits the political interests  of the entire Congress.  If you think of any “big” goal that Congress is likely to achieve legislatively — on the left they would be health care and climate change legislation, on the right it would be marginal income rate reductions — the reason the accomplishment of such a goal is a big deal is because a wide swath of the Congress opposes it. What most bipartisanship ultimately amounts to is a least common denominator of lame policy that is likely to do little more than make each congressman look better to their constituents.

Steve Forbes goes to the WSJ to pimp for Giuliani’s massive tax cuts — including slashing the corporate rate by 10%, scrapping the estate tax, reducing the income tax to three 10%, 15% and 30% brackets and cutting capital gains from 15% to 10%.  While it goes without saying that his plan is fiscal lunacy – where exactly will all this money come from? – Forbes  manages to make a series of bogus claims.

He goes on a slight rant about how damn complicated the tax plan is and we’re left to assume that Giuliani will “simplify the tax code.”  Giuilian’s plan would, according to Forbes, allow someone to fill out a “FAST” form with the three brackets, or to stay with the current tax code.  Forbes tries to pull a fast one over us by trying to say that three brackets = simple, but then in the next sentence, Forbes reassures us that “Prized deductions for mortgage payments, state and local taxes, charitable contributions, and child tax credits will all be preserved on the FAST Form.”  So, instead of providing a new tax code that is free of all those deductions, Giuliani would just add another layer of complexity to the tax system and encourage people to even spend more time hunting for deductions between the two systems.  Forbes provides an anecdote: “Moreover, taxpayers can choose each year which plan works best for them. For instance, a small business owner might take advantage of the deductions in the current tax code one year, but choose the FAST Form the next.”  As someone who professes

The second humdinger in Forbes’ piece is that “Rudy Giuliani knows self-government, not centralized government, makes America great. His proposals demonstrate an opposition to centralized power and a commitment to a growth society.”  There are two things Forbes refused to acknowledge in his relentless pimping of Rudy: 1. the plan would eviscerate revenue and 2. Giuliani wants to jack up spending. None of these extreme tax cuts make sense in a world where Giuliani wants to increase the end strength of the military by 10 brigades, buy more submarines, do missile defense and stay in Iraq indefinitely.  But, as is so typical among conservatives, military spending doesn’t count as “centralized” or “big” government.  Again, this combination of profligate war mongering and tax cuts for the rich

The New Republic has an article looking at the process by which William Kristol became a Times Columnist.  Of course, he wasn’t the only named bandied about by Arthur Sulzberger and Andrew Rosenthal.  The article reveals a few others who were considered, and it’s almost sad to see what would have been:

So, last fall, Sulzberger and Times editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal prepared a list of some 25 conservative writers. According to a person with knowledge of the search, the names included Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, The Atlantic‘s Ross Douthat, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Max Boot and three Weekly Standard staffers: senior editor Christopher Caldwell, associate editor Matthew Continetti, and the magazine’s editor and founder, Bill Kristol.

Krauthammer is just as singularly hawkish, if not more so than Kristol, but at least can write well and has the capacity to occasionally write an interesting, out of the box column like those he’s written on intelligent design or religion in the GOP primary.  Max Boot is too a neocon’s neocon, but he’s also a UC Berkeley alumnus who has a pretty good knowledge of military history and would have more to say on foreign affairs than “omg, teh surge iz worken!”  Matthew Continetti has an amazing first name, is a good straight-political writer and, because of his youth, would have been a interesting pick. Caldwell and Douthat, in my mind, are the class of conservative commentary.  Not only are they both not orthodox conservatives, they both have the capacity to, like David Brooks, write columns that aren’t just reflecting the short term political situation or whatever controversy happens to flare up.

I’ve gone back and forth on Kristol.  I think that a good op-ed page needs to have some conservative voices, and despite David Brooks’ Bush and Iraq cheerleading, one gets the feeling that he was designed to soothe liberals into thinking he’s an OK dude.  Both Caldwell and Douthat have these qualities as well, but they are both such good and interesting writers, that their choice would have probably been lauded across the political spectrum.  Kristol, on the other hand, has called for the Times to be investigated for treason and, more importantly, just isn’t that good of a writer, both of which should have been enough for him not to get the job.

Another interesting thing this article gets at is how the Kristol pick was largely a panic move by the Times.  Because the right wing media, led by the Weekly Standard, had been relentlessly hammering the Times‘ pre-Iraq war coverage, they lurched right and “Judith Miller’s credulous front-page pieces on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction began appearing with increasing frequency.”  The right wing media had so effectively “worked the refs,” constantly lambasting the Times, that Sulzburger and Rosenthal felt compelled to throw out a piece of red meat and hire one of their most vociferous opponents.  Say what you will about liberal bias in the media, but left wing pressure has never forced the Times to hire an unabashed, Times-criticizing leftie like Eric Alterman, and likely never will.

This one line, from a former Times staffer, captures the mood best:

 ”My personal opinion is it’s an appalling choice,” a former veteran Times staffer said of Kristol’s appointment. “Not because he’s been wrong about so much, but because he called for prosecuting the Times for treason. You’re entitled to your opinion, but, in all due respect, go fuck yourself.”

As you all know, I’m an avid bloggingheads.tv watcher.  One of the more entertaining aspects of the format is seeing what types of mundane actions the participants engage in and the ignorance of their fellow bloggingheads.  We have had Eric Alterman drink a beer in a diavlog, and infamously, Julian Sanchez sucking down about six cigarettes in 35 minutes.  But there’s something of a trend emerging, jewish, hawkish national security reporters who suck down cancer sticks like it’s their job.  First it was Eli Lake, and now we have Michael Goldfarb slowly killing himself on screen.   I’ll let y’all in the comments speculate why hawks are poisoning themselves.